The central planner wolf in philanthropic clothing

From Why I stopped being a YIMBY by Simon Cooke.  The subheading is The YIMBY movement has lost its way becoming just another planning-led and illiberal group that believes its vision, a Young Fogey version of Le Corbusier’s cities in the sky, should be imposed.

I keep intending to write an essay and never get around to it because of its sprawling nature.  The core argument is that the governing powers around the world have largely abandoned the straightforward agenda that is the wants and priorities of their constituents.  These, broadly, are something like, and in no particular order:

Steadily growing productivity which leads to 

Steadily growing economy

Steadily growing real income 

Choice of jobs

Good education institutions

Good public safety (personal and property)

Equal application of the law

Respect for human rights (freedom of speech, religion, association, etc.)

Sound money (low and predictable inflation)

Sound public finance

Good public infrastructure

Low cost of living

Better, cheaper, safer pretty much covers it.

These are not novel.  Most people want most of these things most of the time though the relative priorities might shift around over time.  

And the delivery of these things isn't really rocket science either, though it does require discipline and the willingness and capacity to make trade-off decisions.  A public policy not working?  Cancel it!  Benefits from a program of activity less than costs?  Cancel it!  Expenses greater than tax revenue?  Cut them!

Bad government is substantially a choice made consciously by bad leaders.  Citizens should be voting losers out of office on a routine basis instead of giving them more time to continue failing.

Cooke is touching on one example, Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) a movement theoretically grounded in prosocial philanthropy, encouraging land owners in cities to agree to a degradation in the quality of life in their single family residential neighborhoods in order to increase housing available in the city through increased densification.  

It is, and always has been, an emotional argument, slipping in coerced central planning to achieve redistribution aims of central planners, inevitably of one variant form of Marxism or another.  

You want more housing and cheaper housing in a city?  Don't coercively force densification on neighborhoods that don't want it.  Reduce taxes, reduce regulations, accelerate the construction approval process, get rid of corrupt city employees who gum up the building process, encourage commercial activity within the city by increasing rule of law and improved market access and participation.  Implement that plan and you will get more housing.  Not necessarily where central planners think it ought to be.  Not necessarily in the form they prefer.  Not necessarily at the price points they want.  But it will happen on its own and it will be what residents want.

But that is not what the central planners want.  They want their YIMBY central planner wolf in philanthropic clothing.  Which is the point Cooke is making.

I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism. What we get is a twee version of Le Corbusier’s planned urban communities where, rather than brutalist modernism we get a world filled with dull pastiche of Maida Vale mansion blocks. 

[snip]

At first YIMBYs were consistent in seeing that the way to resolve the housing crisis was to increase the supply of land for development. Depending on where you lived there were different priorities - stopping single family zoning, scrapping urban growth boundaries, removing expectations of planning gain and making the permit process faster and more predictable. The feature of all these campaigns was that the way to ameliorate - hopefully end - the housing crisis was to reduce regulation and do less planning. Everywhere the cry was ‘build more houses’.

The problem, however, is that YIMBYs were young(-ish), ideologically left wing and living a childless life in big cities. The simple truth about housing supply (if you increase the supply of land for building, the market will meet need and housing costs will become affordable) wasn’t good enough. Voices began to say it was more complicated and, as criticisms of YIMBYism arose, the YIMBYs backed away from their simple recognition that supply and demand is real and does largely determine values. The new urbanism stopped being about how you dropped house prices and reduced rents by building houses and began to embrace elements of trendy urbanism: a shift to talk about affordable homes not simply homes per se; an obsession with urban densification; and the embrace of environmentalism especially in the form of public transport. As a result YIMBYs stopped simply campaigning for more land supply and more homes, and instead began to talk about planned urban environments, agglomeration theory and using development to make public transport systems economically viable.

Read the whole thing.  YIMBY started out at least with a theoretical good goal - let the market function in order to increase the supply of housing.

In an odd inversion, YIMBY has become the very thing that has lead to the housing crisis in the first place - a central planning nightmare.  It involves pursuing goals incompatible with those listed at the top of this essay.  Central planners want what is ideologically appealing to them and DO NOT want residents to choose different objectives.  So we end up with:  

Imposed densification

More money dumped in mass transit which no one rides

Penalties for cars which everyone prefers

Imposed speed limits to make commutes longer (Vision Zero)

Aspirations towards walkable cities

Imposed DEI principles

Redistribution and subsidy based on race and other preferred attributes

Imposed energy restrictions in pursuit of AGW goals (Net Zero and 100% clean or renewable energy)

Rent control

Set asides (a percentage of new construction set aside for the poor)

Focus on Affordable Housing (and Housing First) rather than focusing on Housing in general

Expanded imposed environmentalism

Anti-family and more specifically anti-children policies (in effect if not explicitly acknowledged)

Higher costs of everything

Less economic growth and dynamism

Less choice/freedom

Listen to your constituents.  Observe rule of law and equality before the law.  Let markets function.  Focus on growth.  Focus on cheaper, safer better.  Everything else - jettison.  It is expensive and deceptive junk making everything worse for everybody.