Handle is skeptical of Yimbyism

He writes,

Right now Libertarians and some Progressives are on a pro-density “just build more housing” kick, and tend to dismiss and disparage the motives of local residents who try hard to stop it. What I’ve tried to point out is that a legitimate reason for protest is the fact that our system government – especially in big winner city centers – is simply no longer capable of “preserving infrastructural adequacy” let alone at anything approaching reasonable costs and timescales.

Read the whole comment.

The thing is, Boston is capable of undertaking infrastructure projects. It now has bike lanes galore.

22 thoughts on “Handle is skeptical of Yimbyism

  1. As someone who has had these debates here in SF I can say at least that:

    1. YIMBYs usually also advocate for increased transit project funding and better construction processes for just this reason;

    2. NIMBY residents will often raise this objection in passing but rarely is it their main or most detailed concern. If you look at the recent fights over affordable housing projects in SF (senior housing in Forest Hill, the “historic” laundromat development in the Mission) you don’t see folks demanding the developers pay for infrastructure impacts; you see them demanding the project be stopped for a scattershot host of other reasons, so scattershot and prone to change that it sure looks like they’re just seizing on any excuse they can find.

    • “Good Schools” and low crime are infrastructure the government can’t maintain when low income households move in. NIMBYs aren’t going to say it directely, but it’s true.

      If you want people to be more OK with poor people moving around them you should be more in favor of things which make their presence less of an externality. They will probably not be libertarian, progressive, or egalitarian. More like how Singapore keeps order.

      • yes — rich folk don’t want to live near people with poor folk lifestyle choices.

        Because of social side effects. I understood that kids from poor families did better when they were with kids from rich families — but also kids from rich families did better when they were with kids from rich families.

        Even those who are willing to sacrifice themselves, for the poor, are often unwilling to sacrifice their children’s maximum best future for the poor.

  2. Obviously, there are a lot ways to improve Yimbyism and it is 80% a local issue that are fixable. Also we can look towards Far East Asian cities for solutions to improve transportation and lifestyle. For the most part, Tokyo and Singapore are very functioning examples to view. And isn’t Tokyo the first really successful mega-city in the modern global economy?

    However, I mistrust anybody who claims that we going to lower rent prices by more than ~10% with Yimby solutions. It is not very possible in coastal cities and I don’t see how investors pour tons of money into a heavily depreciating market. (Also I wish Yimby commenators would state lower prices allow more to buyers to purchase not increase the demand.)

    • Absolutely you could lower rent prices by more than 10%. That’s a gimme.

      Investors will put money in as long as they can expect to capture above the required rate of return on their capital. Since developers can make money in non-coastal places, at much lower rents, they can do it on the coasts too.

      • Past the short term, not a gimme at all. One has to apply a dynamic, not static analysis. Properties in all winner cities tend to be bid up to the limits of what people can afford, the “pain”/”sacrifice” level they can absorb. This is exacerbated by the fact that high prices themselves serve as the only legal exclusion to those unable to pay the rent, and people are willing to pay a lot for higher quality neighbors, who are a zero sum resource. Building more doesn’t necessarily solve the rat race nature of the problem. Mortgage underwriting standards are probably the only thing preventing people from dumping even more of their incomes into desirable properties.

  3. If we are talking about Boston, then I think Handle is wrong. We have infrastructure adequacy. It is expensive, often corrupt, and slow, but the city works. It is a far more pleasant place to move around than New York or San Francisco.

    Boston has been gradually getting less and less corrupt. There are still plenty of problems, but compared to a few decades ago, there has been significant improvement. One weird quirk of our political scene is that although municipal state and federal offices are almost completely held by Democrats, we have elected several Republican Governors who are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative enough to moderate the progressive majorities.

  4. The reason that YIMBYism won’t work is that it is still calling for political pull to achieve its goals. YIMBYs and NIMBYs both think that they know best what should be built.

    From what I can tell, YIMBYs are not calling for a greater respect of property rights and a deference for the unplanned innovations that would result.

    • By that logic, Houston would have a better emerging order than other cities with use planning. It doesn’t.

      • On the “decent lifestyle on a median income” metric, Houston kicks San Francisco’s ass and wipes the floor with Boston.

      • What’s the best metric for showing this?

        I actually don’t know, but now think the increase in home value * the population might be a good number.

        So Cambridge going from 670k to 1300k, * 110k (sort of constant)
        South Boston from 409k to 790k, *35k (also sort of constant)
        http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/South-Boston-Boston-MA.html

        I’d be interested to know what house prices are doing in a city where the pop is growing.

  5. Kling:
    “The thing is, Boston is capable of undertaking infrastructure projects.”

    After 8 years of observation – “undertaking” has become almost a mortuary process as time (and costs) are consumed while the many particular interests carve out their specific desired portions of the benefits (or protections) from any or all the activities required or appended are determined – and then, AGAIN, during execution.

  6. Surprisingly, a telling line in Handle’s comment, which falls within Arnold’s “Specialization and Trade,” has not been “picked up.”

    “. . . it shows the increasing geographic centralization of high-paid labor activity, who need to be physically close to each other. ”

    It is probably more of a correlation than an implication that “densities,” and all the “needs” that accompany them, result from the need or “demand” for relationships, that in turn result from specializations. The relationships are found in concentrations of varying specializations which trade their specializations with one another, or require those of others to meet their personal deficiencies or limitations which are part of the effects of specialization.

    Of similar interest is the relationship of those area concentrations (e.g., a particular city) with other population areas, both concentrated and dispersed.

    Take a look at Paris, France, and its areas of specializations.

  7. Boston:

    Natural gas requirements met by imports of LNG from Russia, largely due to “opposition(s) to pipeline improvements and additions to bring in continental-sourced NG.

    Now, of course this condition ( pipeline restrictions) supported the LNG terminal created during earlier domestic “shortages.” (to the benefit of terminal and local transfer interests.)

    That’s Boston infrastructure.

  8. To be clear, I am actually generally in favor of very strong property rights and minimalist building regulation. I would prefer for real property interests to be explicitly formalized and for expectations to be predictable, such that building activity could occur quickly and cheaply, legally insulted as much as possible from political or opportunistic processes, under the (convenient legal fiction) theory that people had bargained while keeping those possibilities in mind.

    The trouble is, that’s not what Yimbyism is offering. For Yimbyism to work, that is, to avoid being a zero-sum mechanism which just screws a lot of incumbent stakeholders over, it needs a whole simultaneous suite of reforms that work in harmony. It’s one thing to say developers should have more freedom to build, but it’s another to say that homeowners and landlords should also have more rights and insulation from politics, which they don’t.

    The trouble is, real property law is now a total mess. It’s just not clear what people or jurisdictions can do or prevent, what delays or costs they can or will impose. Furthermore, there are no non-political and legal ways for property owners to protect their fundamental interests. This makes everything sufficiently unpredictable and fraught that it incentivizes – really compells – people to use political tactics and processes instead of markets. Yimbys and other building advocates are doing the same thing! Better property law that settles these matters for the foreseeable future, and tolerates opportunities to contract and covenant, are essential to making this work, and so must be done at the same time.

    A metaphor could be trying to improve an old clunker that barely moves by putting in a much more powerful engine. But now the shocks can’t handle the weight, and the transmission can’t handle the torque, and the brakes can’t slow the clunker down, and by trying to make one ‘improvement’ in isolation, you’ve actually made things worse. If you also improve the shocks, brakes, transmission, etc. then you’re talking about a net positive.

    So, for example, if you got rid of public schools, and everyone sent their kids to private schools which had the liberty to do whatever they wanted, well, then parents might fret less about the composition of the local public school student body, or the composition of local voters who elect members of the school board. In the absence of that, the details of new development affect a local resident in a much deeper sense than mere pecuniary externalities, and thus inherently becomes matter of politics. To depoliticize building, one has to depoliticize everything else too as part of the deal. Otherwise, it’s no surprise when there’s no deal.

    Or thing about crime and public security and safety. If the state would deploy sufficient policing resources and allocate it to ensure a right to equality of safety / freedom from crime, then one need worry less about neighbor quality. Otherwise, safety-conscious residents (i.e., everybody) will try to segregate to the extent feasible, which means both segregation on the basis of prices and werewithal, and segregation on the basis of political processes and building regulation. Gotta fix that too. Yikes, this is looking really hard to pull off in a successfull and just way now!

    It’s not a sufficient argument to say, “It’s just too hard to do more than one politically difficult thing at a time.” It may be too hard, that doesn’t negate the fact that you still have to do everything at the same time to avoid making things even worse. Sometimes grand Coasian bargains and coordination problems just can’t be solved in a piecemeal fashion without some kind of guarantees.

    To explain why, we really have to go back to fundamentals.

    What are people really buying when they buy some real property. Put aside the replacement cost of the structure, where does the market price for the land (or volume) itself come from?

    Abstractly we would say the capactiy of that particular volume to satisfy preferences (or, because long-term, some kind of “net present value of expected satisfactions of expected preferences” … ), but I think you could reasonably split those into two major categories for most people, which are (1) Commuting quality, and (2) Neighborhood quality (which includes neighbor quality).

    Now, “stable expectations for commuting and neighborhood quality” is really like having stable expectations for the fact that your property has a special feature like waterfront or a (legally-protected) view.

    Imagine what the owner of a waterfront property thinks of the idea of someone doing something that was formerly illegal, and buying the underwater plot just in front of his from the state, building a dike around it and draining it, and then putting a 20 story building on it. He is going to think, “I paid an enormous premium for a particular quality of my real property, and you just erased it for your own benefit. You owe me compensation one way or the other, and you should have negotiated with me to obatin my permission and consent first.” Now tell the guy, “You have zero entitlement to compensation,” and then try to smear him as a greedy, selfish, and corrupt obstructionist when he tries to use the political process to avoid such outcomes. Good luck.

    But follow the money. The state granted the owner of waterfront a kind of monopoly, for which he paid fair value. Then the state reneged on the deal, and sold the monopoly to someone else, for the public benefit of the exchange. Whatever the judges say, by common sense of fairness, that’s a ‘taking’, and by a common sense of justice and property, not to mention some better assurance that new projects actually do improve net social welfare (else too hard to pay for the rights taken), the public compensates people for marketable property it takes from them.

    Of course, having the political option to prevent such uncompensated expropriation is itself a kind of valuable ‘property’ right that fits into expectations. Removing that right is a taking too (again, as experienced, not necessarily legally).

    A genuinely liberated real property market, under freedom-from-crime conditions of public order, and a responsibility for developers to pay for any needed additional infrastructural capacity (and to not permit occupancy of a single unit until that infrastructure is operational), would be a thing to behold! Bring it on, please. But that’s not what Yimbys are going to do if they get their way.

  9. Libertarians like having the power to choose density and what they presume it will provide them.

  10. I really don’t think homeowners are going to approve of any policy that decreases the price of their homes. The SF bay area (and other expensive cities) are just stuck with high prices until something breaks. Perhaps they start to lose companies who aren’t willing to pay employees enough to live there. Cities certainly are creating larger and larger incentives to move companies out of the area.

    I also wonder what rent control (if it passes) will do. I would expect it to produce waiting lists. And at some point, companies can’t expand because there are so few apartments available to new hires.

    • Rent control provides inflation protection for politically connected affluent rent-seekers.

    • There is an externality high rent located companies can exploit. Namely delayed family formation. Twenty something programmers don’t mind tiny apartments and roommates. Housing supply affects family formation at the margin.

      These places are IQ shredders that run through the youths of their workers then dump them to a long commute or another part of the country.

      For the executives living in a city with the poor priced out is probably a positive externality, and they can afford the housing.

      Hence why Facebook offers egg freezing.

  11. Everything except government is speeding up. Government is slowing down. The results are trivially predictable. Something has to give. It will be government.

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