Here we'll disagree. I think the choice to center housing abundance around infill over the preferences of existing homeowners in already sought after places is the quintessence of a bad, teeth-pulling decision. 1/

It was a kind of original sin that's distracted us from more fruitful approaches, which would involve more overt public risk-bearing by building on initially less-sought-after greenfields, and trying to turn those into new desirable places. 2/

The anti-NIMBY trench warfare approach to me has been a catastrophic enemy of the good. Because great places aren't inherently scarce, but the approach implicitly accepts existing scarcity (of neighborhoods and cities that are desirable) and has us fighting over control of those. /fin

Antitrust regulations might! The "landbanking" critique of big homebuilders is contentious, but there might be something to it. (I think! I think some of the rebuttals substitute a kind of glibness for critique.) Vacancy taxation might! 1/

Are antitrust and vacancy taxation "existing"? To a degree I think. Perhaps more importantly, a public option might. 2/

Public options, as @jwmason.bsky.social seminally wrote, are a very general mechanism that can be deployed when the private sector fails to provide or organizes to restrict, price elasticity. jwmason.org/slackwire/pu... 3/

Social housing, a public option, does, despite the Faircloth Amendment, exist to a degree! /fin

I agree! I'm not at all a just-let-the-market-do-its-magic kind of guy, but "inclusive zoning" is a form of sliding scale pricing, imposing certain social costs we should collectively cover on arbitrary others who happen to be adjacent. 1/

When we want to purchase social goods, the purchaser should be the we that we compose as a government, with the burden sharing we democratically enact via tax policy. 2/

The issue is, which doesn't fall cleanly left or right, is that lots of people like to hide the existence of burdens and any proper accounting of upon whom they fall. 3/

Inclusive zoning is palatable to people on the right, because it's not overtly building social housing. It's palatable to people on the left, because you get units of affordable housing for people. 4/

But it'd be better if the state just bought units of affordable housing, and regulated the marketplace to ensure the provision is competitive and price-elastic. 5/

(There are lots of parallel cases. The fact that most college students don't pay the full "sticker price" for tuition is a way to get wealthier parents to subsidize poorer students.) 6/

(But why should the burden of subsidizing poorer students be restricted to wealthy people who happen to have college age kids? Wealthy childless people should chip in at least as much!) 7/

(But a sliding scale "looks" progressive, and hides redistribution in prices and price discrimination rather than overtly enacting it in government. So we ubiquitously and unjustly resort to it.) /fin

Because it follows directly from stuff Ezra says — in a hedged way, maybe this tradeoff is good, but he points out this precise tradeoff, it is his anecdote. And individually all the tradeoffs look good. His claim is they compose to catastrophe. 1/

The problem is the emphasis on DE- regulation rather than RE- regulation. Do we need to revisit some tradeoffs and revise how we do things? Sure. Do we need to just get rid, without replacement of workplace safety rules or regulations that require air filtration for homes near freeways? 2/

In a Motte / Bailey kind of way, a lot of the abundance prescription says the answer is yes. The motte is "well, maybe not, maybe this one actually is worthwhile", but the bailey is "regulation is the problem, we have to get rid of a lot of it". 3/

Again, I think it's a bad idea to conflate the YIMBY movement (itself a broad and fractious tent) with the Ezra Klein / Derek Thompson Abundance intervention. 4/

When I've described eliminating zoning rules as the *sine qua non* of YIMBYism, people like @resnikoff.bsky.social tell me I'm out of date, YIMBY is a much more broad-based pro-housing church that includes eg support of social housing and doesn't place deregulation above other approaches. 5/

I think that's a fair cop! But conflating the Ezra Klein / Derek Thompson Abundance intervention with YIMBYism is largely reverting to and conceding my prior, overly narrow view. I don't want to be reductive of Ezra and Derek either! They both support developing state capacity in other ways. 6/

But the heart of their critique really is the everything bagel, that liberals fail by demanding "too much", not by demanding what they ought to demand, but perhaps in ways that need to be improved. 7/

That's a really important distinction! 8/

Are you are asking people to surrender goals like air quality and workplace safety because getting housing done is lots more important, or are you asking people to prioritize and organize in ways that reconcile the production of key goods like housing with achieving other goals? 9/

The pushback Ezra and Derek are getting isn't because anyone (well, anyone besides a few degrowthers) opposes, say, housing abundance. We all want housing abundance! But we don't want it as a monomaniacal priority that bulldozes other priorities. 10/

Where there are tradeoffs, we actually have to think about how to make them, or whether there are ways of reorganizing what and how we are acting to render the tradeoffs less severe. 11/

If something is presented as a silver bullet, a simple unifying idea a fractious Democratic coalition should unite behind, it's probably trading off for that "unity" and "coherence" that work of acting with bespoke attention and care. And there are things a lot of us mean to keep caring about! /fin

see Ezra www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/o... quite explicitly describing workplace safety as a problem (via google books, i think the same anecdotes are in the book, but i haven't read it yet). 1/

it's not clear he's saying workplace safety standards are a *problem* exactly. he acknowledges there are tradeoffs, and is explicit that this might be a good tradeoff. but it's provided in a context where lots of individually seemingly justified tradeoffs are alleged to compose to sclerosis. 2/

(in general, i don't think equating the Ezra Klein / Derek Thompson abundance intervention with YIMBY is right. they're clearly related, but not the same thing. you can be a YIMBY and enthusiastic or unenthusiastic about their generalization of certain YIMBY housing ideas to domains far afield) /fin