So counter-productive to blame homeowners for current housing problems. Also ageist, on the whole. Why foment a new kind of class conflict? You call for a generation to be generous and civic-minded but I see no generosity or tolerance in your argument. Resenting the past and jumping to the conclusion that homeowners are "selfish" and "im…
So counter-productive to blame homeowners for current housing problems. Also ageist, on the whole. Why foment a new kind of class conflict? You call for a generation to be generous and civic-minded but I see no generosity or tolerance in your argument. Resenting the past and jumping to the conclusion that homeowners are "selfish" and "immoral" is puritanical and over-simplifying. It shifts the issues from economical/social/political to personal and moral. You also elide in your argument the environmental costs of untrammeled growth; how will your grandchildren lead full lives in denatured and probably overcrowded developments? You're right that housing issues are very complex which is one reason why we must refer them to wider social issues: the systems we live under favor the wealthy at every turn. And yes, landowners do benefit from this -- it doesn't help to punish them for acquiring the property their society encouraged them to acquire decades ago. Zoning changes rarely address affordability and can lead to even more expensive housing. Density too brings with it problems -- rarely mentioned: congestion, destruction of greenspace, lack of access to amenities, inadequate infrastructure to support growth. Developers are making a fortune from the 'housing crisis' and have every reason to promote and prolong it. And yes, the system encourages them to do so. Let's work, hopefully without bitterness and harsh judgment, towards systemic change instead of punishing individuals or classes. Consider also that the housing crisis is being fueled in part by private equity companies buying up and speculating in housing stock. You make some good points in your piece, but you're grinding an ax and it shows.
“It is perfectly understandable that past generations, whose politics were formed when this affordable housing crisis was far less apparent, did not rank “maintaining housing supply” high in their mental list of public causes. Daniel Duane’s recent New York Times Magazine story about growing up in Berkeley beautifully details how his mother’s generation, who came of age fighting battles against racist real estate developers who were part and parcel of a local power structure that was trying to squelch radical protest, found themselves as staunch opponents of development decades later. The problem is that between 1963 and 2023, the state of the world changed.”
this strikes you as lacking any generosity or civil-mindedness? you put “selfish” and “immoral” in quotation marks but ctrl+F returns nothing for either word anywhere on the page besides your comment, so can i ask where these are supposed to be coming from? do you not think falsely attributing quotations evinces a lack of intellectual generosity? the piece is manifestly clear that anti-development political commitments came about in a time and context in which it was completely understandable and justifiable, only that the time and context has changed and their policy positions ought to change for the sake of fidelity to the very principles that led to the anti-development stance in the first place. you could only read “old people are selfish and immoral, fuck ‘em” into the piece from a position of severe defensiveness
Thank you for attentively reading my post and replying to it.
Allow me to remind you that quotation marks are not only used to offset quotations; they also serve as emphasis within a sentence and as a mark of irony. I used them in the last two ways. Nolan's piece is moralistic -- indeed his main effort seems to be to lay a moral duty on homeowners. I question this. Nolan has no right to personally decide what constitutes public duty now nor to urge his definitions on any "class" of society. I think this approach is inappropriate even in an opinion piece.
I find the analogies he makes between "protecting the environment" and "historical preservation"on the one hand and the current housing situation on the other to be unconvincing: these are all different issues. Certainly there are social problems associated with housing but this crisis is also being driven by massive vested economic interests. Surely these, and the kind of capitalism which supports them, are a worthier target than the homeowners whom Nolan acknowledges didn't have housing shortages on their minds when they bought their homes fifty years ago. It would be more effective to lecture Blackstone, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos (whom Nolan already hates) rather than making homeowners easy targets for such old and new grievances. For these reasons I placed "immoral" and "selfish" in ironic quotation marks: I don't see the homeowning "class" as either of these things, and Nolan implicitly imputes to it both moral failure and self-seeking.
No, I don't see "generosity or civil-mindedness" in your quote from Nolan's piece. In its context the passage is part of a quasi-philosophical argument which claims, astonishingly, that public good "demands" that homeowners support all decisions which lead to increased new housing. To say that this is arrogant is an understatement. It's echoed in the conclusion to the piece: "But you must think about all of the people in your city . . . . You must think about the community. You must think about the public." What an ex-cathedra pronouncement! You're hearing not defensiveness but incredulity. Send this encyclical to Bezos, Thiel, Blackstone, developers, their shareholders, and other members of the 1%. Many of the homeowners being subjected to this kind of critique are middle-class and have worked hard to acquire and build up both their homes and their towns. It helps little to command them -- in the name of a shakily defined virtue and an arbitrarily imposed obligation -- to take the fall for the current mess.
This is really my question--if ALL homeowners in America vow to keep away from ANY possible building projects in their area--would Americans be able to find housing? Would housing become affordable? It’s not really clear to me that it would! Already most homeowners are not involved in city planning or paying ANY attention whatsoever to zoning or permits. How many homeowners have any investment in such things let alone even know if they’re happening? Only in a few communities does this happen, for whatever reason. And yes, it’s annoying. But suppose we got rid of those NIMBYs etc. Do we then suddenly SOLVE the crisis? I find this wildly implausible.
There has to be more to it than this.
I also wonder what people mean by ‘build housing’ because the yimby movement is laser focused on the most expensive markets in a weird way. But they have special issues that are way more complicated sometimes than just ‘the NIMBYs are causing a housing crisis.’ I suppose there are some places, like Hawaii, where the ‘locals’ are in fact, colonized, and whose community would be genuinely destroyed by every single developer descending to built high-rises on every scrap of land. Do they have to pay for the national (actually global) crisis by having Honolulu (in fact all the islands) turned into Hong Kong?
(I have no dog in this fight. I have never been to Hawaii. I just know some indigenous Hawaiians.)
It just seems like this is going to be a case-by-case thing if we’re not just going to be arguing that people that with money have a right to live everywhere. Because I keep hearing about how it’s fine that the luxury apartments aren’t solving any housing problems in the nice parts of California and all the poor people can just move to Stockton. But if we want housing for the whole country why is it never about the whole country?
Ro -- these are really interesting questions. I don't think getting rid of the NIMBYs would result in affordable housing: developers and their investors would continue to build market-price units and reap the profits. The NIMBY thorns in their sides would just be gone. As far as I know the YIMBYs believe that building tons of expensive housing all the time will eventually bring down housing prices. They apply the supply/demand paradigm unproblematically to housing and believe (again according to what I've learned) in 'trickle-down housing': as the rich buy up the new units the older ones are vacated for less wealthy occupants. Lots of problems with this theory, largely because trickling down doesn't happen. Communities ARE being destroyed -- everywhere, not just Hawaii. This is creating anger and grief, and IMO the profound social and psychological effects of such destruction are being overlooked. People who acquired their homes in good faith do feel that they're having to 'pay' so cities like Hong Kong can be built. If they try to defend and preserve at least some of their communities they're labeled as anti-change, politically conservative, selfish, immoral etc. The question becomes who do such cities serve? This is where larger arguments about capitalism come into play. Given that our society overwhelmingly favors the 1%, the 'new' cities are effectively being built for them. Some YIMBYs, I suspect, aspire to 1% status and see unlimited development as an opportunity to advance. The affordable housing cry can be a straw man. It's never about the whole country because it literally isn't. It's about profit and preserving the unequal economic status quo. The speculative interests of private equity firms and the ambitions of developers/realtors/the construction industry and their investors are driving the crisis. There simply is no money in affordable housing thus no incentive to build it. Everybody knows this but no-one will admit it. Also underpinning the crisis is climate change, anxiety about burgeoning population (especially as opportunities for the beleaguered middle class shrink), and an awareness that space and land are effectively finite. Something else that no-one wants to admit. We're also seeing, IMO, the understandable disappointment of a generation that's being betrayed by decades of unequal economic practice and the shredding of the social safety net that other wealthy countries often provide for their citizens. The mythic promise of home ownership as a sign of success seems withheld from those of them who are middle and working class. They may not end up wealthier than their parents. Unfortunately this sad possibility has opened the way to resentment and the search for scapegoats, especially among older home-owners. It's a very complex situation; housing is like health care -- both a need and a commodity to be traded, and the two impulses clash, especially now within an overall frame of forms of capitalism breaking down.
I don’t have a way of fact checking every claim you make here but I think we are in agreement on a couple things--that the crisis is much more complex but people’s feelings are attaching to one small idea, a kind of principle that it’s worth questioning should be absolute.
The principle ‘it’s always good to build more housing. There is a moral imperative to build more housing, and bad to block housing’ is a utilitarian principle. It’s not even clear whether it DOES lead to more happiness overall. That’s the assumption.
The one thing about utilitarianism is that you can just totally run roughshod over people’s rights. So it’s tailor made for something like European colonialism....’group membership isn’t important....people trying to preserve their way of life isn’t important...because eventually no one will remember and everyone will be assimilated and happy.’
It’s like the Borg. What? You’re HAPPY in the Borg cube! Why are you complaining? Nobody ever considers bigger picture things like ‘what if we had no private property at all’ or whatnot.
Who cares what used to stand here. Yes, the poor people occupied the cities and we want them now. But they’ll just be scattered to the four winds, and the rich people living in their excellent condos shall be just as happy. We have maximized utility.
The socially powerful are going to use this principle to divide the less powerful is my worry. I worry about the whole framing. of NIMBYISM and YIMBYISM. It substitutes generations for class. It makes poor black communities the REAL REASON condos cost so much. Or whatever.
On the other hand the left wing thing where NIMBYs are protesting building things seems so dumb that I sincerely wonder if there aren’t agent provocateurs getting them to be poster children for the YIMBY campaigns.
Something is off about the whole way it is shaped. But insofar as it sometimes sounds like it requires blanket libertarian assumptions that trump any kind of right or value, e.g., of the environment...I would say one shouldn’t adopt it.
Generally, I am skeptical it is a real thing. Too many of the claims are flimsy and implausible. I don’t know why leftists are falling for it. Is it is an attempt by larger financial entities to change the urban power structure in their favor because they want to have more control in the future? I don’t know. But whatever it is, I would like to see how it is going to lower housing costs, cure homelessness or do anything for anyone. So far this is all explained in the vaguest of terms, and whatever is supposed to happen is so far off in the future you could never hold anyone accountable if it doesn’t come to pass.
So counter-productive to blame homeowners for current housing problems. Also ageist, on the whole. Why foment a new kind of class conflict? You call for a generation to be generous and civic-minded but I see no generosity or tolerance in your argument. Resenting the past and jumping to the conclusion that homeowners are "selfish" and "immoral" is puritanical and over-simplifying. It shifts the issues from economical/social/political to personal and moral. You also elide in your argument the environmental costs of untrammeled growth; how will your grandchildren lead full lives in denatured and probably overcrowded developments? You're right that housing issues are very complex which is one reason why we must refer them to wider social issues: the systems we live under favor the wealthy at every turn. And yes, landowners do benefit from this -- it doesn't help to punish them for acquiring the property their society encouraged them to acquire decades ago. Zoning changes rarely address affordability and can lead to even more expensive housing. Density too brings with it problems -- rarely mentioned: congestion, destruction of greenspace, lack of access to amenities, inadequate infrastructure to support growth. Developers are making a fortune from the 'housing crisis' and have every reason to promote and prolong it. And yes, the system encourages them to do so. Let's work, hopefully without bitterness and harsh judgment, towards systemic change instead of punishing individuals or classes. Consider also that the housing crisis is being fueled in part by private equity companies buying up and speculating in housing stock. You make some good points in your piece, but you're grinding an ax and it shows.
“It is perfectly understandable that past generations, whose politics were formed when this affordable housing crisis was far less apparent, did not rank “maintaining housing supply” high in their mental list of public causes. Daniel Duane’s recent New York Times Magazine story about growing up in Berkeley beautifully details how his mother’s generation, who came of age fighting battles against racist real estate developers who were part and parcel of a local power structure that was trying to squelch radical protest, found themselves as staunch opponents of development decades later. The problem is that between 1963 and 2023, the state of the world changed.”
this strikes you as lacking any generosity or civil-mindedness? you put “selfish” and “immoral” in quotation marks but ctrl+F returns nothing for either word anywhere on the page besides your comment, so can i ask where these are supposed to be coming from? do you not think falsely attributing quotations evinces a lack of intellectual generosity? the piece is manifestly clear that anti-development political commitments came about in a time and context in which it was completely understandable and justifiable, only that the time and context has changed and their policy positions ought to change for the sake of fidelity to the very principles that led to the anti-development stance in the first place. you could only read “old people are selfish and immoral, fuck ‘em” into the piece from a position of severe defensiveness
Thank you for attentively reading my post and replying to it.
Allow me to remind you that quotation marks are not only used to offset quotations; they also serve as emphasis within a sentence and as a mark of irony. I used them in the last two ways. Nolan's piece is moralistic -- indeed his main effort seems to be to lay a moral duty on homeowners. I question this. Nolan has no right to personally decide what constitutes public duty now nor to urge his definitions on any "class" of society. I think this approach is inappropriate even in an opinion piece.
I find the analogies he makes between "protecting the environment" and "historical preservation"on the one hand and the current housing situation on the other to be unconvincing: these are all different issues. Certainly there are social problems associated with housing but this crisis is also being driven by massive vested economic interests. Surely these, and the kind of capitalism which supports them, are a worthier target than the homeowners whom Nolan acknowledges didn't have housing shortages on their minds when they bought their homes fifty years ago. It would be more effective to lecture Blackstone, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos (whom Nolan already hates) rather than making homeowners easy targets for such old and new grievances. For these reasons I placed "immoral" and "selfish" in ironic quotation marks: I don't see the homeowning "class" as either of these things, and Nolan implicitly imputes to it both moral failure and self-seeking.
No, I don't see "generosity or civil-mindedness" in your quote from Nolan's piece. In its context the passage is part of a quasi-philosophical argument which claims, astonishingly, that public good "demands" that homeowners support all decisions which lead to increased new housing. To say that this is arrogant is an understatement. It's echoed in the conclusion to the piece: "But you must think about all of the people in your city . . . . You must think about the community. You must think about the public." What an ex-cathedra pronouncement! You're hearing not defensiveness but incredulity. Send this encyclical to Bezos, Thiel, Blackstone, developers, their shareholders, and other members of the 1%. Many of the homeowners being subjected to this kind of critique are middle-class and have worked hard to acquire and build up both their homes and their towns. It helps little to command them -- in the name of a shakily defined virtue and an arbitrarily imposed obligation -- to take the fall for the current mess.
This is really my question--if ALL homeowners in America vow to keep away from ANY possible building projects in their area--would Americans be able to find housing? Would housing become affordable? It’s not really clear to me that it would! Already most homeowners are not involved in city planning or paying ANY attention whatsoever to zoning or permits. How many homeowners have any investment in such things let alone even know if they’re happening? Only in a few communities does this happen, for whatever reason. And yes, it’s annoying. But suppose we got rid of those NIMBYs etc. Do we then suddenly SOLVE the crisis? I find this wildly implausible.
There has to be more to it than this.
I also wonder what people mean by ‘build housing’ because the yimby movement is laser focused on the most expensive markets in a weird way. But they have special issues that are way more complicated sometimes than just ‘the NIMBYs are causing a housing crisis.’ I suppose there are some places, like Hawaii, where the ‘locals’ are in fact, colonized, and whose community would be genuinely destroyed by every single developer descending to built high-rises on every scrap of land. Do they have to pay for the national (actually global) crisis by having Honolulu (in fact all the islands) turned into Hong Kong?
(I have no dog in this fight. I have never been to Hawaii. I just know some indigenous Hawaiians.)
It just seems like this is going to be a case-by-case thing if we’re not just going to be arguing that people that with money have a right to live everywhere. Because I keep hearing about how it’s fine that the luxury apartments aren’t solving any housing problems in the nice parts of California and all the poor people can just move to Stockton. But if we want housing for the whole country why is it never about the whole country?
Ro -- these are really interesting questions. I don't think getting rid of the NIMBYs would result in affordable housing: developers and their investors would continue to build market-price units and reap the profits. The NIMBY thorns in their sides would just be gone. As far as I know the YIMBYs believe that building tons of expensive housing all the time will eventually bring down housing prices. They apply the supply/demand paradigm unproblematically to housing and believe (again according to what I've learned) in 'trickle-down housing': as the rich buy up the new units the older ones are vacated for less wealthy occupants. Lots of problems with this theory, largely because trickling down doesn't happen. Communities ARE being destroyed -- everywhere, not just Hawaii. This is creating anger and grief, and IMO the profound social and psychological effects of such destruction are being overlooked. People who acquired their homes in good faith do feel that they're having to 'pay' so cities like Hong Kong can be built. If they try to defend and preserve at least some of their communities they're labeled as anti-change, politically conservative, selfish, immoral etc. The question becomes who do such cities serve? This is where larger arguments about capitalism come into play. Given that our society overwhelmingly favors the 1%, the 'new' cities are effectively being built for them. Some YIMBYs, I suspect, aspire to 1% status and see unlimited development as an opportunity to advance. The affordable housing cry can be a straw man. It's never about the whole country because it literally isn't. It's about profit and preserving the unequal economic status quo. The speculative interests of private equity firms and the ambitions of developers/realtors/the construction industry and their investors are driving the crisis. There simply is no money in affordable housing thus no incentive to build it. Everybody knows this but no-one will admit it. Also underpinning the crisis is climate change, anxiety about burgeoning population (especially as opportunities for the beleaguered middle class shrink), and an awareness that space and land are effectively finite. Something else that no-one wants to admit. We're also seeing, IMO, the understandable disappointment of a generation that's being betrayed by decades of unequal economic practice and the shredding of the social safety net that other wealthy countries often provide for their citizens. The mythic promise of home ownership as a sign of success seems withheld from those of them who are middle and working class. They may not end up wealthier than their parents. Unfortunately this sad possibility has opened the way to resentment and the search for scapegoats, especially among older home-owners. It's a very complex situation; housing is like health care -- both a need and a commodity to be traded, and the two impulses clash, especially now within an overall frame of forms of capitalism breaking down.
I don’t have a way of fact checking every claim you make here but I think we are in agreement on a couple things--that the crisis is much more complex but people’s feelings are attaching to one small idea, a kind of principle that it’s worth questioning should be absolute.
The principle ‘it’s always good to build more housing. There is a moral imperative to build more housing, and bad to block housing’ is a utilitarian principle. It’s not even clear whether it DOES lead to more happiness overall. That’s the assumption.
The one thing about utilitarianism is that you can just totally run roughshod over people’s rights. So it’s tailor made for something like European colonialism....’group membership isn’t important....people trying to preserve their way of life isn’t important...because eventually no one will remember and everyone will be assimilated and happy.’
It’s like the Borg. What? You’re HAPPY in the Borg cube! Why are you complaining? Nobody ever considers bigger picture things like ‘what if we had no private property at all’ or whatnot.
Who cares what used to stand here. Yes, the poor people occupied the cities and we want them now. But they’ll just be scattered to the four winds, and the rich people living in their excellent condos shall be just as happy. We have maximized utility.
The socially powerful are going to use this principle to divide the less powerful is my worry. I worry about the whole framing. of NIMBYISM and YIMBYISM. It substitutes generations for class. It makes poor black communities the REAL REASON condos cost so much. Or whatever.
On the other hand the left wing thing where NIMBYs are protesting building things seems so dumb that I sincerely wonder if there aren’t agent provocateurs getting them to be poster children for the YIMBY campaigns.
Something is off about the whole way it is shaped. But insofar as it sometimes sounds like it requires blanket libertarian assumptions that trump any kind of right or value, e.g., of the environment...I would say one shouldn’t adopt it.
Generally, I am skeptical it is a real thing. Too many of the claims are flimsy and implausible. I don’t know why leftists are falling for it. Is it is an attempt by larger financial entities to change the urban power structure in their favor because they want to have more control in the future? I don’t know. But whatever it is, I would like to see how it is going to lower housing costs, cure homelessness or do anything for anyone. So far this is all explained in the vaguest of terms, and whatever is supposed to happen is so far off in the future you could never hold anyone accountable if it doesn’t come to pass.