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I would probably fall under your haute precariat categorization. I studied economics & math in undergrad with a plan of pursuing a PhD, but I chickened out of that path my senior year. After college I was accepted into a prestigious teaching fellowship, which paid for my graduate education at a well known relatively elite institution. After a few years of teaching, I realized it wasn't for me, and I've spent the past few years oscillating between unemployment and working lousy jobs in hospitality or office work.

I've moved back and forth between NYC and my parents' homes in FL. My dad who recently passed was a renter and not very financially secure, but my brother and I stand to inherit my mother's house when she passes. I'm currently pursuing self-study in programming to ideally move back to NYC with more solid career prospects. I'm currently 33.

I'm a DSA member and left-YIMBY and I've spent a lot of time arguing housing with my comrades, and I'm thoroughly convinced that for the vast majority of them their position on housing is matter of ideology & ignorance rather than perverse incentives. Most folks I know in NYC from middle class backgrounds have parents who live elsewhere. There's no incentive to push for NIMBY policies in NYC where you currently rent because you stand to inherit property in MN or FL in 30 years.

The truth is that young leftists are skeptical of arguments about supply and demand and simply buy into the narrative that construction of new "luxury" housing drives up rents and pushing out existing residents. Developers are pursuing profits so they must be bad. YIMBYs are all nerdy, basic bro, (neo)liberal white guys who work in tech so they must be wrong. Racial justice groups tell us development causes gentrification, and they're the good guys so they must be right.

The bright side is, it should be easier to change bad ideas than bad interests. Leftists genuinely aren't interested in seeing home values soar, and they resent their suburban upbringings. They want to have an affordable life in the city, and genuinely think that's what they're fighting for. They believe in a massive expansion of public housing if not full decommodification. They just don't get that opposing private development not only makes that more difficult, it really is a form of accelerationism that stands to harm many folks (themselves included!) in the process.

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This is a really interesting post. The NIMBY-ism among the left is certainly disconcerting. I think your first hypothesis explaining it is more accurate than inheritance. It doesn't seem to me that anybody is considering an inheritance 30 years away when advocating against rezoning projects. It seems much more ideological to me.

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I want to push back on the student loan claims being made.

A lot of young folks went into debt to study non-marketable subject areas at expensive colleges. People who are smart enough to get into these schools are smart enough to know that this is a poor investment. I suspect that a lot of this was driven by people wanting to pursue more meaning careers than their parents had, with a better work-life balance. This was a key theme for millennials. But a lot of the wealth that boomers have was made by doing "sell out" jobs with poor work-life balance, specifically to build that wealth. So younger folks made a different choice and, again, these are not stupid people who need to be protected from their choices.

Also, a lot of student debt is for graduate programs that are more geared for personal development than for anything else. There has been an explosion of MFA programs over the years...it's really a bubble that is supported by parental wealth and student debt, and the financial return on an MFA is minimal. But again, taking on that debt is a choice made by our most intelligent young people.

Not to say that the changing economy hasn't made things harder for this generation. But the theme of victimization seems overdone and contributes to a more toxic political dialog.

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It occurs me that probably the biggest reason why YIMBYism doesn't appeal to the "haut precariat" is that they are Utopian and YIMBYism is anti-Utopian.

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Inheritance

Yes the 4 grandchildren will come into a comfortable amount of money when my wife and I pass on our ill gotten real estate gains to their parents, who if lucky, will pass on even more wealth. I am a Silent and the wife is a Boomer. We are the lucky ones who lived in the 3 glorious decades. Children of college graduates. Recipients of the government largess of that era. I watched America go from "we are all in this together" to "you are on you own" to "fuck you I got mine".

Our real luck is our families got out of Europe, most likely one step ahead of the rope, to America and finally washed up against the western edge of the continent.

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I am old enough to remember that being part of Generation X felt a bit like being a part of a "haut precariat", with both the socialist revolution of the 60s and the yuppie self-centredness of the 80s seemingly having flamed out. At the time it felt the future was going to be incredibly socially liberal but in a more pro-capitalism way. But many of those Gen-Xers turned into Trumpers, and many turned into very annoying NIMBYs (sometimes both). It is kind of sad to see my generation now crapping on young people with all their force. As Noah suggests, the combination of declining earnings from labor and massive windfalls from real estate has made people go crazy. Personally I would be happy to see the emergence of a Greta Thunberg of housing that the Zoomers could rally around.

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Separate from the YIMBY/NIMBY debate and home ownership, there is a lot more going on with the inter-generational effects of middle class family wealth, not just in the anticipation of inheritance but in the buying and borrowing power one gets from family assets. I'm now in my 70s. I bought my first home in the Bay Area 40+ years ago thanks to a down payment loan from one of my roommate's parents. We bought the house as a group; we all (all four of us) got our foot in the door that way; we've all done well since. Further, my mom started giving me money to build an IRA, which supplemented my own, late-in-life 401-k savings. My wife's parents did the same. Neither one of us gained much in our inheritances from our parents' home ownership, in part because there were multiple siblings, but what we did inherit cemented our retirement next eggs. Now I find myself thinking more of how I can manage my retirement savings to help my daughter and grandkids. The house is part of that calculation, but not the major part. What is more important is the retirement nest egg. How do I manage that to make sure my daughter and grandkids get the same kind of help I got from my parents. My parents' generation was more likely to have pensions that, in large part, were not able to be passed on to their heirs. My generation is more likely to have tax-deferred retirement accounts. It makes for a different calculation. My spending affects what I pass on to my daughter and her kids (which is always the case in any scenario but somehow seems more evident when one is managing assets rather than income). Meanwhile, just as I did, my daughter is making decisions with a feeling that her own retirement will be secured by her parents' assets -- not just the homes we own (we are now divorced), but what we hold on to for her in our IRAs and 401-k's I think the change in the structure of retirement plans from pensions to savings plans is having effects we should pay more attention to. I'd rather have the savings I have now than a guaranteed pension, and I'm wary of annuitizing too much of those savings, because I am planning for my daughter and grandkids. How many others of my generation are doing the same? And will the changing structures of retirement plans change spending behaviors for the elderly?

One final thought on inheritances from the Boomer generation. If our kids are having fewer kids than we did, as is generally the case, the transfer of wealth, from whatever the source, will be much greater for the recipients on an individual basis.

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re: the cycle of the haut precariat taking over their parents homes - doesn't the senior health care industry intend to soak up every last penny from the profits of retirees selling their home?

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I think you're correct that simply ignoring or mocking the haut precariat is a bad idea. This is a me thing, but what is the internet for other than venting about people you don't like? I struggle to have any sympathy whatsoever for people with a family safety net holding on to ill fated dreams. My family had no money (or even housing I could move into), so I had to give up multiple career dreams (music, then academia) to, well, learn to code. When you've made career decisions based on whether or not you'll have a place to live, it's really, really hard to care that some people are mad they didn't get their dream job.

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So yeah my peer group is this haut precariat and I am only seeing suggestions but not explanations of the NIMBY arguments I actually regularly see, do here they are:

1) city-dwelling haut precariats are seeing the only housing going up to be luxury housing and pencil towers. They share information regularly about how rezoning and redistricting has often been used as a hammer to knock out minority and immigrant communities. Thus, they interpret the argument for rezoning to be an attempt by landlords to displace small, old homes occupied by minority and immigrant homeowners to replace with unaffordable luxury apartments.

2) Environmentalism. Construction is one of the heaviest impact waste industries locally (and is disruptive and ugly etc so forth). In suburban context, the haut precariat have watched local woods and fields blanketed by McMansions they could never afford and if they did, would still require owning an either gas-guzzling or expensive luxury electric car to access or get to. They'd still be willing but you know, where the jobs and excitement are etc.

Now those reasons may just be self-justification for primal wealth incentives but they must be recognized on their face. This post and comments ask what the haut precariat may be thinking but aren't pointing out what they're saying.

Ironically a big factor that ties in both arguments regardless of the suburban / city divide is simply that most visible homebuilding over the past few decades has been ugly shit for rich people and not humble and relatively dense accomodations for middle income earners, so it's hard to convince people that it's a good idea to build more stuff when the nice 100+ year old houses are being replaced with ugly rich people shit. America's overly expensive cost of building is resulting in only the worst types of housing being built, making people not want to see more housing.

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That life is so shitty and disappointing. I took a gamble on doubling my loans at 30 to get an accounting degree and it has worked out. I think. Finally started contributing to a 401k in my late 30s and bought a crappy 125 year old 1200 sq ft house. I regularly think about how terrifying that gamble to go back to school was and how incredibly lucky I am it worked out. I'm a frugal person and truly grateful to have the chance to play catch up and maybe retire one day. I could very easily be a bitter and angry person had I received no accounting job offers instead of just 1 or tried to by my house in 2020 instead of 2019. My great worry is how many losers this country has created by circumstance who expected a normie college, job, wife, house, kids, retire life sequence. It's not there anymore on as wide a scale.

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A few theories.

1. The middle class suburban life is what they know they will want some day.

2. NIMBY / YIMBY battles are fought in the suburbs and they don’t really want to live in the suburbs. They want that cool city life, where apartments are already going up.

3. They perceive YIMBY as synonymous with gentrification. Build more luxury apartments and displace brown people.

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"Now, that’s just a conjecture; I don’t have evidence that this is why there are so many young Left-NIMBYs out there. " - this seems like the right question. Is there also something similar to the notion of overpopulation or nuclear power - self identifying progressives had their opinions on these topics set some decades ago, and they just haven't gotten round to thinking about them again.

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There was an article along these lines recently: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/will-the-great-wealth-transfer-spark-a-millennial-civil-war.html

tl;dr is that only a small number of millennials/genZ stand to inherit most of the gains.

Now, this is talking about all assets, not just real estate, but I’d imagine the distribution is similar enough. So the model you’re building of the haut precariat supporting nimby candidates and policies is of a white highly educated sub-professional or professional who stands to inherit some property. That really isn’t very many people, is it? How many people’s parents own a home worth close to, say, a million dollars? Seems like that’s most common in the suburbs and exurbs of superstar cities where home prices are high. What about, I dunno, Tulsa or Cleveland or Birmingham? Seems like a very small class.

Also, I suspect there are meaningful compositional effects here. The younger cohorts are less white and less wealthy than boomers or genX. Since interracial marriage is still quite low, property isn’t getting passed down across those lines very often.

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Not a sad end at all for young adults to turn into their parents - though they might not agree :)

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It seems to me Noah is thinking too much like an economist here. He's giving the haut precariat way too much intellectual credit (they must have a perfect understanding of how urban housing markets work) and not nearly enough ethical credit (they must be motivated by ruthless self-interest and nothing else).

It seems pretty unlikely to me that the activists are rubbing their hands and muttering "Myuh huh huh huh! Let's all pretend to be super progressive and socialistic while *actually* protecting the appreciation of Mom and Dad's house for when it's ours!" Most people are neither all that smart nor all that amoral.

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