"You depressed about the news, Eddie?"

On YIMBY, pluralism, politics, and plays.

a dumb guy reading a newspaper at the beach surrounded by happy beautiful people who aren’t wasting their lives like he is /dall-e

I have a friend who is increasingly passionate about this one very narrow issue and is thinking of starting a group to advocate for the reforms that they want. The person is a liberal, but the issue isn’t really A Liberal Issue.  I’m not sure how much I even agree with them, but it’s not something I think is evil or anything, and since they’re my friend, I’ve been helping them brainstorm ideas and strategies. (I’m not going to tell you what the issue is because it’s not my place.)

Anyway, last week, we were talking about the politics of it all, and they expressed general anxiety over the fact that some of the proponents of this idea are a specific group of conservatives. Their reasons for it are completely different from my liberal friend’s. I tried to allay this anxiety. Who cares why they agree with you? They’re people who agree with you. You don’t need to sign onto the whole conservative agenda. You guys just agree about this one thing. My friend understood the political reality of what I was saying.

America is a pluralist democracy. To get anything done, you need to get people to agree with you—at least anybody, ideally everybody, but necessarily more than a few. You do not need to be worthy of a Robert Caro biography to understand that movements need to be open to and indeed in search of limited-use allies.

My friend got this, but we had to talk about how all these liberals will be turned off by it. That’s true. We live in a time when people are turned off by the thought of making common cause with people who aren’t on their team. But that’s a bad thing. It’s an unfortunate reality that you just have to deal with.

I thought of this yesterday when this article about how the YIMBY movement needed to speak out on Palestine was making the rounds. 

The YIMBY movement is about zoning reform so that people in the United States can build more housing. It is the cause about which I am most supportive. Build, build, build!  This is the Ben Dreyfuss agenda for a better tomorrow.

A lot of people agree with the YIMBY position: Developers, libertarians, economists, and people who want rent to be cheaper and housing to be more affordable. I don’t know if Trump is a YIMBY. He might be a NIMBY because he’s a racist but he’s also a builder, at least in theory.

NIMBYs also come from all parts of the ideological atlas: Racists, environmentalists, stupid people, historical preservationists, limousine liberals, and socialists, too. The socialists hate it because developers are YIMBY and developers are capitalists and capitalism is Evil™. They gussy up their objections in some bullshit about how instead of letting people with means and desire to build buildings that increase housing supply, we should do nothing until someone finds a magic lamp and is granted three wishes from a genie and uses one of them for building a bunch of wonderful lovely housing projects or whatever.

In short, this is the increasingly rare sort of debate that shuffles ideological cohorts. So what’s the single most unproductive thing YIMBY advocates could do? Drink cyanide? Yes, probably drink cyanide. But the second most unproductive thing would be to wed the YIMBY movement unnecessarily to a hugely divisive issue like Israel-Palestine.