Hey Matthew, I can’t speak for Luca, but as a Yimby in the board of one of the larger orgs, I’d like to say that I’m sorry that’s been your experience.
I can certainly imagine (and have been in) rooms like what I think you’re describing, I still believe the movement overall is leaning towards wide tent that’s inclusive of center right sensibilities. That’ll differ from conversation to conversation, org to org, and frankly region to region, but my personal experience (and what I continue to advocate for) is a movement that can push the ball forward in whatever ways we can all agree on (which, as long as we continue to agree we need more housing, will continue to be quite a lot).
Thanks for the sentiment Jeff. I’m in no way trying to suggest that all orgs are like that and I’m glad you take a positive attitude to voices on the right in yours.
While I’m still hesitant to call myself a YIMBY, at least without substantial caveats, I could definitely be called a fellow traveler of the movement and wish it all the best.
Dude there is a super direct correlation between building more housing and trump vote share. It’s mind boggling how much better the sunbelt is at this stuff than blue America, and this difference has widened not shrunk recently
Democrats TALK about building housing. Republicans just DO IT.
As a Centre-Right Urbanist with an intellectual sympathy for the YIMBY movement, I must confess myself deeply disappointed with my actual engagements with YIMBYs in practice.
In my experience, Left YIMBYism is taken for granted, with a small and begrudging acceptance for libertarians like Bryan Caplan.
Concepts like Gentle Density get short shrift because everyone seems to want to recreate Manhattan everywhere in the world, albeit with much much more ‘affordable housing’ (ie anti-market poison pills).
When you point out how toxic those kind of YIMBY ideas are to the median voter, you get accused of crypto-NIMBYism. Well, if being against rent controls and being for reasonable height limits makes me a NIMBY, then a NIMBY I am, albeit far less of one than the average American or Anglo.
I don’t begrudge anyone their views and I enjoy a spirited argument on the future of housing. But YIMBYs need to accept that getting conservatives on board isn’t a nice to have, it’s a need to have.
There is a pretty substantial chunk of the YIMBY movement that is aligned with groups like Niskanen, Center for New Liberalism, etc. Rent control is probably the issue that creates the most arguments inside the movement, that I've seen, because people get pretty passionate about both sides of that argument. I think the anti-rent-control folks have at least largely persuaded the more AOC-aligned YIMBYs that extreme rent control like what Stockholm has is counter-productive. :-/
I second Auros and Jeff. There is some weirdness in the movement about good faith, nontoxic libertarians (a label I used to ascribe to and was arbitrarily scrutinized for), but most YIMBYs are reasonable people who tolerate other perspectives. Auros is absolutely right about important contributors to the YIMBY movement at Niskanen, AEI, Mercatus, Stand Together, and other think tanks and political orgs that are at least partially right of center. For the most part we are a bunch of happy warriors who get along surprisingly well! Even notorious YIMBY Twitter is generally positive.
I think the internal tension about rent control is slightly overrated, though Auros knows the internal convos better than I do. Most YIMBYs recognize that rent control is a destructive policy with a track record of failure. YIMBYs who support it often focus on the political expediency of doing so, while largely admitting that it is not very helpful. That is how I have perceived intra-YIMBY debates, anyway; I could be mistaken.
I’m interested in what you mean by “good faith, nontoxic libertarians”? Is this just a reference to the more far right coded Hoppean libertarians or something else?
When it comes to centre-right think tanks, I do feel that they tend to lean more libertarian, especially on economic issues, which doesn’t really reflect the reality of conservative sentiment to my mind. Many conservatives I know are becoming more and more sceptical about the utility of Laissez-faire economics. I share some of their concerns, which is why I think it’s crucial to address them in as harmless a way as possible
I see my place in the debate as bringing together community minded conservatives and YIMBYs to support proposals that give locals more choice in the kind of developments that get build and not whether developments get build. My hope is that this will mean more traditionally styled buildings between 3-8 stories and fewer glass and concrete monstrosities or single family homes.
The general idea of "you get to decide where and how to build the housing, not whether housing gets built at all" is the point of California's Regional Housing Needs Allocation program, but the program was all a shell game until very recently -- cities would never actually hit their production numbers, and there were no significant consequences. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfqmJNeHeqg -- Cupertino City Councilmember basically openly saying they intend to flout the law. And they got away with it! There was no penalty to them, through that RHNA cycle, for having listed sites that they knew weren't going to get developed.) We'll be seeing over the next few years whether the changes to the law that have been pushed through will make a difference.
Of course, even if it works out, the actual numbers that have been set for the current eight-year cycle in the Bay Area are way too low. Basically they picked a level at which they think the problem _won't get any worse_, not a production level that would bring prices down and vacancy rates up, to the level of a healthy market where the typical person can find a home without spending more than a third of their income.
Hey Matthew, I can’t speak for Luca, but as a Yimby in the board of one of the larger orgs, I’d like to say that I’m sorry that’s been your experience.
I can certainly imagine (and have been in) rooms like what I think you’re describing, I still believe the movement overall is leaning towards wide tent that’s inclusive of center right sensibilities. That’ll differ from conversation to conversation, org to org, and frankly region to region, but my personal experience (and what I continue to advocate for) is a movement that can push the ball forward in whatever ways we can all agree on (which, as long as we continue to agree we need more housing, will continue to be quite a lot).
Thanks for the sentiment Jeff. I’m in no way trying to suggest that all orgs are like that and I’m glad you take a positive attitude to voices on the right in yours.
While I’m still hesitant to call myself a YIMBY, at least without substantial caveats, I could definitely be called a fellow traveler of the movement and wish it all the best.
Dude there is a super direct correlation between building more housing and trump vote share. It’s mind boggling how much better the sunbelt is at this stuff than blue America, and this difference has widened not shrunk recently
Democrats TALK about building housing. Republicans just DO IT.
As a Centre-Right Urbanist with an intellectual sympathy for the YIMBY movement, I must confess myself deeply disappointed with my actual engagements with YIMBYs in practice.
In my experience, Left YIMBYism is taken for granted, with a small and begrudging acceptance for libertarians like Bryan Caplan.
Concepts like Gentle Density get short shrift because everyone seems to want to recreate Manhattan everywhere in the world, albeit with much much more ‘affordable housing’ (ie anti-market poison pills).
When you point out how toxic those kind of YIMBY ideas are to the median voter, you get accused of crypto-NIMBYism. Well, if being against rent controls and being for reasonable height limits makes me a NIMBY, then a NIMBY I am, albeit far less of one than the average American or Anglo.
I don’t begrudge anyone their views and I enjoy a spirited argument on the future of housing. But YIMBYs need to accept that getting conservatives on board isn’t a nice to have, it’s a need to have.
There is a pretty substantial chunk of the YIMBY movement that is aligned with groups like Niskanen, Center for New Liberalism, etc. Rent control is probably the issue that creates the most arguments inside the movement, that I've seen, because people get pretty passionate about both sides of that argument. I think the anti-rent-control folks have at least largely persuaded the more AOC-aligned YIMBYs that extreme rent control like what Stockholm has is counter-productive. :-/
I second Auros and Jeff. There is some weirdness in the movement about good faith, nontoxic libertarians (a label I used to ascribe to and was arbitrarily scrutinized for), but most YIMBYs are reasonable people who tolerate other perspectives. Auros is absolutely right about important contributors to the YIMBY movement at Niskanen, AEI, Mercatus, Stand Together, and other think tanks and political orgs that are at least partially right of center. For the most part we are a bunch of happy warriors who get along surprisingly well! Even notorious YIMBY Twitter is generally positive.
I think the internal tension about rent control is slightly overrated, though Auros knows the internal convos better than I do. Most YIMBYs recognize that rent control is a destructive policy with a track record of failure. YIMBYs who support it often focus on the political expediency of doing so, while largely admitting that it is not very helpful. That is how I have perceived intra-YIMBY debates, anyway; I could be mistaken.
I’m interested in what you mean by “good faith, nontoxic libertarians”? Is this just a reference to the more far right coded Hoppean libertarians or something else?
When it comes to centre-right think tanks, I do feel that they tend to lean more libertarian, especially on economic issues, which doesn’t really reflect the reality of conservative sentiment to my mind. Many conservatives I know are becoming more and more sceptical about the utility of Laissez-faire economics. I share some of their concerns, which is why I think it’s crucial to address them in as harmless a way as possible
I see my place in the debate as bringing together community minded conservatives and YIMBYs to support proposals that give locals more choice in the kind of developments that get build and not whether developments get build. My hope is that this will mean more traditionally styled buildings between 3-8 stories and fewer glass and concrete monstrosities or single family homes.
Short answer, yes. It is fairly easy to tell if a self-described libertarian is a pluralistic classical liberal or something more sinister.
The general idea of "you get to decide where and how to build the housing, not whether housing gets built at all" is the point of California's Regional Housing Needs Allocation program, but the program was all a shell game until very recently -- cities would never actually hit their production numbers, and there were no significant consequences. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfqmJNeHeqg -- Cupertino City Councilmember basically openly saying they intend to flout the law. And they got away with it! There was no penalty to them, through that RHNA cycle, for having listed sites that they knew weren't going to get developed.) We'll be seeing over the next few years whether the changes to the law that have been pushed through will make a difference.
Of course, even if it works out, the actual numbers that have been set for the current eight-year cycle in the Bay Area are way too low. Basically they picked a level at which they think the problem _won't get any worse_, not a production level that would bring prices down and vacancy rates up, to the level of a healthy market where the typical person can find a home without spending more than a third of their income.