Comment by nathan_compton
2 days ago
This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. Like the idea that there is an active contingent of leftists trying to construct some kind of defense of the current housing system or critique of reforms (in general) aimed at making it easier to build houses strikes me as truly bizarre.
There may be some environmentalists who have housing as a pet peeve or something, and there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way.
I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists.
The argument isn't that the left broadly construed opposes housing legalization! Just that there's a prominent faction of them that do. Right-NIMBYs are a much bigger problem across the US.
Thompson recently recorded a podcast episode with Zephyr Teachout, taking the "we shouldn't do anything before we address antitrust" side of the argument; you can listen to it if you think "the antitrust left" isn't a real thing. Understand: the issue isn't antitrust; it's a totalizing worldview based purely on antitrust. Antitrust is probably super important! But where I live, zoning reform is much more important.
Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. They're not talking to the Republicans. Not in the sense they're talking to Democrats, at least. I don't think they could make that much clearer than they have.
Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.
That belief has reached prominent political leaders as well. I listened to a bit of the Ocasio-Cortez/Tim Walz Madden livestream on Twitch, and they were talking about how something needed to be done about the greedy developers who were driving the housing shortage.
I have been doing YIMBY stuff for around 8 years now, and it does not map nicely onto any kind of left-right narrative.
There was one conservative dude who ran for city council here who was all about 'private property' and 'get rid of government regulations', who also ran against the idea of liberalizing zoning.
I've met left wing people who I agree with on many issues who will do the most spectacular, Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that 'supply and demand' apply to housing.
There are moderate Democrats who are big backers of various reforms. And some on the far left who get that if you want Vienna style social housing, you also need Vienna style zoning and building regulations.
A former mayor here is a moderate Republican - he totally got what we were about and said some really nice things about welcoming new neighbors in one speech a few weeks after he met up with our YIMBY group.
It's just not an issue that - so far - has been slotted into the trench warfare that other issues have been.
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Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.
The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
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,"having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money."
Can you show me an example of someone pushing this?
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> Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.
“Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China.
It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse.
At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
"Abundance" directly addresses climate change in the book. The scenario it describes is that we need to electrify at a pace far beyond what we're doing today in order to find off climate change, but large scale clean energy projects are often stymied by red tape and legal challenges. Also lack of government investment in scientific research.
Politics is local and there's nothing more local than your housing values
> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.
This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala.
People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.
Housing supply is the biggest economic problem that regular people face.
Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson did not bring us Joe Biden, Ezra became one of the most critical mainstream journalists of Biden. Their politics are meaningfully different.
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FWIW: Ezra Klein called for Biden to step down before most others and asked for a fast national convention (not Kamala). Broad brushstrokes are energy saving, but just incorrect.
> People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face.
Housing is that.
This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.
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I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform.
Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could (like I do) call them "left-NIMBYs" and be in the same rhetorical place.
Most leftists gag over current anti-housing laws (I wish that were true of the right, but right-YIMBYs make up a tiny minority of the political right).
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Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY.
Explain?
UK Greens aren't NIMBYs. They're against doing more of what's being done across UK cities already - which is building generic boxy blocks of cheap housing that look like they fell out of Minecraft, and selling them for unreasonable prices.
Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents.
There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem.
The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."
Dehydrated man, after drinking one glass of water, rejects more water, reasoning that he's still thirsty.
Thats being a nimby in all but name. The UK does not build flats relative to its needs.
Uk greens are unfortunately nimbys. They even shut down solar farms and things you would think they would be in favour of.
> Mamdani - rent control
Mamdani wants to freeze rents of housing that is already under rent stabilization. He is also an advocate for reform and deregulation, and working backwards from outcomes. He has been talking to people from the construction industry and one of their main concerns is predictable time scales. He seems very pragmatic.
In the last election, Australia's Green Party was the only party whose housing plan involves actually building homes.
The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.
Talk vs action. The Australian Greens opposed Australia's build-to-rent legislation. They didn't oppose the entire legislation. They opposed the one part of the legislation that would have helped the problem.
Aside from the fact that the few policies they made explicit in their platform would actually be counter-productive to getting more supply (such as National-level rent freezes), they also don't have a good track record at the local level when it comes to housing.
I've been very involved in council-level politics where repeatedly the Greens members were aligning themselves with the right-wing members ("ratepayers rights"-type groups) when it came to delaying/blocking development permits, enforcing parking requirements, preventing/delaying rezoning, etc. They fundamentally don't understand the issue at all. All talk, no substance.
And that's before we get to the CFMEU matter, which I think was the final blow for them during the last election.
My guess is that the "leftist critique" isn't one of not wanting new houses built, but of not wanting extensive government subsidies and political energy to go to builders and other groups who will not solve the problem, a la our storied history with broadband subsidies.
This pitched debate may very well simply represent an attempt to forestall action by bogging efforts down in debate over what's effective or correct, of course. It's worked for any number of groups looking to forestall what seems like an obvious and inevitable solution: reducing lead exposure by banning its use in consumer products, reducing tobacco-related illness by making it difficult and more uncomfortable to partake, and, in our case, making housing affordable by letting prices fall.
"there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way"
People tend to call the Democrats the left, as they're at least somewhat leftward of the Republicans. It's at least easier for discussion purposes than speaking of the right and the other right.
Yeah, I get it. But we also use liberal and I think in this particular case its worth drawing the distinction between these two "camps" of the democratic party.
The meaning of liberal and conservative has shifted so much over time that the term is now useless. The original meaning of liberal was about not killing you neighbor if they were a different religion - from which we get freedom of religion. That slowly expanded to things like freedom for slaves and women voting.
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The impression i get as an outsider is that liberals are basically republicans that don't hate minorities.
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It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side".
Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
This is one of those extremely important points that we say every once in a while and then forget to emphasize. Opposing good ideas or supporting bad ideas because they somehow get tagged into weird ideological buckets along with completely unrelated issues is a big reason why our political system is so dysfunctional.
Excellent comment. I agree that not many leftists support the current housing system. Probably only some existing home owners are excited about how it works today - they may want home prices to stay high. I'm lucky to be a home owner but I also see that the current system is incredibly destructive, having not enough homes and very high home purchase prices is really hard on people. We should not have to spend so much of our income pursing a home.
> houses should be cheaper by any means necessary.
That's basically the position Klein has in the book Abundance, but everywhere I go online the left automatically comes out hostile to it or anything that embraces market solutions. Your anecdote might be true but beyond your small sample size it doesn't seem representative. Broadly, they want populist solutions. This is why Sanders and Warren gave a lukewarm criticism of tariffs, and why they like price controls for grocery stores despite their having small margins, and risk of food shortages it could bring.
If the problem is in our midst, we must acknowledge it.
Local boards in blue cities (California in particular) have blocked new housing for decades using every tool at their disposal. Places that lean left have anomalous rent growth. Places that lean left approve fewer new houses. Places that lean left have anomalously high building costs. This is a matter of written record. Embarrassingly, the only US city to buck this trend is Austin, a city in red-Texas known for a recent influx of radicalized right wingers.
> yuppies who want to defend their housing prices
Yuppies, but definition, are young professionals. They don't own houses, they rent. They are the ones paying the high rental costs as neighborhoods gentrify. They want more housing. The 35+ home owning population is the one that blocks new housing.
> I don't associate this position with leftism in any way
The leftist - YIMBY conflict shows up on 3 fronts.
First, Leftists have issues with the free-market. They reject market-housing solutions as a way to create new housing.
Second, Leftists like Govts and regulation. YIMBY wants less regulation, so they can maximize for space and price. Regulated Govt built housing is both more expensive and worse than what free markets already provide.
Third, and the most important, is a subtle accusation: "Leftists act just as selfish as everyone else, once they are the ones in power". Having come from an ex-socialist country, I have a deeply rooted belief in this accusation. Not that leftists are worse people, but that people are people, and systems should work around their imperfections rather than having expectations of ideological virtue.
The anti-trust left is a nice way to point a sub-section of the left which uses regulation, social outrage and critiques of free-market as a way to get personally beneficial outcomes, at the expense of the wider population. I understand - #NotAllLeftists. YIMBY & abundance advocates themselves have left-sympathies. But the anti-trust left is a non-trivial number and the conversation must start from acknowledging that they exist.
You can just look at the empirical evidence. Where are homes being built? Primarily Texas, Florida, Nevada, Arizona. Where are they not being built? New York, California, Illinois.
Do with that information what you please.
> resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets
The economy is too complex to be planned in details and such attempts at control have failed again and again.
I think some people also miss that, crucially, the market is not an external force, it is just the aggregate of each individual's need, decision, and desires. SO in a way a working market is as free and democratic as can be.
I like to say the market is undefeated thoughout history.
You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.
What is it like living a life completely ignorant of reality?
If you'd like to learn, feel free to ask chatgpt on the leftish pushback against abundance. Or historical examples of leftists blocking housing projects. Or environmentalists prioritizing niche interests over those of the general community. There are many, many examples.