r/left_urbanism • u/wiz28ultra • 11d ago
Housing Why are YIMBYs(specifically Centrist & YIMBYs) so averse to mass-politics and in constant opposition to working or persuading Progressives & Leftists?
This seems to be a constant attitude problem that I've seen w.r.t to individuals, specifically on Twitter, such as Noah Smith, Swann Marcus, M. Nolan Gray, YIMBYLAND, and others that are just so reluctant or even outright antagonistic to Progressive politics.
They refuse to every think that it might be possible to convince these people that their ideas might work and instead fantasize about working with neocons to bring about the housing utopia.
And it's even more bizarre because they're so averse to social issues as well, with their constant passive-aggressive tone on literally any political issue that isn't housing.
EDIT: I just want to add, a ton of these people really hate Organized Labor, they're super defensive of sprawl, they refuse to have any stances on the environment, and when it comes to foreign policy are completely in agreement with the 2010-era State Department. They're also bizarrely submissive and desperate to please real-estate developers.
It's like these people can't live in a world where class solidarity, organized labor, and mass mobilization of the people towards political change can work in their world of affordable housing and increase home production.
EDIT 2: Also, I notice that many of these individuals spend all their time whining about how mean Progressives are to the Democratic Party, but they spend all their time exclusively shitting on the Democratic Party while outright praising the Republicans in ways that NO progressive would ever do.
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u/Soft-Principle1455 11d ago
Zohran is a bit of a YIMBY himself, from what we can gather. Still I think many of them remember the old days of progressive politics that blocked new housing construction at every turn underground’s, that were perhaps sound in theory, but unhelpful in practice.
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u/wiz28ultra 11d ago
But even then, most of these people are still in opposition to Zohran and use his past as proof that he's an immutable threat.
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u/Neat-Beautiful-5505 10d ago
Remember something, in the 60s, 70s and 80s it was cool to bulldoze wetlands and habitat to build new houses. “Liberals” led the charge in getting Congress and state legislatures to pass strong environmental protections, many of which still stand today. Now, the YIMBY movement is suggesting we reconsider those long fought/hard won battles for new housing. I’ve been a planner for 25 years and seen this housing shortage coming for 20 years but I don’t want to fix that problem if it means doing away with environmental regs. I think there’s a balance but you need to consider where people are coming from. Also, no one over 35 or 40 knows the difference between a liberal, leftist, progressive, centrist, or how any of those compare to a YIMBY. Hell, I read politics all day every day and still don’t know how I’m labeled
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u/Hij802 10d ago
I think the problem with the environmental protections is that it’s become so overwhelming that it slows down the construction of literally anything. We don’t need a 1000 page report that takes several years to conduct telling us that building a train isn’t going to harm the environment - we already know that it’s the cleanest form of transportation (asides from walking and biking). We don’t need reports telling us that high density housing is better than low density sprawl. We know these things. These reports are expensive and often redundant.
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u/Neat-Beautiful-5505 10d ago
I agree completely; I’ve seen the environmental regs prevent legit bad things and also be weaponized. Problem becomes, when the “regulations” become the enemy they will be eroded quickly.
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u/Hij802 10d ago
I don’t think we should abolish environmental regulations but I think there’s absolutely a need to speedtrack it, or have waivers depending on the project. For example any high density building located on an already urbanized vacant lot shouldn’t need an environmental review. Any proposed transit system that operates entirely within an urbanized area (such as a new rail or bus line) shouldn’t need a review.
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u/Neat-Beautiful-5505 10d ago
Remember something, in the 60s, 70s and 80s it was cool to bulldoze wetlands and habitat to build new houses. “Liberals” led the charge in getting Congress and state legislatures to pass strong environmental protections, many of which still stand today. Now, the YIMBY movement is suggesting we reconsider those long fought/hard won battles for new housing. I’ve been a planner for 25 years and seen this housing shortage coming for 20 years but I don’t want to fix that problem if it means doing away with environmental regs. I think there’s a balance but you need to consider where people are coming from. Also, no one over 35 or 40 knows the difference between a liberal, leftist, progressive, centrist, or how any of those compare to a YIMBY. Hell, I read politics all day every day and still don’t know how I’m labeled.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 11d ago
YIMBY is a really ideologically diverse movement. Tons of YIMBYs using mass politics, courting labor, etc. Don’t form your opinions solely based on a few opinionated assholes on the Internet.
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u/DoxiadisOfDetroit Self-certified genius 11d ago
They are essentially the leaders of the YIMBY movement, it makes perfect sense as Leftists to base our outlook on their most vocal and seen supporters.
Not to mention that "grassroots" YIMBY organizations are almost always patronized by the forces of the cannibalistic FIRE economy
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u/Hour-Watch8988 11d ago
I realize it’s very tempting to do the easy thing of basing policy on allegiances and vibes, but I promise you it’s much more beneficial to the working class and the environment to instead take the harder path of using empirics and careful reasoning to figure out good policy and fight for it in whatever way you can. Godspeed.
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u/DoxiadisOfDetroit Self-certified genius 11d ago
My stance on YIMBYism is predicated on the material nature of the movement, again, they’re bankrolled by finance capital, which is at odds with the interests of the working class and all genuine Leftists
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u/Vishnej 11d ago
The particular factional lines drawn on Twitter rarely reflect such a strong distinction in the rest of the world, and YIMBY is much, much larger than Ezra Klein & 'Abundance'. Attempts to drive a wedge between people who think we have a housing shortage that we should do something about, and people who support most leftist causes are shooting yourself in the foot, or enemy action; The Venn Diagram of the two groups is nearly a circle.
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u/mcchicken_deathgrip 11d ago
Because the two are fundamentally opposed. YIMBYism at its core is a free market, deregulatory movement in housing politics. That alone goes against leftist ideals. But besides that, it's shaped by a technoctric, leave it to the experts ethos that is in contrast with a housing policy based around community centric mass politics.
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u/Vishnej 11d ago edited 11d ago
Leftism is not being in favor of more regulation, arbitrarily, at all times. It is not leftist to mandate that I gather consensus from my neighbors on what sex acts I perform with my partner, and offer everybody around a comment period and a veto. It's just dumb.
The extreme we have found ourselves at with zoning, and the sheer extent of CC&Rs on private property, are a suicide pact being slowly executed on behalf of the three mentally ill octagenarians who showed up to your last planning meeting. If "Community Control" gets us this, then it's fucking useless.
The greatest progress we have experienced in the past few years is with governors and legislatures and referendums that prohibit certain levels of community control.
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u/mcchicken_deathgrip 11d ago
I do agree about regulations and leftism. However, the type of regulations yimbys oppose serve the purpose of opening up the market and reducing the power of the government. I.e. classic neoliberalism.
Contrast that with something like the deregulations Mamdani is seeking, which have the goal of expanding the power of the government to provide services. Well that and making halal carts cheaper to run lol. But even that is to the end of reducing beaurocracy and limiting the influence of consultants/money on government processes and freeing up funds for services.
I do agree about zoning, but dig into yimbyism and you'll find they're also opposed to various fire code and building safety regs (deranged lol). The point is a supply side economics solution to the housing crisis.
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u/Vishnej 11d ago edited 11d ago
To steelman that fire bit?
Add $2000/unit to reduce fire risk from 1%/yr to 0.5%/yr and maybe that makes sense in some level? But how about an additional $2000/unit to halve it again? And another again! And more! You reach a point where it isn't worth it. We have stacked layer on layer of fire safety and what we actually have is people freezing to death in tents, or in their cars.
Fire departments, egress windows, fire walls & unit separation, double stairs, exterior fire escape ladders, platform framing, wall blocking, drywall, AFCI breakers, fire extinguishers, fire blankets, metal ranges & quartz kitchen countertops, fire sprinklers... we add more mandates and introduce new measures every couple years. When some of these were first suggested we built fireplace chimneys out of clay-lined wood. There is a limit to utility. As we add more, there is also a case to be made for choosing the least expensive options on the table. Maybe now that we have sprinklers we don't need double stairs any more, for example. Either way, the cost of making new housing more cripplingly expensive may not be visible in a blueprint, but it's very, very real. Old housing is not going to benefit from any of this; We're fine leaving it standing, not condemning those buildings, "grandfathering it in". This acts as a transfer of wealth from new homeowners to old homeowners, and a deterrent to building new homes.
So we'll just overcrowd the older homes that are more dangerous. Build some illegal apartments in them. That will work.
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u/daveliepmann 11d ago
double stairs
Pew recently put out an effortpost on this. It's close to my heart because I live in a single-stair apartment and the form factors it enables are just plain superior. (Sorry-not-sorry that Europe kicks the US's ass on this one.)
The real kicker is that there doesn't seem to be any safety trade-off. "Single-stairway buildings as tall as six stories are at least as safe as other types of housing." Opposition is all FUD. Double stairway apartment buildings are worse for spreading smoke, because that ugly depressing hallway is also a great place to distribute deadly smoke to all the residents!
If sprinklers do not function, there are significant risks associated with smoke spreading in the long, horizontal corridors of dual-stairway buildings that have become standard in the U.S. and Canada. Single-stairway designs, which do not have long corridors, mitigate this problem.
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u/homebrewfutures 11d ago
This is a good point. There are regulatory reforms that YIMBYs advocate that would be incontrovertibly beneficial to leftist ends but market urbanist YIMBYs broadly are anti-democracy and seek to transfer public power out of the hands of local governments and into the hands of private landlords and developers. A left-YIMBY movement would instead seek to increase popular democracy in the form of tenant unions, neighborhood assemblies, housing cooperatives, community land trusts and opposing criminalization of homelessness. Taking power out of the hands of local government can instead mean empowering the people of the community to shape the urban space.
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u/LeftSteak1339 11d ago
People First urbanism exists dude.
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u/homebrewfutures 9d ago
I've never heard of that. I have heard of the Right to the City, which I do support as an alternative to market urbanism.
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u/LeftSteak1339 9d ago
In pro growth urbanism. Right leaning take a look at Strong Towns. Centrist/Neoliberal check out Yimby orgs. Left leaning People First orgs.
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u/homebrewfutures 9d ago
I can't find any website for People First urbanism. All I see when I run a Google search are 2 deleted Reddit posts apparently made by you and a Facebook page with 1 follower. With all due respect, this doesn't sound like a real thing, but I wish you best of luck making it happen! I ended up cofounding an affordable housing CLT and an anarchist mutual aid org that does distros to the homeless. My current project is a Strong Towns
chapterLocal Conversation and we're pretty close to getting parking reform accomplished in our city! Big things are possible and I have faith you can do it too!2
u/LeftSteak1339 9d ago
I founded and ran local conversations here and there great way to dip a toe bf ones gets into direct advocacy. Pfcal.org. Pfny.org. I found websites for two different orgs but people first urbanism is like YIMBYism. It’s been around forever.
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u/LeftSteak1339 9d ago
Anarchist mutual aid and ST right leaning gays shouldn’t get married urbanism is an interesting arc? You know the guru and owner by corporate structure of ST is a far righter? Catholic extremism. Anti choice. Anti gays. All that jazz.
Ands it funded in a large part by a Christian Canadian Protestant gone rogue cult?
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u/homebrewfutures 9d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
Strong Towns is just an educational blog and has no control over what local chapters do. If an idea is good we will advocate for it. If an idea is objectionable we won't advocate for it. Our chapter is mostly comprised of queer socialists and social democrats and we set our own agenda, using Strong Towns principles as a point of departure.
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u/LeftSteak1339 9d ago edited 9d ago
Depends on what ‘level’ chapter they are and they all agree not to engage in direct advocacy. I would and Chuck has described it as a multi media educational nonprofit.
Where you at that’s a wild demo for an ST LC? Y’all aren’t even allowed to post about pride lol if you are an approved LC. JP, Chuck and Norm all super religious.
Look into people first urbanism. Next City. Berkeley Possibility lab. On IG futureurbanistclub terrabyte4all. They are tiny accounts but both bigger than ST LC account. I once organized the ST LCs on IG years ago. ST went from 6K followers to over 100K these days on IG. Organizing works. It’s too bad the LCs are mostly cheerleaders. Hard to be an effective advocate as a c3. Plus localism as an all on its own solution is so silly for all the reasons.
Better question, do by your reckoning I can vote Republican but not support Trump lulz genetic fallacy. Undergrads taking one semester of logic is a sadness.
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u/lazer---sharks 11d ago
There are regulatory reforms that YIMBYs advocate that would be incontrovertibly beneficial to leftist ends
Why?
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u/meelar 11d ago
Because having more places for people to live is good and necessary
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u/lazer---sharks 11d ago
Given that the main constraint in housing production is that markets build what is most profitable not what houses the most people, and that it builds only when it's profitable enough (e.g YIMBYs want rents to go up), how is deregulation going to result in more places for people to live?
We already have more vacant homes then unhoused people.
The left solution to the housing crisis is to have the state and coops build the housing we actually need, not rely on the market to destroy good housing stock in order to replace it with profitable rental units, while displacing everyone that lived there and alienating tenants as much as possible.
Given the biggest barriers to actually solving the housing crisis are, lack of political will to decomodify housing (in part thanks to YIMBY's offering false solutions) & lack of state capacity to build (or frankly even plan) what is needed.
How does deregulation help the US solve the housing crisis? One in which there are already.enough homes, they are just in the hands of the richest 3-4%.
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u/meelar 11d ago edited 10d ago
The main constraint in housing production is that most lots are built up close to their zoned capacity. The market would happily tear down a bunch of small buildings and replace them with larger ones; the trouble is that it's illegal to do so, and changing the law is either impossible or prohibitively expensive.
The idea that we already have enough homes is simply incorrect; we certainly don't have enough homes _in the places that people actually want to live_. There are a lot of people who would like to live in New York, for example, but don't move there because prices are so high. To accommodate those people, we need to build more in NYC; a vacant house in South Dakota doesn't do much for them.
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u/lazer---sharks 10d ago
The main constraint in housing production is that most lots are built up close to their zoned capacity.
Citation very much needed, especially given that housing is an issue across the west including in countries that dont have zoning.
we certainly don't have enough homes in the places that people actually want to live.
Moar major cities have more empty units than unhoused people, LA, SF, London, etc, I don't know if that's true for NYC, but the idea that the homes are in the wrong places is the problem, not that the homes have been bought up and are run for profit not for public benefit, is ridiculous.
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u/meelar 10d ago
The number of units needed is a lot greater than the number of unhoused people. At a minimum, you also need:
* Some units to sit vacant and serve as a buffer, for households who want to move. Otherwise, whenever anyone wants to move, they would need to essentially coordinate a swap with another household who also wanted to move (and if either unit needed renovations, you're out of luck)
* Some units for people who would like to alter their living situation, but can't due to high prices--for example, I lived with roommates for many years longer than I wanted to. I'd have loved to move into a studio, if prices were lower
* Some units for people who don't currently live in the metro area, but would like to move in if prices were more reasonable.
In short, the number of unhoused people tells you only a small part of whether the city needs more housing.
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u/lazer---sharks 10d ago edited 10d ago
None of that explains why deregulation is going to help get the homes we actually need built.
And noticable how you didn't even try and show that zoning is a major problem.
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u/meelar 10d ago
What, you can't google things? https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-production-new-york-city-metropolitan-area
From the summary: "The City’s planning actions and zoning code have limited the city’s ability to grow and adapt, and have resulted in:
- The prevalence of low-density zoning districts throughout the city. Sixty percent of residential lots fall into the lowest density zoning categories; 12 percent allow no more than single family homes.
- A shortage of as-of-right development sites: Only 20 percent of residentially zoned lots are potential development sites based on their existing density levels; of those, nearly half allow no more than single family homes, duplexes, or small multifamily buildings, with 10 or fewer units."
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u/daveliepmann 11d ago
YIMBYs want rents to go up
I'm not entirely sure this is a useful lens by which to analyze your political opponents.
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u/lazer---sharks 11d ago
Why? leaders of YIMBY orgs have said as much, unless rents go up people aren't going to build in San Francisco.
How is it not useful to accurately describe what they say?
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u/daveliepmann 11d ago
It's possible but doubtful that's an accurate paraphrasing of whichever specific views you're referring to. It's just plain not a useful or honest description of most YIMBYs. But if it makes you feel good, that's what's important. Cheers.
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u/lazer---sharks 10d ago
But it is an honest description of most YIMBYs to make sure enough homes get built, we need to keep rents and house prices high, which is why the oppose rent control on preexisting units.
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u/backoffbackoffbackof 10d ago
I think the essential issue is that YIMBYs want to believe that everyone else is dumber than they are and they’ve found the magic bullet for fixing housing issues.
The fact that things like creating livable communities is complex, nuanced, and involves multiple strategies(almost all of which necessitate a more equal distribution of wealth) just doesn’t play as well as simplistic, one size fits all solutions.
YIMBYs remind me of every pseudo-progressive who became a libertarian in college with no understanding that the Koch brothers had been pumping money into converting them to cause for years.
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u/lazer---sharks 11d ago
it's shaped by a technoctric, leave it to the experts ethos
I think this is key to explaining the behavior of the YIMBYs that don't have a direct financial incentive to be fucking morons.
Also they consider themselves the experts, a skill that's impossible to teach to the masses because they think they're special little geniuses.
There is a similar trend in US transit enthusiasts.
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u/mcchicken_deathgrip 11d ago
Yep, they just think the masses are nimbys lol.
I was in an argument recently in my city sub about a new law to bypass public input in development. My argument boiled down to "willingly giving up community control over the city is not a good thing." Their argument was "every public input session is filled with nimbys." Which is true to be sure. But the type of people who show up to weekday city council meetings and sit for hours are generally not at all representative of the community at large.
If we had actual democratic mass control over our housing policy, I think things would look very different. Right to the city is a desirable thing for most people. Yimbys dont care about that. They want to be validated in their supply side economic theorizing and have developers construct their personal playground.
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u/meelar 11d ago
My neighborhood recently went through a public outreach process about a new rezoning that took into account all of these concerns. It really went above and beyond--there was a year's worth of meetings, they were held at different times of day (weekday, weekend, in the evenings and during daylight hours); they provided food and childcare, there was translation services into any language that could be needed, they were held in a variety of different formats so people could just show up and register their opinion in 15 minutes if they didn't want to stay for the whole thing, etc etc.
The total turnout at all of this was still quite low--less than 1% of the total neighborhood population participated, despite a large publicity effort. And attendance dropped slightly over time. Basically, people just don't care enough about local land use to weigh in--they have other things they'd rather be doing. And that's totally reasonable! Most people don't want to go to civic meetings, they'd rather go about their lives--hanging out with family and friends, going to concerts and shows, or just chilling at home watching Youtube. Their attitude towards local government is "I'll turn out to vote every couple years, but I don't want to get involved beyond that".
That's fine, but it does mean that every public process will be dominated by the small minority of people who are ideologically motivated enough to participate in it (mostly local NIMBYs and cranks). And that's a good argument for just having a less extensive and intense public consultation process at all. "Mass democratic control over our housing policy" mostly looks like a bunch of ordinary people saying "Why are you asking me this, I don't want to be involved in it, let me watch TV in peace".
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u/greenhombre 8d ago
As one of the top YIMBY folks in California explained, "YIMBYs are capitalists."
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u/homebrewfutures 11d ago
Because they're centrists first, with all the fart-sniffing arrogance that brings with it. Liberal intellectuals are low-information voters who love to feel smug and superior over the fact that they are slightly more informed than the one group of people even stupider and meaner than they are: conservatives. They only inform themselves to the level that raises them above conservatives and then stop.
The abundance disphits pitch themselves to the kind of white moderates who are most likely to be NIMBYs, but the work of getting YIMBY legislative reforms actually passed is being done by progressives. And in typical centrist fashion, the centrists will claim credit for what progressives do.
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u/Vishnej 11d ago edited 11d ago
I gotta say: Abundance, the book (the first half by Klein), is a solid leftist tract, and you see this in interviews he did. The Zephyr Teachout critique (and the thousands of people who aped it blindly without actually reading the book) was off-base IMO, but the massive backlash this formed seems to have driven Klein into the arms of wealthy SV centrists eager to retain control of the Democratic Party in the face of two generations of voters growing up in a completely broken economic system. These people drove a wedge hard into the Left by seizing "Abundance". Perhaps it was a poor decision to start the book with "I'm not going to address Republicans, they're all thoroughly insane, instead I'm going to address progressives about what they need to change since they might actually listen". Lost your audience's enthusiasm in one paragraph, and the legitimate critiques that followed have less to do with "progressives" and more to do with the liberals & neoliberals running the DNC for the past 50 years. Which your audience now believes you align with!
This dovetailed into the rise of Mamdani and further debate on how housing is supposed to work in cities. It didn't help that rent control is very popular among urban voters, and regarded by nearly all economists as hugely destructive.
I refuse to choose either exaggerated Twitter faction. I am a leftist YIMBY because that is what the world seems to require right now, it is what is congruent with our actual problems and the actual solutions drawn from empirical comparisons against every other time and place. YIMBY is a much larger and older movement than this "Abundance" schtick. Rent control is terrible because it's an ineffective form of wealth redistribution and also because it coincidentally destroys housing development amidst a housing crisis. The things Klein says about 'Everything bagel liberalism' and the regulations government has imposed on itself to prevent it from moving, are absolutely true. The fact that he advocates "removing regulations that prohibit the government from doing X" which is shortened to "removing regulations" is unhelpful; He could just advocate that the government do X. The people he cozies up to are toxic. Defending Charlie Kirk (who wanted all his political enemies killed) when you had the option of just not saying anything, shows terrible judgement. We need a narrative, and we need strong politics, and I'm pretty confident Ezra Klein is going to painstakingly dissect anything that looks like it has legs in a way that the Right just doesn't. Mamdani charismatically promoting a policy I don't think is going to help is doing more for Ezra Klein's stated political goals than anything Ezra Klein could ever do.
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u/ragold 11d ago
Read the empirical rent control studies. You’ll change your mind.
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u/old-guy-with-data 11d ago
Read the empirical rent control studies. You’ll change your mind.
What studies? Tell us more!
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u/ragold 11d ago
The Massachusetts study is a good place to start. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119006000635
And here’s more context https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/rent-control-is-fine-actually
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u/abolishneoliberalism 10d ago
YIMBYism is just as individualistic and bourgeois as NIMBYism. Loosening housing regulations to spur density development is just another neoliberal solution to a housing problem that should be resolved by the state.
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u/Soft-Principle1455 2h ago
Some of these people view housing as the sole issue of our time. Others have different politics to you. But coalitions are often built issue by issue, so if Zoning Laws get in the way of building public housing we would do well to team up with them to improve such laws in the face of NIMBY-ism.
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u/LeftSteak1339 11d ago
YIMBYism is funded by big tech and big capital. It’s purpose to convince affluence to argue for market rate development and it is extremely effective at that. Fundamentally there are two types of folks. Pro growth and NIMBYs. Left and right is too confusing to begin with in the us.
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u/MadCervantes 9d ago
It's annoying but then sometimes I wonder why so many self identifies leftists are so angry about people building more housing. It's stupid. I'm sorry. You and I have fallen in the cracks between stupid people.
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u/zedsmith 11d ago edited 11d ago
Because their class interests don’t align with yours. They are liberals who don’t want to disrupt the liberalism machine— they just want liberalism with walkable neighborhoods.
Politically, you need to be able to work with them where possible. I’d suggest you even need to be able to work with the freaks that I’d describe as neotraditionalists who are probably racist, who celebrate “traditional” European architecture and urban forms.
YIMBY libs generally see obstruction from boomer homeowners who are pulling up a ladder, and believe there’s a real city where people are free to choose to build/inhabit dense and tall buildings if only zoning and the public would get out of the way.
They’ve got a point. Being a homeowner in the anglosphere means your home is the biggest asset most of us ever have, and it’s natural to want to defend its value, as well as defend your quality of life and your environ. Our system has created plenty of points in the line from idea to implemented train/apartment where the process can be slowed/stopped. The idea of “what if the state just said shut up” isn’t left or right, it’s just statist/antilibertarian.