A more cynical view is that many progressives (often white and well-to-do) actually have a vested self-interest in preserving the status quo and only cosplay as champagne socialists to make themselves feel good and fit in to their social milieu.
And TBF, the reactionary right is also heavily in to cosplaying as radical revolutionary fascists (well, they’re cosplaying at being radical revolutionaries; many of them _are_ fascists).
Exactly. Progressives and people and in general first think of "Number One." "Would that proposed apartment building a couple blocks down help me? No. Okay then I'm going to fight it." Then, what is the political consensus in my social circle? Hate Trump; Hate GOP; Climate Change; Renewables etc. etc. "Better mirror all those ideologies in my social speech so I fit in." That's the "cosplay as champagne socialists" part.
Do you know anyone like this? I personally don’t. I know a lot of people who want to do the right thing and are genuinely confused about why building more housing is both good and opposed by groups that have noble aims.
When you have a group like the Social Democrats of Denver opposing (below market rate) new housing (on a golf course!) it makes people confused. People who are inclined to have a positive view of the Social Democrats or at least believe that they advocate for the poor take the opposition as a signal that new housing is bad for the poor. It is hard to believe that avowed advocates for the unhoused are actually working to harm those who are unhoused. The confusion is real.
People should exercise some critical thinking and interrogate why they believe people who are telling them that building more housing won't help house more people.
I agree in the abstract, but I imagine you may have noticed significant variation in the human population in their ability to understand micro generally and micro as it relates to the supply and demand of housing specifically :).
My mental model of the universe includes a non-trivial number of people who are smart and good but don’t or can’t think about housing policy with any degree of rigor or depth.
Democratic Socialists, not Social Democrats. The former are socialists, the latter are welfare capitalists. The former are mind-rotten commies, the latter are statist liberals with a history of socialism that ended post-USSR / Post Eduard Bernstein reforms.
PARADIGM 1: Earth and everything on it, minus the humans: The humans muck up the works. More humans means less space for all the other animals, less wildlife, more pollution etc.
PARADIGM 2: Human Society: It doesn't work without economic growth and population increase. Every society with population decline has gone into Overall Decline. You have to have enough young people for society to be balanced economically and for people to be emotionally happy.
Well said. It is more than a little ironical that some 'liberal' billionaires that have made their billions in capitalist US are now nefariously promoting progressive causes not only in the US but around the world
I wonder if the answer involves some sort of crackdown on The Groups by national party leadership.
Maybe Biden hauls their leadership into a panel where he just bluntly questions them about what they’re actually doing to help the American people and why nothing he’s signed into law is actually getting built.
Maybe he hauls them before the DNC, with evidence of how they’ve profited off the cronyism, and bans them from the party and from contracting with the federal government.
The Groups are a bottom-up phenomenon, so I have a hard time seeing how they get fixed by anything but a top-down response that delegitimizes them in front of the public.
I like Noah's piece; I feel like I've been seeing this argument a lot lately, and it feels important, but I've also been thinking about, "why now?"* One argument that's been made is that "the Groups" that you refer too have become so dysfunctional that it's visible to everyone.
But another piece, I think, is that the 90s tech boom (and subsequent period of software eating the world) gave everyone a misleading sense of how easy it is to deploy new technology. It felt almost frictionless for a decade or two, but now people are remembering that new hardware technology is more challenging to deploy.
Or, perhaps, it isn't new -- I was just reading something today about a group of politicians in the 80s labeled, "Atari Democrats" for their pro-tech positions: https://tedium.co/2023/03/22/atari-democrats-history/
I'll add to my own comment that part of how I view the situation is just, "you can't take the politics out of politics."
I think it's important to argue, as Noah does, for the value in being able to make change in the world. I think it's good to not fall too far into the thinking of, "those idiots, why can't they see that they're messing everything up."
Making change in the world generally requires persuading people (unless you're just releasing a new version of software), and that's a frustrating process, but it should be possible and is an important process.
If they are a bottoms-up phenomenon, I doubt a top-down response would actually delegitimize them. I think you have to win hearts and minds one by one.
Their actual legitimacy comes from the top, though. The whole thing is a mirage: they claim to represent a bunch of small-g groups, but they really only represent themselves. So their power derives from people at the top taking them seriously and not calling the bluff, for fear of burning bridges within the broader coalition.
That’s why I see the opportunity here for someone to call the bluff.
Well, yes. But they’re also vulnerable to pressure. That’s why The Groups have their balls in a vise. And yet, pressure can be applied from other directions as well.
“Checkism,” great coinage. I will be quoting that. You say that progressives need to start believing in progress. You’re totally right and all the points you make are excellent, but I think you underestimate that if progressives sincerely believed in progress, then they wouldn’t be progressives anymore. Like i’m thinking of what Hayek said that if socialists only learned economics then they wouldn’t be socialists. The reason progressives don’t believe in progress has to do entirely with their pathological hatred of capitalism and their proud belief that larger government can better provide for the common welfare than the free market. Unless their entire ideology were to go into reverse, progressives will continue to favor intuitively appealing schemes to use the blunt state to benefit the public, the state which only continually misallocates resources, stunts growth, constrains opportunity and concentrates wealth. They define progress differently from right brained people like us, progress to them is entirely moral and collectivistic in nature--it is punishing rich people and babysitting poor people, and to be able to say that by raising taxes and creating more opportunities NOT TO WORK that you care for people more. Progress to them is not about delivering real change, but to be able to say you care about people enough to use the state to bully the rich.
Wouldn't it be nice if people who love capitalism and want social change (I'm guessing there are at least 100M of us) were represented in our government? Instead, we have to choose one or the other. I think the history books will write about how we had an opportuniy after the 2020 election to make real changes and we blew it, for the exact reasons Noah describes.
The free market is an unopopular thing to believe in because people either don’t understand it or temperamentally they can’t stand it because it doesn’t advance equity, and their consciences won’t be appeased unless government enforces equality of result. The funny thing is free markets actually engender more equality between classes over time. Government entrenches disparities between classes and indeed creates class strife. Look at the most extreme example of a command ecoonomy in communist countries. The government enriches itself while everybody else starves. How’s that for equity?
You are staring at the fact that living standards crashed when command economies were dis-assembled and pretending it doesn't exist.
People hate capitalism because it institutionalized that old biblical thing: To those who have, even more shall be given, but to those who have not, even what little they have shall be taken away.
"continually misallocates resources, stunts growth, constrains opportunity and concentrates wealth"
This is the list of complaints against capitalism. Which suggests that you share goals with all the people you despise, just either you or they are badly wrong on the empirics.
Progressivism is a statement of identity and values, not an agenda for actual physical changes in the world. There’s a reason it’s mainly programmer-adjacent people on the internet (Noahpinion, Slow Boring, ACX, /r/neoliberal, etc) expressing frustration about the illogic in the nuts and bolts implementation of progressive policy: we’re the only ones whose social awareness is too dense to catch the games actually being played. Thinking progressives actually want lower housing prices or more frequent train service when they opine on urban policy is like thinking someone is actually attacking you when they’re playfully teasing.
Noah, good piece. But I feel like you and others have been beating this drum for a while and I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone disagrees. I’d love you to publish an interview or guest response from someone at Roosevelt Institute or EarthJustice (or similar) who can at least make the best case for where they think you are wrong. I don’t expect to be convinced, but I would love to understand the other side of this argument.
Good piece. Having lived in CA and with most of my friends and my volunteering heavily intertwined with politicians and activist groups and government-funded NGO ecosystems, I see very little evidence that meaningful results are the objective of policies or policy positions, nor that these positions or priorities would ever be amended based upon the failure to achieve the supposedly desired results (nor if they proved to be harmful).
Being progressive is mostly about feelings, about being seen to have the right views, gaining the power to control, creating jobs for the right sort of people (being able to exclude or disenfranchise the wrong sort, or at least making them live in an environment in which they will be uncomfortable). As far as I have observed, it is not about results.
Not that politicians of any stripe are overly concerned with results. There are individual exceptions, and these exceptional people should be backed during the brief time period before they become co-opted.
While a Westerner now, I have relatives/family from the Northeast who were part of local urban machine politics. I was a big fan of Corey Booker in Newark because he actually wanted to bring investment to the city (rather than selling development rights to his girlfriend like his predecessor) and he wanted the school system to get better and be accountable (fewer results there). Once he got into the Senate he basically copied and pasted the Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer push emails and simply became a cookie cutter hack.
I have some hopes for a guy like Ro Khanna, but my guess is he is already on the precipice of being a cookie cutter hack who occasionally talks a good game but ultimately won’t go against the interests of the donors and activists.
I think there's a big chunk of progressives who think the difference in behavior and attitudes between police officers and social workers is that police officers went to the police academy at 18 and social workers took a social work major in college at the same age, and if you switched them over you'd still see police and social workers have the same differences.
So if you retrained a police officer as a social worker, they would change their attitudes and behavior in confrontational situations.
They think that the "wrong sort of people" are so by choice and they could choose to be the right sort of people if they wanted to.
Yet they don't apply that to, say, LGBT+ people.
Conservatives have exactly the same problem in a mirror. They think that you can't choose to be conservative or liberal, but that you can choose to be straight or gay (and a bunch of other things).
Both are wrong: people have much less agency than we think. Look at Ozempic: it works by making you want to eat less. If you can't choose to or not to eat, then what can you really choose?
No, I think people don't choose to be gay, or liberal, or conservative, or asshole bullies or a bunch of other things.
I think both sides make the mistake of thinking some things are by choice and some are inherent and that almost every time there's a disagreement, it's inherent and not something people can choose.
I think cops are asshole bullies because asshole bullies become cops, not because anything in cop training makes them asshole bullies.
I think men have sex with men because they are gay, not out of any choice. I think people are revolted that men have sex with men because they are homophobic and they don't have any choice about that either.
At the level of society, you can shape individual incentives, you can shape upbringings, and you can change people collectively. But I don't think that you can change much about people just by asking them to choose to.
There are good reasons why people in their 20s are less homophobic than people in their 60s. There are even good reasons why people in their 60s are less homophobic than the same people were when they were in their 20s. But those aren't a matter of people choosing to be better and then that's it.
Great article Noah, I started following because you articulate so well that the US needs an abundance mentality and techno optimism. Unfortunately when you combine this essay with your prior posting of "The Darkness" a depressing outlook. It is difficult to see how our country can change to become a nation of abundance for all our people. We will be locked in a battle of them against us until some catastrophe either economic or outside force (ie China) forces us to change.
I think Noah has skipped over a huge part which I call “pet-victim progressivism”.
It’s when progressives over index on caring about their pet victims (they prefer “marginalized groups”) and use them to justify stasis. You can see it with idiots whining about “gentrification”, endless handwringing over the environment (overlaps with checkism and NEPA) and the movement to shrug off public order issues in cities because their pet victims cause them. More broadly, it’s the stymieing of advancement for the median because their pet victims in some edge cases may be inconvenienced. The solution is to just stop caring about these groups, but it’s more of a mental issue that I call “protest disorder”.
Agree. It’s also extremely condescending to lump people who share one characteristic into buckets of marginalization and declare that you know best what they need.
Groups have been around for a long time, but at some point during the past 20-25 years or so it seems like a line was crossed and they became disproportionately, stupidly powerful. It’s astonishing to me, even though it has happened during my adult life, and I agree that it’s extremely harmful. I’ve heard shocking stories from friends in DC about how this works on the ground.
I read about this being a result of both Citizens United and wealthy people realigning behind the Democrats over the last few decades. The "groups" previously ran off small-dollar donations which meant they had to get results to keep getting those donations. Now they're funded more by giant grants from "left-wing" billionaires, which for structural reasons aren't conditioned on actually achieving things.
"[T]he success of the Chips and Science Act is threatened by a flotilla of unrelated objectives and unreasonable restrictions that Congress and parts of the administration have attached to the grant-giving process…
"Applicants [for government funding] will be evaluated based on their plans to “create opportunities for minority-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned businesses…and commit to using iron, steel, and construction materials produced in the United States.”
But this isn't part of a progressive checklist; this is the normal way federal government contracting works. The Buy American Act of 1933 (!) requires the federal government to buy American–made iron, steel, and manufactured goods wherever possible. Small businesses have gotten preferences since the Small Business Act of 1953. Minority business preferences emerged from legislation signed by Nixon in 1973. The Women-Owned Small Business program was started in 2000.
Yeah, I had the same reaction reading the original editorial in WaPo this morning. These requirements plus the no stock buyback one are eminently reasonable in my view, esp. since small biz targets are normally contingent on actually receiving qualified offers for said goods and services. So Intel could contact a small biz for cleaning services, office supplies, or vending machine services for example, but nobody expects or requires them to purchase EUV lithography machines from them.
It's the other fluffy and vague stuff that should be cut.
The problem with solar energy is that it just consumes way too damn much land for the amount of power you get from it. And that's not counting the massive infrastructure of transmission lines because it's so far away from.places that actually need the power or the special landfills we'll need to throw out the solar junk as the panels age and degrade. I realize this isn't the main point of the piece but we simply need a better solution there. Anything that needs the land and rare earth metal footprint that solar does simply cannot be environmentally friendly.
I'm a huge nuclear advocate though I acknowledge the industry has shot itself in the foot by actually helping to heap unnecessary regulations on industry. I do expect next gen nuclear, if it is given anything like the chance we've showered on renewables, will blow wind and scorch solar out of the ballpark.
I would not put much faith in Judith Curry’s description of the Australian grid. Firstly, she overlooks the three main factors driving high energy prices (lack of domestic gas reservation policy, high coal prices and network charges). She doesn’t acknowledge SA has done better relative to the Eastern states since pivoting to renewables; it used to be much more expensive. She woefully misrepresents the progress in synthetic inertia and grid forming inverters. The reports by AEMO which she is so fond of citing make it clear the grid is on a path to very rapid decarbonisation, without nuclear. In fact if you are interested in reading what a decarbonised grid looks like, google “AEMO integrated system plan” - its quite readable to the layperson. Don’t forget to check out the hydrogen scenario!
Thank you, Noah. This is well-argued piece that echoes Ezra Klein's similar observation a few months back. I think to enable this sort of change, the nation will need fresh language to get beyond "Regulation vs Deregulation." We will need to develop a new set of nimble rules that encourage and support dynamism and efficiency. The answer for Progressives is to talk about and implement "smart regulation" whose goal is to balance public safety and welfare against concern for progress, economic impact and efficiency, particularly with respect to time. After all, time is a finite resource for all humans. In short, don't let so called Conservatives own deregulation. Let's take an axe to all the piecemeal regulation of the past and build a new system that's simpler and better
Noah and others have been beating this drum for what seems like a decade now. At first I didn't want to accept it, but that didn't stop me from being quickly converted. It seems like zero progress has been made getting the story out. The "progressive" press could help.
A long time ago I used to regularly see articles asking why building in America was so expensive. It seems like when the answer turned out to be regulation, those articles stopped appearing. You'd think the right wing press would have been shouting it from the hill tops these last years, but they seem happy with the status quo as it makes it hard for the government to function well.
Standing ovation for this entire post, Noah. I agree 100%.
Can you please write another post that talks about what we, ordinary American voters, can do about it? We've got one major political party that mostly values what I value, but is inefficient for all the reasons you've outlined (the Democrats) and one major party that has been hijacked by the bat-guano wingnuts who are cool with violently overturning elections (the Republicans). What to do?
Calling things like Single Family Zoning a stasis subsidy if a blatant mischaracterization. By the same logic, Ford honoring a 60,000 mile warranty is a stasis subsidy. The homeowner purchased a home under a set of land development rules that govern the way that land can be used. A continuation of those rules as enshrined in the law (and paid for in the sale and taxes) is not a subsidy in any way unless the beneficiary somehow manipulated the law under which the purchase was made.
And if you want to talk about actually subsidizing those who don't deserve it, just look at the outcome of any upzoning YIMBY plan --- The incumbent owners, developers, and landlords in desirable areas get a windfall of development rights and profits while zero wealth-building opportunities for the lowest income people are created at all. Nobody is gonna build wealth buy purchasing a slightly cheaper unit in a multi-family dwelling. Meanwhile, if you own in less desirable areas, your home will lose value as more people move to the desirable areas. The rich get richer. The poor remain poor. The marginal homeowner loses home equity.
Funny enough, the same people crying about gentrification and teardown of modest historic homes to be replaced by McMansions somehow think that giving developers and incumbent owners a huge windfall while removing guardrails is somehow progressive.
The LIBERTARIANS have co-opted this entire debate through faux progressive YIMBYism. I include Noah in the co-opted cohort.
If you want a neighborhood to stay exactly as it was as when you found it for as long as you live there, buy the neighborhood and problem solved, buying a single house doesn't give you control over it
We DID buy the neighborhood, under rules that said it would stay the same. If those rules had not been in place, we would not have bought, or would have paid much less.
Not true. In our area, a town wants to put a solar farm on the closed town landfill. A handful of homeowners in a nearby subdivision have sued to block the solar farm because it would impact the view from their house and may reduce their home value. They have a good chance of winning the lawsuit.
You know what doesn't help the poor? Keeping housing costs artificially high with overly onerous govt regulation.
I promise you, many ordinary non-wealthy families would benefit a great deal from cheaper housing options.
I think you somehow missed the part of YIMBY that is all-in on densification - nobody is calling for legalizing mcmansions, they're calling for legalizing apartments and other multifamily housing.
And using your definition of 'subsidy' nothing is ever a subsidy lmao. Even actual literally directly giving homeowners money every year isn't a subsidy unless they 'manipulated the law'. So I think you have nothing interesting to add.
I'm a YIMBY so I disagree with you off rip, but if we go with your thesis of "The incumbent owners, developers, and landlords in desirable areas get a windfall of development rights and profits while zero wealth-building opportunities for the lowest income people are created at all", it seems like additional wealth is being generated, and it just needs to be distributed differently. This seems like an argument to 1. Tax the developers more heavily and distribute the money, or 2. Upzone the entire city equally so poor landowners benefit too. It doesn't seem like a valid argument to do nothing.
your option #1 is politically dead. Will never happen
Your option #2 does not fix the problem. As I stated earlier owners in areas that are less desirable will not benefit from upzoning as demand for their property actually falls with the movement of people to new housing in desirable areas.
Not to mention that even the poorer landowners are already land owners and likely building equity and wealth. The market segment that is 'supposed' to get relief from all this upzoning gets zero wealth building opportunities and maybe some slightly cheaper housing in neighborhoods that are now even less desirable. Or, if we are to believe the YIMBYs, there will suddenly be poor people able to afford renting luxury units in quadplexes near the city center. LOLs
No but maybe they can afford more than a studio or not be forced to split rent with multiple roommates.
Its pretty shocking how you ignore the huge weight of housing costs - you have to be blind and deaf and dumb to not realize how beneficial lower housing prices and slower rates of housing price increases would be to the poorest people in most American cities.
Not blind or deaf or dumb to this. There simply is no evidence that upzoning actually fixes any of those problems. It is a huge giveaway to the already wealthy and provides zero wealth building opportunities for the very people you wish to help.
I don't get it, what is your solution? I don't like existing home owners getting their wealth inflated any more than the next non-home-owner, but what other way can we increase the supply of homes (and make them more affordable) other than this? To me it seems obviously better to lower the bar to ownership, even if the equity building opportunity isn't the same as the original owners had, than do nothing.
I am not at all sure that it is better that a few people on the margin are now able to afford 1/4th of a quadplex which is certainly no kind of wealth building path. Meanwhile, the marginal lower income homeowner in nearby further-out, but less desirable, areas has what little equity they may have had sucked out from under them.
--Developer & existing landowner in desirable area get windfall $$$$
--(IF SOLD) New marginal 'homeowner' ends up with a 3rd-class partial quadplex asset that builds equity very slowly if at all. The unit will be big money on a $/sqft basis as all new construction will be "luxury" as it never makes sense not to build this type.
--(IF RENTED) New renter pays big money on a $/sqft basis. Landlord gets windfall $$$
-- Neighbors get an unwanted eyesore likely to fall into disrepair because of collective action failure
-- Marginal homeowner (likely much poorer than average homeowner) in area where new tenant/owner is drawn from loses equity
Do I have a solution? No. But, upzoning certainly isn't one.
Upzoning may not solve the issue of providing the next generations with the same wealth building opportunities, but it may solve the issue of having a place for them to live at least. There may be other levers that should get pulled to redistribute the wealth that's been accumulated in assets, but I think those levers should be pulled in addition to upzoning, not instead.
"The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein is required reading for understanding housing in the US over the past century, including subsidies and zoning rules. Much of the current segregation and poverty in cities is the outcome of a half-century of subsidies and rules that created the post-WW II suburbs. These were national approaches, not just implemented in the Jim Crow south, so impacted every significant community in the US.
I have read the book and am well aware of the history. The questions here are about whether upzoning achieves anything positive n terms of improved affordability or wealth building opportunities for lower income people. The answer to both counts is No.
How is that even possible. The outcome of driving up prices in one desirable city is that people start moving to the next city on their list.
The high cost of housing in SF 25 years ago pushed tech-workers to Boulder and then Denver and then Austin and on and on, eventually to Chattanooga and Reston and beyond.
The problem is not that there is really a lack of affordable housing in the US. It is that there is not affordable housing in the cities people want to live in. In fact, there is a LOT of very VERY cheap housing in places people don't really want to live. Why not make these places desirable instead? Charter city style? Innovation hub style? Subsidize people who will move to the rustbelt for example...
It would be cheap
It isn't a giveaway windfall to the already wealthy
It would be much easier politically as there are far fewer potentially injured parties
It would create real wealth building opportunities for lower income would-be homeowners and business owners (and incumbent, often lower income, property owners)
It could revitalize hollowed-out and shrinking cities in places like the rustbelt
A lot of the housing already exists and just needs renovation
The prevalence of remote work is already draining some of the mythology around the agglomerating power of big cities
What does upzoning an already expensive and desirable area get you?
--It lets people foolishly be hopeful that they might suddenly be able to live in the city they covet. Not gonna happen.
--It lets you feel like you have stuck it to the man? However, instead it lets developers and the already rich get richer.
Housing prices have been going up by like 20% y/o/y everywhere, not jus the big cities. And more unoccupied housing doesn't seem to lead to prices going down, just building that rot.
Upzoning doesnt force anyone to sell or build, it just makes it legal. Why do you want to keep duplexes illegal? What is the coherent argument for why duplexes should be illegal anywhere in this country
Yes, we all know that nimbys' primary concern is that all the change happen elsewhere, not in their community.
I don't think they should be illegal. I think we should not short-circuit the existing guardrails in the name of fantasy faux progressivism co-opted by libertarians. Doubly so because it doesn't achieve any of the stated goals of making housing affordable or of building wealth opportunities for folks lower down the ladder.
You want to build a duplex or quadplex where there is a SFH, fine. Request a variance and go through the process. But, don't pretend you are helping poor people or making cities affordable.
Well said. Zoning is not a private agreement such as an HOA covenant. It is a government ordinance that restricts the use of property that is constitutional only if it is related to public health, safety or general welfare. Nobody has a property right in their current zoning.
No, but zoning variances require an owner to appeal to the board of zoning and present their case publicly on a case by case basis. That is, if someone wants to build a duplex where their SFH sits, they will go through this process. Broad-brush upzoning removes nearly the entirety of this process allowing neighbors to injure neighbors without so much as a case review.
Funny enough, the same people crying about gentrification and teardown of modest historic homes to be replaced by McMansions somehow think that giving developers and incumbent owners a huge windfall while removing guardrails is somehow progressive.
The LIBERTARIANS have co-opted this entire debate through faux progressive YIMBYism. I include Noah in the co-opted cohort.
You aren’t going to be injured if your neighbors build a new house (and if you think it’s an injury then you need psychiatric treatment). Also, repeating the same idiotic phrase doesn’t mean you have a point.
Libertarianism is absolutely not rationally consistent thus the Locke and Nozick provisos...
And yes, you can be injured by having something you don't want built next to your home. Happens all the time. Developers are regularly sued when their new high-rise blocks the sun, etc...
I believe I am injured far more when the government doesn't let me build an ADU on land I own and paid for just because someone thinks the zoning ordinance as drafted in 1996 was handed down by God himself as an unchanging mandate.
A more cynical view is that many progressives (often white and well-to-do) actually have a vested self-interest in preserving the status quo and only cosplay as champagne socialists to make themselves feel good and fit in to their social milieu.
And TBF, the reactionary right is also heavily in to cosplaying as radical revolutionary fascists (well, they’re cosplaying at being radical revolutionaries; many of them _are_ fascists).
Exactly. Progressives and people and in general first think of "Number One." "Would that proposed apartment building a couple blocks down help me? No. Okay then I'm going to fight it." Then, what is the political consensus in my social circle? Hate Trump; Hate GOP; Climate Change; Renewables etc. etc. "Better mirror all those ideologies in my social speech so I fit in." That's the "cosplay as champagne socialists" part.
Do you know anyone like this? I personally don’t. I know a lot of people who want to do the right thing and are genuinely confused about why building more housing is both good and opposed by groups that have noble aims.
There are serious problems to be solved. They are best solved in somebody else's community.
It's pretty simple.
I find it funny how often people's confusion about economics coincides with their economic interests.
When you have a group like the Social Democrats of Denver opposing (below market rate) new housing (on a golf course!) it makes people confused. People who are inclined to have a positive view of the Social Democrats or at least believe that they advocate for the poor take the opposition as a signal that new housing is bad for the poor. It is hard to believe that avowed advocates for the unhoused are actually working to harm those who are unhoused. The confusion is real.
People should exercise some critical thinking and interrogate why they believe people who are telling them that building more housing won't help house more people.
I agree in the abstract, but I imagine you may have noticed significant variation in the human population in their ability to understand micro generally and micro as it relates to the supply and demand of housing specifically :).
My mental model of the universe includes a non-trivial number of people who are smart and good but don’t or can’t think about housing policy with any degree of rigor or depth.
Democratic Socialists, not Social Democrats. The former are socialists, the latter are welfare capitalists. The former are mind-rotten commies, the latter are statist liberals with a history of socialism that ended post-USSR / Post Eduard Bernstein reforms.
One possibility: There are two paradigms:
PARADIGM 1: Earth and everything on it, minus the humans: The humans muck up the works. More humans means less space for all the other animals, less wildlife, more pollution etc.
PARADIGM 2: Human Society: It doesn't work without economic growth and population increase. Every society with population decline has gone into Overall Decline. You have to have enough young people for society to be balanced economically and for people to be emotionally happy.
The two paradigms conflict. Sorry.
Paradigm 2 is wrong because technology is unprecedented. We don't need as many young people to support the old anymore.
Also only suicidal organisations solve the problems that were the reason to create them.
Well said. It is more than a little ironical that some 'liberal' billionaires that have made their billions in capitalist US are now nefariously promoting progressive causes not only in the US but around the world
Good one Noah! More of this.
Also - what do we do about it now?
I wonder if the answer involves some sort of crackdown on The Groups by national party leadership.
Maybe Biden hauls their leadership into a panel where he just bluntly questions them about what they’re actually doing to help the American people and why nothing he’s signed into law is actually getting built.
Maybe he hauls them before the DNC, with evidence of how they’ve profited off the cronyism, and bans them from the party and from contracting with the federal government.
The Groups are a bottom-up phenomenon, so I have a hard time seeing how they get fixed by anything but a top-down response that delegitimizes them in front of the public.
A tangential response ---
I like Noah's piece; I feel like I've been seeing this argument a lot lately, and it feels important, but I've also been thinking about, "why now?"* One argument that's been made is that "the Groups" that you refer too have become so dysfunctional that it's visible to everyone.
But another piece, I think, is that the 90s tech boom (and subsequent period of software eating the world) gave everyone a misleading sense of how easy it is to deploy new technology. It felt almost frictionless for a decade or two, but now people are remembering that new hardware technology is more challenging to deploy.
Or, perhaps, it isn't new -- I was just reading something today about a group of politicians in the 80s labeled, "Atari Democrats" for their pro-tech positions: https://tedium.co/2023/03/22/atari-democrats-history/
I'll add to my own comment that part of how I view the situation is just, "you can't take the politics out of politics."
I think it's important to argue, as Noah does, for the value in being able to make change in the world. I think it's good to not fall too far into the thinking of, "those idiots, why can't they see that they're messing everything up."
Making change in the world generally requires persuading people (unless you're just releasing a new version of software), and that's a frustrating process, but it should be possible and is an important process.
If they are a bottoms-up phenomenon, I doubt a top-down response would actually delegitimize them. I think you have to win hearts and minds one by one.
Their actual legitimacy comes from the top, though. The whole thing is a mirage: they claim to represent a bunch of small-g groups, but they really only represent themselves. So their power derives from people at the top taking them seriously and not calling the bluff, for fear of burning bridges within the broader coalition.
That’s why I see the opportunity here for someone to call the bluff.
Well, yes. But they’re also vulnerable to pressure. That’s why The Groups have their balls in a vise. And yet, pressure can be applied from other directions as well.
Not American, but I would think a) try and persuade some top people in the Biden admin b) bipartisan deregulation bill.
OKRs.
“Checkism,” great coinage. I will be quoting that. You say that progressives need to start believing in progress. You’re totally right and all the points you make are excellent, but I think you underestimate that if progressives sincerely believed in progress, then they wouldn’t be progressives anymore. Like i’m thinking of what Hayek said that if socialists only learned economics then they wouldn’t be socialists. The reason progressives don’t believe in progress has to do entirely with their pathological hatred of capitalism and their proud belief that larger government can better provide for the common welfare than the free market. Unless their entire ideology were to go into reverse, progressives will continue to favor intuitively appealing schemes to use the blunt state to benefit the public, the state which only continually misallocates resources, stunts growth, constrains opportunity and concentrates wealth. They define progress differently from right brained people like us, progress to them is entirely moral and collectivistic in nature--it is punishing rich people and babysitting poor people, and to be able to say that by raising taxes and creating more opportunities NOT TO WORK that you care for people more. Progress to them is not about delivering real change, but to be able to say you care about people enough to use the state to bully the rich.
It actually works better in British English - chequism won't get confused with chekism (support for the KGB).
Wouldn't it be nice if people who love capitalism and want social change (I'm guessing there are at least 100M of us) were represented in our government? Instead, we have to choose one or the other. I think the history books will write about how we had an opportuniy after the 2020 election to make real changes and we blew it, for the exact reasons Noah describes.
The free market is an unopopular thing to believe in because people either don’t understand it or temperamentally they can’t stand it because it doesn’t advance equity, and their consciences won’t be appeased unless government enforces equality of result. The funny thing is free markets actually engender more equality between classes over time. Government entrenches disparities between classes and indeed creates class strife. Look at the most extreme example of a command ecoonomy in communist countries. The government enriches itself while everybody else starves. How’s that for equity?
You are staring at the fact that living standards crashed when command economies were dis-assembled and pretending it doesn't exist.
People hate capitalism because it institutionalized that old biblical thing: To those who have, even more shall be given, but to those who have not, even what little they have shall be taken away.
"continually misallocates resources, stunts growth, constrains opportunity and concentrates wealth"
This is the list of complaints against capitalism. Which suggests that you share goals with all the people you despise, just either you or they are badly wrong on the empirics.
Progressivism is a statement of identity and values, not an agenda for actual physical changes in the world. There’s a reason it’s mainly programmer-adjacent people on the internet (Noahpinion, Slow Boring, ACX, /r/neoliberal, etc) expressing frustration about the illogic in the nuts and bolts implementation of progressive policy: we’re the only ones whose social awareness is too dense to catch the games actually being played. Thinking progressives actually want lower housing prices or more frequent train service when they opine on urban policy is like thinking someone is actually attacking you when they’re playfully teasing.
Noah, good piece. But I feel like you and others have been beating this drum for a while and I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone disagrees. I’d love you to publish an interview or guest response from someone at Roosevelt Institute or EarthJustice (or similar) who can at least make the best case for where they think you are wrong. I don’t expect to be convinced, but I would love to understand the other side of this argument.
I liked this even before reading. Title (+ subtitle) says it all.
Good piece. Having lived in CA and with most of my friends and my volunteering heavily intertwined with politicians and activist groups and government-funded NGO ecosystems, I see very little evidence that meaningful results are the objective of policies or policy positions, nor that these positions or priorities would ever be amended based upon the failure to achieve the supposedly desired results (nor if they proved to be harmful).
Being progressive is mostly about feelings, about being seen to have the right views, gaining the power to control, creating jobs for the right sort of people (being able to exclude or disenfranchise the wrong sort, or at least making them live in an environment in which they will be uncomfortable). As far as I have observed, it is not about results.
Not that politicians of any stripe are overly concerned with results. There are individual exceptions, and these exceptional people should be backed during the brief time period before they become co-opted.
While a Westerner now, I have relatives/family from the Northeast who were part of local urban machine politics. I was a big fan of Corey Booker in Newark because he actually wanted to bring investment to the city (rather than selling development rights to his girlfriend like his predecessor) and he wanted the school system to get better and be accountable (fewer results there). Once he got into the Senate he basically copied and pasted the Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer push emails and simply became a cookie cutter hack.
I have some hopes for a guy like Ro Khanna, but my guess is he is already on the precipice of being a cookie cutter hack who occasionally talks a good game but ultimately won’t go against the interests of the donors and activists.
> creating jobs for the right sort of people
This honestly felt like the quiet part of the "defund the police and replace them with social workers etc" arguments.
I think there's a big chunk of progressives who think the difference in behavior and attitudes between police officers and social workers is that police officers went to the police academy at 18 and social workers took a social work major in college at the same age, and if you switched them over you'd still see police and social workers have the same differences.
So if you retrained a police officer as a social worker, they would change their attitudes and behavior in confrontational situations.
They think that the "wrong sort of people" are so by choice and they could choose to be the right sort of people if they wanted to.
Yet they don't apply that to, say, LGBT+ people.
Conservatives have exactly the same problem in a mirror. They think that you can't choose to be conservative or liberal, but that you can choose to be straight or gay (and a bunch of other things).
Both are wrong: people have much less agency than we think. Look at Ozempic: it works by making you want to eat less. If you can't choose to or not to eat, then what can you really choose?
Seriously? You think people are wrong when they say you don't chose to be gay?
This feels a lot like assuming the truth MUST exist between two viewpoints, with no idea that one side might just be right on the facts.
No, I think people don't choose to be gay, or liberal, or conservative, or asshole bullies or a bunch of other things.
I think both sides make the mistake of thinking some things are by choice and some are inherent and that almost every time there's a disagreement, it's inherent and not something people can choose.
I think cops are asshole bullies because asshole bullies become cops, not because anything in cop training makes them asshole bullies.
I think men have sex with men because they are gay, not out of any choice. I think people are revolted that men have sex with men because they are homophobic and they don't have any choice about that either.
At the level of society, you can shape individual incentives, you can shape upbringings, and you can change people collectively. But I don't think that you can change much about people just by asking them to choose to.
There are good reasons why people in their 20s are less homophobic than people in their 60s. There are even good reasons why people in their 60s are less homophobic than the same people were when they were in their 20s. But those aren't a matter of people choosing to be better and then that's it.
Great article Noah, I started following because you articulate so well that the US needs an abundance mentality and techno optimism. Unfortunately when you combine this essay with your prior posting of "The Darkness" a depressing outlook. It is difficult to see how our country can change to become a nation of abundance for all our people. We will be locked in a battle of them against us until some catastrophe either economic or outside force (ie China) forces us to change.
I think Noah has skipped over a huge part which I call “pet-victim progressivism”.
It’s when progressives over index on caring about their pet victims (they prefer “marginalized groups”) and use them to justify stasis. You can see it with idiots whining about “gentrification”, endless handwringing over the environment (overlaps with checkism and NEPA) and the movement to shrug off public order issues in cities because their pet victims cause them. More broadly, it’s the stymieing of advancement for the median because their pet victims in some edge cases may be inconvenienced. The solution is to just stop caring about these groups, but it’s more of a mental issue that I call “protest disorder”.
Agree. It’s also extremely condescending to lump people who share one characteristic into buckets of marginalization and declare that you know best what they need.
Groups have been around for a long time, but at some point during the past 20-25 years or so it seems like a line was crossed and they became disproportionately, stupidly powerful. It’s astonishing to me, even though it has happened during my adult life, and I agree that it’s extremely harmful. I’ve heard shocking stories from friends in DC about how this works on the ground.
I read about this being a result of both Citizens United and wealthy people realigning behind the Democrats over the last few decades. The "groups" previously ran off small-dollar donations which meant they had to get results to keep getting those donations. Now they're funded more by giant grants from "left-wing" billionaires, which for structural reasons aren't conditioned on actually achieving things.
So... Like gun rights, except on the left?
A+++ writing by Noah here. I agree with every word.
"[T]he success of the Chips and Science Act is threatened by a flotilla of unrelated objectives and unreasonable restrictions that Congress and parts of the administration have attached to the grant-giving process…
"Applicants [for government funding] will be evaluated based on their plans to “create opportunities for minority-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned businesses…and commit to using iron, steel, and construction materials produced in the United States.”
But this isn't part of a progressive checklist; this is the normal way federal government contracting works. The Buy American Act of 1933 (!) requires the federal government to buy American–made iron, steel, and manufactured goods wherever possible. Small businesses have gotten preferences since the Small Business Act of 1953. Minority business preferences emerged from legislation signed by Nixon in 1973. The Women-Owned Small Business program was started in 2000.
Yeah, I had the same reaction reading the original editorial in WaPo this morning. These requirements plus the no stock buyback one are eminently reasonable in my view, esp. since small biz targets are normally contingent on actually receiving qualified offers for said goods and services. So Intel could contact a small biz for cleaning services, office supplies, or vending machine services for example, but nobody expects or requires them to purchase EUV lithography machines from them.
It's the other fluffy and vague stuff that should be cut.
SBA and 8A requirements are a racket. If you’ve had any exposure to federal contracting you see how absolutely worthless and corrupt it is.
The problem with solar energy is that it just consumes way too damn much land for the amount of power you get from it. And that's not counting the massive infrastructure of transmission lines because it's so far away from.places that actually need the power or the special landfills we'll need to throw out the solar junk as the panels age and degrade. I realize this isn't the main point of the piece but we simply need a better solution there. Anything that needs the land and rare earth metal footprint that solar does simply cannot be environmentally friendly.
Progressives are right to resist it.
So you must love nuclear, then.
I'm a huge nuclear advocate though I acknowledge the industry has shot itself in the foot by actually helping to heap unnecessary regulations on industry. I do expect next gen nuclear, if it is given anything like the chance we've showered on renewables, will blow wind and scorch solar out of the ballpark.
Herewith a very informative article on the problems of "unreliable" generation on the grid:
https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/14/australian-renewable-energy-transition-part-3/
I would not put much faith in Judith Curry’s description of the Australian grid. Firstly, she overlooks the three main factors driving high energy prices (lack of domestic gas reservation policy, high coal prices and network charges). She doesn’t acknowledge SA has done better relative to the Eastern states since pivoting to renewables; it used to be much more expensive. She woefully misrepresents the progress in synthetic inertia and grid forming inverters. The reports by AEMO which she is so fond of citing make it clear the grid is on a path to very rapid decarbonisation, without nuclear. In fact if you are interested in reading what a decarbonised grid looks like, google “AEMO integrated system plan” - its quite readable to the layperson. Don’t forget to check out the hydrogen scenario!
Thank you, Noah. This is well-argued piece that echoes Ezra Klein's similar observation a few months back. I think to enable this sort of change, the nation will need fresh language to get beyond "Regulation vs Deregulation." We will need to develop a new set of nimble rules that encourage and support dynamism and efficiency. The answer for Progressives is to talk about and implement "smart regulation" whose goal is to balance public safety and welfare against concern for progress, economic impact and efficiency, particularly with respect to time. After all, time is a finite resource for all humans. In short, don't let so called Conservatives own deregulation. Let's take an axe to all the piecemeal regulation of the past and build a new system that's simpler and better
Noah and others have been beating this drum for what seems like a decade now. At first I didn't want to accept it, but that didn't stop me from being quickly converted. It seems like zero progress has been made getting the story out. The "progressive" press could help.
A long time ago I used to regularly see articles asking why building in America was so expensive. It seems like when the answer turned out to be regulation, those articles stopped appearing. You'd think the right wing press would have been shouting it from the hill tops these last years, but they seem happy with the status quo as it makes it hard for the government to function well.
.
Standing ovation for this entire post, Noah. I agree 100%.
Can you please write another post that talks about what we, ordinary American voters, can do about it? We've got one major political party that mostly values what I value, but is inefficient for all the reasons you've outlined (the Democrats) and one major party that has been hijacked by the bat-guano wingnuts who are cool with violently overturning elections (the Republicans). What to do?
Work to make the party you value more efficient and make the batshit party lose until they change.
Calling things like Single Family Zoning a stasis subsidy if a blatant mischaracterization. By the same logic, Ford honoring a 60,000 mile warranty is a stasis subsidy. The homeowner purchased a home under a set of land development rules that govern the way that land can be used. A continuation of those rules as enshrined in the law (and paid for in the sale and taxes) is not a subsidy in any way unless the beneficiary somehow manipulated the law under which the purchase was made.
And if you want to talk about actually subsidizing those who don't deserve it, just look at the outcome of any upzoning YIMBY plan --- The incumbent owners, developers, and landlords in desirable areas get a windfall of development rights and profits while zero wealth-building opportunities for the lowest income people are created at all. Nobody is gonna build wealth buy purchasing a slightly cheaper unit in a multi-family dwelling. Meanwhile, if you own in less desirable areas, your home will lose value as more people move to the desirable areas. The rich get richer. The poor remain poor. The marginal homeowner loses home equity.
Funny enough, the same people crying about gentrification and teardown of modest historic homes to be replaced by McMansions somehow think that giving developers and incumbent owners a huge windfall while removing guardrails is somehow progressive.
The LIBERTARIANS have co-opted this entire debate through faux progressive YIMBYism. I include Noah in the co-opted cohort.
If you want a neighborhood to stay exactly as it was as when you found it for as long as you live there, buy the neighborhood and problem solved, buying a single house doesn't give you control over it
We DID buy the neighborhood, under rules that said it would stay the same. If those rules had not been in place, we would not have bought, or would have paid much less.
Well tough shit lol rules change all the time and nobody is doing illegal shit, they are following the recognized democratic processes.
Apple stole from me by releasing the iPhone 5 after I bought the iPhone 4.
>under rules that said it would stay the same.
What rules?
Zoning rules.
Rezoning is theft!
HAHAHAHAH
Yes, anything changing from your expectations is theft.
Zoning laws how far from your house? 1 mile? More?
1 block in every direction.
This is like saying you bought the municipality based on the party in office. Laws change. They aren’t immutable.
Well, you were scammed then. As much right as you thought you had to dictate what other people did with their property, none of it was on paper.
Not true. In our area, a town wants to put a solar farm on the closed town landfill. A handful of homeowners in a nearby subdivision have sued to block the solar farm because it would impact the view from their house and may reduce their home value. They have a good chance of winning the lawsuit.
You know what doesn't help the poor? Keeping housing costs artificially high with overly onerous govt regulation.
I promise you, many ordinary non-wealthy families would benefit a great deal from cheaper housing options.
I think you somehow missed the part of YIMBY that is all-in on densification - nobody is calling for legalizing mcmansions, they're calling for legalizing apartments and other multifamily housing.
And using your definition of 'subsidy' nothing is ever a subsidy lmao. Even actual literally directly giving homeowners money every year isn't a subsidy unless they 'manipulated the law'. So I think you have nothing interesting to add.
Question: How would you class the laws saying that the government cannot build housing on it's own?
Dumb
I'm a YIMBY so I disagree with you off rip, but if we go with your thesis of "The incumbent owners, developers, and landlords in desirable areas get a windfall of development rights and profits while zero wealth-building opportunities for the lowest income people are created at all", it seems like additional wealth is being generated, and it just needs to be distributed differently. This seems like an argument to 1. Tax the developers more heavily and distribute the money, or 2. Upzone the entire city equally so poor landowners benefit too. It doesn't seem like a valid argument to do nothing.
your option #1 is politically dead. Will never happen
Your option #2 does not fix the problem. As I stated earlier owners in areas that are less desirable will not benefit from upzoning as demand for their property actually falls with the movement of people to new housing in desirable areas.
Not to mention that even the poorer landowners are already land owners and likely building equity and wealth. The market segment that is 'supposed' to get relief from all this upzoning gets zero wealth building opportunities and maybe some slightly cheaper housing in neighborhoods that are now even less desirable. Or, if we are to believe the YIMBYs, there will suddenly be poor people able to afford renting luxury units in quadplexes near the city center. LOLs
No but maybe they can afford more than a studio or not be forced to split rent with multiple roommates.
Its pretty shocking how you ignore the huge weight of housing costs - you have to be blind and deaf and dumb to not realize how beneficial lower housing prices and slower rates of housing price increases would be to the poorest people in most American cities.
Not blind or deaf or dumb to this. There simply is no evidence that upzoning actually fixes any of those problems. It is a huge giveaway to the already wealthy and provides zero wealth building opportunities for the very people you wish to help.
I don't get it, what is your solution? I don't like existing home owners getting their wealth inflated any more than the next non-home-owner, but what other way can we increase the supply of homes (and make them more affordable) other than this? To me it seems obviously better to lower the bar to ownership, even if the equity building opportunity isn't the same as the original owners had, than do nothing.
I am not at all sure that it is better that a few people on the margin are now able to afford 1/4th of a quadplex which is certainly no kind of wealth building path. Meanwhile, the marginal lower income homeowner in nearby further-out, but less desirable, areas has what little equity they may have had sucked out from under them.
--Developer & existing landowner in desirable area get windfall $$$$
--(IF SOLD) New marginal 'homeowner' ends up with a 3rd-class partial quadplex asset that builds equity very slowly if at all. The unit will be big money on a $/sqft basis as all new construction will be "luxury" as it never makes sense not to build this type.
--(IF RENTED) New renter pays big money on a $/sqft basis. Landlord gets windfall $$$
-- Neighbors get an unwanted eyesore likely to fall into disrepair because of collective action failure
-- Marginal homeowner (likely much poorer than average homeowner) in area where new tenant/owner is drawn from loses equity
Do I have a solution? No. But, upzoning certainly isn't one.
Upzoning may not solve the issue of providing the next generations with the same wealth building opportunities, but it may solve the issue of having a place for them to live at least. There may be other levers that should get pulled to redistribute the wealth that's been accumulated in assets, but I think those levers should be pulled in addition to upzoning, not instead.
It isn't even clear that upzoning gives anyone a place to live. Or, even a more affordable place to live.
"The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein is required reading for understanding housing in the US over the past century, including subsidies and zoning rules. Much of the current segregation and poverty in cities is the outcome of a half-century of subsidies and rules that created the post-WW II suburbs. These were national approaches, not just implemented in the Jim Crow south, so impacted every significant community in the US.
I have read the book and am well aware of the history. The questions here are about whether upzoning achieves anything positive n terms of improved affordability or wealth building opportunities for lower income people. The answer to both counts is No.
Blocking the expansion of housing, driving up prices in the community, hurts them quite a bit though.
How is that even possible. The outcome of driving up prices in one desirable city is that people start moving to the next city on their list.
The high cost of housing in SF 25 years ago pushed tech-workers to Boulder and then Denver and then Austin and on and on, eventually to Chattanooga and Reston and beyond.
The problem is not that there is really a lack of affordable housing in the US. It is that there is not affordable housing in the cities people want to live in. In fact, there is a LOT of very VERY cheap housing in places people don't really want to live. Why not make these places desirable instead? Charter city style? Innovation hub style? Subsidize people who will move to the rustbelt for example...
It would be cheap
It isn't a giveaway windfall to the already wealthy
It would be much easier politically as there are far fewer potentially injured parties
It would create real wealth building opportunities for lower income would-be homeowners and business owners (and incumbent, often lower income, property owners)
It could revitalize hollowed-out and shrinking cities in places like the rustbelt
A lot of the housing already exists and just needs renovation
The prevalence of remote work is already draining some of the mythology around the agglomerating power of big cities
What does upzoning an already expensive and desirable area get you?
--It lets people foolishly be hopeful that they might suddenly be able to live in the city they covet. Not gonna happen.
--It lets you feel like you have stuck it to the man? However, instead it lets developers and the already rich get richer.
Housing prices have been going up by like 20% y/o/y everywhere, not jus the big cities. And more unoccupied housing doesn't seem to lead to prices going down, just building that rot.
Upzoning doesnt force anyone to sell or build, it just makes it legal. Why do you want to keep duplexes illegal? What is the coherent argument for why duplexes should be illegal anywhere in this country
Yes, we all know that nimbys' primary concern is that all the change happen elsewhere, not in their community.
I don't think they should be illegal. I think we should not short-circuit the existing guardrails in the name of fantasy faux progressivism co-opted by libertarians. Doubly so because it doesn't achieve any of the stated goals of making housing affordable or of building wealth opportunities for folks lower down the ladder.
You want to build a duplex or quadplex where there is a SFH, fine. Request a variance and go through the process. But, don't pretend you are helping poor people or making cities affordable.
Well said. Zoning is not a private agreement such as an HOA covenant. It is a government ordinance that restricts the use of property that is constitutional only if it is related to public health, safety or general welfare. Nobody has a property right in their current zoning.
No, but zoning variances require an owner to appeal to the board of zoning and present their case publicly on a case by case basis. That is, if someone wants to build a duplex where their SFH sits, they will go through this process. Broad-brush upzoning removes nearly the entirety of this process allowing neighbors to injure neighbors without so much as a case review.
Funny enough, the same people crying about gentrification and teardown of modest historic homes to be replaced by McMansions somehow think that giving developers and incumbent owners a huge windfall while removing guardrails is somehow progressive.
The LIBERTARIANS have co-opted this entire debate through faux progressive YIMBYism. I include Noah in the co-opted cohort.
You aren’t going to be injured if your neighbors build a new house (and if you think it’s an injury then you need psychiatric treatment). Also, repeating the same idiotic phrase doesn’t mean you have a point.
https://imgur.io/r4LEf2D?r
Bog standard NIMBY, eh? Knock the stupidity out of your head.
Libertarianism is absolutely not rationally consistent thus the Locke and Nozick provisos...
And yes, you can be injured by having something you don't want built next to your home. Happens all the time. Developers are regularly sued when their new high-rise blocks the sun, etc...
I believe I am injured far more when the government doesn't let me build an ADU on land I own and paid for just because someone thinks the zoning ordinance as drafted in 1996 was handed down by God himself as an unchanging mandate.
You knew the rules when you bought. AND you have recourse to petition the zoning board
Libertarianism only works if you assume representative agents.
IE, there's no such thing as the next generation. Because otherwise equality of opportunity is utterly destroyed.