Comment by tptacek
2 days ago
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.
It's dogmatic among the left that "market based solutions are bad". And because Abundance embraces market solutions, it must therefore be bad too.
Basically, all the arguments I've seen against Abundance tend either towards the ideological, or irrelevant. I tend to see very little empirical arguments.
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But you literally described the moderates being YIMBY and the more radical being NIMBY, which is left-right, but instead of left vs. right on pole ends opposing, it's the leftists and rights agreeing on NIMBY against the moderate centrists. Horseshoe theory strikes again. There is a growing populist frustration where citizens like both people like Tucker Carlson and Bernie but hate the moderate establishment. Low educated are frustrated with outcomes (ironically being NIMBY on housing is a primary cause) and go extreme compared to the educated moderates.
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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.
> Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more.
Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification).
It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.
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> Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.
The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs.
The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite.
> 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.
Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?
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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?
keep reading along in the comments, I've come across an example already
> 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.
> Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.
I've been in leftist housing advocacy circles. I studied urban planning.
1) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates euclidean zoning
2) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates down-zoning
3) Every urban planning class I took said that euclidean zoning is bad
Euclidean zoning is the principle land use regulation in the United States because it is supported by powerful people, landowners and yes property developers (who are also almost always land speculators.)
Thompson and Klein misrepresent euclidean zoning as a leftist project and then set it up as a wicker man to stuff with all the environmental and labor protections they want to torch.
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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.
Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party.
"The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl
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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).
Right-YIMBYs are a tiny minority, but have you seen one in person? Truly a majestic, noble creature. You know they will fiercely stand their own ground but at the same time also go to extreme lengths to avoid putting their noses where they don’t belong.
Long thought extinct, sightings have been reported.