The problem with even the best economic analysis (admittedly the only kind on this substack) is that people don't live in an economy -- they live in a neighborhood, a community, a town, a nation. Or, rather, they did. At some point, "do I want my town to fill up with people who don't like me and aren't like me even if there are proven economic benefits?" flips from 'yes' to 'no'.
Similarly, many people could double the rent they make from the spare room by kicking out grandma and renting to a hard-working family of four, and can make even more by renting out the garage and building an ADU in the backyard, but not everything is about money. Not for everyone.
I think this article and it’s analysis are best used to explain why this issue isn’t as salient as it should be. If everyone understood the economics of supply and demand, the concerns of local neighborhoods would be drastically overmatched by votes at less local levels. It’s only because of a lack of critical mass that understands the issue that local homeowners are able to exert such outsized influence.
This is a bit like the whole fictitious 'loss aversion' -- we evolved to be wary of hidden downsides, and we're often right (even when we don't have the numeracy to explain how).
But you don't have any right to BAN other people from building an ADU in their backyard. So your comment is 100% fallacious. The question is not about whether you personally want to build an ADU, it's about the negative economic impacts of (unconstitutionally) banning everyone from building an ADU.
* use of the word "fallacious" despite there being no formal or informal fallacies
* reference to the Constitution
* two weeks late
I'm tempted to ask if you are catching up on Substack now that high school is out for the summer but depending on where you live that joke won't land until next week.
Yup. I was way more YIMBY before it coalesced into a movement. The blinders on in this article are insane.
Bryan. It’s just not possible that, at this point, you’re unaware that the reason people oppose developments in their neighborhoods are typically not economic. WE’RE NOT LOOKING TO SELL OUR HOUSE.
I want my kids to be able to ride their bikes in the street, to attend schools nearby that are not insanely overcrowded, to be able to fit on the train during my commute and to not have the already horrible LIRR degenerate further to the point where it’s actually unusable, to be able to walk into a restaurant without reservations, to keep crime low… you know, actual quotidian life instead of theoretically you-pinky-swear-it’s-true that we’ll get more money for our house should we decide to move after you’ve wrecked our neighborhood. Housing prices are a really low priority, in either direction.
Almost all of these problems are either solved/helped by YIMBYism or privatizing transportation and its infrastructure. Riding bikes in the street is more plausible with tolled roads and more walkable infrastructure creating less traffic. Crime will probably go down due to increased development - unused lots make places ugly and studies show that more developed areas have less crime. (He explains this at the time 22:37 here https://youtu.be/QtO4GRbDTmI).
You'll also probably get more restaurants to meet demand. Also, a lot of these problems as re trivial compared to the housing crisis.
"Crime will probably go down due to increased development"
There were several instances in the city I used to live in where the building of apartment buildings in places that used to be dominated by single family homes resulted in a lot of black people moving in and both crime and school dysfunction increased. Fights over school districting zones got brutal. Eventually this also brought down home values.
As to the rest, the YIMBY movement needs to understand that unless it solves the fact that crime and schools, which are a huge portion of real estate value, need to be addressed first its more or less dead in the water. But fighting political battles over crime and schools isn't an area where libertarians are popular and can blame it on approved of groups.
Separation of school and state, or, at least, school choice solves that issue. We already have a solution that many places use (Colorado has a bunch of charter schools, for example) so that is a non-starter issue.
As popular as charter/vouchers are, this is exactly and area where libertarians are popular.
Until recently there was school choice in zero states.
There were a few instances in which some poor families could go to charter schools, which are just another kind of government school run almost the same. When covid came all the charter schools closed for a long time and made kids wear masks just like the public schools.
Now there are a few red states where some people can get back 50% or so of the kids funding to spend on some other government approved schooling. Availability and restrictions vary amongst these states. Funding for this choice is unclear, many bills restrict it to some cap as a % of the population, others haven’t worked out the funding source. It’s unknown if everyone trying to do it would get the money.
In most states and most of the population there is no choice. There is no prospect for getting this passed outside of deep red states.
It’s pretty obvious that the only way to pass school choice is to have the gop win huge in elections, but I don’t see any libertarians prioritizing that. Bryan is in Virginia and his state had an election centered around education, wokeness, and covid it he still didn’t make an endorsement.
Charter schools aren't just another kind of government school. While they are "public", they are run outside the government school system. So they have different incentives than government schools. They are a weird quasi-public/private that I am not entirely comfortable with, but they are different.
They are a step in the right direction, if not the perfect solution or ultimate goal. And you can get them in places that aren't deep red. You would have a revolt in CO for example, if they went away.
It’s a good point and it resonates with my experience growing up in a middle class suburb near an affordable housing development. We knew who the bike thieves and muggers were. It was painfully obvious to everyone.
If you think "riding a bike through the streets" requires ultra low density, then it shows you are ignorant and irrational. You are the people Bryan is referring to. You should visit the Netherlands once.
You might be shocked to learn that there is more than one kind of activity that can be described as "riding a bike through the street". If you assume there is only one kind and that some other commenter doesn't know about European street-bicycling (or third-world street-bicycling for that matter) your problem isn't ignorance, it's something else.
But Brian, why do we assume that house owners have strong economic interests at all behind their nimby-ism? I know I'm a NIMBY by nature (luckily I don't live in a place where it would matter), but my stance does not depend on my economic understanding of things (which is weak). It's pure visual preference. I'm not planning to sell my real-estate. But should the "historical milieu saving" restrictions in my part of town be lifted and new high-rises get built around my house, I would be forced to sell and move to another place, losing a lot of value (whatever it is - costs of moving, having to live father away from workplace, loss of the garden that I've been cultivating for many years and that is just starting to reach maturity). I'd have to move because my visual preferences for the surroundings are very strong. A large percentage of the people inhabiting this part of town are like me - they came for the romantic surroundings (it's not extremely beautiful, but it's kind of romantically old and slummy). They would all have to go. The cost of apartments is not what they care about when they discuss building restrictions.
I have no idea why you think you would lose your garden. If it’s on your property you would still have your garden.
The only thing you would lose with some moderate upzoning is the ability to control your neighbor’s property (which you should have never had to begin with). Your post is 100% strawman. Cringe.
No-no, I actually honestly would probably sell my garden along with the apartment and find another place in a romantic neighborhood (I wouldn't have money to buy a new place and also keep the garden). But I don't mean that just whatever new building gets built would be too much for me. It would have to a number of houses quite big and really ugly, visible from my yard, to drive me out. I'm a bit confused why you don't believe it? Wouldn't you move away if you neighborhood got too ugly for you to tolerate?
I wouldn't like that garden any more. When I look around in the garden, I can see the big picture, which includes the surrounding ugly structures. The picture will turn ugly. I would lose a great part of my interest in gardening there, knowing that this scene will never look pretty again.
I suspect you generally don't look at visual scenes as whole large pictures, right? You will take them apart and concentrate at different parts separately. This is a totally good and legitimate way of doing it, but I suspect that neither of us can easily switch from being large-picture viewer to a separate part viewer, or vice versa.
Why do you expect to have control over other people's property, just to satisfy your aesthetic preferences? You can move away if you don't like what your neighbors are doing.
The thing is that I do have such control - my town council's architecture department has a strong ideal of keeping historical parts of town intact and recognizable as historical parts (e.g. can't build larger than other buildings in the area, old buildings can be demolished only if they're not mendable any more, etc). If inhabitants of the area don't like a new building project they can offer arguments why it should be changed, and a committee of architects will decide the result. If I didn't have such control over my neighbors I would absolutely have to move, with large costs to myself. Since I can, I use my control. Also, my neighbors and the town council have similar control over me. Should I decide to build another house on my plot and rent it out, they may object and ban it. Now, should our town suddenly become insanely popular, everybody trying to move in, like SF, the town council may decide to overrule the architects and sacrifice the historical town parts to fit more people. Then I would lose my control over neighbors, they'd lose their control over me. The current situation, however, doesn't necessitate such a measure.
All I wanted to say was that economic considerations may not dominate NIMBY sentiments, at least not everywhere. These can be esthetic, or a yearning for peaceful traffic for young kids to safely move around on their own, or whatever.
Really, it's amazing that so many economists buy into a collusion story on housing because the collusion isn't even close to being plausible, and a similar story would never be so widely accepted by economists in other contexts.
The easiest way to figure out why people oppose building is to go to a zoning meeting. I have never heard "want my house price to go up" mentioned once, and I don't think people are hiding their preferences.
We just had another kid and we decided to have my wife stay home for awhile. In addition, our private school down the street has purchased a new location, and between a longer commute, higher tuition, and extra kids with less income, we thought we would give the public school down the street a shot. After all, the kids that live on our block their age all go there and the parents like it so it would be good for making friends.
So I register and...they claim they are "full". They did offer to put my kid on a bus to a far away elementary school somewhere else in the district (which is the size of the county) for all the good that would do.
Apparently this is a big problem in the town. I had heard people mention overcrowding in the schools and traffic when schools get out is something I've experienced first hand, but where I come from the school districts are town based and they would never send a kid to another part of the county. There is very little chance of a new school being built anytime soon to relieve pressure so my kid can go to the school they are zoned for. Our town has experienced rapid growth and its grown far faster then the public goods like schools and roads can keep up.
So I totally get it when people oppose new building because the schools are overcrowded. If you think schooling is worth $15k+ a year, and you don't want to put your kid on a bus to a faraway school with none of their friends, new building represents a potential huge loss to your quality of life.
Yes, it's the governments problem for not building enough schools, but that's a whole other can of worms. It seems unlikely for a variety of reasons that people in the town can fix that issue.
Anyway, this is just one of the reasons listed by the NIMBYs in town. I find many of their reasons dumb but others are legitimate. House prices doesn't appear to be a concern at all. Other places I've lived have all had their own particular local issues.
It would be interesting to separate how people living in newly developing communities with a lot of open land feel about this relative to people living in fully developed communities. I would expect it is the fully developed communities where people don't expect to see a drop in rents, and the fairly logical reasoning is that redevelopment will replace old housing units with new units and the development cost and quality of those new units are likely to be higher and command higher rents. It's like the difference between asking - if we increase the number of rental cars in your area by 50%, what happens to rental prices? - vs. if we junk half of the existing rental cars in your area, which are 5 year old Honda accords, and replace them with twice as many Telsa Model S's, what happens to rental prices? Apartment renters are accustomed to seeing expensive new buildings replace inexpensive old buildings, and that upward affect on rent is more immediately visible than the longer term impact of greater overall housing supply.
Don't people mainly want housing regulation so their neighborhood can be as close to a resort as possible? Maybe they don't really care about their house price for their own wealth rather than a way to price other people out of their market. The lower the cost of housing near you the more likely you and your kids are going to have to interact with less desirable people and the pathologies that come with them.
One would think they would take this deal even knowing it was economically costly.
I addressed this same point in a top-level comment because I have the same general view. In the absence of the ability to legally restrict who moves in, the only existing method is to prevent all new building. So that’s what happens.
The way to prevent new building, is to buy up all the empty land around you and then not use it.
I don't think any of us YIMBYs have a problem with that.
I am a property rights absolutist (or near enough), so the way to stop building is to buy the property yourself. Anything else is evil. And yes, I mean that.
I forget where I saw this, but apparently the by-far largest concern people have with new development seems to be a rise in traffic. People really really hate traffic. The idea that they may end up spending less time on the road even if there is more traffic (because some amenity ends up much closer) seems to escape most folks.
If you haven’t read Alain Bertaud’s “Order without design” work yet I strongly advise you to do so. He also did an econtalk with Russ back a few years ago.
An alternative explanation is that people observe demand-induced supply: shifts in demand raise prices, which creates political support for upzoning, which shifts supply. So people interpret the question about building new housing as moving along an upward-sloping long-run supply curve, due to shifts in demand. Hence, new housing is associated with higher prices.
1. But if it did not benefit current owners would they learn?
2. Some people know. I was once in a meeting of apartment owners and 1 person who owned about 10 apartments expressed anger that local politicians were allowing so much building because they said it would hurt their rental income. So could people like that be the marginal voters.
I agree with those who posit that people care about neighborhoods beyond the economic vale of their home. There are real world tests of neighborhoods to see what happens when conflicting values problems arise: clustered Section 8 housing. I have seen first hand when 10% of homes in a neighborhood classified as Section 8 (heavily subsidized or free housing for the poor), crime tends to skyrocket. Of course, this is anecdotal on my part, but it is also the story that tends to be advertised in the local news. Housing costs become irrelevant to good parents when inordinate crime raises its ugly head, particularly violent crime.
So what are some realistic strategies to make the public less economically illiterate? What has been tested and what are the results? If we really want to solve this problem what can we do?
The case for NIMBYism basically boils down to memetic reproduction. Part of your culture/society/information system is a result of your built environment, so if you want that culture/society/information system to reproduce/continue to exist, you need that built environment to stay the same. This is of course traded off against the need for "progress" to provide adequate evolutionary advantage against competing cultures. I'm sure if Bryan had a chat with Robin Hanson about it there would be some interesting insights uncovered.
The problem with even the best economic analysis (admittedly the only kind on this substack) is that people don't live in an economy -- they live in a neighborhood, a community, a town, a nation. Or, rather, they did. At some point, "do I want my town to fill up with people who don't like me and aren't like me even if there are proven economic benefits?" flips from 'yes' to 'no'.
Similarly, many people could double the rent they make from the spare room by kicking out grandma and renting to a hard-working family of four, and can make even more by renting out the garage and building an ADU in the backyard, but not everything is about money. Not for everyone.
I think this article and it’s analysis are best used to explain why this issue isn’t as salient as it should be. If everyone understood the economics of supply and demand, the concerns of local neighborhoods would be drastically overmatched by votes at less local levels. It’s only because of a lack of critical mass that understands the issue that local homeowners are able to exert such outsized influence.
This is a bit like the whole fictitious 'loss aversion' -- we evolved to be wary of hidden downsides, and we're often right (even when we don't have the numeracy to explain how).
But you don't have any right to BAN other people from building an ADU in their backyard. So your comment is 100% fallacious. The question is not about whether you personally want to build an ADU, it's about the negative economic impacts of (unconstitutionally) banning everyone from building an ADU.
* absolutely no awareness of my actual point
* use of the word "fallacious" despite there being no formal or informal fallacies
* reference to the Constitution
* two weeks late
I'm tempted to ask if you are catching up on Substack now that high school is out for the summer but depending on where you live that joke won't land until next week.
Just looks like you never actually read the Substack post that you commented on.
You should learn about urban design and property rights sometime.
Sure thing kiddo.
Enjoy your fallacies.
I will. To help me out a little, would you name one?
Yup. I was way more YIMBY before it coalesced into a movement. The blinders on in this article are insane.
Bryan. It’s just not possible that, at this point, you’re unaware that the reason people oppose developments in their neighborhoods are typically not economic. WE’RE NOT LOOKING TO SELL OUR HOUSE.
I want my kids to be able to ride their bikes in the street, to attend schools nearby that are not insanely overcrowded, to be able to fit on the train during my commute and to not have the already horrible LIRR degenerate further to the point where it’s actually unusable, to be able to walk into a restaurant without reservations, to keep crime low… you know, actual quotidian life instead of theoretically you-pinky-swear-it’s-true that we’ll get more money for our house should we decide to move after you’ve wrecked our neighborhood. Housing prices are a really low priority, in either direction.
Did you actually read the article cited? It doesn't say anything inconsistent with what you are saying.
Almost all of these problems are either solved/helped by YIMBYism or privatizing transportation and its infrastructure. Riding bikes in the street is more plausible with tolled roads and more walkable infrastructure creating less traffic. Crime will probably go down due to increased development - unused lots make places ugly and studies show that more developed areas have less crime. (He explains this at the time 22:37 here https://youtu.be/QtO4GRbDTmI).
You'll also probably get more restaurants to meet demand. Also, a lot of these problems as re trivial compared to the housing crisis.
"Crime will probably go down due to increased development"
There were several instances in the city I used to live in where the building of apartment buildings in places that used to be dominated by single family homes resulted in a lot of black people moving in and both crime and school dysfunction increased. Fights over school districting zones got brutal. Eventually this also brought down home values.
As to the rest, the YIMBY movement needs to understand that unless it solves the fact that crime and schools, which are a huge portion of real estate value, need to be addressed first its more or less dead in the water. But fighting political battles over crime and schools isn't an area where libertarians are popular and can blame it on approved of groups.
"Fights over school districting zones"
Separation of school and state, or, at least, school choice solves that issue. We already have a solution that many places use (Colorado has a bunch of charter schools, for example) so that is a non-starter issue.
As popular as charter/vouchers are, this is exactly and area where libertarians are popular.
Until recently there was school choice in zero states.
There were a few instances in which some poor families could go to charter schools, which are just another kind of government school run almost the same. When covid came all the charter schools closed for a long time and made kids wear masks just like the public schools.
Now there are a few red states where some people can get back 50% or so of the kids funding to spend on some other government approved schooling. Availability and restrictions vary amongst these states. Funding for this choice is unclear, many bills restrict it to some cap as a % of the population, others haven’t worked out the funding source. It’s unknown if everyone trying to do it would get the money.
In most states and most of the population there is no choice. There is no prospect for getting this passed outside of deep red states.
It’s pretty obvious that the only way to pass school choice is to have the gop win huge in elections, but I don’t see any libertarians prioritizing that. Bryan is in Virginia and his state had an election centered around education, wokeness, and covid it he still didn’t make an endorsement.
Charter schools aren't just another kind of government school. While they are "public", they are run outside the government school system. So they have different incentives than government schools. They are a weird quasi-public/private that I am not entirely comfortable with, but they are different.
They are a step in the right direction, if not the perfect solution or ultimate goal. And you can get them in places that aren't deep red. You would have a revolt in CO for example, if they went away.
It’s a good point and it resonates with my experience growing up in a middle class suburb near an affordable housing development. We knew who the bike thieves and muggers were. It was painfully obvious to everyone.
If you think "riding a bike through the streets" requires ultra low density, then it shows you are ignorant and irrational. You are the people Bryan is referring to. You should visit the Netherlands once.
US density isn’t Dutch density. Different demographics, gun proliferation, law enforcement model.
You might be shocked to learn that there is more than one kind of activity that can be described as "riding a bike through the street". If you assume there is only one kind and that some other commenter doesn't know about European street-bicycling (or third-world street-bicycling for that matter) your problem isn't ignorance, it's something else.
But Brian, why do we assume that house owners have strong economic interests at all behind their nimby-ism? I know I'm a NIMBY by nature (luckily I don't live in a place where it would matter), but my stance does not depend on my economic understanding of things (which is weak). It's pure visual preference. I'm not planning to sell my real-estate. But should the "historical milieu saving" restrictions in my part of town be lifted and new high-rises get built around my house, I would be forced to sell and move to another place, losing a lot of value (whatever it is - costs of moving, having to live father away from workplace, loss of the garden that I've been cultivating for many years and that is just starting to reach maturity). I'd have to move because my visual preferences for the surroundings are very strong. A large percentage of the people inhabiting this part of town are like me - they came for the romantic surroundings (it's not extremely beautiful, but it's kind of romantically old and slummy). They would all have to go. The cost of apartments is not what they care about when they discuss building restrictions.
Your definition of "economic" is too narrow.
Right, but I think the host was talking about this narrow meaning of economic ignorance.
Maybe NIMBYs would let up if architects stopped designing ugly projects
They would, at lest in a large part, I'm sure. The situation with ugly projects is a great mystery of our time.
I have no idea why you think you would lose your garden. If it’s on your property you would still have your garden.
The only thing you would lose with some moderate upzoning is the ability to control your neighbor’s property (which you should have never had to begin with). Your post is 100% strawman. Cringe.
No-no, I actually honestly would probably sell my garden along with the apartment and find another place in a romantic neighborhood (I wouldn't have money to buy a new place and also keep the garden). But I don't mean that just whatever new building gets built would be too much for me. It would have to a number of houses quite big and really ugly, visible from my yard, to drive me out. I'm a bit confused why you don't believe it? Wouldn't you move away if you neighborhood got too ugly for you to tolerate?
How does the sight of other buildings inhibit your ability to garden?
I wouldn't like that garden any more. When I look around in the garden, I can see the big picture, which includes the surrounding ugly structures. The picture will turn ugly. I would lose a great part of my interest in gardening there, knowing that this scene will never look pretty again.
I suspect you generally don't look at visual scenes as whole large pictures, right? You will take them apart and concentrate at different parts separately. This is a totally good and legitimate way of doing it, but I suspect that neither of us can easily switch from being large-picture viewer to a separate part viewer, or vice versa.
Why do you expect to have control over other people's property, just to satisfy your aesthetic preferences? You can move away if you don't like what your neighbors are doing.
The thing is that I do have such control - my town council's architecture department has a strong ideal of keeping historical parts of town intact and recognizable as historical parts (e.g. can't build larger than other buildings in the area, old buildings can be demolished only if they're not mendable any more, etc). If inhabitants of the area don't like a new building project they can offer arguments why it should be changed, and a committee of architects will decide the result. If I didn't have such control over my neighbors I would absolutely have to move, with large costs to myself. Since I can, I use my control. Also, my neighbors and the town council have similar control over me. Should I decide to build another house on my plot and rent it out, they may object and ban it. Now, should our town suddenly become insanely popular, everybody trying to move in, like SF, the town council may decide to overrule the architects and sacrifice the historical town parts to fit more people. Then I would lose my control over neighbors, they'd lose their control over me. The current situation, however, doesn't necessitate such a measure.
All I wanted to say was that economic considerations may not dominate NIMBY sentiments, at least not everywhere. These can be esthetic, or a yearning for peaceful traffic for young kids to safely move around on their own, or whatever.
Great post, Bryan.
Really, it's amazing that so many economists buy into a collusion story on housing because the collusion isn't even close to being plausible, and a similar story would never be so widely accepted by economists in other contexts.
The easiest way to figure out why people oppose building is to go to a zoning meeting. I have never heard "want my house price to go up" mentioned once, and I don't think people are hiding their preferences.
We just had another kid and we decided to have my wife stay home for awhile. In addition, our private school down the street has purchased a new location, and between a longer commute, higher tuition, and extra kids with less income, we thought we would give the public school down the street a shot. After all, the kids that live on our block their age all go there and the parents like it so it would be good for making friends.
So I register and...they claim they are "full". They did offer to put my kid on a bus to a far away elementary school somewhere else in the district (which is the size of the county) for all the good that would do.
Apparently this is a big problem in the town. I had heard people mention overcrowding in the schools and traffic when schools get out is something I've experienced first hand, but where I come from the school districts are town based and they would never send a kid to another part of the county. There is very little chance of a new school being built anytime soon to relieve pressure so my kid can go to the school they are zoned for. Our town has experienced rapid growth and its grown far faster then the public goods like schools and roads can keep up.
So I totally get it when people oppose new building because the schools are overcrowded. If you think schooling is worth $15k+ a year, and you don't want to put your kid on a bus to a faraway school with none of their friends, new building represents a potential huge loss to your quality of life.
Yes, it's the governments problem for not building enough schools, but that's a whole other can of worms. It seems unlikely for a variety of reasons that people in the town can fix that issue.
Anyway, this is just one of the reasons listed by the NIMBYs in town. I find many of their reasons dumb but others are legitimate. House prices doesn't appear to be a concern at all. Other places I've lived have all had their own particular local issues.
It's almost impossible to get people to be supply/demand literate when their perceived wealth is dependent on them being illiterate.
It would be interesting to separate how people living in newly developing communities with a lot of open land feel about this relative to people living in fully developed communities. I would expect it is the fully developed communities where people don't expect to see a drop in rents, and the fairly logical reasoning is that redevelopment will replace old housing units with new units and the development cost and quality of those new units are likely to be higher and command higher rents. It's like the difference between asking - if we increase the number of rental cars in your area by 50%, what happens to rental prices? - vs. if we junk half of the existing rental cars in your area, which are 5 year old Honda accords, and replace them with twice as many Telsa Model S's, what happens to rental prices? Apartment renters are accustomed to seeing expensive new buildings replace inexpensive old buildings, and that upward affect on rent is more immediately visible than the longer term impact of greater overall housing supply.
The responses don't vary all that much with context. Supply skepticism is prevalent almost everywhere.
Don't people mainly want housing regulation so their neighborhood can be as close to a resort as possible? Maybe they don't really care about their house price for their own wealth rather than a way to price other people out of their market. The lower the cost of housing near you the more likely you and your kids are going to have to interact with less desirable people and the pathologies that come with them.
One would think they would take this deal even knowing it was economically costly.
I addressed this same point in a top-level comment because I have the same general view. In the absence of the ability to legally restrict who moves in, the only existing method is to prevent all new building. So that’s what happens.
The way to prevent new building, is to buy up all the empty land around you and then not use it.
I don't think any of us YIMBYs have a problem with that.
I am a property rights absolutist (or near enough), so the way to stop building is to buy the property yourself. Anything else is evil. And yes, I mean that.
I forget where I saw this, but apparently the by-far largest concern people have with new development seems to be a rise in traffic. People really really hate traffic. The idea that they may end up spending less time on the road even if there is more traffic (because some amenity ends up much closer) seems to escape most folks.
If you haven’t read Alain Bertaud’s “Order without design” work yet I strongly advise you to do so. He also did an econtalk with Russ back a few years ago.
For some one that can’t take a joke you are pretty funny.
An alternative explanation is that people observe demand-induced supply: shifts in demand raise prices, which creates political support for upzoning, which shifts supply. So people interpret the question about building new housing as moving along an upward-sloping long-run supply curve, due to shifts in demand. Hence, new housing is associated with higher prices.
The central tenet of NIMBYism is about intruding on your neighbor’s property rights.
There’s no reason in the world you shouldn’t be allowed to build an ADU in your own backyard if you bought the land.
1. But if it did not benefit current owners would they learn?
2. Some people know. I was once in a meeting of apartment owners and 1 person who owned about 10 apartments expressed anger that local politicians were allowing so much building because they said it would hurt their rental income. So could people like that be the marginal voters.
Opposition to new housing has to be argued on economic terms because that’s pretty much all you can bring to land court.
I agree with those who posit that people care about neighborhoods beyond the economic vale of their home. There are real world tests of neighborhoods to see what happens when conflicting values problems arise: clustered Section 8 housing. I have seen first hand when 10% of homes in a neighborhood classified as Section 8 (heavily subsidized or free housing for the poor), crime tends to skyrocket. Of course, this is anecdotal on my part, but it is also the story that tends to be advertised in the local news. Housing costs become irrelevant to good parents when inordinate crime raises its ugly head, particularly violent crime.
So what are some realistic strategies to make the public less economically illiterate? What has been tested and what are the results? If we really want to solve this problem what can we do?
The case for NIMBYism basically boils down to memetic reproduction. Part of your culture/society/information system is a result of your built environment, so if you want that culture/society/information system to reproduce/continue to exist, you need that built environment to stay the same. This is of course traded off against the need for "progress" to provide adequate evolutionary advantage against competing cultures. I'm sure if Bryan had a chat with Robin Hanson about it there would be some interesting insights uncovered.