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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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:

NIMBY (or nimby),[1] an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard",[2][3] is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called nimbys, and their viewpoint is called nimbyism. The opposite movement is known as YIMBY for "yes in my back yard".[4]

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:

An ordinance the Madison Common Council adopted in 1966 defines a “family” as “an individual, or two (2) or more persons related by blood, marriage, domestic partnership, or legal adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit, in a dwelling unit, including foster children,” though city ordinance does carve out some exceptions for roomers, children, group homes of people with disabilities, and so on. The implication for renters is that, depending on the zoning of an area, it might be technically illegal for more than two unrelated people to live in an apartment together. Restrictions are also tougher for renters than for people who own homes. In our scenario, if one of us had been able to buy a home, it would have been legal for us to live together, but as renters, it would be illegal in most residential districts to share a home.

…

The neighborhoods with the greatest opposition to this change are already some of the most expensive in the city. Homes currently for sale in Dudgeon Monroe, Vilas, Greenbush, and Wingra Park range between $625,000 and $1.3 million for a 4 bedroom home. They’re not your typical target neighborhoods for student housing. UW-Madison undergrads are a smart bunch, but likely very few of them have the time, money, and energy to hollow out your neighborhood of expensive homes. Most of them are perfectly decent neighbors, too, by the way.

…

The fact that the current ordinance doesn’t relate to use, but is more about who, is an indicator that it is designed to be discriminatory. While more explicit restrictions against poor people, young people, unmarried people, or students living in certain homes would certainly violate fair housing laws, these thinly-veiled discriminatory ordinances seem to fly under the legal radar. Still, one could argue it does violate city protections based on marital status, income, as well as student status. It actually could be cause for a lawsuit. Some municipalities’ family definitions have been struck down by courts in various locations around the US, and the Attorney General of Wisconsin in 1974 wrote an opinion that these ordinances “are of questionable constitutionality” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s discriminatory enough that housing is so gosh-darned expensive—do we really need unjust zoning ordinances on top of the price tag?

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.

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.

That's not hypocritical at all. The hypocrisy exists only when you demand that other people accept things in their neighborhood, but not in your own.

Note that it's also not hypocritical to demand that certain things be kept away from all neighborhoods. For example, demanding that heavy industry or other things that cause serious nuisance be kept separate from housing is completely reasonable, if that separation is reasonably possible.

Is there some sort of gross statistic that bears out this impact on the whole economy, other than your disposable income one? In terms of GDP and GDP growth, Japan looks like bottom of the first world country. The "conventional wisdom" is that Western countries are mostly the same economically.

Oh, Japan has lots of problems

The question is, why do the strengths and problems seem to balance out so much? If you have multiple independent factors, then the total variance sets an upper limit on the effect size of individual factors. So whenever someone says that a factor like housing or regulation or something else that some countries already get right, has a huge potential for economic growth, I look at the small variance between first-world countries, and conclude that either the factor doesnt have that much of an effect, or theres some sort of interaction effect that eats away most of the first-order-effect.

So, I found your claim that Japan actually is doing much better in the whole economy very interesting.

The western world isn't homogeneously wealthy though.

Most of it is within a factor of 2, which corresponds to about 30 years of economic development - and the bigger ones grow slower.

And Japan is at a minimum proof that you can have a functional and affordable housing market even with extreme land constraints and a high population density if you just allow more construction.

My beef is with the claim that this is keeping the whole economy down.

Disposable income after tax and rent is much more useful in predicting actual living standards than GDP per capita is.

For someone who owns property, as most NIMBYs do, the prospect of cheap housing is a bad one. It's not about keeping homeless people out of sight, it's about keeping rents flowing in and property prices climbing.

I have no idea why Japan has almost no homelessness, but how sure are you that it's because housing is cheap? While many temporarily homeless are really homeless because rent is too high and incredibly cheap living arrangements aren't available, the mentally ill or drug-addicted homeless might not hold an apartment at $100/mo, or might get kicked out of one. And even though the 'temporarily homeless due to cost of living' outnumber the addicts when you count by 'have you ever been homeless' on a population basis, the latter are less likely to climb out of homelessness, and are much more of the homeless population at any point in time. Compare it to Japan's low crime rate. (Although low rent is good even w/o affecting homelessness ofc)

Housing and mental illness and drug addiction are all very complex, and I'm not super confident in this hypothesis. But I think there's a good case to be made that making housing cheaper will reduce homelessness significantly. There are a lot of people who are borderline unable to care for themselves, where in good circumstances they do well enough, but in bad circumstances they'll totally collapse. You can take a person, and if they have a roof over their head and their own toilet, they'll be able to hold down a job at McDonald's, or doing landscaping, or some other straight forward job. But take away that roof over their head, their life becomes harder enough that they're unable to hold down any job, and they spiral. They turn to drugs to get any semblance of happiness, or maybe because all the other homeless people who become their de facto social circle use drugs. And expensive housing turns them from transitory homeless to a blight on society.

I think Scott's post here makes a good case about cheaper housing being very good good even if it's not the main point of the post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko

In general I am skeptical of any comparisons to foreign countries like Japan or any in western Europe. This is because, for example, Japan has a culture of falling in line, keeping your head down, and being normal that is far more strict than culture in America. So the worst of the worst people in Japan are only doing things like, I don't really know, let's just say maybe talking too loud on the phone once in a while. This is far more tolerable than the worst of the worst in America, which OP describes as:

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.

Not only that, but for Japan especially, they are more hostile to foreigners than America is, so they have far less of an immigration workload to deal with. That means if you're Japanese and you live in Japan and you were raised Japanese from the start, your neighbors are more likely to be just like you and as Japanese as you are, and dealing with the same culture. Having neighbors similar to you is what OP wants:

I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. [...] 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.

Of course, it's not all roses. Japanese culture has plenty of downsides (high rate of innocent convictions, peer pressure, work suicides, etc.). But I simply don't understand why any time someone brings up how Japan or the Netherlands has better housing/urban design/transit/etc. they will always, without fail, never mention the important difference between those countries and America: culture. (And other important things too, like law enforcement policies.)

Let me clarify my point. I'm generally skeptical of arguments of the form "they did [thing] in [Japan/Europe], why can't we do it here?" that do not take into account culture. Because my answer to that question is culture. If you live in Japan and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing your new neighbors might do is talk on the phone too loudly. If you live in America and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing that could happen is, well, let me just quote OP again:

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.

So then people oppose these projects when they otherwise wouldn't if they had lived in Japan.

You state that "Prices are lower because supply is higher." This I do not have a disagreement with. But you seem to miss the point of why, exactly, supply is higher.

I think your mistake is characterizing it as "wasteful" for people to pay to price out undesirable people from their neighborhoods. People pay that premium for a reason: they think it's worth spending a lot of extra money to not have to live around those people.

In other words, the nimbies you're responding to are essentially saying "we'd rather give up a lot of money than live around those people" and your response is essentially "but that's a lot of money that could be used otherwise". Which... well, yes, of course, but people derive value from that money.

Your musical chairs point - that someone has to live near these people - is trivially true. But a basic principle of living in a free market liberal society is that people get to selfishly make themselves better off if they're able to afford it. Perhaps we'd be better off if people donated more of their wealth to alleviate the burdens of the less fortunate, but human nature is what it is. Why single out housing as the one domain where people shouldn't be able to use their wealth to obtain things they want at the expense of others?

Ok but how much money exactly does it take to price out undesirables and who/what else are you pricing out at the point the price actually gets to? If you have multiple children have you decided which one will get the house and which one(s) will be priced out of the neighborhood they grew up in?

This sounds like a good idea. Let's apply it to the rest of society first, and then apply it here last. Reasonable?

More comments

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.

If they've always been around what they are inflation adjusted sure, but if they've doubled and tripled you have to contend with the fact that the population is going to be continuously aging rather than staying similar. If you want a place to actually be frozen in time you need to maintain the difficulty of entry as low as it was in the past.

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.

This would only be true if such neighborhoods were closed off from pedestrians, which they often are not. Mentally ill people rummaging through garbage early in the morning or other problems occur even in expensive areas.

Affordable housing is not right. This is something that seems to be lost on the media. What makes certain areas desirable also generally makes them expensive.

Mentally ill people rummaging through garbage early in the morning or other problems occur even in expensive areas.

Not in the suburbs! I know OP was focused on city living, but still, I want to put a good word in for my preferred environment. Source: I live in a suburb, not even a particularly expensive one (by Bay Area standards anyway), and it's blissfully isolated from all manner of city problems, including a wide swathe of undesirables undertaking undesirable behavior. One perk of the car-centric setup is that you need to minimally have your shit together to own a car, and it wouldn't be practical to live here without one. (For whatever reason the hooligans who steal vehicles don't penetrate here often — perhaps it's not a particularly lucrative environment for thievery?)

The suburban version of hobos rummaging through your trash is the metal scavengers getting out earlier than the trash truck on bulk pickup day. They tend to not leave as much of a mess though.

Those guys perform an actual public service, as they take larger metal items the trash collectors won't.

I have long thought large parts of North American cities should be much denser, but something that I noticed these new YIMBYs don't seem to recognize at all is that buildings have major externalities. That is why zoning laws exist. Letting people build whatever they want is not optimal.

They say that NIMBYs just want to restrict the housing supply in order to inflate their property values, but this makes no sense. If that's what they wanted to do, they would try to stop housing construction everywhere but their own neighbourhoods. Being allowed to develop their own properties would maximize their property values, but restricting the supply would depend on stopping development everywhere else.

That's not what a NIMBY does. That's what an OIMBY does (Only In My Backyard).

An explanation that matches their behaviour much better is that they want to preserve the value of their property by preventing the construction of buildlings with negative externalities. I have a lot of very serious NIMBYs in my family and they typically complain about things like preserving the character of the neighbourhood or discouraging transients from moving into the neighbourhood. They never talk about preserving property values. They don't want their property values to go up because they never plan to sell and don't their property taxes to go up.

Zoning restrictions are probably not the best way of dealing with negative externalities, but that does seem to be what they are used for and it's an important purpose. If they're removed, something else should be put in place to deal with the problems they're intended to solve.

They don't want their property values to go up because they never plan to sell and don't their property taxes to go up.

This does not make sense. If my $1-4 million home goes up even just 10% that is more than enough to pay taxes just by borrowing against it

Market price pretty much solves your issue with not wanting a homeless shelter next door. So long as it’s paid for/funded with market rationality. The local government probably builds the homesless shelter as long as they are rational - building the homeless shelter as cheaply as possible then it won’t be put in your backyard. It will be put in a poor persons backyard or around those who would rather have cheaper rent and a homeless shelter than people who are willing to pay a higher price to not live around homeless people.

The local government probably builds the homesless shelter as long as they are rational

What evidence have you ever seen from local government to indicate that rationality is prevalent or even present in most of their actions?

Reminds me of the meme that rich celebrities should welcome illegal immigrants to their homes and neighborhoods. They never take up the offer.

The local government probably builds the homesless shelter as long as they are rational - building the homeless shelter as cheaply as possible then it won’t be put in your backyard.

This is one of the wildest takes I've ever seen. I don't know of a single homeless shelter that was built according to this principle. They are almost always built to convenience the homeless in their preferred activities of panhandling, boozing, and harassing productive citizens.

You guys are probably right. I’m just close to a market absolutists and the issue here isn’t markets it’s politics encouraging nimbysm. No one by market principles would locate a homeless shelter on expensive real estate.

Well, no one by market principles would tolerate the current state of homelessness at all. It only exists because of publicly owned commons that are not policed as they would be if they were privately held. In addition, many of the public institutions that claim to have a monopoly on violence in a local area, would attack and imprison anyone who does take rational action with regard to their own private property.

The local government probably builds the homesless shelter as long as they are rational - building the homeless shelter as cheaply as possible then it won’t be put in your backyard.

The local government connives with some developer to give them a tax break on another project in exchange for the developer ceding the space for the homeless shelter, so they don't actually care about the cost of the lot.

Possible. But if you elect good leaders that want to provide public services efficiently then not an issue.

This isn’t an issue with nimby it’s an issue with your government.

Possible. But if you elect good leaders that want to provide public services efficiently then not an issue.

This IS efficient from the point of view of the government. They pay nothing.

if you elect good leaders

This is a more difficult problem than the original one he's grappling with, though.

homeless shelters [...] gave them first-hand and literal application of “yes in my backyard”

YIMBYs aren't advocating for new homeless shelters, they're advocating for more residential development, generally - and, at the margin, those units will be filled by normal people who are able to pay slightly less than current residents are, not the homeless. (Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk) Maybe if somewhere went full YIMBY rents would drop a lot, but that seems unlikely imo. YIMBYs claim more housing will help with homelessness not because poor druggies will be able to live alongside rich families, but because increases in stocks everywhere means more rich-ish people can live near you, freeing up units in middle-class areas for middle-class people, who'll put less pressure on poorer areas ... etc.

Coase's theorem relies on zero transaction costs, which are not present IRL when negotiating between diffuse collections of residents and state and local governments. And it guarantees pareto efficiency, which (by definition) leaves massive improvements on the table if a few people are very stubborn, e.g. strongly prefer 'not in my backyard' even over being paid.

So is it that high prices, specifically, keep out the wrong kinds of people? That would still allow a lot of building that might only lower prices somewhat. And is it really worth spending 25-35% of everyone's income on rent to maintain that? Even if [high rent, no building, good communities] is better than [low rent, lots of building, bad communities], there must be a way to achieve 'good communities' without banning building - although not necessarily a politically viable one.

YIMBYs aren't advocating for new homeless shelters, they're advocating for more residential development, generally - and, at the margin, those units will be filled by normal people who are able to pay slightly less than current residents are, not the homeless.

I think the definition of YIMBY/NIMBY has changed a bit. When I first heard it in my highschool class, my teacher was ranting about progressives who were like "Homeless shelters are so important! We need to do more for the poor!" but who would blanche and try to stop any such projects if they were being built nearby their own home. The initial emphasis was originally Not In My Backyard, it was about hypocrisy. But the counter-movement that's emerged, YIMBY's, is more Yes in My Backyard, they're more about just getting stuff built in general and tearing down red tape, they aren't actually organizing to build homeless shelters nearby themselves.

Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk

"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.

I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.

I'm a YIMBY and I think that so-called affordable housing requirements should be abolished. All houses are potentially affordable given a healthy market.

Yup. This is the way things are done in the rest of the world. If there is "affordable housing" it takes the form of little tiny apartments (like ... 6 square meters) which anyone can afford because they are minimalist. (Americans might call these tenements, and they are illegal.) Developers outside of the US seem to prevent claims of gentrification by grandfathering old tenants/owners into the new, larger units built on the same land.

"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards.

I don't know about percentages, but in my portion of a major NIMBY city, development usually does not tear down single family homes, but instead tears down poor-quality 1- or 2- story apartment buildings (often of the dingbat variety, which does not age well at all) and puts up in their place 10-12 story (4-5 of which is above-ground parking) stickbuilt cookie cutter "luxury" apartment blocks with rents that are far higher than the units replaced (because newer and nicer amenities, and often larger individual units).

The new units may be more expensive, but the net effect is still to depress prices generally. Yuppies move into the new "luxury" units, freeing up the mid-level housing they used to occupy for the middle class, in turn freeing up cheap housing for the poor.

Jesus, are those stickbuilt things really up to 12 storeys now? We're going to have a lot of deaths when one of those burns. Or are they only 6-7 wood above concrete?

6-7 stories above 4-5 concrete parking-garage floors.

Are you sure? The limit prescribed by the US's International Building Code for apartment buildings (occupancy R-2) has not been increased beyond five stories of heavy timber (type IV-HT) or four stories of dimensional lumber (type V) on top of a concrete podium, with a total building height of 85 feet for heavy timber or 70 feet for dimensional lumber.

But maybe your city uses a different code.

I think there may be a difference with newer engineered timber buildings, e.g.: https://www.fox6now.com/news/worlds-tallest-mass-timber-building-milwaukee-ascent

I think an engineer (def. local authorities sufficiently lobbied) can override this sort of thing -- it's expensive, but definitely is not physically unpossible:

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/real-estate/tallest-wood-residential-tower-world-vancouver-bc-1943876

I could be wrong and it could just be 5 above the parking. Regardless, they're tall. And expensive. And generally replacing old apartment/condo units instead of single-family homes.

This is one of those mexican standoff tragedy of the commons situations for me.

EG, I am strongly for NIMBY policies on homelessness until I am assured that YIMBY policies will be adopted state/nation wide.

Exemplified by the problems certain areas are having now: Some section of the nation are too cowardly to imprison or execute the homeless but poor enough in spirit to harass indigents until they fuck off somewhere else; all the way down the chain until they reach somewhere that has principles instead of standards which instantly becomes fucking awful.

If we could coordinate such that everywhere adopted YIMBY polices at once, it would be pretty much fine. Since we can't, I'm going to vote to give the brain fried PTSD'd out veteran a buss ticket back to el paso and they can go to hell.

Your desires, to have good, respectable, neighbors, to not live near disruptions etc. Are not only acceptable, they're completely expected. My objection to NIMBYism lies not in it's goals but in it's tactics which I believe frequently amount to using government action to appropriate the land value of other private actors for their own benefit. As a libertarian I see this as tantamount to communism.

Let me illustrate this with an example. There is a quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. Next to the neighborhood there is a field owned by a single farmer who grows corn. The neighborhood residents enjoy the quiet seclusion brought by being surrounded by corn and their homes values appreciate due to the relative scarcity of housing in their immediate vicinity. However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.

Now let's consider a few ways that the neighborhood residents might respond.

Scenario #1: the residents allow the field to be sold and new houses to be built and welcome their new neighbors

Scenario #2: the residents negotiate with the farmer and pay him a fixed sum of money in order for him to agree to put a restriction on his land that it will not be used except for agricultural purposes for the next 50 years

Scenario #3: the residents collectively buy the land from the farmer and turn it into a private park

Scenario #4: the residents use the fact that they outnumber the farmer to enact coercive government action to block any potential development of the land

In a sense all of 2,3 and 4 could be called NIMBY but my only objection is to #4. However #4 and analogous situations seem to make up the vast majority of NIMBY behavior so I consider myself an opponent of NIMBYism in general. My core belief is that you don't own your neighbors land and even if you have been recieving a benefit from how he has chosen to use that land for a number of years you are not in any way entitled to continue recieving that benefit and any use of government action to coerce your neighbor to use his land in a certain way is effectively theft.

more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn

Though this may be a type of efficiency, removing productive farmland from cultivation to site housing that does not require arable land does not seem an efficient form of land use.

housing that does not require arable land

Housing requires nearby jobs, land nearby jobs is relatively rare, sometimes the value from being nearby jobs vastly outweighs value from being arable. In any case, if we just built dense housing like apartment buildings with no parking lots, pretty little arable land would need to be built over; it's only suburbs or urban sprawl with massive highways that waste tons of arable land.

The market is much better at finding efficient uses than your speculation.

NMBYIsm is seldom used in this context. It's more about people who have no stake, not the contrived farmer example. The pro-NIMBY argument has to do with existing homeowners (stakeholders) suffering an externality with no just compensation.

However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.

No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in. People don't think in terms of efficiencies, they think in terms of values. Your example could have been from an economics textbook, which has a certain POV that is not relevant to the matter at hand, and does not reflect reality well enough to accept.

Taxation is theft. Theft is OK when enough people agree on it.

No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in.

This is a distinction without a difference. The farmer might not be thinking in terms of efficiencies but the forces that make the land more efficiently used as housing are the same forces that make the price higher thus making it more attractive for the farmer to sell. You're also ignoring the primary point. It doesn't matter why the farmer wants to sell what matters is that it's his land not anyone else's so other people have no right to tell him how it can be used.

This is a distinction without a difference.

No it's not. The quality of life benefit that the gently-waving fields of corn provide to the local residents is real! It even gets priced in in the value of the neighbor's homes. It just doesn't get directly converted to the farmer's benefit unless he acts to cannibalize the benefit (by selling the cornfield to someone who will build something "worse" there). This is a problem with conflating increased price with higher efficiency/benefit - at least insofar as we want people to be incentivized to provide and/or do things that their neighbors like and/or enjoy.

I've accounted for this. If the current residents are enjoying so much benefit from the farmland that it's actually more efficient to leave it undeveloped then there will be a price at which scenario #2 can be cleared

Our entire system is based on price = efficiency. That’s the American system. While the farmer might not be a trained economists it’s still the entire basis of our system higher price = higher efficient use

(For some good you could say higher marginal efficiency; oxygen is super important but the marginal oxygen is worthless type arguments).

I think all of this is fine with the caveat that you understand you are probably outnumbered by poorer people and its possible they will win the democratic fight. You can advocate and vote for your interests and they can do the same.

That might mean they win in your city over your objections and allow more densely zoned homes.

In other words the choosier you are of your neighbors and allies, the fewer neighbors and allies you have. This is a trade off. Of course your allies may be individually wealthier and more influential. This too is a trade off.

As long as you are willing to accept being overriden if your preferences lack enough support then i don't personally see an issue with your position.

Pragmatically you may want to not be too exclusive to try and bleed off support from the other side, but thats not really relevant to the values part.

I think poor people care much more about separating themselves from even poorer people then about getting to be with the richer people. Horrible-to-be-around-ness also follows the power law.

Imagine the top 0.01% of horrible-to-be-around-ness.

Eh, I don’t think the homeless actually represent any sort of voting bloc. And in representative democracy, wealthy landowners with local business ties and tons of skin in the game curry way more favor with politicians than those with nothing to lose.

If the politicians desire to turn a nice city into an indigent shithole, then I suppose that’s what they will have when people of means vote with their feet. See also, Detroit.

This becomes untrue if democracy is sufficiently local.

And becomes even truer if democracy becomes sufficiently global. If either of those things happen then yes, the calculus changes.

A lot of the problem with NIMBYism is the hypocrisy. If you believe that it's a moral imperative to help the homeless, that people who don't like the homeless are evil, and that the homeless are pleasant people to live next to who don't cause problems anyway, then not wanting a homeless shelter in your backyard shows that you are being hypocritical and that your actions don't match the moral condemnation you are ready to hold over people's heads. That's very different from admitting that the homeless are smelly, rude, commit a lot of crime, and unworthy of respect and then not wanting a homeless shelter near you--of course you don't! You just explained why!

I think you are fighting a strawman of yimbyism. Of course everyone wants to live in pleasant neighborhoods with friendly stable people and not drug addict criminals! The nimbys don't have a monopoly of that desire.

Since you cited Coase. There's a very obvious path of reasoning that leads to one not being a "nimby", that is being for free markets. If you believe in the power of the market to allocate scarce resources among agents with infinite wants most effectively. Then dense housing will be built where dense housing is in demand because there is no stronger force in the universe than people wanting to make money. Using any form of political leverage to oppose such developments let that be through onerous zoning regulations or whatever is interfering with the free market, and as such creating economic deadweight losses.

A study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that the housing restrictions brought on by NIMBY activists are costing US workers $1 trillion in reduced wages, (several thousand dollars for every worker), by making it unaffordable to relocate to higher-productivity cities.

Your preferred mode of living would still be available in a world without rampant nimbyism of the likes present in America. It's not like there are no good neighborhoods with high-earning residents in Japan, or Korea or Finland or the UAE. But you won't have housing prices so ridiculously high that you start dun goofing the birth rates. If there is a demand for the type of living arrangement you so revere, it will exist even in a yimby world, you will have to pay for the privilege though (you already are in aggregate and directly). I've said it before and I will say it again, there is some serious bullshit afoot if random housing in your city costs more to rent than renting a much superior arrangement in the tallest building in the world in pure luxury.

Since you cited Coase. There's a very obvious path of reasoning that leads to one not being a "nimby", that is being for free markets. If you believe in the power of the market to allocate scarce resources among agents with infinite wants most effectively. Then dense housing will be built where dense housing is in demand because there is no stronger force in the universe than people wanting to make money. Using any form of political leverage to oppose such developments let that be through onerous zoning regulations or whatever is interfering with the free market, and as such creating economic deadweight losses.

That is only part of it. the NIMBY debate is about people who exact an externality without the counterparty being justly compensated. Yes, land is being used sub optimally, then optimization should mean all parties are compensated, which is consistent with a free market approach. You want to build an apparent complex in my nice neighborhood, fine, but you owe me the difference of what my home would otherwise be worth.

I've said it before and I will say it again, there is some serious bullshit afoot if random housing in your city costs more to rent than renting a much superior arrangement in the tallest building in the world in pure luxury.

It's not that surprising. Think of how hard it is to transport goods to the top floors of a skyscraper. Prices are driven by connivence, proximity to jobs etc.

You want to build an apparent complex in my nice neighborhood, fine, but you owe me the difference of what my home would otherwise be worth.

Does the inverse also apply? If you want that apartment complex to remain a parking lot, you owe the owner the difference of what his parking lot would be worth if it were turned into apartments? If you're really so committed to maintaining your neighborhood, you should be willing to put your money where your mouth is and outbid every property developer.

Your preferred mode of living would still be available in a world without rampant nimbyism of the likes present in America. It's not like there are no good neighborhoods with high-earning residents in Japan, or Korea or Finland or the UAE. But you won't have housing prices so ridiculously high that you start dun goofing the birth rates.

Uh, have you seen the birth rates in those places? Korea is 0.81. Japan is 1.34. Finland is 1.37. The UAE is 1.46. The US is 1.64. It's not NIMBY or the housing prices for that matter.

I've said it before and I will say it again, there is some serious bullshit afoot if random housing in your city costs more to rent than renting a much superior arrangement in the tallest building in the world in pure luxury.

No, it isn't. Real estate is largely about location, and as a location, Dubai is a problem in many ways.

Uh, have you seen the birth rates in those places? Korea is 0.81. Japan is 1.34. Finland is 1.37. The UAE is 1.46. The US is 1.64. It's not NIMBY or the housing prices for that matter.

YES!! I did not imply that these places did not have bad birth rates, I should have put them in separate paragraphs to make the point and avoid confusion. My point was that these places have the kind of neighborhoods OP wants, AND the income to cost of housing ratio is a lot lower!

Housing prices being one of the many anti correlates to birth rates is another point. But it makes a lot of mechanistic sense.

No, it isn't. Real estate is largely about location, and as a location, Dubai is a problem in many ways.

Price is determined by demand and supply (and not much else), location influences demand. If NYC built more houses, the prices would be lower, this is really not a controversial statement to make. I gave the example of Dubai because I live here, and because housing gets built in abundance and it has some of the lowest housing to income ratios.

A study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that the housing restrictions brought on by NIMBY activists are costing US workers $1 trillion in reduced wages, (several thousand dollars for every worker), by making it unaffordable to relocate to higher-productivity cities.

Wouldn't all the workers moving to higher-productivity cities lower the salaries of workers living in those cities? The glut of workers vying for jobs would probably bring the price down more than several thousand dollars for every worker.

They'd be coming from other places reducing labor supply and raising wages there. Even if migration lowers the urban wage by introducing more people as long as it's a higher wage than where they were migrating from it's possible for the average to still increase. Also the mechanism by which you restrict or increase the urban labor supply is by raising or lowering housing supply which effects rents. So if there's a ton of new houses built and a whole bunch of people can move to the city and flip burgers even if that depresses the wages of existing burger flippers they benefit from lowered rent, or the absence of a rent increase, since new housing was built.

But the main argument is that agglomeration allows specialization which increases productivity, and wages are downstream of productivity. If a bunch more skilled people move to the city they can specialize in their most productive niche due to economies of scale. Because they're incredibly specialized and productive unskilled people can earn higher wages selling services to them. You could draw in so many unskilled people that there's no longer an urban rural unskilled wage difference once you adjust for rent, but it would still be a lower average wage then if the unskilled people were selling services to less specialized skilled people.

And that wouldn't matter because on aggregate products will be cheaper (And ultimately everyone is richer on balance). I think @Ecgtheow said it a lot better than I could in another comment in this post.

Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits

For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.

This is why unions are better. People teaming up to offer lump some deals drive up the overall price when individual workers would sell cheaper. Same thing housing. If a group hangs up to ban the entire construction of new housing it can drive up home prices. But our system is based on having defectors drive down the price in nearly every business and transactions going to marginal value. Many individuals homeowners would gladly sell off their yard for cash and allowing building in it etc.

They are defecting if you consider getting something and holding onto it and not allowing more of it to be made cooperating. There is another mode of doing things, which is doing things better and doing/building more things.

From a bird's eye view, you want the price of things to go down over time, you want more competition, more things, more goods, more services, and more houses. If your mode of operating is to not grow the pie but instead defend your share then sure, large swathes of humanity operates under those principles.

That’s my point individuals will defect. Sort of a prisoners dilemma where if everyone cooperates to restrict supply of land they can cause the valué to skyrocket in a booming jobs market. But individually a lot of people who paid $500k for their house now worth $1.5 would gladly sell off their backyard for cash.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.

It does matter. There are winners and losers. The people two states over who get to save two cents at a time are better off, and the people put out of work are tens of thousands of dollars worse off, but there are enough pennies to balance the tens of thousands of dollars, so it's all a wash!

The world doesn't work that way, and while it can be modeled in such a fashion, you should not confuse that model with reality.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.

This hyperbole doesn't add anything to your argument--it just undermines your credibility and makes you guilty of unnecessary antagonism. Don't do this.

Arguably that is exactly the economic decisions that have been taken over the last few decades. Outsourcing manufacturing makes everything cheaper for all consumers but hollowed out steel works and manufacturing in the rust belt.

Now you can certainly argue as to whether that was a good thing ( I would lean towards yes but some of the value should have been redistributed to the losers) But it is basically the essence of the neo-liberal economics of the past 50 years or so. So it is definitely reflective of reality as it stands.

I don't care about what you majored in.

Arguing for maximally free markets is hardly a novel economic stance to hold. And yes I do think 10 people imposing anti-free-market policies to shift 2 pennies from 1000 people so that they could be 2 dollars richer is morally wrong. This is the standard free-market maximalist stance. Also, half the pennies get lost in thin air (DWL) the moment they make their deal with the devil (market restrictions) so they are 1 dollar richer each. I want there to be the most dollars in the world, not some people having a lot of them at the cost of others having less, sue me.

That's definitely a position.

There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.

There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.

There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers.

Was it this one? It's about immigration, not tariffs, but otherwise seems to match pretty closely.

It appears I might just be totally miscalibrated on this topic. I checked the IGM Economic Experts Panel. Although most of the expert economists surveyed believed immigration was a net good for America, they did say (50% agree to only 9% disagree) that “unless they were compensated by others, many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year”. I’m having trouble seeing the difference between this statement (which economists seem very convinced is true) and “you should worry about immigrants stealing your job” (which everyone seems very convinced is false). It might be something like – immigration generally makes “the economy better”, but there’s no guarantee that these gains are evently distributed, and so it can be bad for low-skilled workers in particular? I don’t know, this would still represent a pretty big update, but given that I was told all top economists think one thing, and now I have a survey of all top economists saying the other, I guess big updates are unavoidable. Interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this.

OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!

How did you find it?

More comments

If you believe in the power of the market to allocate scarce resources among agents with infinite wants most effectively.

I don't think this applies meaningfully to any of my three examples, where the externalities are born by current residents rather than the agents accruing the benefits (in the first case, there essentially isn't an economic benefit).

It's not like there are no good neighborhoods with high-earning residents in Japan, or Korea or Finland or the UAE. But you won't have housing prices so ridiculously high that you start dun goofing the birth rates.

You picked four of the absolute lowest fertility countries in the world to illustrate this point? I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates.

I will concede citing fertility rates doesn't make much sense since that metric is far too confounded. But a strong argument could be made that housing prices are variable in that, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say on the matter.

As for your examples, how so?

I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates

You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space.

Russia and France have the same sub-replacement TFR as the Maldives and Qatar, two countries famous for having no free space at all. Next to the latter two are equally cramped Djibouti and the Seychelles, both with above-average TFR.

It makes sense that Djibouti would have a high fertility.

...what do you mean, specifically?

I just checked, and Djibouti's TFR is 2.522, according to this. This is actually interesting when one compares it to Somalia (note: Djibouti's population is majority Somali and overwhelmingly Muslim) with a TFR of 5.661, ie. over the double the rate in Djibouti. Just the effect of Djibouti's (obviously) greater urbanization?

I was making a childish pun about the pronunciation of the name Djibouti.

Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.

France modernized post WW2.

Wait.... Really? By what measurements? I always imagined they were as modern as the US or England prior to WWII and I'm surprised to hear that they weren't.

Basically all industrialized countries went through the modernization that led to declining birth rates post WW2, but France definitely lagged behind Germany and the UK economically before the 2nd world war.

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

I think this can be explained by demographics, like immigration and high Muslim population in France. Religiosity seems to be correlated with birth rates. Look at the Mormons for example.

Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.

This is a complete tangent. But I want some more opinions on this matter. I understand the general two themes of

  1. lower birth rate = Less young people to take care of old people

  2. less young people = less productive working people

I these negative consequences of a lower birthrate; however, resources in any country (or planet) are necessarily finite. So even if there is space now for there to be a higher birthrate in most of these countries, at some point there won't be. At some point it will be NECESSARY to have a lower birth rate (Alternatively a higher death rate, but i don't like that alternative) to account for the resource constraints. And the first issue issue is also a transitory one in many respects as long as the birth rate is at or above replacement, the number of people in the space will eventually stabalise to a consistent level and there will once again be enough young people to support the old. And both could potentially become obsolete someday with the increase in mechanical automation of labor.

TL;DR Can someone give me an argument against the fact that at some point we will eventually need a lower birth rate in at least some parts of the world at a given time.

Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.

The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.

This just seems like a kind of pointless worry as we don't actually have a high enough birthrate to replace ourselves. It's not at some point we're going to need to dip below positive so that we don't run out of space, it's we crossed that point decades ago and are so far on the other side that things are going to get weird. Unless you're talking on a global context, at which point housing policy in specific countries is not really an important factor.

If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.

Or conversely, low costs per area will allow bigger houses to be cheaper.

YIMBYs don't want bigger houses; they want more houses in the same space.

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:

NIMBYs won’t let anything be built and this is what happens. There is not enough housing in the area but Madison-area NIMBYs are fake progressives who don’t actually care about the working class. Their number 1 priority is preventing multi family units from being built near their unremarkable mid century homes.

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”.

So your homeless shelter doesn't get built near your neighbourhood, or anywhere else in your city. Now what? You've addressed the point that such shelters will impose externalities on those living near them, but shelters themselves are not the cause, the homeless people are. And the lack of shelters will not actually remove those homeless people.

Perhaps they simply congregate in your city centre, making it increasingly unpleasant to be in as happened in many major American cities. Maybe they just start congregating in a random place, pitching their tents in some neighbourhood for no apparent reason - and perhaps they pick your neighbourhood, and you've got the problem anyway. What's the solution to this?

Obviously, with the homeless there are non-housing related options: you could try and simply ship them away to some other area, or have the police be much harsher on vagrancy and imprison many of them. In the first case, what's to stop these other areas from sending them back, or the homeless themselves from simply returning? Will you end up in an expensive cycle of carting the homeless back and forth? For the second, what about prison capacity? I can't imagine prison construction is any more popular than shelter construction, so where do you plan to build the extra prisons needed for the homeless population?

Admittedly, this example only applies to homeless shelters, and there are other examples like loud or foul smelling factories which might be better.

Let's turn to the housing question instead. As many of the other replies have noted, there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice neighbourhood, filled with familiar people. A lot of poor people are just unpleasant to be around and bring issues with them, and high housing prices do act as a barrier. But I think nimbys making this argument are not being logical or following the idea through to its conclusion.

I assume you're a homeowner in Madison, right? Maybe your house is worth $1 million or something. But I'm also going to assume that this is not a particularly large or impressive house, given the pressures on housing costs you mentioned? If we remove those restrictions and start heavily increasing density in the area, then perhaps your area will become less pleasant, with more bad people around.

Except: you'll still have the capacity to afford $1 million in housing. That's not going to vanish just because there are more houses in the area. Even in the yimby paradise of Japan, they succeeded in keeping property prices at the same level for ~20 years, not actually in lowering them - and if there was some unprecedented success in lowering housing costs, this would almost certainly take many years to accomplish, given existing homeowners time to realize value.

So now, instead of living in your $1 million 3 bed suburban house surrounded by other $1m suburban houses, you move to a $1 million 6 bed McMansion, surrounded by other McMansions. Your ability to spend money to preserve a certain living situation has not changed. What that money can buy has improved.

There is an argument that this only applies up to a limit: if you're already wealthy and can afford a 20 room mansion, there's no real room to move up. But putting aside the fact that this is a tiny niche of the population, if you have that kind of money there is already a solution: just buy land. Give yourself a couple of acres around your house. Don't want an apartment complex to block your view? Buy the land there, pay an appropriate fee to cover the loss to society.

Neighborhoods aren't fungible

Do you actually believe this? Do people really consider that "ABC Street", with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities is somehow different from "XYZ Street" with its rows of one story suburban houses 10 minutes from nearby amenities?

After all, if there is one constant in the property market, it is that people are constantly on the lookout for bigger, better housing. Do people's revealed preferences suggest that a large number of people really think that their neighbourhood is the only one that is nice and with good people?

I will accept there are a handful of places that you really can't replicate: a New York brownstone, a London Georgian terrace. But these places are already incredibly expensive and desirable. No amount of new building will make these areas any less desirable and expensive.

And if you want to talk aesthetics in particular, in some cases it is the nimby restrictions which cause the shortage of these types of housing! I can't talk for the US, but here in the UK the rise of the generic tower block and hideous "Deanobox" is overwhelmingly driven by property regulations.

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.

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.

I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.

I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.

But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.

I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?

(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)

Law professors at stanford are 'the upper-class equivalent of a welfare leech'?

But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop.

"Surely we can all agree - we don't have THAT much responsibility to the environment, right? Otherwise we'd have to stop using lead paint, leaded gasoline, maybe stop dumping oil into rivers - and, wow, what a mess that'd be."

What even is this argument? Surely if going to india and 'saving lives at 100/pop' (givewell estimates it at $5k) isn't worth doing, it is so because of ... some aspect of those lives or what saving them entails, and not because we're not already doing it.

The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).

EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.

And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.

Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1

... okay, and the revealed preference of conservatives and reactionaries is that they love porn. this doesn't tell us that porn is good the interesting claim isn't "do most normal people do X", because ... they're normal people, many just imitate what their friends or family or media does, some come up with their own ideas which aren't any better, the interesting claim is "is X worth doing". If the amount of value something has is determined solely by how much other people, at the present moment, value it - i guess handwashing in hospitals was valueless until semmelweis.

Those publications aren't inspiring at a glance, but they're probably better philosophy than the 75th percentile philosophy paper. And she spent a lot of time teaching law too (apparently they both stopped teaching after FTX) - which isn't particularly parasitic. I'm not gonna look too deeply into this, but even if she has much more prestige than she should for a law school teacher, that's hardly welfare leech

I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.

There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).

There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.

  1. I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.

  2. (Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)

In any society containing modern progressives (ie. postwar ones), you don't exactly get a choice on the matter. These people represent enemy civilians at best and enemy soldiers at worst, in a zero sum war against your basic rights and interests - to stop half way at indifference is to declare the bizzare position of neutrality towards yourself.

Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop?

Isn't this more or less what Effective Altruism is trying to do?

Notwithstanding the fact that the most dedicated EAs sometimes suffer burnout, it does seem there's at least some people putting their money where their mouth is in terms of valuing the lives of humans.

Yes, there's definitely some people that care.

But the vast majority just profess to care and their actions (i.e. revealed preferences) suggest otherwise.

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.

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?

If the ants say "I've got mine, go build your own, and if you can't do so before winter that isn't my problem" then we are in The Parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, and we are supposed to feel at least somewhat sympathetic to the ants. NIMBYism is where the ants say "I've got mine, and if you build your own I will shoot you" which puts us in a kind of reverse It's a Bug's Life.

What's your evidence that "Caring About Other People" (which people? caring how?) delivers superior outcomes to "not" caring about other people?

Apologies for the confusion. I had no intention of claiming one set of values is "superior" to another. In fact, I thought I directly stated that the difference in goals meant that debating which approach is "superior" isn't a meaningful conversation to have in this context.

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.

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"

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?

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,

It's not just progressives who fall into this trap. I have seen many on the right who are preoccupied with other people, too. I think both sides have a tendency to moralize , but about different things.

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.

That's fine if people want to make stupid choices. Just don't make me pay for the externalities or make me have to pretend that these are values to aspire to.

I think you're too focused on trying to win obvious rhetorical concessions against very online urbanist YIMBYs and not really dealing with the issues at hand. Except for some urbanists and WEIRD people, I think most people would love to live in a suburban neighborhood in a beautiful location with people of only their socioeconomic class and culture and a short commute to work with easily available parking. I'm on the YIMBY side, but I have no issue admitting I would absolutely love that living situation, but the issue is that maintaining such environments in the face of economic headwinds isn't done through Coasean negotiations but through government restrictions on property rights that create deadweight economic loss.

YIMBY's are mostly progressives trying to convince blue city governments so they make arguments about egalitarianism and diversity but I don't think economic development is inherently progressive or egalitarian. Logically as a city increases in population some part of it will have to increase in density or it will sprawl infinitely. The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.

Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits

For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.

Economic geography changes all the time; the places where young talented people want to move changes as different innovative fields develop new industry clusters, the places where hardworking blue-collar people migrate from or to changes as different extractive or manufacturing industries rise and fall. If we want a dynamic economy we have to accept there will be large population transfers and we need a system of housing production that facilitates such transfers. The people who live in a place affected by such a transfer will resist the change to the place they live, they'll want subsidies for public services in half-empty cities, or to ban housing to be built for newcomers where the market determines it should be built. If everyone is allowed to impose regulation or appropriate public funds in order to preserve the character of the place they live in the way it was when they got there we get sclerosis and massive deadweight loss. You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.

The point of YIMBYism/fewer restrictions on property rights is to let the market decide where density increases, not which neighborhood is better at lobbying the local political system.

Essentially nobody really wants the market to decide; online YIMBYs just say that to try to recruit online libertarians. But they just want opposite restrictions. Parking maximums instead of minimums, setback restrictions, tax schemes favorable to density, etc.

While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.

Most people, even YIMBYs, support the right of a community to impose some restrictions on activities with large externalities. Only the most extremist libertarians think anyone has the right to build a fish cannery or paper mill in a residential area.

Only the most extremist libertarians think anyone has the right to build a fish cannery or paper mill in a residential area.

Why does this have to be an extreme libertarian position? The free market essentially solves the problem associated with this. Neighborhoods that stink of fish will be cheaper to live in and those who are not okay with that can pay for the privilege.

I live in a city that does indeed allow the unthinkable idea of fish canning (slaughterhouse) plants in the middle of the city, they just get surrounded by dirt-cheap housing and businesses (and people do live there). It's still cheaper overall to live in a place that doesn't smell like meat because not fucking with the markets really does wonders.

The issue of course, and I'm broadly on the YIMBY side, is that the moment that slughterhouse gets plopped down it imposes economic costs on some with diffuse benefits for all. The people who paid not cheap prices for their houses are out a significant portion of their largest asset and the diffuse beneficiaries will not compensate them.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between projects which impose a true negative externality on neighbors and projects which merely remove a previous positive externality. A slaughterhouse really is making things specifically worse and I think that should be compensated but residents who currently enjoy the seclusion brought by the woody area behind their neighborhood and thus are lobbying to disallow bulldozing it to build more houses can fuck right off.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners? It's not like a fish canning factory can just plop out of nowhere, large disruptive projects take years/decades to build and the intention to build as such is broadcasted well in advance.

We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?

I think you'll find people quite unwilling to just eat huge unfair economic hits like this. They'll lobby whatever powers they can to prevent their loss and ultimately they will succeed, even if they have to go to extreme lengths. If you don't let them do it through cities they'll do it through some other scheme. You're talking about taking the equivalent of several years of work away from people's net worth, they'll bomb the construction if it comes to that.

The ONLY reason the middle class has jumped head first into real estate investment is because of the government consistently enacting zoning regulations to deliberately benefit homeowners at the expense of everyone else, which likewise benefits a community’s most consistent voters. Anyone else who borrowed an amount of money 3-4x their salary as part of a 30-year loan, wiped down the countertops, then cried crocodile tears when their “investment” didn’t make them millionaires, would rightly be told they were an irresponsible idiot.

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It's not just homeowners, concentrated benefits / diffuse costs are a general problem - overfishing may benefit you, personally, now, but takes a bit away from other fishers now, and from you in the future, and persistent overfishing would necessitate regulation.

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

In a world where homeowners are hapless agency-less simpletons, yes. But it's not a wise long-term strategy for the potential slaughterhouse owner, people will wisen up to his tactics. There are countless ways businesses can extract money out of you now too, but competition fixes that issue just fine.

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Might as well ask why people are allowed to have a say in the way their city/state/nation is run. Because we've accepted that from other principles. If you want to argue for the god-emperor to make every zoning decision, be my guest. Until then, let people who live there decide how they want to live, and suffer or reap the consequences.

let people who live there decide how they want to live

This is contradictory to letting people use their land that they own the way they like. People can decide how they live as long as they bear the cost of it instead of politically strongarming others into making decisions that benefit them.

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Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally. If the majority of people in the neighborhood think that inviting more hobos to hang out is the right thing to do and should probably be considered a new amenity, well, tough shit for me. As much as I'd like to be the dictator of my own fiefdom, I'd settle for collaborative local control of policies. I suppose equally implicit is that I reject the idea that anyone that owns a given yard can do as they like with it, free from government interference.

I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.

But then what is the point of even owning property? If others want veto power over what I do with the land that I own, then they can buy it from me. If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.

If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.

But like, they can. Nonetheless, people choose to own property, because it still affords greater freedom to do [whatever] than renting. The set of things you're allowed to do when you're renting is smaller than the set of things you're allowed to do as a landowner / homeowner. This remains true even though the latter set does not contain "literally anything conceivable."

I don't agree. It's why I will never buy a house in an HOA: the entire point is to do what I want. As soon as neighborhood Karens are telling me what I can and can't do on the land I own, ownership is meaningless.

Idk where you live, but as far as I know, almost everywhere has a building code, at least in the US. I suppose a sufficiently rural area might offer more leeway.

Building codes do limit what you can do with your land (and are a non-trivial part of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate as they may include restrictions that greatly reduce density like parking or setback requirements), but HOAs have a reputation for having arbitrary and detailed restrictions on the use of your land like "your house may be painted one of these 4 colors".

Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.

What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.

In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.

It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?

To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.

It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not.

This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".

In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.

Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US,

This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.

I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?

Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".

I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines. If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.

I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.

(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)

In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.

The numbers in the linked video are actually from a separate organization, Urban3. I don't really think that the linked comment "shows ST to be dishonest." gattsuru seems to agree that funding is coming from the state and local government, which is also something that ST has pointed out. They then complain about the fact that ST's comparison between 2 lots is (misleading? inaccurate?) because one lot has more businesses than the other, when in fact that is the whole point. Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income. Overall I would describe this as "someone disagrees with them" not "they're being dishonest."

This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability.

Why does it "ring hollow"? I agree that reckless driving doesn't get enough enforcement; I've previously complained about that. But I think this problem long predates BLM protests and backlash against police. Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing. Even the use of the term "car accident" is arguably misleading; we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory. What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame. Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.

I am also skeptical that enforcement has/would have a big effect, but I would love to see some empirical research. However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.

Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.

I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines.

Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.

If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.

I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.

I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.

Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.

(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)

Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.

Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income.

Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:

Yes, but they're not right. Lafeyette Parish's budget is available online, and its total Operations Expenditures for the current year are 427 million USD, with an included 90,000 households. Assuming no taxes are paid by businesses or out-of-parish people, all operations expenditures together runs at 4.7k USD per household. Its Public Works expenditures, which include all transportation spending, end up 654 USD per household. Even assuming that the 3.3k USD number StrongTowns comes up with is correct, that still doesn't get to 9k USD infrastructure -- and that's defining 'infrastructure' so broadly as to include police, parks, recreation, information services, so forth, (and spotting them two years of inflation, too).

--

What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame.

I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.

My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.

Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.

Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.

However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.

I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.

Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.

I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.

I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control.

It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.

Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.

What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.

But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations

It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.

Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:

Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.

Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.

I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.

Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver.

I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.

I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.

Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.

As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).

I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.

It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.

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Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing.

Not really.. Pedestrian deaths declined from 1979 (8096) to 2009 (4109) Non-pedestrian deaths dropped precipitously starting after 2005, more or less plateaued from 2010 to 2014, rose again until 2016, then fell until 2019. This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.

we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory.

Certainly we have it; it's what determines who is "at fault" in an accident. Even no-fault states apply it to some sorts of damages. Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)? Negligence doesn't result in that.

That's still over a 50% increase in pedestrian deaths over about 10 years, enough to push it to the highest raw level since 1990, especially since the EU saw a substantial decline over the past decade. And the chance from 2020 to 2021 was massive.

This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.

It's not the only factor, but it's definitely one. SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians than other cars, and the same factors that make a vehicle safe for its occupants can make others unsafe, encouraging an arms race.

Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)?

I'm confused by this question. The whole point I'm making is that we use the word "accident" for a lot of car crashes that are preventable, because one or more drivers engaged in some sort of irresponsible or reckless behavior. Asking if I want to jail people for accidents is rather sidestepping the issue. If you speed and follow too close on the highway, resulting in a fatality, yeah, you should be in prison. That's manslaughter; the lack of intent to kill makes it not murder, but it's still generally a crime to behave recklessly and injure other people. A similar situation is literally one of the examples in the wikipedia page on manslaughter.

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In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people.

Citation needed. Can you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles, keeps a handle on the vagrant problem, and generally results in superior outcomes? There's lots of NIMBY areas with good economic and social outcomes, but has YIMBY ever actually been implemented at scale in the US?

an you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles,

I'm not aware of any that do a good job over the whole metro area, no (good enough to evaluate their effects in this way, at any rate). You could probably point to individual towns or neighborhoods, but these would probably be A) subject to selection bias because they're rare, B) too few in number, and C) surrounded by other places with different policies. Not Just Bikes made a video about a streetcar suburb of Toronto which seems pretty nice, and if there are any crowds of druggies, they haven't stopped housing prices there from rising faster than in the rest of the city (because of course, such places are mostly illegal to build now, so the supply is constrained).

However, I think you've misunderstood the point of this sentence. Policies generally associated with NIMBYism are not just about keeping vagrants or other obvious problem-causers away. This is clear from looking at the policies themselves, as well as NIMBY arguments, which involve things like property values.

Here's one example: The ski resort town of Vail has been fighting to keep the ski resort of Vail from building employee housing. The reason they give is bighorn sheep range, but they've approved several regular homes to be built in the area and didn't care about any measures the resort offered to protect the sheep. And I think it's pretty clear that resort employee housing is not going to suddenly attract homeless people to one of the most expensive resort towns in the world!

Similarly with opposition to e.g. a duplex or retail or a school. A neighborhood full of million-dollar homes is not suddenly going to be crawling with hobos and criminals because someone put a duplex up going for half a million each side or a small elementary school.

It seems to me that people associate and conflate nimbyism with multiple different issues. It's understandable, maybe even beneficial, that people might oppose things like housing projects in areas with lots of families. One could argue those things need to go somewhere, but I think ultimately housing projects in modern urban america have been failures. Its time to try something else.

Then there's the more common somewhat related problem of regulatory burden, where people oppose construction of basic housing, apartments, businesses, or infrastructure, through arcane laws that basically upend the function of property rights (I can do with my property as I will). This seems less defensable and ultimately is one of the main cruxes of the housing crisis in high cost west coast cities.

Then there's this recent left leaning obsession with dense urban living that gets thrown in (without any logical connection IMO). The claim is that it's more environmentally friendly, would lead to more equitable or equal outcomes, and also just seems to be an aesthetic choice. The method to achieve this seems to be scrapping suburban infrastructure, regulating away cars, and generally centralizing government authority so people cannot resist. There are a lot of obvious reasons not to do this (dense urban areas have poorer outcomes than suburbs in income inequality, mental health, self reported happiness, crime and basically every metric you can think of outside of average income, which may or may not still exist when adjusted for cost of living) If it isn't obvious I think the value of this argument approaches nill, and is just signal boosted by the location and recruiting pool of media conglomerates. If anything, as the internet makes your location more and more economically irrelevant, it seems that dense urban living makes less sense than ever.

The YIMBYs and the dense-urban-living people are the same people with different hats (or masks) on. No YIMBYs are out there supporting my right to build a 10-foot fence or run a business from my house; they only support relaxation of regulations in as much as that relaxation results in densification.

Definitely not true, because I'm a YIMBY and am totally opposed to dense urbanification. You could call most of the republican party functionally YIMBY (anti construction regulation) but anti urbanification, they just don't use those terms. There's a pretty clear connection between how red an area is and its lack of housing regulation.

Many of the twitter YIMBYs I'm vaguely aware of tend to be neoliberal/market-leaning, and they're generally supportive of 'mixed use development', i.e. being allowed to run small-scale businesses in residential areas (or build homes in business areas). IT's claimed to revitalize neighborhoods, lead to local businesses you can walk to and socialize around.

The idea of trying to hide and defending ones farm is one of the worst ideas in the American right. Chicago has African levels of murder and the people who built it vote democrat and have BLM profiles on their linkedin since they isolated themselves in suburbia. This is the same mistake the French elite made by moving to Versailles. If you isolate yourself from society, cohesion will plummet. If people don't interact there is no understanding left. This will rip society apart and create a soulless city. American cities tend to lack public spaces, life on the streets and genuine culture and instead have stroads and strip malls. A walkable mixed use development is much more likely to have a living culture with less fat people and a stronger identity as people actually interact with each other and have chances to form a collective identity. If you are nothing but an atomized consumer isolated from the others, bringing in cheap foreign labour seems much more appealing than if they have to live next door.

A healthy society should be one large community in which different classes play different roles but fundamentally are one team. How are people going to identify with each other if they live in isolated enclaves? The goal should be to maximize skin in the game as people climb the social ladder. Greek and Roman aristocrats went into battle first, the same should apply today with the added requirement that they use public transit and drink tap water. Low skin in the game for the top is a dangerous direction for a society to wander.

American sprawling cities are the most woke and most pro multicultural places on Earth. Even places in Europe that are considered multicultural are as white as Boston. The idea that suburbia would lead to a better society for right wing people seems to be empirically false. It seems to lead to generic urban sprawl in which the top third is isolated from the rest of the society and slowly loses its connection to the rest.

I agree that outer-ring suburbs are about the worst in terms of optimizing atomic quality of life vs. community, but you seem to completely exclude the existence of small towns, which seem to me to offer superior sense of community along with low cost of living and the most egalitarian of lifestyles (due largely to the lack of high-end amenities, granted.) The main downside is lack of economic opportunity, but there's no inherent reason we couldn't make that a social priority as opposed to densification.

For what it's worth, my choice was already a unit in a multifamily dwelling in a relatively dense area of the city (although Madison is not an especially dense city as a whole. My preferred style of living are places like the row homes in Alexandria. I agree completely with preferring an interconnected community, walkability, bikeability, and a firm sense of city identity as important. I'm not interested in Retvrn-style politics of retreat, I'm interested in asserting the legitimacy of communities being able to say no to larger, non-local governments imposing deterioration on them in a way that no should accept for their neighborhood. I just have no particular desire to impose this preference on suburbanites - if they don't want this in their backyard, they get to say no, and that's fine.

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