YIMBYs Keep Winning | Hacker News Reader

YIMBYs Keep Winning

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50 pointstheptip31 comments

Interestingly yimbys are often associated with youngish urban lefties but the core principles are actually conservative in nature. Strongtowns.org discusses this a lot. Well built cities are more financially sustainable ones.

It's a circle, one day the left will find out they are on the right. And the right will find out they are on the left.

Politics is really more of a multidimensional spectrum. I don't know why it's so popular to represent the entire political spectrum on one line. I guess that's what is taught in school?

I kind of think it is a line. Think of a tire rolling over the road. We move left and we move right. With a cycle of left right left right.

We will always have conservative views with perspective to the current status. And we will always have progressive or liberal views with perspective to the current status. As we roll one way or the other we will find our self in interesting places we thought not possible.

On top of all of that people of all political affiliation use laws to short slightly achieve goals with results in unexpected outcomes. This is what keeps the tire rolling left and right.

The solution? Logical thought and collaboration excluding those whom hold positions of political power.

Your example is multidimensional: there's left, right, and forward. And it involves a cycle. :)

"Conservative" vs. "progressive" is a more useful concept than left and right, but still paints a limited picture. The meaning also varies greatly from person to person, making these words inadequate.

If we define conservative as "traditional," there is only one major objective: return to past equilibrium. If we define progressive literally as "progress," there are many directions to go, many paths to follow, many lines to draw. These are not balanced categories.

Makes reporting easier since the stories have clean lines for bad and good guys.

You might find https://www.politicalcompass.org/ interesting. They move it to two dimensions.

For the sake of discussion, "authoritarian" vs. "libertarian" is a useful concept. But that compass still uses the utterly useless 'left' and 'right' dimensions.

One axis represents the economic and the other the social dimension. No ambiguity about left and right there. It's obviously only a model and people's actual political beliefs have more dimensions.

The words "left" and "right" can be used in an economic sense. In terms of actual political usage, the definition of left and right varies so wildly among individuals that it has no one understood meaning.

It’s not that interesting, left and right is still on a single line, the 2nd axis only represents how pushy they are. People’s politics are way more complex than this.

That's not how axes work. That's not how dimensions work. And that's definitely not how lines work.

YIMBYs keep making gains, but haven't really won anything yet. I'd say their success is not unlike present climate change policy: there's an emerging consensus on the correct policy, but we're a long way before the problem stops getting worse, let alone solved.

The burst of ADUs in California seems like a win

I wish. YIMBYs have not managed to do anything of consequence. It's naive and far too premature to declare that things are turning in the right direction.

75% of new housing is single family homes. We're building the same unsustainable housing stock, with the same sprawl, that results in crazy prices. This isn't a win.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-single-family-housing-st...

The California ADU "win" is inconsequential. California is down 3-4 million units. We're talking about 20k ADUs per year. California needs to build 300k-400k+ units per year. Building at such a low rate is a NIMBY win!

In my extremely left Massachusetts town NIMBYs just killed 1000 units of new housing and turned them into hundreds of thousands of square feet of lab space. All because they don't want anyone to change the character of the neighborhood. Better to have a lab building than to accept an equally sized building with new people in it.

Heck, in the town nextdoor they just voted against new bikeway on land that is already owned by the state (disused rail trail) and fully paid by the state. All this would have done is raise people's home values. And this isn't a one off, it's happened regularly in the state for years now.

NIMBYs are definitely winning. All of the basic statistics show this no matter where you look.

If one thing comes from ADU related wins being that there is a decoupling of mortgage cost to rent then that should be massively encouraged everywhere. In fact give tax breaks to people who build them even. Basically the idea that in a time when mortgage rates are 7% plus on a 1M house, and somehow you can find a rental for less than whatever that would cost is so unlikely that you have tons of people fighting for the rare case when that happens. But with an ADU it’s just a random additional space that could easily house a couple of people and charging a low rent and low utilities for that seems super likely. In particular imagine the amount of older people who have a large enough back yard and might benefit a bunch from additional income and having a neighbor close by to look in on them occasionally.. seems like with the aging population in US it’s a win win.

what’s up with articles not defining terms anymore? wut the heck is YIMBY? some play on words opposite of NIMBY?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement

What is a YIMBY?

"Yes In My Backyard".

It's meant to be the opposite of a NIMBY, someone who always says "Not In My Backyard" to new building proposals, with the end-result that nothing is ever built.

It's interesting because on of the reasons YIMBY-ism "annoys a lot of people" is because while it's meant to be the opposite of NIMBY, it's really not. It ends up being in practice Yes-In-Your-Back-Yard, which is arguably a less pronounceable acronym (YIYBY). Not as much fun.

There's also the twin to NIMBY, a bit less pronounceable as well: FYIGM - F. You, I Got Mine.

Couldn’t read the whole article because of the paywall but the author pretty much lost me in the first paragraph…

> The YIMBY movement annoys a lot of people who are highly engaged with politics because we are living in a time of intense political polarization, and YIMBYism is not aligned with either pole

Who *wants* polarization and would be annoyed by bipartisanship?? Wouldn’t it make more sense that people find the common ground and unity refreshing? Just a strange phrasing of the movement.

I think you're reading him backwards- he's pro YIMBY, and saying that they are bipartisan and successful, but annoying to highly online highly partisan types.

Note the author is himself deeply engaged in partisan political discourse - he's referencing his discourse (the discourse he frequently engages in) as being the polarizing discourse (which I assume from his comments he finds frustrating)

>Who wants polarization and would be annoyed by bipartisanship?

I think this[0] is the right take, but I'm guessing you haven't read much in the way of political discourse on Twitter, Reddit and Facebook over the last decade or so? Nuance has been discarded and there's hardly any willingness to compromise on anything.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37449692

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