It's good to see lots of YIMBY writing in the NY Times, The Atlantic, WaPo, and other places liberal normies tend to read. Also, I think the crisis of homelessness (and people's frustration) has become so widespread that people suspect something bigger is going on beyond "gentrification."
Jun 22, 2022·edited Jun 22, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Helllll yeah Noah. This is what I’m talking about! This content rocks! YIMBY > NIMBY. But it could use even more depth. Next topics could be:
1. How to win over NIMBYs?
2. What’s in it for them?
We have to empathize, engage and communicate with the NIMBY. Build a majority, develop consensus and work to get something done (somehow). Anything is better than nothing.
I’ve been telling people that DSA chapters outside SF are relatively sane, but the Peninsula chapter has been tweeting that the YIMBY movement is a CIA op recently, so I guess not. Old people in Burlingame and tankies is a rare alliance, though, and doesn’t need to be opposed since those people don’t have the personalities to do anything but post.
I've found that a lot of Twitter YIMBYs and NIMBYs have very little understanding on how a multi-family housing project gets built. Having designed affordable housing in several mid-market areas (Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, Nashville, New Orleans) and that include both for and non-profit developers.
People act like Cities just bend over for housing developers but the truth is, they don't really. And many of the housing developers I've worked with, hold onto and manage their own properties for the long-term.
I've also witnessed in public meetings (because nearly every permit/planning dept requires public meetings when you're asking for density increases (yes even Cities promote low-density MF). The middle class neighbors protest if you use the words "affordable" in any housing presentation. The lower and working poor neighbors protest if you use the words "market rate" and "affordable" because they see two threats to their property values - a rise in property values or an influx of even poorer people. Yes, America's class warfare has been so successful that the working poor don't even like living next to themselves apparently.
We've gone in to meetings describing quality MF developments as "work force" and then specifically mention housing for teachers, nurses, care-workers, etc. etc, as the market target. And what we've discovered is that new housing begets net positives vs negatives. Especially in depressed and underserved communities w/ blocks of vacant lots and limited services. I've watched an entire neighborhood turn around after we repurposed an old school campus that had been left derelict for 15 years & was a hot spot for crime into 80 affordable units for working artists. The neighbors thanked the development team for turning the school into a new focal point for the community. Vacant lots were suddenly having duplexes built on them, adding more stock. Local businesses saw opportunities. It was a win-win for the community despite pushback from people who claimed the units were going to be for fake artists and just be over-priced apartments because more people who supported the redevelopment came out to support the project.
Housing doesn't have to be complicated. Multifamily is made especially difficult because for the numbers to work developers have to increase density because market competition for lots is so intense. ROIs on MF might be 7-10 yrs. So it's not a quick-flip like some people think. Upzoning and mixed zoning in older, inner-ring suburbs would help ease the pressure by allowing 2-3-4-6 unit projects to happen. Which some call the missing middle. But what people also don't realize is it takes a year plus to build, after you've designed and permitted the project, which can take 6-12 months itself.
Material and labor shortages in construction have lingered for years, well before the Covid crunch and subsequent boom. They've only gotten worse. But if we want to make housing affordable again, we have to build more. For everyone.
Dean Preston is a collection of hashtags in a trenchcoat. YIMBYs just trying to expand the carceral state because a home is merely a prison without guards.
Do you have any theories on the motivations of the Left-NIMBYs. The best I can tell is they really value time and space intensive activities like gardening. And because there's not a lot of money transacted in these activities they regard them as middle class (despite requiring access to lots of expensive land).
I want there to be a more interesting explanation beyond they are just aestheticists who highly value quaintness... but maybe that's the whole story? Perhaps with nostalgia mixed in as well?
Left-NIMBYism is increasingly less mysterious to me. What you've said towards the end of your article gets us most of the way there: YIMBYs don't care about process, they care about results. Even the anti-capitalist YIMBYs are willing to put aside their reservations to address the urgency of the crisis.
But once you're deeply bought in on the idea that capitalism is incurably evil, anything which works to stabilize our current institutions - including the prevention of deep, deep suffering - just helps the evil to stick around longer. We need to stop putting bandaids on the capitalist system with legislation, and let it run its evil course so that everyone else can see how bad it is and let it go. If you try to fix the problems of capitalism with more capitalism, you're going to create worse problems down the line and we'll all have been stuck in the capitalist hellhole a while longer while we tried to avoid the growing pains necessary to bring about a Marxist revolution. When you're really, really bought in on Marxism or whatever the utopian equivalent is, the emotional pain of watching this glimmer of hope - the recognition of capitalism's getting us into this housing crisis - get stamped out would predictably lead to huge Twitter meltdowns.
I grew up in predominantly multi-family government-funded housing AND worked for a multi-family corporate developer, manager/housing owner. I have professional experience in tax credit/section 42 section 8 and market rent multi-family housing.
Personally, multi-family government-subsidized housing provided my family and me a nice place to live and a better school district than we would have been able to afford. However, I find myself torn between these two movements and can understand both sides and am more concerned with the lasting repercussions of both movements if taken to the extremes.
It appears as if most YIMBYS are empathetic and genuinely want to help disadvantaged people have access to housing in urban areas. For this, I applaud them. However, YIMBYS are advocating for a short-term solution that has the potential to seriously impact the low-income people they are most concerned with helping. For instance, I think it is imperative and careless not to consider the motivations of the lower-income constituents that YIMBYS want to help. Most families or individuals in multi-family housing (especially government-subsidized) would love to and actively aspire to be homeowners one day. This really shouldn’t be shocking, considering there are few long-term financial benefits to renting. Renting has zero impact on one’s credit score, making it no easier to be approved for a loan despite years of paying your rent on time. The same input that NIMBYS are exercising over their communities is something most lower-income renters would love to have. Renters and landlords do not have the same motivations or priorities because multi-family is still a BUSINESS and like most businesses they prioritize their bottom line. Just because a property is government-subsidized does not mean it’s non-profit. Many corporations own and invest in government-funded housing and make a killing (most of the time profits are larger than market rent properties because of the tax breaks.) I see nothing wrong with building more affordable housing as it is desperately needed, whether market rent or government-subsidized. Still, neither housing options make home ownership more obtainable for their residents. Poor people don’t just want a roof over their head; they strive to have the same things that wealthier families have, a community where they have input and an investment that they can one day own and pass down to their children or other beneficiaries of their choosing. YIMBYS can advocate for more housing development but should be aware that renting is simply a crutch-not a solution or even a stepping stone for low-income residents. If and when low-income residents become homeowners, they too will want to have input in their communities and their voices heard. Their input may or may not be similar to that of NIMBYs, but that is something we will never know if their hard-earned money continues to go towards rent instead of home ownership.
Are there any other issues that have avoided the partisan sorting of American politics, where people work on it together despite not being aligned on other political issues? Seems rare nowadays, used to be way more common – or is that just an illusion of looking at the past?
Following on from that – do the Left-NIMBYs hate the YIMBYs so much precisely because they don't let themselves get sucked into the everything-is-everything homogenisation of other left organisations?
One big perceptual problem was that there was a big move to suburbia in the 1960s and 1970s followed by an urban revival in the 1980s and 1990s. What one saw was more expensive housing in urban areas displacing lower cost housing or manufacturing. NYC, for example, is now full of neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side that were once low cost options but are now higher end and where their original inhabitants were pushed out by rising rents. Telegraph Hill in San Francisco was once housing for blue collar dock workers into the 1950s. Back then, Silicon Valley was farmland, not suburban.
Meanwhile, there was a construction boom but the only place where this resulted in lower cost housing seemed to be the exurbs as even the suburbs became more expensive. You can argue that this means that there was too little urban construction as opposed to exurban construction, but brownfield construction is almost always going to be more expensive than greenfield construction. Also, the government was willing to build or upgrade roads, but not mass transit. Transportation patterns gave a big advantage to urban areas located inland on relatively flat plains, not traditional port cities with good harbors.
Look at contemporary Seattle. They have built tens of thousands of apartments and condominiums in the last ten years. South Lake Union was full of car lots, light manufacturing and other low value uses. It is now full of high rise apartment and office buildings. That's massive new supply. Is it cheaper than ever to live in Seattle now? No. It is almost certainly cheaper than it would have been without all that construction, but Seattle was much cheaper 20 years ago. Nearby Capital Hill used to be full of modestly priced housing options. It too has seen prices rise and residents replaced. They have rainbow painted crosswalks in memory of the refugee gay community now refugees elsewhere.
I'm sure there are places where new building has kept housing prices down. The Midwest is full of places that are more or less willing to give away housing, but this isn't about new construction. The problem is finding housing somewhere where one can also get a job to pay for it. I would love to see more housing built, more upzoning and more mass transit. Seattle is working on this by up-zoning as it builds out its light rail system. I seriously doubt we'll see rents and prices moving downhill despite this.
I grew up in a neighborhood that actually did move from upmarket to middle class housing. Jackson Heights was originally developed for movie stars working in Astoria, complete with a country club, luxury ten room apartments and a high end shopping street. By the time I was born, it was middle class. It moved further downmarket in the 1970s. By the 1980s, we couldn't sell my late father's apartment. Now it is middle class again. I'm not sure where the lower end people live.
P.S. That subway elevator story is hilarious. FYI, 69th Street just off of Lexington was where the titans of industry had their townhouses starting around the 1930s. The head of US Steel hammered out major deals on that street. A lot of the US economy was directed from that block. The story in NYC is that the Upper East Side is the right wing part of the city and the Upper West Side is the left wing. There used to be a good, if you like that kind of thing, indie right wing bookstore not far from that disputed elevator. This being NYC, it's hard to tell if this is left wing or right wing NIMBYism. I think it's just New Yorkers being pain in the ass New Yorkers. It's a city where everyone is required to have an opinion. It can be exhausting sometimes.
The craziest thing about it to me is how most people who think they are left-NIMBYs tend to concede the whole issue without even thinking about it - saying "sure, sure, upzone and build market rate housing, I don't care" and then claiming the real problem with YIMBYs is their supposed opposition to rent control and other tenant protections. They can't believe that something as banal as building regulations is the core issue the conflict is being fought over.
Hey Noah, you've lived in Japan and there the housing prices aren't as horrible (though I've heard differently about Tokyo). House prices don't really go up there so it's not treated as an investment. What lessons can the USA incorporate, knowing stuff like national land use regulations and the regular rebuilding of structures probably won't take root here?
It's good to see lots of YIMBY writing in the NY Times, The Atlantic, WaPo, and other places liberal normies tend to read. Also, I think the crisis of homelessness (and people's frustration) has become so widespread that people suspect something bigger is going on beyond "gentrification."
Helllll yeah Noah. This is what I’m talking about! This content rocks! YIMBY > NIMBY. But it could use even more depth. Next topics could be:
1. How to win over NIMBYs?
2. What’s in it for them?
We have to empathize, engage and communicate with the NIMBY. Build a majority, develop consensus and work to get something done (somehow). Anything is better than nothing.
Even the smallest victories count.
I wish I was on Twitter more to see the name-calling and tortured economic logic this post generated from NIMBYs.
I can see it now:
- “All the studies point to MORE HOUSING creating MORE UNAFFORDABILITY.”
- “Building more housing destroys neighborhoods, so is anti-black, latinX, anti LGBTQ+…”
- “Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are now straight up FASCISTS”
- “Anyone who is a YIMBY is an idiot”
- “I’m white, but I’m a NIMBY because housing activists like Darrell Owens are all race traitors!”
Well, maybe I don’t need to go on Twitter after all.
I’ve been telling people that DSA chapters outside SF are relatively sane, but the Peninsula chapter has been tweeting that the YIMBY movement is a CIA op recently, so I guess not. Old people in Burlingame and tankies is a rare alliance, though, and doesn’t need to be opposed since those people don’t have the personalities to do anything but post.
I've found that a lot of Twitter YIMBYs and NIMBYs have very little understanding on how a multi-family housing project gets built. Having designed affordable housing in several mid-market areas (Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, Nashville, New Orleans) and that include both for and non-profit developers.
People act like Cities just bend over for housing developers but the truth is, they don't really. And many of the housing developers I've worked with, hold onto and manage their own properties for the long-term.
I've also witnessed in public meetings (because nearly every permit/planning dept requires public meetings when you're asking for density increases (yes even Cities promote low-density MF). The middle class neighbors protest if you use the words "affordable" in any housing presentation. The lower and working poor neighbors protest if you use the words "market rate" and "affordable" because they see two threats to their property values - a rise in property values or an influx of even poorer people. Yes, America's class warfare has been so successful that the working poor don't even like living next to themselves apparently.
We've gone in to meetings describing quality MF developments as "work force" and then specifically mention housing for teachers, nurses, care-workers, etc. etc, as the market target. And what we've discovered is that new housing begets net positives vs negatives. Especially in depressed and underserved communities w/ blocks of vacant lots and limited services. I've watched an entire neighborhood turn around after we repurposed an old school campus that had been left derelict for 15 years & was a hot spot for crime into 80 affordable units for working artists. The neighbors thanked the development team for turning the school into a new focal point for the community. Vacant lots were suddenly having duplexes built on them, adding more stock. Local businesses saw opportunities. It was a win-win for the community despite pushback from people who claimed the units were going to be for fake artists and just be over-priced apartments because more people who supported the redevelopment came out to support the project.
Housing doesn't have to be complicated. Multifamily is made especially difficult because for the numbers to work developers have to increase density because market competition for lots is so intense. ROIs on MF might be 7-10 yrs. So it's not a quick-flip like some people think. Upzoning and mixed zoning in older, inner-ring suburbs would help ease the pressure by allowing 2-3-4-6 unit projects to happen. Which some call the missing middle. But what people also don't realize is it takes a year plus to build, after you've designed and permitted the project, which can take 6-12 months itself.
Material and labor shortages in construction have lingered for years, well before the Covid crunch and subsequent boom. They've only gotten worse. But if we want to make housing affordable again, we have to build more. For everyone.
robert reich is the perfect example
It's almost enough to restore your faith in democracy
Dean Preston is a collection of hashtags in a trenchcoat. YIMBYs just trying to expand the carceral state because a home is merely a prison without guards.
Do you have any theories on the motivations of the Left-NIMBYs. The best I can tell is they really value time and space intensive activities like gardening. And because there's not a lot of money transacted in these activities they regard them as middle class (despite requiring access to lots of expensive land).
I want there to be a more interesting explanation beyond they are just aestheticists who highly value quaintness... but maybe that's the whole story? Perhaps with nostalgia mixed in as well?
bring full house living in SF
Left-NIMBYism is increasingly less mysterious to me. What you've said towards the end of your article gets us most of the way there: YIMBYs don't care about process, they care about results. Even the anti-capitalist YIMBYs are willing to put aside their reservations to address the urgency of the crisis.
But once you're deeply bought in on the idea that capitalism is incurably evil, anything which works to stabilize our current institutions - including the prevention of deep, deep suffering - just helps the evil to stick around longer. We need to stop putting bandaids on the capitalist system with legislation, and let it run its evil course so that everyone else can see how bad it is and let it go. If you try to fix the problems of capitalism with more capitalism, you're going to create worse problems down the line and we'll all have been stuck in the capitalist hellhole a while longer while we tried to avoid the growing pains necessary to bring about a Marxist revolution. When you're really, really bought in on Marxism or whatever the utopian equivalent is, the emotional pain of watching this glimmer of hope - the recognition of capitalism's getting us into this housing crisis - get stamped out would predictably lead to huge Twitter meltdowns.
I grew up in predominantly multi-family government-funded housing AND worked for a multi-family corporate developer, manager/housing owner. I have professional experience in tax credit/section 42 section 8 and market rent multi-family housing.
Personally, multi-family government-subsidized housing provided my family and me a nice place to live and a better school district than we would have been able to afford. However, I find myself torn between these two movements and can understand both sides and am more concerned with the lasting repercussions of both movements if taken to the extremes.
It appears as if most YIMBYS are empathetic and genuinely want to help disadvantaged people have access to housing in urban areas. For this, I applaud them. However, YIMBYS are advocating for a short-term solution that has the potential to seriously impact the low-income people they are most concerned with helping. For instance, I think it is imperative and careless not to consider the motivations of the lower-income constituents that YIMBYS want to help. Most families or individuals in multi-family housing (especially government-subsidized) would love to and actively aspire to be homeowners one day. This really shouldn’t be shocking, considering there are few long-term financial benefits to renting. Renting has zero impact on one’s credit score, making it no easier to be approved for a loan despite years of paying your rent on time. The same input that NIMBYS are exercising over their communities is something most lower-income renters would love to have. Renters and landlords do not have the same motivations or priorities because multi-family is still a BUSINESS and like most businesses they prioritize their bottom line. Just because a property is government-subsidized does not mean it’s non-profit. Many corporations own and invest in government-funded housing and make a killing (most of the time profits are larger than market rent properties because of the tax breaks.) I see nothing wrong with building more affordable housing as it is desperately needed, whether market rent or government-subsidized. Still, neither housing options make home ownership more obtainable for their residents. Poor people don’t just want a roof over their head; they strive to have the same things that wealthier families have, a community where they have input and an investment that they can one day own and pass down to their children or other beneficiaries of their choosing. YIMBYS can advocate for more housing development but should be aware that renting is simply a crutch-not a solution or even a stepping stone for low-income residents. If and when low-income residents become homeowners, they too will want to have input in their communities and their voices heard. Their input may or may not be similar to that of NIMBYs, but that is something we will never know if their hard-earned money continues to go towards rent instead of home ownership.
Are there any other issues that have avoided the partisan sorting of American politics, where people work on it together despite not being aligned on other political issues? Seems rare nowadays, used to be way more common – or is that just an illusion of looking at the past?
Following on from that – do the Left-NIMBYs hate the YIMBYs so much precisely because they don't let themselves get sucked into the everything-is-everything homogenisation of other left organisations?
One big perceptual problem was that there was a big move to suburbia in the 1960s and 1970s followed by an urban revival in the 1980s and 1990s. What one saw was more expensive housing in urban areas displacing lower cost housing or manufacturing. NYC, for example, is now full of neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side that were once low cost options but are now higher end and where their original inhabitants were pushed out by rising rents. Telegraph Hill in San Francisco was once housing for blue collar dock workers into the 1950s. Back then, Silicon Valley was farmland, not suburban.
Meanwhile, there was a construction boom but the only place where this resulted in lower cost housing seemed to be the exurbs as even the suburbs became more expensive. You can argue that this means that there was too little urban construction as opposed to exurban construction, but brownfield construction is almost always going to be more expensive than greenfield construction. Also, the government was willing to build or upgrade roads, but not mass transit. Transportation patterns gave a big advantage to urban areas located inland on relatively flat plains, not traditional port cities with good harbors.
Look at contemporary Seattle. They have built tens of thousands of apartments and condominiums in the last ten years. South Lake Union was full of car lots, light manufacturing and other low value uses. It is now full of high rise apartment and office buildings. That's massive new supply. Is it cheaper than ever to live in Seattle now? No. It is almost certainly cheaper than it would have been without all that construction, but Seattle was much cheaper 20 years ago. Nearby Capital Hill used to be full of modestly priced housing options. It too has seen prices rise and residents replaced. They have rainbow painted crosswalks in memory of the refugee gay community now refugees elsewhere.
I'm sure there are places where new building has kept housing prices down. The Midwest is full of places that are more or less willing to give away housing, but this isn't about new construction. The problem is finding housing somewhere where one can also get a job to pay for it. I would love to see more housing built, more upzoning and more mass transit. Seattle is working on this by up-zoning as it builds out its light rail system. I seriously doubt we'll see rents and prices moving downhill despite this.
I grew up in a neighborhood that actually did move from upmarket to middle class housing. Jackson Heights was originally developed for movie stars working in Astoria, complete with a country club, luxury ten room apartments and a high end shopping street. By the time I was born, it was middle class. It moved further downmarket in the 1970s. By the 1980s, we couldn't sell my late father's apartment. Now it is middle class again. I'm not sure where the lower end people live.
P.S. That subway elevator story is hilarious. FYI, 69th Street just off of Lexington was where the titans of industry had their townhouses starting around the 1930s. The head of US Steel hammered out major deals on that street. A lot of the US economy was directed from that block. The story in NYC is that the Upper East Side is the right wing part of the city and the Upper West Side is the left wing. There used to be a good, if you like that kind of thing, indie right wing bookstore not far from that disputed elevator. This being NYC, it's hard to tell if this is left wing or right wing NIMBYism. I think it's just New Yorkers being pain in the ass New Yorkers. It's a city where everyone is required to have an opinion. It can be exhausting sometimes.
The craziest thing about it to me is how most people who think they are left-NIMBYs tend to concede the whole issue without even thinking about it - saying "sure, sure, upzone and build market rate housing, I don't care" and then claiming the real problem with YIMBYs is their supposed opposition to rent control and other tenant protections. They can't believe that something as banal as building regulations is the core issue the conflict is being fought over.
Hey Noah, you've lived in Japan and there the housing prices aren't as horrible (though I've heard differently about Tokyo). House prices don't really go up there so it's not treated as an investment. What lessons can the USA incorporate, knowing stuff like national land use regulations and the regular rebuilding of structures probably won't take root here?