YIMBYism as Industrial Policy
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
Want to bring manufacturing jobs to the US? You don't need some insane tariff policy, all you need to do is allow people to build housing on land that they own.
Bonus: this will grow GDP by double digit percentage points instead of throwing into another recession https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...
Tax incentives or other reasons to have companies offer jobs in places like Milwaukee or Boise reduces housing pressure on the big cities.
What we used to have is smaller (in area) cities, who were not governed in lock-step, and if housing was needed, entire new cities would pop up (sometimes called suburbs, but check them - often they're their own legal entity).
building out the VHCOL cities is the fastest path to high growth and social mobility. These are far and away the country's most productive places (even for low skilled work) and build up, reducing housing cost, and bringing in migrants and making them more productive turbocharges growth.
We need to unlock our economic centers if we want to survive.
https://www.commercialcafe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites...
It is home to (or adjacent to the home of) the most valuable companies in the world.
The reason it doesn’t look like Shenzhen is because 1) Americans invest a huge portion of their life savings into their homes which means 2) preventing that asset from depreciating is important and 3) scarcity is the easiest way to accomplish that and 4) homeowners have disproportionate political power to do so.
As long as these (by national standards) mediocre houses keep appreciating, homeowners will fight change.
When the Chinese government exercises eminent domain, my understanding is that many people want their homes to be targeted because of the (comparatively) lucrative payouts. Cash neutralizes concerns 1, 2, and 3.
Now that people in California have held their homes long enough, buying them out is a lot more expensive. There are better ways to make the numbers work, though.
The current regime is the endgame: The distortions grew large enough to cause a flip to mercantalist policy-making and winner-loser dynamics. It has a short-term logic to it, but it is also incompatible with where we are. All the biggest businesses in modern America were built around dollar debt, consumerism and outsourcing, and all the workers were likewise tied to either the fortunes of these businesses or the government itself. All it'll do is produce a crisis, which can only resolve through a more holistic policy framework.
And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course.
Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.
If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain.
It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
Whether congestion pricing is welfare-positive really depends on your utility function. I think rich commuters probably like it, and poorer people who need to drive for work probably hate it. My concerns are more related to political accountability, political incentives, and discrimination against non-voters, all of which exist here.
The whole point of a city is all the things you can do. If you don't want to go someplace then what are you doing in a city - there are plenty of nice cheap places to live in very rural areas where you can sit in your house going nowhere. Thus cities need to build infrastructure to such that there is no induced demand and the people there can do what they want.
Note that I didn't specify what they build. Most cities should be building metro systems not roads.
If that's not the case, then congestion pricing works by putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can. This is, in fact, a good thing to do; if not everyone who wants to use the roads can do so at once, because there aren't enough roads, then it's most efficient to give the space to those who most need it by willingness to pay. (Regressive distributional impacts of this can be addressed with the revenue that congestion pricing raises, e.g., by cutting consumption taxes.) Making people sit in traffic does no good at all and is just wasteful.
But if you want not just to eliminate that waste, but to actually increase people's mobility, then you need to build enough roads or trains. Whether that's worth the cost depends, as always, on local conditions.
(To be clear, the goal from this perspective is not to "shift transit modalities"; it's to get people where they're going without making them waste time in traffic. Sometimes that means getting more of them onto trains, and sometimes it doesn't.)
It’s not just easier. If there are no other options, it doesn’t matter what congestion toll you put. The only option is car.
> putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can
Sure, but for most people the demand for transportation before and after normal working hours is inelastic. A smart policy takes that into account and doesn’t inconvenience people for going to/from work.
There’s no reason 280 and 101 can’t also have corresponding high speed rail lines to cut commute times from San Jose to SF down from 2 hours to a fraction of that.
In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.
What is the bad that rivals our current housing crisis and infrastructure depletion?
The common thread is these were done by the federal government.
According to this position, the thing to do is to reduce the influence of bureaucrats and courts over what kind of building is allowed, and instead concentrate authority in a small number of elected officials who are empowered to do whatever they judge best—while making very clear to voters that those elected officials are responsible for whatever outcomes come of this, so that if those outcomes are bad (as judged by voters), the officials won't be reelected. In short, let democracy do its job.
I've been a temp at the equivalent of the IRS in my country. We had unbelievably inefficient processes. Some of it was because of very old software, but most of it was simply procedures, my main example is that the person approving a rebate/delay can't know or guess who's asked for it. I had to check if they were eligible, then anonymize them, then send the data to someone I don't know (to be exact, if it was the first year you asked for a delay i could automatically approve it without a seal of approval). Hopefully nowadays they have better software that helps them do that (explaining he situation without letting too much details slip was hard, but a good use of LLMs I would guess?)
Just this wikipedia page will give you a sense of the scale of just one of those issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_evictions_in_China
But it's quite obvious that any large-scale building would result in at least some of that. There is no way to "figure out" how to avoid all harms or how to avoid at least some broken eggs in the basket. Personally I'm all for North Americans figuring out what a "greater good" is, but the idea that it'll actually happen is laughable; we can't, we won't, we'll simply fester in what we have.
And it works. A great example from Europe: Copenhagen. It's the world's best city in several rankings.
How did it get there? By using every inch to build "affordable housing"?
Nope. It got there through ruthless population control measures, that actually _reduced_ the Copenhagen population: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...
…by the Danish tourism board?
> through ruthless population control measures
The best city people choose not to live or have kids in. Got it.
Nope. E.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/28/10-most-livable-cities-in-th...
> The best city people choose not to live or have kids in. Got it.
Pretty much. The only way a dense city can work is by limiting its growth. The denser the city, the smaller the birth rate (in the developed world).
The best place for kids as evidenced by the birth rate? Suburbs.
If a builder does try to comply with the demand, they come up with other reasons to block construction (doesn't match neighborhood's character, not enough parking, demand yet another environmental review, etc.)
If you want to decrease costs, you have exactly two options:
1. Decrease the city population.
2. Build _more_ cities, or new suburbs.
This is just factually inaccurate? I don't think we can meaningfully discuss anything if you're going to lie about major claims like this.
Outside of 2008, when all the prices dropped, and relatively recently (within ~40 years).