BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

1/OK, so. Let's talk about Left-NIMBYism.

We all know about Right-NIMBYs, rabidly protecting their white-flight suburbs from Those People. And there are plenty of liberal NIMBYs too.

But NIMBYs of the Left are also a force to be reckoned

 2/Left-NIMBYs have developed a canon of interlocking, mutually reinforcing beliefs about housing and urbanism.

These beliefs are mostly false, but they form a powerful "canon" that quickly ossifies into a hardened worldview.

It looks something like this:
3/Fortunately, Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs has written an article that perfectly encapsulates the Left-NIMBY worldview (and quotes me in it!).

So this is a teachable moment.

https://t.co/nvFJryQZGi
4/Robinson selectively quotes a Bloomberg article of mine (https://t.co/iamRrW6oei).

Look at the part he quoted, vs. what I actually wrote!

Pretty different, eh? 😉
5/In fact, as I wrote in the article that Robinson failed to read more than one line of, it's theoretically possible that Left-NIMBYs COULD be right that allowing market-rate housing drives up local rents.

I take that possibility very seriously, as do YIMBYs.
6/But as always in economics, we need to look at the EVIDENCE, not just theory!

And although there isn't a mountain of evidence on market-rate housing yet, some evidence is starting to pile up.

And it doesn't look great for the Left-NIMBY theory.
7/For example, here's a 2016 paper by Xiaodi Li about what happens to nearby rents when you build market-rate housing.

https://t.co/AwrJTJK2lY
8/And here's a brand-new paper by Kate Pennington about what happens to rents and to gentrification when you build market-rate housing in San Francisco:

https://t.co/8GCbE1jNOC
9/And here's a 2019 paper by Brian Asquith, Evan Mast, and David Reed, about what happens to rents and to gentrification when you build market-rate housing:

https://t.co/6YPHc38NDF
10/There are others (https://t.co/Hp3ecU9Ly0, https://t.co/AjipSyRSOy), but the general result here is starting to become clear.

Market-rate housing lowers nearby rents while drawing high-income people away from low-income neighborhoods.
11/In fact, reality looks very much like my "Yuppie Fishtank Theory" (which is really just a segmented markets model).

It's an explanation of why YIMBYism doesn't need Econ 101 or Supply-and-Demand:

https://t.co/8o6V0L4Wbv
12/But Robinson gets things even more wrong when he claims that YIMBYs are Randian shills who hate public housing and demand that market-rate housing be the only solution.

Here's what he writes:
13/Robinson singles out three YIMBY organizations for his accusations:
California YIMBY
YIMBY Action
Open New York

Let's see what each one has to say about public housing, shall we?

Here's Brian Hanlon, co-founder of California YIMBY.

https://t.co/hU4hWQh1Px
14/Here's Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action:

https://t.co/M52O8R67St
15/Here's Ben Carlos Thypin, founder of Open New York:

https://t.co/OxII8YxxKh
16/Robinson simply failed (or refused) to do his homework. His characterization of these YIMBYs is utterly wrong. In reality, they're just a bunch of lefties who want to build ALL types of housing instead of insisting on just one.
17/In fact, I think the conflict between YIMBYs and Left-NIMBYs is not fundamentally about evidence, or about public housing.

It's about preservationism vs. growth and change. Left-NIMBYs want to stand athwart urban history, yelling Stop.
18/Whereas YIMBYs recognizes that cities will always grow and change, and we can't preserve them in amber. Instead, we have to shape their growth into something equitable and inclusive.
19/Left-NIMBYism is not confined to the West Coast; you see it popping up in cities across the nation. It's wrongheaded, but it's something we're going to have to deal with as we fight to make American cities livable for everyone.

(end)

https://t.co/05c6IMSc4y
Anyway, if you like this sort of thing, you can sign up for my free email list, and have my posts delivered directly to your inbox!

https://t.co/FGppA1M8W6

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And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.


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1/I'm thinking about the end of Apu in the context of the national debates on immigration and diversity.


2/Apu's presence in Springfield represented a basic reality of America in the late 20th and early 21st century: the presence of nonwhite immigrants.

3/As Tomas Jimenez writes in "The Other Side of Assimilation", for my generation, immigrants from India, China, Mexico, and many other countries aren't strange or foreign. On the contrary, they're a

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This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.


My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl

If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.

In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir

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Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.

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Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

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https://t.co/neqzyYVaYS

What did I learn?

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3/The survey, the 21-CAS, asks people about how they define their own identity - race, national origin, and/or "American".

It also asks them about what they think being an "American" entails.

4/Basically, the survey asks people about 5 types of "Americanism":
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2. Believing traditional American values like freedom
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4. Multiculturalism vs. blending in
5. Being white and/or Christian

5/I edited out a few others (e.g. being born in America, being a citizen, speaking English). Anyway.

The upshot is that except for being white/Christian, most of these definitions of "American" get broad endorsement from all groups of people surveyed.
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