The Only Thing Worse Than A NIMBY Is A Preservationist.

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Well, I thought I was mostly done writing about land-use. Then someone had to write a nasty, unfair, inaccurate takedown of YIMBYs, a cause I devoted my first two years in SF to. Worse still, the author promoted zoning and local control, of all things. Some people are motivated by love. I am motivated by anger at negative-sum upwards power transfers.

So here’s my response, originally published in Exponents. Speaking of neoliberals, on Saturday I recorded an interview with the Neoliberal podcast which should be out in a few weeks. And on Thursday on my OnlyFans me and Shotbydrfox will be going live discussing all things sex, porn, and photography. Come by.

The Only Thing Worse Than A NIMBY Is A Preservationist

Current Affairs Editor Nathan J. Robinson recently wrote about the nationwide YIMBY movement to encourage building more homes to ease the rent crisis. 

Robinson portrays YIMBYs as a selfish, capitalist, money-grubbing monolith based on nothing more than older hitpieces and uncharitable interpretations of excerpts of copy lifted from selected YIMBY group websites. He also accuses YIMBYs of believing in “a fairy tale, a story about a world that could theoretically exist rather than the world that actually does exist.” But I would argue that it’s Robinson who believes in fairy tales. Specifically, he seems to believe we live in a world where building housing increases housing prices and exclusionary zoning doesn’t increase housing costs, concentrate poverty, harm the environment, and exacerbate disparate health outcomes, displacement, homelessness, racial segregation, and the racial education gap.

Supply and demand impact prices

“YIMBYs do not have much sympathy with preservationists or people who want to keep the character of their neighborhoods,” Robinson writes, correctly. 

It’s worth thinking about why that is. 

YIMBYs believe that the problem of affordable housing is a problem of supply. This idea is hardly unique to YIMBYs. It turns out that nearly every economist agrees that, all else equal, when demand outstrips supply, prices rise. And when supply outstrips demand, prices fall. 

Robinson believes that housing is a special case where new supply creates its own demand. That is, if you build it (housing) they (rich people) will come. The thing is this just isn’t true. 

Rather, our severe nationwide rent crisis, where half of renters must spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, is a direct result of having severely underbuilt housing. 

Economists widely agree that building more housing eases displacement pressures and lowers rents regionally. We actually have real-world examples of it working in Seattle and the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Another reason we know supply and demand impact housing prices is that rents have fallen as people have left expensive cities during the pandemic.

The problem with public housing 

Robinson thinks public housing is the solution to the rent crisis, pointing to countries where it’s worked well and claiming “There is little interest [among YIMBYS] in having the government build new public housing.” This isn’t even close to true. YIMBY leaders including the foremothers of SF YIMBY, Laura Foote and Sonja Trauss, are outspoken in their support for more public housing and more funding for social housing. 

“There’s no reason why good public housing can’t be built,” Robinson writes. Well, there is one reason. It costs $1 million to build a one-bedroom market-rate apartment in San Francisco and between $700,000 and $800,000 to build one unit of affordable housing. Talk about a “vastly inefficient way to help the poor.”

The impacts of zoning

The sad reality is that preservationists protecting the character of their neighborhoods are why we have a housing crisis in the first place. Regulatory barriers to building more housing significantly raise the cost of building new housing and limit the amount of new housing that gets built. 

Take local control. Robinson supports hyperlocal deliberative democratic land-use decisions. “Nobody deserves to have the future of their neighborhoods determined by developers rather than the democratic process,” he writes. Unfortunately local control empirically benefits the rich and white at the expense of the poor and BIPOC. Rich white homeowners consistently use local control to block new affordable housing to protect their property values. Giving neighbors the right to block housing drastically increases the price of housing without improving its quality. 

Most of the country “preserves neighborhood character” through exclusionary zoning, which Robinson also supports. Exclusionary zoning makes it illegal to build dense, affordable housing. 

Every piece of available credible evidence suggests that exclusionary zoning increases the price of housing, concentrates poverty, exacerbates disparate health outcomes, widens the racial education gap, harms the environment, and exacerbates displacement. 

Exclusionary zoning prevents Americans from moving to opportunity, trapping people in low-growth areas linked with poverty, diminished career prospects, and lower rates of family formation. These areas are linked with higher rates of opioid addiction, diabetes, stroke, heart attacks, and high blood pressure and “deaths of despair.” 

“Where one lives shapes when one dies,” writes Derek Thompson. Exclusionary zoning condemns people to miserable lives and early deaths. 

Exclusionary zoning also causes homelessness. One study found deregulating 11 highly regulated housing markets would decrease homelessness by 13 percent in the United States overall and by much more in those cities. Homelessness would fall by “54 percent in San Francisco, by 40 percent in Los Angeles, and by 23 percent in New York City. On average, homelessness would fall by 31 percent in these 11 metropolitan areas, which currently make up 42 percent of the United States homeless population.” 

Exclusionary zoning also increases racial segregation and is generally racist as all hell. “Zoning emerged as the most important tool of increasingly powerful neighborhood groups that sought to limit racial integration, protect the ‘character’ of existing neighborhoods, and encourage the early stages of gentrification,” writes Nikil Saval.

“Our cities are broken because affluent Americans have been segregating themselves from the poor, and our best hope for building a fairer, stronger nation is to break down those barriers,” the New York Times Editorial Board wrote last year. “We need to rewrite the rules that have made it virtually impossible to build affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods, immiserating lower-income families forced ever farther from jobs and services.”

Rezoning for density would increase racial diversity and boost economic growth while easing income inequality and lowering rents, drawing low- and middle-income earners from low-opportunity areas to high-opportunity cities. Zoning for density would increase U.S. GDP by 9.5 percent, according to the Brookings Institute’s Edward Glaeser. In Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimate that exclusionary zoning lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009.

Preservationists have decided to lock a full quarter of the US population out of economic opportunity and resign them to die in their shrinking towns in order to preserve “neighborhood character” for their wealthy homeowner constituents.  

Thankfully, every day more people become aware of the devastating impacts of exclusionary zoning and local control over land use. Which is why California, Atlanta, Oregon, Washington, Seattle, Minneapolis, Nebraska, Virginia, and Maryland introduced or passed zoning for density. 

The real fairy tale is that you can use local control and exclusionary zoning to preserve neighborhood character without doing severe, lasting harm. In reality, reams and reams of evidence indicate clearly that growth controls decrease economic growth generally and particularly harm low-income and non-white Americans in nearly every measurable way including health, education, economic mobility, inequality, and more. 

It’s fine for Robinson to dislike YIMBYs for aesthetic reasons. But I’d argue one thing worse than a YIMBY is someone who is willing to misrepresent reality in ways that will harm the marginalized to benefit the wealthy. There is no reality in which preserving neighborhood character by blocking new housing benefits the marginalized on net.