I’ve been asked by so many leftists to respond to this article and I have nothing else to talk about so let's do it: “Why Socialists Must Reject the YIMBY - NIMBY binary.” These types of articles used to come out a dime-a-dozen back in the day and reading this one felt like a blast from the past.
I appreciate your stepping once more into the breach on this. But it's tough to know what to do in the face of these extremely tired and facile arguments that fly in the face of a metric ton of evidence that we have now, much of which you cite here. A good rule of thumb for me is that if anyone using the phrase "trickle down" in a housing conversation they have no idea what they are talking about. Do their opinions still matter politically? Maybe. But they are mainly just pawns of the NIMBYs in the unholy alliance between the landed classes and the so-called Left.
You're never going to eliminate the existence of bad opinions, and initially I had decided to ignore the article because well I didn't think it was rigorous but the incessant citing of it to me and in conversations convinced me to write about it. The good thing is these types of articles are repetitive and so like the Vacancy Substack this substack can be cited frequently too.
Go get 'em! The vacancy thing is especially aggravating. It is somewhat counterintuitive but these folks are theoretically policy-oriented people that should be able to understand simple facts like low vacancy rates are the problem not the solutions, places with lower vacancy rates have more not less homelessness. But it's this zombie argument that keeps refusing to die.
Thank you, good analysis. The bar chart of 2010-2019 approvals per capita got me curious about how the smaller East Bay cities compare, so I looked them up and they look bad. Oakland is 37, Berkeley 18, and Alameda 16. Ugh.
I appreciate your stepping once more into the breach on this. But it's tough to know what to do in the face of these extremely tired and facile arguments that fly in the face of a metric ton of evidence that we have now, much of which you cite here. A good rule of thumb for me is that if anyone using the phrase "trickle down" in a housing conversation they have no idea what they are talking about. Do their opinions still matter politically? Maybe. But they are mainly just pawns of the NIMBYs in the unholy alliance between the landed classes and the so-called Left.
You're never going to eliminate the existence of bad opinions, and initially I had decided to ignore the article because well I didn't think it was rigorous but the incessant citing of it to me and in conversations convinced me to write about it. The good thing is these types of articles are repetitive and so like the Vacancy Substack this substack can be cited frequently too.
Go get 'em! The vacancy thing is especially aggravating. It is somewhat counterintuitive but these folks are theoretically policy-oriented people that should be able to understand simple facts like low vacancy rates are the problem not the solutions, places with lower vacancy rates have more not less homelessness. But it's this zombie argument that keeps refusing to die.
Thank you, good analysis. The bar chart of 2010-2019 approvals per capita got me curious about how the smaller East Bay cities compare, so I looked them up and they look bad. Oakland is 37, Berkeley 18, and Alameda 16. Ugh.