if you paint people unsympathetically and call them segregationists and parasites, you can talk yourself out of sympathy. it’s not a great habit though. 1/

how about a young couple who scraped together a $200k down payment on a $1.6M Bay Area home which is now there only 8x levered asset? 2/

is it understandable that couple might be extremely conservative about changes to the character of the neighborhood that might affect the value of nearby housing? 3/

how about a long-time resident who actively participated in getting landscaping done on the medians and benches placed just so in what has become, with the work of people like her, an ever more charming place? should she have no special voice? 4/

i’m not saying she *should* be able to exclude the world. i’m saying these calls are often harder than YIMBYs give themselves license to pretend. /fin

(note there are two distinct claims YIMBYs sometimes make about local government. one is that it is unrepresentative *locally*, bc old white people turn up disproportionately or whatever. the other is that it defies a broader preference that should include nonlocal voices.) 1/

(to the degree the 1st is true, it’s at least an ethically easy problem. local government should be reformed to be more inclusive, its choices more genuinely representative.) 2/

(to the degree the 2nd is true, it’s more ethically fraught, a conflict between democratic action of the broader polity and minority rights.) /fin

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

i think you are putting your hopes too fervently on the formal institutional structure rather than the preferences of people on the ground. CA has made meaningful progress by pushing things up to the state level, especially ADUs. 1/

but how often, actually, does a sizable project get built over the objections of affluent neighbors? in SF, so much of the controversy has been in the Mission, far from the most valuable neighborhood to develop. why? there’s no institutional or legal preference for developing there. 2/

one can imagine a world where the broad public is more disenfranchised, and distinctions like “affluent” or “marginalized” cease to matter for political tractability. you might get a lot of dense housing built that way! eastern european communism did just that! 3/

but centralizing power so dramatically might be undesirable for nonhousing reasons. 4/

as long as local publics have meaningful political power, and their interests are deeply levered into housing, and the value of housing is location, location, location, the “character” (often exclusivity) of neighborhoods… 5/

it’s going to be a hard fight to build over neighbors’ very passionate objections. /fin

the key is not to be so manichean. it’s not an either/or choice. a dense new district in the Bay Area gets more agglomeration benefits than a new city in Nevada. 1/

does it get as much as if you could dramatically redevelop Pacific Heights or the Mission? no. but it’s lots more achievable (and lots less disruptive of actual people’s lives and interests, as an ethical matter). 2/

the point is to find ways forward that manage the tradeoffs between agglomeration and disruption well. it’s an error to think you can optimize only for one of these. 3/

there are no reforms, larger or smaller, that will vanquish NIMBY politics, because its the preferences that make the politics, not the tools that get wielded. 4/

yes, absolutely, new cities will eventually become as conservative as NIMBY neighborhoods, if they are successful and develop a base of residents who want to conserve what they love. 5/

but they are not there yet while the project is greenfield. well, most of them aren’t, there’s always somebody, but numbers matter in overcoming political objections. as California Forever has shown, if you are sufficiently arrogant, you can render even greenfield development politically toxic. /fin

i guess what i’d say is zoning is more the symptom than the problem. in the absence of zoning, you’d still have angry inhabitants psychologically and financially levered into their neighborhood’s status quo devoting resources with great passion to blocking development. 1/

yes. if it’s not zoning it’s environmental. if it’s not environmental it’s something else. the key point is people already live there. if you have not actually persuaded them that they *like* the changes they propose, they will find means of fighting you unless they are marginal+disenfranchised. 2/

(plus, physically, retrofitting infrastructure is harder than planning capacity and building for it de novo.) /fin

* they *like* the changes *you* propose…