i don’t mean to tar YIMBY ideas as “communism”. i’m sorry if it came off that way. i’ve spent a lot of time in post-communist Romania, and it just really is true the communists built a lot of dense housing in ways we’d find impossible because local objectors were not enfranchised. 1/

questions surrounding the breadth of enfranchisement are very complicated. on the one hand, sure, preferences as aggregated at a state level constitute enfranchisement as much as preferences aggregated at a neighborhood level. 2/

but an important component of what we mean by “enfranchisement” in a liberal democracy (maybe that frame is now obsolete?) is respecting of certain rights even against larger majorities. freedom of speech is antidemocratic. minority rights are antidemocratic. 3/

generally, we rely on a kind of subsidiarity with respect to rights allocation — what directly affects you and your life, what is “local” to you, is more rights-bound, less democratically controlled than things that are “larger”. you can decorate your own home as you will. 4/

externalities complicate this picture. you can’t burn tires just because it’s in the backyard of your fenced home. local land-use control provokes externalities — much less new housing gets built in desirable localities than potential new residents would prefer. 5/

i’m not here to tell you what’s right or wrong about the balance between a presumption that what’s local has rights against the broader polity vs the broader polity’s interest in overcoming the externalities of local choices. 6/

i’ll just say that the conflict is fraught, and if there are alternative paths to achieving the larger polity’s goals that don’t require overriding presumption and expectations of local control, making people feel powerless about what is very intimate to them, we should cet paribus prefer them. /fin