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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.
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
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