A decade ago, when the issue of Republican anti-science bias was raised, a common response was to point to attitudes to vaccination, where, it was claimed, Democrats were the anti-science party. I observed at the time that this claim wasn’t justified by the available evidence. A little later, I noted the likelihood of the Republicans becoming anti-vax , a point on have been proved tragically right by the Covid pandemic.
But this case, and many more like it, hasn’t prevented the publication of a continued stream of pieces starting from the premise that “both sides do it”. The latest iteration relates to housing policy, and the claim that Democrats are the party of NIMBYism. For example this piece in The Atlantic by Jerusalem Demsas states
liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
Demsas is way off the mark[1]. Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for multi-family housing to be erected in traditionally residential zone. These provisions were vigorously resisted by Republicans, following the lead of Donald Trump, who used racist scaremongering to mobilise opposition.
More generally, the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is now ascendant among leftists (AOC is a notable example), as well as moderate liberals like Biden. There are still plenty of left and liberal NIMBYs, but it’s Republicans who make NIMBYism a majority view.
Rather than go through this issue in detail, I’m going to propose a meta-theory to explain why Republicans are always wrong, and why they always get a pass from both-sidesists. The central propositions are
(i) Leftist and liberals start from the meta-belief that the right policies will be consistent with empirical evidence
(ii) Republicans and rightwingers start from the meta-belief that “owning the libs” is more important than any policy outcome
(iii) Bothsidesists start from the meta-belief that a situation where half the population is systematically wrong is unthinkable.
Now consider a situation where correct and incorrect beliefs about some policy are initially distributed more or less randomly across the political spectrum. This is the ideal case for bothsidesists who will point out the inconsistencies. But to the extent that their claims are valid, those on the left will gradually reject the beliefs that have been shown to be wrong. At this point, it is necessary for those on the right, not only to hold on to their existing wrong beliefs, but to embrace those that have been abandoned by the left.
It’s easy enough to multiply examples.
The first I noticed was carbon pricing. As long as environmentalists rejected pricing in favor of detailed controls, carbon pricing was popular on the right. But as soon as the case for pricing became widely accepted, the right changed sides. The same was true in more technical debates about the relative merits of carbon taxes and tradeable permits.
The Earned Income Tax Credit was a Republican initiative, signed into law by Gerald Ford, but it is now denounced by the right . Indeed the EITC formed the basis of the “47 per cent pay no tax” talking point popularised by Mitt Romney. Sticking to Romney, his own ‘Romneycare” plan for Massachusetts was the basis for Obama’s much-vilified Affordable Care Act. And so on.
And throughout all of this, bothsidesists have tried, with increasing desperation to find examples of rational thought on the right. But these examples either turn out to be wrong (for example, the claim that nuclear power is a sensible option held back by environmentalists) or are picked up by the left and repudiated by the right.
This process cannot end well. Either political power in the US will end up in the hands of an utterly delusional movement, or the two-party system will collapse, with unpredictable consequences.
fn1. It’s fair to say that policies dating back to the 1970s, backed by liberals, empowered local resistance to developments of all kinds, from polluting industries to expanded provision of housing. But localism is deeply embedded in US culture, both for good and ill.
{ 64 comments }
Kevin 12.27.22 at 3:55 am
I don’t understand this. It is an objective fact that it is much, much, much harder to build in left wing cities in the US (and Canada, and Australia, and…). This goes for hosting and all sorts of other infrastructure, both because of zoning and environmental rules, to say nothing of the fact that public sector workers being left-signed means that cost control doesn’t happen (see NYC subway costs).
It really is true that it is much faster to build a wind turbine in Texas, which is why they are building them at an incredible rate, that it is much easier to build a house in Queensland, Alberta, and Arizona, which is why the rate of housing construction and the price of them is much lower than in California, Toronto, and Sydney.
The biggest failure on the left, seriously, is that if you are the party of “government should do more”, you actually need to care a lot about the government doing things well. It is not possible to see stats like multiple decades of net internal migration out of left-wing locations, and especially so among lower income people, as anything but a massive failure of governance. I wish YIMBY were ascendant among leftists, but look at any planning meeting in San Francisco and New York and see who supports allowing you to build on land you own and who opposes it.
Pseudonym 12.27.22 at 3:58 am
I don’t know that proposition (ii) is necessary to explain your examples, though, even if it’s consistent with them. The right embraced carbon pricing up to the point that it became politically feasible. Romneycare, IIRC, was largely a product of a legislature that had veto-proof majorities. Both of these outcomes are also consistent with a right that cares deeply about a “let them die” policy outcome but finds that outright stating their position is politically disadvantageous (for some odd reason).
Alan 12.27.22 at 4:06 am
The Federalist Party attempted to steal the presidential election of 1800, by having their members in the house of representatives (the electoral college had tied between two Democratic-Republican candidates) vote for a conservative Democratic-Republican. The house tied repeatedly until Jefferson was finally elected at the thirty0fifth ballot. During the stalemate the Democratic-Republican governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania had called out their militias and announced they would march on Washington if Jefferson were not elected. Federalist governors in their New England stronghold responded by threatening their own march on Washington.
If the house had remained tied, and Pennsylvania and Maryland had imposed Jefferson by force, there would presumably have been an entirely new constitution and subsequent US history would have strongly resembled nineteenth century Mexico or Peru, with power changing hands only by coup and every new government proclaiming a new constitution.
The relevant part of this history is that within a decade the Federalists, who had controlled the presidency and both houses since 1789, held no significant state or federal positions and would never again have a viable presidential candidate. All presidents were Democratic-Republicans or Democrats (Jacksonians) from 1801 to 1841.
It’s possible the Republicans will follow the Federalists into oblivion. You can’t run on we wuz robbed forever, particularly if you plainly weren’t robbed.
What will the 2024 election look like? If Trump is not, as seems unlikely, the Republican candidate he will almost certainly be the ‘Patriot’ candidate. There may even be a third candidate of the right in someone like Liz Cheney. If Trump is the official Republican candidate that almost guarantees a Cheney campaign. The US electoral system is remarkably unkind to parties that split their votes.
John Q 12.27.22 at 4:14 am
Kevin @1 I’m not sure about your other claims, but Queensland (where I live) has had Labor governments almost continuously for the last 30 years, while NSW (capital Sydney) has the longest serving Liberal-National (= conservative) government in Australia.
Pseudonym 12.27.22 at 5:19 am
Alan @3: I can’t imagine that Liz Cheney has any statistically significant support in the Republican party from people who would otherwise vote for Trump. Now if Ron DeSantis were to win the GOP nomination and Trump launch a third-party bid, things might actually get interesting.
Sashas 12.27.22 at 6:19 am
@Kevin (1) I think your whole comment is about YIMBYism, and I’m responding to it as such. Please do correct me if I’m mistaken about that!
I think it’s important to remember that people tend to be YIMBYs to a different degree about different things. You suggested wind turbines and houses. I’ll suggest homeless shelters, Black-owned barbecue shops, and air force bases. (These aren’t chosen at random – I picked three examples of recent YIMBY/NIMBY conflict in Madison, Wisconsin.) On the whole, I saw leftists in Madison support the first two and oppose the third. I saw many white progressives support the first and oppose the other two. I saw conservative Democrats oppose the first two and support the third.
The OP didn’t really address variation in YIMBYism among possible projects, but he did raise the example of affordable housing. This, like homeless shelters, in my experience tends to get the support of leftists and progressives while being opposed by conservatives.
It may still be easier to build affordable housing in Texas than in a more left-wing state. I don’t actually know. However, I have watched how Republican governments in Wisconsin behave towards Milwaukee. Namely, NIMBYs often also say “yes in YOUR backyard, lol”. Thus it is very easy to bulldoze Black neighborhoods to build highways without really saying anything about the NIMBY/YIMBYism of people in those neighborhoods. Cities in the US in red states tend to be under this kind of attack. I know Milwaukee is for certain, and I suspect it’s universal. If we want to see NIMBY/YIMBY distinctions, we need to zoom in closer than the level of a state to distinguish it from “yes in YOUR backyard” behavior.
In terms of planning meetings, in light of my first point, could you share a little about what sorts of things you wanted to build that got such leftist resistance?
Lastly, I’ll point out that every single leftist I have ever met has cared deeply about “government doing things well”. This has not been the case for either moderates or conservatives. Anecdotal, sure, but I hesitate to place “failures of governance” at the feet of leftists.
Minivet 12.27.22 at 6:33 am
In housing, Republicans are worse on principle (“suburban lifestyle dream”), but Dems actually govern most places where there is high demand for housing so their inaction really has to be called out harshly.
Yes, at the presidential level Dems have decent housing platforms. But they’re timidly focusing on carrots when sticks are desperately needed. They’re not yet making NIMBYs nervous. Stasis on housing takes a ton of action to overcome so just saying the right things and making a handful of small new programs doesn’t cut it.
And it’s Jerusalem, not Jonathan.
John Q 12.27.22 at 6:45 am
@Minivet Thanks for pickup on Jerusalem. Fixed now.
On the broader point, this is precisely the process I’m describing. Dems get called out harshly, and rightly, on bad policy, and respond by changing. Repubs then adopt, or double down, on the bad policies.
This is even clearer in relation to renewable energy, where rightwingers back astroturf community groups to make NIMBY objections to all kinds of projects https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1606345279648956416
J-D 12.27.22 at 6:50 am
This is somewhat of an exaggeration. The Federalists quickly ceased to be competitive at the national level, but remained competitive significantly longer in a few States: the Federalist candidate won a tightly contested election for Governor of Delaware in 1824.
On the other hand, the Federalists did not control both Houses of Congress continuously up to 1800; they were in a minority in the House of Representatives in both the 3rd and the 4th Congress (corresponding to George Washington’s second Presidential term.)
These minor corrections do not affect the main point that major political parties can and do wither away. I perceive no current prospects of this happening to the Republican Party, but of course that could change.
J-D 12.27.22 at 7:12 am
John Stuart Mill, Considerations On Representative Government
Moz in Oz 12.27.22 at 8:03 am
It seems to me that democracy is well on the way to becoming a bad idea to many on the right in the USA. It’s not just “that wasn’t a coup attempt” and continued support for the idea that the US is not competent to run an election(!!!), it’s the unending parade of different attacks on it. Sure, it’s funny when “voting is corrupt” backfires on them in low voter turnout (etc), but the leadership response is to double down. I don’t see how this can end well.
My very limited experience of local government in Sydney (Australia) is that the left-right divide, such as it is, is more often a “public good” vs “private profit” one, with a difference in the degree to which that’s the focus between them. Also corruption on “both sides” of a battle that has at least three sides. Viz, you can definitely buy some ALP councillors, but not the Green ones, and it’s often not even necessary to buy the Liberal ones (capital-L liberal not small-l liberal, similar to “Fair and Balanced{tm}” where the literal meaning becomes a term of trade with the opposite meaning).
The woefully categorised “left” Green members often pick sides that seem quite random when analysed strictly through a left-right lens. Against road expansion, against a local park expansion, for some housing and against other (against ribbon development along major roads, for intense development along rail lines and at stations, for example).
The recent Teal victories in Australia also make no sense on a left-right analysis. Were they elected by suddenly left-wing Liberal party strongholds? Did professional rich white people suddenly become Marxists? Or are they conservative as in conservationist conservatives, thinking “let’s not trash the planet, we might need it later”?
J-D 12.27.22 at 8:28 am
Not in all cases, but on average, the more people understand about how things are, the more they are stimulated to think about how things might be different. Not in all cases, but on average, people thinking about how things might be different from the way they are favours the left over the right. Therefore, not in all cases, but on average, the increase and spread of knowledge favours the left over the right and it is to be expected that the right should oppose it more than the left.
MM 12.27.22 at 9:29 am
Well that was a click-bait headline. I thought the article was going to do some work to explain how the right is always wrong, which – tall order – but John Q. is an impressive intellectual, so could have had some good points. Instead, it was about how the American Republican Party and their core support are always wrong in the decade+ “owning the libs” era, which … sure.
nastywoman 12.27.22 at 10:00 am
As (American) ‘Bothsideism’ initially was invented by the meta-belief that ‘the establishment wings of both parties are almost always in agreement when it comes to US war policies‘ (Glenn Greenwald) – and there is this deadly battle of ALL Western Democracies against the ‘Right Wing Racist Science Denying Stupid Fascists’ –
the META of all META needs
FIRST –
to Focus on the twisted War Propaganda.
As with the help of guys like Tucker Greenwald such (Putin) Propaganda has become as disastrously effective as the ‘Bothsideism’ of this:
‘There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up to the War Industry The New Democrats since Clinton have become shills for Corporate America and Arms Industry What happened to the Democratic Party? Why has it become IMPOSSIBLE to question War within the Dem Party’
(Greenwald)
‘For years, Lindsey Graham was the symbol of mindless militarism, cheering every possible war the US could fight. It’s nice to see Dems now united with him in the apparently paramount goal of defeating Russia militarily and economically’.
(Greenwald)
‘Yet again, now, the establishment wings of both parties are in full consensus over Ukraine’.
(Greenwald)
‘Peace Loving Americans should not pay for more war but for US Housing and Health Care instead’
(Tweet of a typical Tucker Greenwald Fan)
‘This is where your $100 billion and counting are going’
(Tucker Greenwald)
‘Throughout post-WW2 US history, the establishment wings of both parties are almost always in agreement when it comes to US war policies’.
SO
(1) Leftist and liberals start from the meta-belief that ALL OF THE ABOVE is truly evil propaganda – as it completely ignores that we are talking about ‘DEFENSE’ – and a hundred Billion -(and if needed hopefully more) in order to DEFEND ‘the people’
against a Brutal and Horrific Invading, Bombing and Killing War Criminal Monster.
META!
Colin 12.27.22 at 10:20 am
Not disagreeing with the main thesis that conservatives are always wrong, but feel you’ve used a bad example to kickstart that argument.
The “NIMBYs are liberals” thing comes from a specific situation – gentrified/gentrifying inner cities with a thriving job market, massive unmet demand for housing, and an increasingly lefty bourgeois set of homeowners set on keeping the neighbourhood form as-is. Imagine trying to knock down a terrace house to build apartments anywhere in Sydney or Melbourne, and then imagine who the opponents will be.
Of course conservatives wouldn’t be better, but they’re not relevant to this situation. They’re out in the burbs where land values per square metre are lower. If the problem is gonna be fixed it’s the bourgeois inner-city lefties currently occupying the high-value land that need to be convinced of YIMBYism, hence them being blamed by The Atlantic writer. And in Australia housing/density decisions are made by local councils which are often small and therefore relatively uniform demographically, with no significant number of conservative voters.
Mike Huben 12.27.22 at 12:52 pm
J-D @ 9
“These minor corrections do not affect the main point that major political parties can and do wither away. I perceive no current prospects of this happening to the Republican Party, but of course that could change.”
The Republican party has already withered away recently, eaten from the inside by the plutocratic control and primarying of the Tea Party. The plutocrats need to divide the electorate for their easy control, hence the “owning the libs” priority that John describes.
Alex SL 12.27.22 at 1:40 pm
The model makes a lot of sense. Just one quibble:
“(iii) Bothsidesists start from the meta-belief that a situation where half the population is systematically wrong is unthinkable.”
I understand the idea of bothsidesim to be that half the population cannot be systematically right. Instead, bothsideist assume that the left half and the right half of the population are equally slightly foolish and naughty and should just agree to be exactly in the centre, which is obviously the wisest and most harmonious point to be. Also, the centre hasn’t moved at all over recent decades although both major parties would consider what were centre-right economic and tax policies of the 1960s to be effectively Maoism if they were advanced today.
Kevin,
Sorry, I don’t follow your argumentation. What decades of net internal migration out of left-wing locations are you referring to? People tend to migrate towards urban areas, which are left-leaning, and out of rural towns, which are conservative. Or are you referring to wealthy people moving out of inner cities to suburbia to have a large garden? But as long as people want large gardens, that would be difficult to counteract with any policy except making commuting impossible.
As for how easy it is to build in Sydney versus Queensland, see what John Q wrote. I think the other question here may be the geographic scale. Is the NIMBYism in what you see as a progressive US state coming from the Democratic state government or from a Republican local council?
Alan,
Not very optimistic about this prospect. Admittedly I am looking at the USA from the outside, but it seems as if Republican primary voters are quite radicalised, and while the last election suggests that radical candidates may repulse rust enough potential Republican voters to cost them majorities then and now, it does not repulse enough of them to produce catastrophic losses. And in the absence of repeated catastrophic losses – say, two or better three subsequent presidential elections with percent vote shares in the thirties – it seems unlikely the party will have a re-think. There may be a one-off split vote election, sure, but they also survived that even in my own memory.
Moz in Oz,
My interpretation of the Teals has been that they’d be okay with a conservative, privatising, deregulating, low tax party if it was just less sexist and climate-denying. Because otherwise they could have just voted Green or Labor instead of inventing a new block; or am I missing something?
NomadUK 12.27.22 at 2:39 pm
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
— John Stuart Mill, letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March 1866)
Don P. 12.27.22 at 5:54 pm
“It seems to me that democracy is well on the way to becoming a bad idea to many on the right in the USA.”
Not to hit a bugaboo, but I actually blame a lot of this on the Electoral College. It used to be that the EC and popular vote “always” (in our memory) went the same way, so the EC was ok. Now that the EC has given the Rs the Presidency twice in 20 years, of course the result is right-wing treatises on how taking power without getting more votes is good, actually. And then the next step is “voting? how quaint.”
Moz in Oz 12.27.22 at 9:26 pm
My interpretation of the Teals has been that they’d be okay with a conservative…
Yes, exactly. They’re still Liberal supporters for the most part, but likely feel that the Liberal Party doesn’t want them. And it’s hard to argue with that, the trek from Tony Abbott to Peter Dutton has not been positive for anyone stupid enough to be female, or under 60, concerned about the environment, or unhappy with corruption, etc.
But we were talking about “the right is always wrong” and I don’t think that’s really useful when talking about former liberal voters now supporting teal candidates. You need to wade into the green-brown split within the right at the very least, but possibly more usefully the liberal-fascist* split within the Liberal party (it’s not the small-l liberals who remain).
(* authoritarian, militarist, sure, but also ‘government exists to support business’ which is core to both fascism and neoliberalism, with a dose of state-sponsored religion and exclusionary patriotism)
Moz in Oz 12.27.22 at 9:34 pm
This just popped up in my feed and seems germane to the current discussion(s) here:
Where’s the middle ground between authoritarianism and democracy?
Media establishment’s search for the mythical “moderate” endangers freedom
https://georgelakoff.substack.com/p/wheres-the-middle-ground-between
Albeit pointing out the same problem we’ve had for a couple of decades (at least) with environmental issues including the problem that has progressed from “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate catastrophe” while the bought media desperately search out ever more delusional “pro problem” types to maintain the illusion of balance. I was honestly not surprised to see some muppet recently “the floods in NSW are a normal and necessary part of the environment…”, just disappointed that they didn’t have to courage to say “so we should do nothing to restrain them, nor should we rebuild afterwards”.
Feminists complain about the same, every “rape is bad” discussion has to include at least “rape isn’t a problem” if not “rape is good and necessary” points of view.
reason 12.27.22 at 10:30 pm
I think Kevin should refer to Cameron Murray on housing – (Fresh Economic Thinking). Cameron Murray has argued forcefully and convincingly that housing regulation has very little to do with the supply of housing and if you want to reduce the cost of housing you should increase the supply of public housing.
Ebenezer Scrooge 12.27.22 at 10:32 pm
Like Colin@15, I agree that John Q has a good argument with a bad example. I think he also makes one bad assumption: that leftists and liberals share the meta-belief that good policies follow from evidence. This is often true, but is subject to two very significant caveats.
First, this meta-belief in evidence gets thrown out the window when the evidence suggests that the liberals or leftists will be personally harmed from good policy. Hence, liberal NIMBY-ism, or liberal resistance to school desegregation for their child.
Second, liberals and leftists have a few deontological principles that are completely immune to evidence, such as the belief that more due process and/or participation is always better for outcomes.
reason 12.27.22 at 10:38 pm
I think those arguing for changes in housing regulation should also read this: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html
And besides I think that while former workers homes in inner cities have been gentrified – at the same industrial premises have left the inner cities and been converted into denser residential areas. Ultimately, I think though that the answer – is that there is plenty of land – what we need is more urban centers and we should invest more in the infrastructure to link them together.
J, not that one 12.27.22 at 11:47 pm
It’s hard to say whether Demsas is using the leftwing tactic of blaming liberalism for everything bad, so people will want to sign on for something more intense, or just a well-meaning moralizer who isn’t interested in politics and doesn’t believe in ignoring arguments just because they come from a particular side.
That the NIMBY dispute actually is an intra-Democrat issue makes it an excellent wedge issue.
Chetan Murthy 12.27.22 at 11:52 pm
Kevin@1: “It is not possible to see stats like multiple decades of net internal migration out of left-wing locations, and especially so among lower income people, as anything but a massive failure of governance.”
I know, I know, you’re right! It’s so crowded, nobody goes there anymore! Also, when you leave, can you let us know, so we can grab your apartment asap? kthxbai
P.S. Geez. The reason rents are so high has nothing to do with “leftists” and everything to do with “incumbents want to profit from their assets” — and frankly, that’s a right-wing thing (as in “the definition of conservative is ‘primarily concerned with the rights of property'”).
Alex SL 12.28.22 at 12:17 am
Going a bit off topic, but as I have long been interested in bad arguments, I have noted with interest how Republicans on social media make the case that “democracy is a bad idea”. As perhaps to be expected for a country that made its founding myths into a secular religion, its constitution into sacred scripture, and its first batch of politicians into prophets of unquestionable wisdom (with the main difference in approach between right and centre-left being how they interpret those myths and writings or cherry-pick from them), they usually do not even try to argue the merits of minority rule but instead claim that the USA had never been intended to be majority-rule. If the founders intended something, that wins the discussion by default, right?
“We are a republic, not a democracy.” Apparently unable to look up the definition of the word republic, which would quickly reveal that every form of government except a monarchy is a republic.
“The electoral college” (and/or senate) “is set up to avoid a majority of states being dominated by a minority of states.” No concern about a majority of people being dominated by a minority of people, apparently. Also, it can be assumed that minority rule would immediately be recognised as highly unfair if this kind of ‘natural’ gerrymandering fell out in favour of progressives.
To my surprise I heard an otherwise very smart colleague make the same argument here in Australia a few years ago: he was concerned that proportional representation would mean that rural areas would be dominated by the cities, and then most of the investment would go there, neglecting rural needs. I am still struggling to understand. Cities are where 86.2% of the Australian population live, so it seems rather logical to me not only that they would dominate electorally but that they would indeed need 86-ish% of the infrastructure and service investment.
And then there is the real silliness. “Look at this map with counties voting R coloured red, and counties voting D coloured blue – the vast majority of the USA are conservative!” Maps of election results of pretty much every nation look quite similar, only of course with the colours reversed, as the USA are nearly alone with their party colour scheme. Personally I find Australian maps most amusing because, as mentioned above, the country is extremely urbanised and mostly very thinly populated. The Northern Territory, for example, has only two federal electorates: (1) the capital city, and (2) the other 99.9% of the territory. I assume Canada would have similar examples.
J-D 12.28.22 at 4:04 am
In some senses, possibly: but not (that is, not yet) in the way that the Federalist Party withered away after 1800, or the Whig Party in the mid-1850s, or a number of Italian parties in the mid-1990s.
politicalfootball 12.28.22 at 4:36 am
It’s true that there is significant support for NIMBYism from the center and left, but pretty much all of the opposition to NIMBYism comes from the center and left.
I think Kevin gets particularly confused here:
It is an objective fact that it is much, much, much harder to build in left wing cities in the US (and Canada, and Australia, and… It really is true that it is much faster to build a wind turbine in Texas, which is why they are building them at an incredible rate
In fact, it has historically been much easier to build in liberal cities. That’s why they are so populous. If we want simple-minded “objective facts,” let us note that the bigger a metropolitian area is, the more likely it is to be run by liberals.
And if you compare the population density of Texas and Manhattan, it’s pretty easy to see why Texans are, by comparison, good sports about wind turbines. A wind turbine in the Bronx affects the lives of a lot more people — it’s in a lot more “back yards” — than one in the High Plains.
After a quick Google, here is one person’s list of the 10 most conservative major cities. I wonder how the major city of Bristol, Tenn. reacts to the construction of apartments in a rich neighborhood. Well no, I don’t wonder.
Here’s another list of the biggest conservative cities from the same Google search: Lafayette, LA; Tyler, TX; The Woodlands, TX; Knoxville, TN; Frisco, TX; Carrollton, TX; Murfreesboro, TN; Chattanooga, TN; Scottsdale, AZ; Plano, TX.
What do you suppose is the highest population density among those?
John Q 12.28.22 at 6:22 am
“It’s true that there is significant support for NIMBYism from the center and left, but pretty much all of the opposition to NIMBYism comes from the center and left.”
Yes! I tried to make this point in the OP, but apparently without success.
MM, apologies for the clickbait. I couldn’t resist, but I’ve fixed it now.
J-D 12.28.22 at 6:58 am
If you look in a few dictionaries, you can easily find more than one definition of the word ‘republic’ (as, naturally, for most words except the most technical). Americans who insist that their country is a republic, not a democracy, are continuing in a tradition that goes back (as at least some of them know) to James Madison, who was clear that he was using these two terms to make the distinction that many people would instead make by contrasting representative democracy with direct democracy. It’s natural, of course, that this is confusing to Foreignanians unfamiliar with the US tradition.
My response to Americans who say ‘We’re a republic, not a democracy’ is not ‘You’re using the word “republic” incorrectly’ but more along the lines of ‘Why do you think you shouldn’t be a democracy?’, because I’d rather make the effort to get at the substance of the issue than contest terminology.
Matt 12.28.22 at 7:39 am
I’m curious if any of the Australians here have a good idea – or even a sense – of how hard it is to build new housing, or apartments, in Queensland, (Gold Coast or Brisbane, in particular) or greater Melbourne, or Sydney. When I lived in Melbourne for five years there was a housing shortage and rents were high, but there was also a lot of construction going on. Some of this was tearing down old houses (some already large) and building even larger single-family homes, but there were also several apartment buildings – some pretty large – build in and around the area I lived (mostly individual homes) while I lived there. Central Melbourne is famous for its large number of construction cranes, at least many of which were building large apartment buildings.
Australia is a pretty bureaucratic place, so I’d be surprised if there were not lots of regulations on building, but it certainly seemed like a lot of building was taking place.
I now live on the Gold Coast, which has significantly higher rents than Melbourne, and a significant housing shortage. I see a lot less construction going on here, but that might be because the housing crunch is relatively new and so the market hasn’t had time to respond yet, or perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places, or maybe it’s harder (for some reason) to build in this area. It would be interesting to hear from people who know more.
But, at least from Melbourne, I didn’t get the impression that regulation was stoppoing construction. I would sometimes see signs saying that people opposed “inappropriate” building in their neighborhood, but this didn’t seem extremely common.
nastywoman 12.28.22 at 10:36 am
“It’s true that there is significant support for NIMBYism from the center and left, but pretty much all of the opposition to NIMBYism comes from the center and left’.
This is an excellent example for how the US – right (which is always wrong) could twist the narrative -(like in the case of ‘war propaganda)
As isn’t NIMBYism initially and basically ALL about:
‘Nothing Fureign in MY Neighbourhood’
So
NO Fureigners
No Blacks
No Browns
No Refugees
No Poor People -(if they bring down the value of MY Neighbourhood)
NO HOMELESS
and – Heck NOT even a guy who let’s his Garden grow wild in the Front Lawn.
AND then a very stupid – and always wrong – US Right-Winger could absurdly tweet:
‘There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up for the Freedom of Move – but the New Democrats since Clinton have become shills for Corporate Americas Landlords and the Building Industry. What happened to the Democratic Party? Why has it become IMPOSSIBLE to question Freedom of Movement within the Dem Party’?
Moz in Oz 12.28.22 at 12:00 pm
Australia is a pretty bureaucratic place, so I’d be surprised if there were not lots of regulations on building, but it certainly seemed like a lot of building was taking place.
There’s both lots of regulation and not enough regulation. There’s recently been a revision to the building code in NSW but the standards are lax even for the current climate. It’s a compromise between people who care a lot about the cost of changing how they build things, and people who are vaguely aware that the building code exists and want it to be better somehow. Guess which side put in more submissions.
Politically councils are under a lot of pressure to approve more houses to cope with all the immigrants federal government brings in to get GDP growth (note the “GDP per capita” number they never want to talk about). That part is relatively easy.
Actually building an apartment block is a complex dance between profitability, demand forecasts, cash availability, political forecasting and goat entrails. The timetable problem is the number of steps as much as anything: first you buy 3-10 houses making up a block of land (there’s a year or more, possibly decades), then you knock them down, then you come up with a design, then you get that design approved by council, the you advertise it to local residents and pray there’s no powerful NIMBYs etc. Now you can start selling off the plan, using the ~5 year approval window to time your sales to market conditions. The easy part: actually building the thing. A year into that you start the desperate final sales of the remaining units hoping that everything is sold before you get the final certificate of occupation. Once you get that the money comes in and you can pay off all those loans. Hopefully just bank loans.
The easy option is: buy those houses, rent them out to pay the mortgages as you buy up ever increasing numbers, possibly paying people to swap into other houses you own, until eventually you have a suitable block. Hold them until they fall down or are worth enough to cover some of the construction costs (if you buy five $1M houses in a block that’s now an $8M block of land. Now hold it for 10 years and it’s a $20M block of land. But you borrowed $5M and rent means you haven’t accrued interest… borrow against the extra $15M!) Property development is 90% spreadsheets, 10% knowing a guy who can get the construction done.
The really easy way is: buy a house. Build a granny flat. Rent out one or both. Congratulations, you’re a capitalist. Next step: buy another house. Knock it down and build two townhouses. Rent them out. Now you own more rentable units than 90% bof Australian landlords.
Alex SL 12.28.22 at 12:29 pm
J-D,
Agreed that why not be a democracy is the salient question, but a few right-wing ‘mercans do not get to unilaterally change the definition of a long-established term for all English-speakers on the globe. There is a reason why polities as diverse as pre-imperial Rome, the USSR, or Iran call themselves republics, but countries with much more democratic electoral systems than the USA such as Australia, Denmark, or Japan don’t. The reason is that the former lot didn’t or don’t have monarchs, and the latter lot do.
Matt,
I live in the very progressive ACT, and I do not get the feeling that there is a lot of NIMBYism here, or at least not that I would ever see it successfully thwarting developments.
Lots of tall apartment blocks constantly going up near the centre, and lots of very densely packed townhouses going up in my suburb. The latter mostly feature brooding black brick and corrugated iron optics, which will presumably work splendidly for keeping AC expenses down in summer, as well as opulent front gardens comprising as many as four (!) evergreen shrubs on three square metres of tan bark. To that can be added the odd row of free-standing family homes, meaning here that there is 10 cm space between neighbouring houses so that they are officially free-standing and clearly not townhouses, oh no, sir. Don’t kick a toy in there, though, because your child will never get it back. These are more expensive than the apartments and townhouses, of course, but still meant to be relatively affordable (which presumably worked better before rates went up).
I guess what I am saying is that it seems unlikely that local NIMBYist residents or even prospective buyers would have had any influence even only on these design choices, because… yikes.
politicalfootball 12.28.22 at 4:13 pm
Having recapitulated the content of the original post in 29, I want to now rephrase this bit from Chetan:
P.S. Geez. The reason rents are so high has nothing to do with “leftists” and everything to do with “incumbents want to profit from their assets” — and frankly, that’s a right-wing thing (as in “the definition of conservative is ‘primarily concerned with the rights of property’”).
Shorter: Liberals and leftists sometimes take conservative positions.
And that’s what Ebenezer fails to get in 23. Liberals/leftists don’t abandon an accurate assessment of reality in that scenario. Their decision to adopt a conservative view of NIMBYism or desegregation is entirely based in fact. They just choose to adopt conservative values.
(And the business about the leftist beliefs on due process and participation is simply fiction. Ain’t nobody on the left who believes that.)
Tim Worstall 12.28.22 at 7:32 pm
“Now consider a situation where correct and incorrect beliefs about some policy are initially distributed more or less randomly across the political spectrum.”
This does seem to leave out the possibility that there are differences about what is a correct policy.
Take, just to be provocative, the idea that greater equality is better. Perhaps we do know what are the correct policies to increase equality. I tend to think that many are wrong on that point but so what for that. But the insistence that these policies, here, increase equality and are therefore right, while these over there decrease it and are therefore wrong is rather petitio principii about whether greater equality is the goal to be pursued.
It is actually possible for people to disagree on the goal of the policy making process after all.
To be less provocative in the example. Sure, we can increase observed jobs in the domestic economy by increasing trade tariffs. As with JQ’s early work on the Oz auto industry and domestic protection. OK. There’s a certain cost to this in those from outside the country who don’t get to make cars for those inside it. Well, yes, and, but……
What’s the right policy answer? That depends upon the ethics of who we want to favour, domestic workers or all? The connection between who benefits under which policy, sure, there’s a right answer there. But the overall right and or wrong would seem to be ethics dependent, not policy.
And, of course, the answer is different if we decide to benefit consumers, not workers, with our policies.
reason 12.28.22 at 8:17 pm
I think before too many people go down the wrong path I need to point something out. High housing prices actually means high LAND prices. Until you understand that, you are not understanding what is going on. And strict building regulations, doesn’t mean housing becomes more expensive – it mean houses are better quality and land prices will be somewhat less. You really need to look at the importance of location and understand why location is so important. (Not to mention the interest rates and ease of lending for housing – the demand for housing is governed mainly by the availability and affordability of credit.) If you want to reduce the cost of housing you do three things – you reduce the supply of credit for housing, you provide more public housing at reduced rents to reduce the pressure on the rental market and you invest in infrastructure to ensure there are more good (I include cleanup of brown field sites in that) – i.e. well serviced and connected – places to live. Building regulations are well down the list.
reason 12.28.22 at 8:34 pm
Of course this old and weary and greatly misinformed debate is a distraction from the main topic where John is 100% correct. The twin disasters for the right (global climate change and the observed failure of neoclassical economic paradigm) have resulted in them scrambling to justify their existing by amplifying massively any criticisms of the left. They have nothing positive to offer.
Matt 12.28.22 at 9:49 pm
Thanks, Moz from Oz and Alex SL – that’s interesting and useful. (The last place I lived in Melbourne was a very nice older house that was becoming increasingly shabby as the owner was planning on tearing it down and building 2-3 town homes. In a way that was a shame, as it was vastly better built than most things I’ve lived in – cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, kept the local noise out (despite old-fashioned windows), etc., but the only reason I could afford to live there was because it hadn’t really been maintained for a few years, pending its soon to happen destruction.)
anon/portly 12.28.22 at 10:59 pm
Demsas is way off the mark[1]. Biden’s infrastructure package included provisions for multi-family housing to be erected in traditionally residential zone. These provisions were vigorously resisted by Republicans, following the lead of Donald Trump, who used racist scaremongering to mobilise opposition.
More generally, the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is now ascendant among leftists (AOC is a notable example), as well as moderate liberals like Biden. There are still plenty of left and liberal NIMBYs, but it’s Republicans who make NIMBYism a majority view.
So, some stuff in one spending bill (which obviously, rounding to the nearest whole percent, will get us 0% of the way to solving the problem Demsas is discussing) and an unsupported claim (“now ascendant among leftists”) means Demsas is “way off the mark?”
Then we get a bunch of stuff about the national Republican party, which even includes a nod (“Romneycare”) to its own irrelevance as regards the local politics Demsas is talking about. Republican governors in blue states and Republican mayors in blue cities (to the extent they exist) have to govern more like Democrats.
I’m not sure I agree with the part about “liberalism is largely to blame;” I’ve always thought that the popularity of Nimbyism with voters was the main culprit, regardless of whether the politicians in charge are on the left or on the right. But I don’t think JQ has been successful in assigning the blame for homelessness problems in cities run by left-wing politicians to right-wing politicians that would seem in most cases to have zero input into the policies in place in those cities. (At least where both the state and city governments are controlled by Democrats).
Moz in Oz 12.28.22 at 11:44 pm
While I remember: ACT, the neoliberal/libertarian fringe of NZ politics was at one stage suggesting that zoning be removed and regulations relaxed to enable more building in Auckland. When it was suggested that this start in the one electorate ACT held they got very upset. What they meant was “no restrictions in areas occupied by other people”.
reason: High housing prices actually means high LAND prices.
But what’s the causal relationship? High land prices justify building expensive houses, but also cheap apartments. Luxury houses end up surrounded by expensive land because the people who own them will pay not to have neighbours (Toorak has a problem with people buying the mansion next door and leaving it empty!)
Aotearoa is in the middle of a legislated change to force urban intensification and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out (right up to “will they change governments”). But if that sticks, and works, it should significantly increase supply. And in a more orderly way than the Sydney approach of letting people build whatever they like and if complaints arrive they apply for retroactive approval of something that’s blatantly noncompliant.
J-D 12.29.22 at 4:27 am
They don’t get to change what the word means for us; but then, we don’t get to change what the word means for them. In a similar way, speakers of North American (US and Canadian) English don’t get to change what the word ‘biscuit’ means for the rest of us, but we also don’t get to change what it means for them.
J-D 12.29.22 at 4:33 am
Aristotle wrote (in his Politics) that ‘there are cities in which they [the oligarchs] swear, “I will be an enemy to the people, and will devise all the harm against them which I can”‘. Bertrand Russell (in his History Of Western Philosophy) cited this and commented, ‘Nowadays, reactionaries are not so frank.’
reason 12.29.22 at 10:47 am
Moz in Oz
The reason for high land prices is because of easy credit for buying houses and lack of planned infrastructure investment to increase the number of good places to live (and of course low land taxes contribute to it). I think in addition that a universal basic income would help – enabling people to decide to live in cheaper places rather than being forced to follow the jobs. Then the jobs would follow them rather than the other way around.
politicalfootball 12.29.22 at 2:43 pm
I don’t think JQ has been successful in assigning the blame for homelessness problems in cities run by left-wing politicians to right-wing politicians …
This seems like a misreading. JQ is discussing a particular type of policies, not politicians.
… that would seem in most cases to have zero input into the policies in place in those cities. (At least where both the state and city governments are controlled by Democrats).
This misunderstands how politics works in a democracy. In New York city and state, for example, it would be silly to suggest that the election and governance of Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul aren’t significantly influenced by conservative policy goals.
John Q 12.29.22 at 11:51 pm
Tim @37 I’m not ignoring principled disagreements over policy goals, just saying that they are no longer a guide to understanding US politics. If you have principled disagreements with the liberal-left on either policy goals or political analysis, you face an unappealing choice (and, don’t take offence, but I’m pretty sure you have faced this choice personally). You can either abstain from political activity, or you can line up with a bunch of people whose primary motive is hatred of their opponents, and who will happily adopt indefensible positions to do so.
Moz in Oz 12.30.22 at 1:32 am
Reason: enabling people to decide to live in cheaper places rather than being forced to follow the jobs. Then the jobs would follow them
That would work outside cities, to some extent, but most people want to live in cities. Although pretty much by definition anywhere that lots of people move to becomes more expensive (government action can shift who pays the extra costs). You can see this to some extent with pensioners, not only do they have a UBI in Australia, the governments here heavily subsidise pensioner-specific infrastructure (albeit not always well).
Which takes us back to who pays and who benefits from infrastructure improvements. It’s not just the right who’s wrong on this – policy from most parties at most levels is that government pays and developers benefit… suggestions that we tax land value increases are even less popular than fixing capital gains tax or banking regulation. Nick Gruen (Australian economist) has suggested opening the reserve bank to private mortgage borrowers to widespread lack of interest.
I do have some hope that the teals here will be YIMBYs and that could help with those changes (they’re already saying “people like me have to pay for it” which is pretty YIMBY)
Kevin 12.30.22 at 5:42 am
As someone who really wants things to improve on housing, the willful ignorance in so many of these comments is so frustrating.
De facto “opposition to NIMBY” is most prevalant on the center-left because most right-wingers don’t think there is anything to oppose: “you can build what you want on the property you own” is clearly the de facto right-wing position. Berkeley, famously the historic center of the American left, has 113,000 people in 1960, and 124,000 today, despite being the center of the most important new economic region in the developed world for the past half-century. Over the same period, Fort Worth, historically the most conservative big US city, nearly tripled its population. I suspect that Berkeley has a smaller absolute number of poor and middle-class residents today than it did 60 years ago! It quite literally takes somewhere between years and “completely impossible” to build something like a simple two townhouses on an existing lot in basically every center of modern American liberalism. The DSA and the Sierra Club have played active roles in this state of affairs more recently.
And it isn’t that “land costs are high” – it’s that the de facto land component of any house is very high because of limits on what you can build. A single 1/4 acre suburban property could hold seven detached, 2000 square-foot houses with a generous London-style shared yard or smaller urban-style patios. If the “land cost” in, say, suburban California or wherever of a detached house was even 1.4 million, the land cost of each of these new urban homes would only be 200k, if you were allowed to build them. To give another example, this huge ranch (https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/N3-Cattle-Company-ranch-larger-than-San-Francisco-14069717.php) a half-hour by a modern train from both San Jose and San Francisco, 80 square miles, was for sale for over a year with no takers at 72 million USD. That ranch is bigger than Paris and San Francisco, combined, and as close to San Jose and SF as those two places are to each other. The land cost per person if we developed this plot to the density of those two cities? 24 bucks! So why couldn’t it sell? Because every single person in the world understands that the government, even today’s “housing is our top priority” California government, would put you through CEQA and zoning and water conservation and whatever other hell before you could get a shovel in the ground, if you ever could.
For us economists, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The best measure of “is your city NIMBY” is “what is the cost of a plot of size X with the right to build one house versus the cost of a plot of size X with the right to build two”? The land is identical, so the only possible difference is that the “right to build” (that is, regulation) drives a wedge. And in Glaeser/Gyourko’s work, this wedge has become absolutely enormous, largely in very left-wing cities, largely since the 1970s.
Moz in Oz 12.30.22 at 8:16 am
Kevin, that seems very parochial from here. NSW has had right wing governments for quite some time now, and mostly also right wing federal governments to help them out. If they wanted to lower house prices they could have done so.
I’m also somewhat aware of some of the water issues in California, so I wonder whether your “$24/person” infrastructure cost includes solar desalination plus pumps etc to bring water from the coast, or does it just assume that buying “water rights” are all it takes? And what makes you think you’d be building Paris rather than Fordlandia? The Cathedral of Notre Dame alone would use up your entire development budget…
reason 12.30.22 at 4:47 pm
It seems the right wing believe in competition except when it comes to allowing local people to decide what sort of localities they would like to live in. Read the interfluidity link I provided earlier. I believe there should be more cities and a greater variety of cities. Competition is a good thing. Stealing an environment from people who live there is a questionable thing to decide to do. I was recently in Sydney a long time after I was last there. It is now a strange place. Much of it is exactly as it was when I grew up there 60 years ago. And then there are mini Hong-Kongs everywhere built on reclaimed industrial land (occupied mostly by migrants from Hong-Kong or South Korea or their children).
I live in the Rhein-Main-Gebiet and I think that is a better way to live than either Skyscraper cities or urban sprawl. Just build more cities not bigger ones or hyper dense ones (that will outgrow their infrastructure).
Wes 12.30.22 at 5:08 pm
Real estate speculation is the pinnacle of capitalist enterprise – get rich without doing a lick of work. Homelessness in America is the physical expression of capitalist values – all that matters is profit for the owners, human life and human suffering don’t enter into decisions. Jesus died for nothing, I suppose.
reason 12.30.22 at 8:33 pm
Colin – just a question – do you live in Australia – because I find it a bit weird to find someone assuming that inner city terraces are necessarily occupied by lefties. Why do you think that? Some of them are – some of them aren’t.
Also I wonder about Kevin seeming to think that State governments decide planning rules – is that true in the US? In Australia that is mostly decided by local councils which used to be notoriously corrupt. If the financial opportunities are great enough, planning rules tend to be changed. What controls the supply of houses is mostly the economics of the housing market not planning rules. Rich people living in nice neighbourhoods paid a lot of money to live in nice neighbourhoods and want them to stay that way. This is only natural. Changing that neighbourhood by buying up the land and increasing the housing density is in a sense (given that land prices reflect mostly externalities) a theft of the commons. Yet another theft (and monetization) of the commons as so much of modern wealth is.
Also in Germany where I live, in many towns and cities, the highest density (and cheapest) housing is on the outskirts because the planners are required to provide a certain amount of housing for poorer residents and they give priority to maintaining the appearance and attractiveness of the inner city. Does it not work that way in the United States?
reason 12.30.22 at 8:50 pm
Link for Keven – https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/2011/04/8-lessons-on-planning-and-housing.html as it seems he didn’t look it up himself.
Alex SL 12.30.22 at 10:31 pm
Kevin,
Sorry, but that is naive and, as Moz points out, parochially Californian. People have few problems with being ideologically inconsistent if it helps their own ends. In this case, of course well-off conservatives* are often NIMBYist if they fear that affordable housing developments will lower their own property values. I am not following the US news that closely, but in the UK, for example, this is a well-known problem, with conservative members of parliament bragging on Twitter that they managed to scupper housing developments in their constituency.
In US and Australian contexts I am more familiar with the related problem of opposition to renewable energy developments. Here too the modal conservative does not say “I guess that is their property, so they can build what they want on it, and I am not going to impinge on their freedom to do so” but instead “this will destroy our beautiful views and produce noise, lowering the value of my property” or, if they want some cover, “but the birds”. Unless you want to claim that the farmers and wealthy owners of holiday homes who lead these protests are actually ‘centre-left’?
*) Americans may not like it, be they Democrats or the kind of nutjobs who think that Democrats are commies, but the solution to the conundrum is that the USA do not have a right-wing party and a centre-left party. Instead, they have a far-right party and a centre-right party**. Which one could argue is at least more electoral choice than in the 1990s, when they only had two centre-right parties. But at any rate, to demonstrate that the left is more NIMBYist than conservatives you would need to have a noticeable left first, and you don’t.
**) Note also that I am not claiming that Labor parties in some parts are that much better; various of them are at best dead-centre these days, selling themselves as more competent and less corrupt alternatives but never doing anything to actively make the economy more equitable.
politicalfootball 12.31.22 at 6:22 pm
Kevin, people in lower-density areas tend toward conservatism. People in lower-density areas also can profit from increasing density. It’s silly to compare the attitudes of lower-density metropolitan areas like Dallas-Fort Worth with higher-density places like San Francisco. But guess what? Dallas-Fort Worth is left-of-center compared with the rest of the United States. Talking about Fort Worth as some kind of archetypical conservative bastion is ridiculous.
De facto “opposition to NIMBY” is most prevalant on the center-left because most right-wingers don’t think there is anything to oppose: “you can build what you want on the property you own” is clearly the de facto right-wing position.
Your repeated use of the phrase “de facto” is non-standard. It’s possible you don’t know what it means. NIMBYism is de facto (“in fact,” or “in practice”) rooted most firmly among conservatives.
In theory, one might say that conservative possess the libertarian belief that it’s okay to build a strip club across the street from a megachurch, but even among conservatives, that sort of libertarianism is rare. Most conservatives think “I should be able to do what I want to do with my property,” but not “You should be able to do what you want to do with your property.”
As it happens, the New York Times just ran an informative piece on exactly this topic. The story examines a number of rural areas where voters are coming out against wind projects.
Everything the story describes is happening in areas that you’d have to assume are Trump country. The story prominently features Piatt County, which (the lllinois State Board of Elections tells me) went 64-34 for Trump. These are de facto conservatives.
The anti-wind Save Piatt County website is full of rightwing propaganda. And would you really expect anything different? Seriously?
Nobody is contemplating forcing people in Piatt County to host wind farms on their properties — it’s all about the voluntary use of people’s own property. And the residents of Piatt County are often against it — unless they happen to own the property. That’s conservatism.
J-D 01.01.23 at 12:10 am
It’s not clear what relationship (if any) you are suggesting between the niceness of a neighbourhood and the housing density. It’s not clear that there is any such relationship.
Also, at this point I can’t track what the relationship is supposed to be with what John Quiggin wrote originally about right and left.
Alex SL 01.01.23 at 11:06 pm
J-D,
Yes, this has gone rather off-topic, perhaps partly because it is hard to argue against the logic of the original post. (The US right so obviously defines itself primarily around the people it hates that even years ago there were jokes to the effect that if Democrats publicly came out in favour of eating, many Republicans would die of starvation. Or at least one thought it was a joke, and then Covid and vaccine denialism happened…)
But I think there is a clear relationship here: A major factor in the niceness of a neighbourhood as defined by wealthy people is not to have the wrong kind of neighbours, i.e., people who aren’t wealthy, i.e., the kind of people who could only afford to live in denser housing without a large garden.
J-D 01.02.23 at 8:21 am
I can’t be sure that your interpretation is the one that the earlier commenter (reason) intended. However, if somebody did say ‘It’s only natural that rich people want to live in neighbourhoods where poor people can’t live, and if poor people are enabled and permitted to live in those neighbourhoods, it’s a form of theft from the rich people who paid a lot for what they wanted’, I would know what to think about that.
reason 01.02.23 at 3:43 pm
Read the interfluidity piece. The question is what you get when decide on the place you want to live, and how much say you should have about how it develops. Now personally I prefer medium density walking neighbourhoods (where I live is one). But I think this is an important discussion to have. I perfer, as I said the German style system of “Sozialwohnung” quotas. Areas should be required to have a mix of residence types, but some flexibility within that requirement. But my point is that the free market tends to ignore externalities, and that can amount to theft and libertarian economists are the worst of the lot in that regard.
Robert J Waldmann 01.03.23 at 4:59 pm
The Earned Income Tax Credit was introduced by a bill signed into law by Gerald Ford who was not Ronald Reagan.
Before Ford Nixon (and Edward Kennedy) supported a negative income tax but could not agree on the benefit level (see also universal health insurance – Nixon supported an employer mandata (later called Clinton cate) and was to the left of Romney and Obama.
Like Clinton, W Bush, Obama, and Trump, Reagan cut taxes on the working poor, but he did not introduce the earned income tax credit.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ib370-earned-income-tax-credit-and-the-child-tax-credit-history-purpose-goals-and-effectiveness/
TM 01.04.23 at 1:43 pm
Kevin 49: “A single 1/4 acre suburban property could hold seven detached, 2000 square-foot houses with a generous London-style shared yard or smaller urban-style patios.”
Hm, a 1/4 acre is 10890 sqft, how do you fit 7x 2000 sqft houses? Are you referring to two story houses?
More to the point: why are you proposing suburban style detached houses instead of four to six story multi unit buildings? I’m confused because you must be aware that suburban housing density is the problem, not the solution?
John Q 01.05.23 at 3:41 am
RJW, thanks for the correction. Fixed now, I hope.
Please nothing more from, or in response to, Kevin. If anyone still wants to comment on the main point of the OP, as opposed to the specific issue of NIMBYism, feel free.
Tm 01.05.23 at 9:36 pm
J-D: „James Madison, who was clear that he was using these two terms to make the distinction that many people would instead make by contrasting representative democracy with direct democracy. It’s natural, of course, that this is confusing to Foreignanians unfamiliar with the US tradition.“
A good example of „A republic not a democracy“ would be the old Republic of Venice – a state ruled by an oligarch ruling class, neither a monarchy nor a democracy. The US, despite the well known shortcomings of its democratic institutions, is nothing like that and nobody seriously believes that it is. The „a republic not a democracy“ trope is used in the context of justifying the antimajoritarian elements of the US political system. For some reason, many Americans take this trope as a historical fact (maybe due to the quality of history instruction in the public schools).
Still it is very obvious that this is not how Americans generally use these terms. Americans do not generally use the term democracy in the sense of „direct democracy“ as opposed to representative democracy. Americans generally believe that the U.S. is in fact a democracy, even the leader of the democratic world and the cradle of democracy and similar.
Btw another comment of mine on this topic seems to have gotten lost. I hope this isn’t considered OT
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