When statists exploit zero-sum situations to drive conflict

From The Left-NIMBY meltdown by Noah Smith.  The subheading is It's getting harder to pretend that blocking new housing helps poor people.

A typical left authoritarian argument which depends on incomprehension of the opposing side's argument, reliance on ad hominem invective, guilt by association rhetoric, and linguistic ambiguity via labels.  

Smith supports the general left agenda to reduce housing costs by densifying cities, breaking down single family residential neighborhoods, improving diversity by subsidizing housing in those neighborhoods, and set-asides by developers for the poor in new construction.  It is a popular recipe among the left and unpopular among actual residents and property owners.

The proposals would reduce property values, destroy the diversity of neighborhoods, increase crime, increase corruption, and usually lead to an exodus from the city.  At least that is how it has always worked in the past.  The capacity to ignore repeated failure and try again expecting different results is not only the mark of a madman but of a utopian ideologue.

The substance of this portfolio of policies is essentially a state taking without compensation.  "We want your nice neighborhood for our statist purposes, regardless of your past investments and efforts to create a community."

Smith is railing about the lack of popularity of these policies even among those on the left.  He also fails to recognize that the issue is substantially confined to a handful of deep blue cities which are currently suffering the dreadful consequences of past bad civic policies.  None of these policies are necessary for new construction or redevelopment in most cities.  And new construction, an increase in supply, is indeed the antidote to high cost housing.

Statist authoritarians are not interested in reducing the cost of housing.  They are interested in imposing control over others, principally by imposing costs and taking value.  Hence the civil war between the YIMBY and NIMBY wings of the hard left.

Smith's entire piece warrants a take down based on empirical argument but that takes too much time with too little return.

Just one point.  Smith gets tangled and lost in the weeds but he makes one claim which is both true and illuminates this as a state taking.

My earlier post quotes several papers showing that new market-rate housing development puts downward pressure on rents, even in the very near vicinity of the new buildings. 

The state is changing the zoning regulations in order to increase building in established and settled neighborhoods in a fashion which will reduce the value of the current property (which is what happens with declining rents.)  It is taking value from the current property owners for some state purpose.

Instead of spending time elaborating the evidentiary sins of Smith's argument, I leave it with one of the commenters, Ethics Gradient who points out that this is fundamentally a zero-sum conflict not amenable to compromise.  

Ethics Gradient

2 hr ago

I appreciate the constructive approach you adopt above, but as someone who has very strong NIMBY sympathies (at the most visceral level, I just like green things, space, and don't particularly like the built environment and basically view urban living in the way that Scott Alexander described his patients in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/ ("These people’s long-term plan was to use San Francisco as a springboard to gain enough money or career capital to be able to achieve their dream of leaving San Francisco.") (I intend sooner or later to try to draft an apologia for what I think are some of the stronger rational points in the NIMBY arsenal) I think you're probably going to find that it's more effective to treat this as a matter of purely zero-sum politics.

With the (enormous, giant, glaring) grain of salt that I can't claim to speak for the NIMBY side at large, I nevertheless think that for the most part the NIMBYs are aware that the basic tradeoff on offer is an alleged increase in the exchange-value of their houses/land to some market-determined value in return for diminished use-value out of the houses/land (because if they didn't prefer their neighborhood at lower density they wouldn't be NIMBYs in the first place). They're well aware of the tradeoff they face, and they're just not interested.

The best offer you could make them would be to ignore (1) entirely (you can't win them over. Singapore is by all accounts a thriving city, people who dislike density still don't want to live there if they can avoid it), instead see if you could guarantee a reasonable buyout value on (2) that I expect would likely be implausibly high (particularly if dezoning happens en masse and concurrently). Of course, it would be a lot cheaper to just not pay the buyout and try to win by a legislative majority (and this seems far more likely to actually happen, procedurally speaking) so from the NIMBY perspective this is back to looking a lot like a zero-sum fight with the YIMBYs - and in turn that suggests that optimal strategy for the YIMBY side is to just crush the NIMBYs at the ballot box by winning mindshare among the uncommitted instead of trying to convert those who disagree.

TL;DR: it's a nice sentiment but I don't think there *is* a way to (at reasonable and plausible cost.[1]) try to get the NIMBYs on your side. They know what's on offer, and they don't want it. This isn't a mistake-theory problem.

[1] In the limit you could always just buy out the NIMBY houses and either leave them vacant or try to find some way to rent them only to nonvoters, (although IIRC (this is not legal advice) that may well be impossible under the FHA or analogous legislation) so that the electorate gets weighted more heavily towards YIMBYs.