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Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 1/2)
There, I said it. In the circles that I reside in, calling someone a “nimby” comes with a clearly negative connotation, such a strong negative connotation that it stands alone as an argument in favor of any given development or policy change. To make sure that I’m thinking clearly and not just embracing the term because I’m a contrarian (although I am admittedly a contrarian), I turned to Wikipedia to make sure I had a sound working definition:
Well, now that I’ve got a clear definition, yes, that’s exactly me. I support good things in my neighborhood and I’m against bad things in my neighborhood. I even embrace the implied hypocrisy of saying that I don’t care if other people want to have bad things in their neighborhoods, it’s really up to them whether they accept or refuse those things. In the event that such a thing is truly necessary for both neighborhoods to succeed and that one of us must accept the bad thing, I embrace Coaseian negotiated handling of the externalities.
Let’s move on to some concrete examples of my nimbyism. The first one that pops to mind are the frequent local proposals for homeless shelters, family shelters, and similar structures and aid organizations. One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect. Without regard to whether such organizations are actually helpful or not, should I want to accept such a similar proposed structure in my backyard? The answer that I give is a fervent no, that inviting the indigent to my neighborhood will make it a worse place to live in just about every conceivable way. I want indigent populations removed from my neighborhood as soon as practicable and legal for the police to do so, for the incredibly obvious reason that this makes my neighborhood a better place to live. Some people feel quite differently from me on this - perfect! Since I don’t want drug addicts and crazy people in the park across the street and others say they don’t mind, we have a Pareto optimal solution. If they actually do feel that there is a cost, we’ll have to come to some sort of Coaseian handling of externalities, but I’ll at least have extracted the concession that it actually does suck to have hobos in your park.
Moving on to one that’s a little less plain to see and that is even more galling to those that think the nimbies must be stopped, let’s talk a bit about housing density. Madison currently faces a housing crunch, caused by economic opportunity and geographic constraints. The city has an unusual abundance of high-skill job prospects as the state’s capitol, home to a large and prestigious university, and large software and biotechnology sectors that have spun off of that university. Geographically, the heart of the city is the largest American city situated on an isthmus, just about one mile wide, running between a picturesque pair of lakes. The city has an ordinance protecting the prominence of the state capitol building, keeping the overall aesthetic of the skyline as it has been. It is also famously tedious to deal with when it comes to historical preservation; if you’d like to enjoy some ridiculousness, check out this recent argument about a bar that Al Capone apparently went to. As a result of these factors, that slice of land is a surprisingly expensive place to live for the Midwest.
Despite the prices, I elected to settle here anyway and I really do love this city. I love the beauty of the city, the historic skyline, the lakes, the biking, the fitness culture, the breweries, the cheese, the parks, the huge farmer’s market, and much more. I even love that it’s the kind of place that a fake Indian nonbinary lunatic would set up shop for fun and profit.Others in my city share that love, but think it should be a cheaper place to live, that we should increase housing density, and this is basically a human right. One recent opinion piece on this has a decent enough piece on a rather villainous and peculiar bit of law here:
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Here’s where I bite the bullet and go full nimby - yes! I am in favor of exactly that in my neighborhood. I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. My experiences with poor people and the transiently coupled have shown me that they’re lower quality neighbors. Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois. Back to the distinction between being a nimby and having a broader policy recommendation though - I don’t care if someone else in some other neighborhood would like to get rid of this sort of restriction, it’s not like I have some moral prohibition on there being poor people with roommates, I would just rather that my neighbors be a nice married couple that is going to stick around a while. I’ll even cop to the even more villainous take that I rather like the high property values here in part because they serve as an effective barrier against living around the kind of people I don’t want to live around.
Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 2/2)
Zooming out to a somewhat ridiculous degree, I find that I extend my position on this all the way up and down the ladder of my preferences and politics. When I consider immigration, for example, it’s not that I’m against all immigration to my country or that I think other countries should necessarily restrict free flow of movement, it’s that I want my nation’s policy to reflect what will be good for our (rather large) neighborhood. We should identify what is good for our neighborhood and choose to do that. In the event that cooperation with other neighborhoods is required, we should sort this out by negotiations to price externalities. There are going to be some pretty obvious agreements about what’s good for the neighborhood and these disagreements can occur between reasonable and well-meaning people, but we’re going to have a tough time getting the terms of debate to even begin to make sense if we can’t agree on whether the improvement of our neighborhood is the priority.
In all of these cases, the counterargument, as I understand it, is that while these things might be good for the current residents of my neighborhood, they’re not good for the potential future residents of my neighborhood. This is where I find it difficult to rebut the argument on its own terms, as it is evidently coming from a perspective of utilitarianism with little or no discount as one moves out the concentric ring of association. I don’t share that perspective and feel little or no responsibility to make my neighborhood more accessible to those that aren’t presently members.
In pondering this a bit yesterday, the part that I find most interesting in the efficacy of “nimby” as a sneer word against an opposing position. How did it come to be that even people that hold fundamentally nimby positions mostly recoil from being called nimbies? I think I found something like an answer in a recent Reddit thread on the putative housing shortage in Madison:
I think that’s it - progressivism demands the sort of egalitarianism that precludes one from saying that their backyard holds any particular value to them relative to other backyards. If something is good, then it must be good everywhere, which means that you must accept it in your backyard. Opposition to development is (correctly, I think) identified as anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, and classist.
In any case, I expect that people will continue to want good things in their neighborhood and not want bad things in their neighborhood. I hope that they regain the inclination to reply simply, “not in my backyard”.
It sounds like you've narrowed down to a specific value difference. While NIMBY isn't particularly strongly associated with conservatism/Republicans in the US (although, the left is often calling out liberals/Democrats, too), I often see people on the left asserting the strawman that the conservative worldview is "I've got mine, screw you." or the related "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" (I haven't actually seen that article before, but I've certainly seen the line repeated on Twitter a lot; scrolling down, that article also contains "I’ve got mine, so screw you").
I'm not sure there's much to gain by discussing further. You've found the fundamental values difference. Except maybe the YIMBY side could come up with arguments that your positions are actually somehow counterintuitively working against that value, but that seems unlikely. I guess there's the problem cited elsewhere in this thread that if you want businesses near you staffed with low-paid service workers, then those workers have to be able to afford housing of some sort vaguely nearby.
You're doubtless familiar with the story of the ants and the grasshoppers. Do you recognize a difference between the ants' reply to the Grasshoppers' demands and the phrase, "I've got mine, screw you"? Does it matter how and why the ants got theirs, or is the question of desserts eternally confined to the present state?
What's your evidence that "Caring About Other People" (which people? caring how?) delivers superior outcomes to "not" caring about other people? The policies Progressives describe as "Caring about other people" don't appear to preclude encouraging people to make risky choices, and then standing back and clucking regretfully as the consequences drive them to various forms of ritual public suicide united by thorough degradation and languorous agony. I personally would rather be swiftly dead or permanently jailed than live out the fitful and deranged trajectory of Travis Berge to its bitter conclusion. A system of "caring about other people" that reliably proliferates lots of Berges, and worse, evidently involves a somewhat nonstandard definition of "caring".
So long as such systems exist, it behooves the responsible and the prudent to wall them off from everything of value to the greatest extent possible, for the simple reason that instinctive, atavistic destruction will always be cheaper and easier than the amassment of value, of the good, of virtue. Actual care for others demands as much: those persuing goodness should be protected and encouraged, those pursuing evil should be given every incentive to change their ways, and blocked from executing their designs in the meantime.
...All of which is a long way to make a simple point: The claims you're implicitly making are completely demolished by multiple decades of observed results. "Caring about other people", in the peculiar way Progressives define the phrase, demonstrably makes the world into a rotting sewer.
The innocence project reliably puts out stories of the wrongfully convicted or executed. If you propose a general increase in 'swift death' or 'permanent jail', how do we balance Berges against Cameron Willinghams? Our system reliably proliferates Berges, as it does pedophiles, fraudsters, schizophrenics, people with nine toes ... because out of hundreds of millions of americans, five hundred people who are released and later reoffend is genuinely difficult to avoid.
Not that you don't have a point, but the evidence here isn't enough to claim "progressives demonstrably make the world into a rotting sewer". Especially since crime rates, over the past 400 years, have consistently trended down, as everything's become more progressive. This is one of the issues I take with neoreaction generally - a monarchist claims crime was better under monarchy because of strict order, etc, but I've never seen this really elaborated upon, other than 'I read lots of victorian literature and they say so', yet crime seems to have decreased generally.
I think in cases like Berges, some form of institutionalization is probably a massive improvement over the current method. That is to say, if I knew my life were going to go down Berges' trajectory, I would rather be institutionalized, and failing that I would rather be dead. His fate is viscerally horrifying to me, and the fact that we, from my perspective, encourage and allow such states to play themselves out without meaningful intervention is unconscionable.
Berges didn't need the full weight of the war-on-drugs criminal justice system. He didn't need a SWAT takedown. But neither did he need to be treated to a revolving-door parody of civil consequences. Once it became apparent that he was completely incapable of making good choices under his own power, he should have been locked up in some sort of minimum-security prison, there to either have the opportunity to rebuild some semblance of personal character, or at least be protected and to protect others from his own worst impulses.
Nor is it obvious to me that our society proliferates Bergeses in the same way it proliferates schizophrenics and people with nine toes. I think there is a fairly direct causation from the absurdly permissive social policies, particularly around highly addictive drugs, crime, and vagrancy, and the way his life ended. He lost control, and the social structures around him refused to help him in any way that worked or mattered.
Piss and shit on the streets, everywhere, together with trash, filth, used needles, infectious waste. Rats, and with them outbreaks of vermin-borne plagues. These are some of the highlights of the social experience in west-coast Progressive strongholds. I think "rotting sewer" is a reasonable summation. I don't want to live in such conditions, and I don't want to share a polity with the people who create and sustain them.
As for crime...I'm wondering if you've checked the stats lately. Here's 1900 to 2000. Here's the recent years, including the eye-popping 30% increase in 2020 that correlated with a major Progressive push to reform policing. I don't see how one matches those figures to a claim of "crime generally going down." We are currently sitting somewhere around five times the murder rate we enjoyed prior to the first modern Progressive era of the 1920s-30s, and the downward slope we enjoyed following the massive increase of the second progressive era of the 1960s-70s seems to be well and truly over.
Worse, one must consider the staggeringly massive investments and restructurings our society has made over the last century, all in an explicit attempt to solve the problem of violent crime. From militarized policing, mass-incarceration, ubiquitous surveillance, forensic science, to trauma medicine, to the increasingly regimented and invasive educational and psychological interventions, we've expended vast sums of money and human lives, and done massive, highly questionable modifications to our core social institutions, many of them with their own harmful side effects. And all this, by our best evidence, could only partially slow the long-term increase, and that to only a limited degree. Now we're headed back up again, quite rapidly, with our previous policy options thoroughly expended. When the murder rate skyrocketed in 2020, that was with a century of crime-suppression and harm-mitigation techniques, many of them ruinously expensive, already in place or expended.
So now... what?
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