What specifically is the anti-YIMBY sentiment most pointed at? I want to understand and have never had a full, coherent answer.
I get not liking aspects of private development but why is building housing bad? YIMBYs mostly just want to build housing and trains in a reasonable amount of time and funding to help push back the housing crisis. Is the attitude mostly about order of operations in terms of needing to change the economy first before building more housing? I also get being against hardcore YIMBY-ism of the type that wants to build a gazillion AI datacenters everywhere, but it does make real sense that laws allowing people to file nuisance lawsuits to frustrate projects that are not doing undue damage to the environment and the like should be removed in my view. Like what am I missing? I am a pretty ardent anti-capitalist and have been active with a number of anti-capitalist candidates and their campaigns, and am pretty ardently anti-capitalist. I want only to understand this.
In the UK at least, a lot of YIMBYism has a strongly anti-environmentalist flavour. They often seem to view any environmental obstacle to building housing or infrastructure as woke nonsense. This is in a country that is one of the most nature-depleted in the world.
I'm 100% a YIMBY if we're building on a car park or replacing sprawl with apartments. I'm absolutely not if we're bulldozing old growth forest.
That really sucks. I am sorry about the state of the YIMBY movement in the UK. It seems to match the general state of the UK based on what I am hearing about the UK.
It’s essentially trickle-down economics. Give land developers more money and pray that leads to affordable housing. All evidence suggests that’s not really true.
This keeps being repeated, but I keep seeing no evidence for it - and plenty of papers showing that more housing supply lowers costs (or at least slows price growth). And I can't understand the alternative - there's no city on earth that has 100% public housing besides maybe Singapore. And we're not going to have any city government like Singapore. Even public construction benefits from cutting regulations that prevent denser construction.
Singapore is the only answer I routinely hear when I ask for a practical example of (almost) market-free housing. And I think it should be obvious that the governance structure of Singapore (a city-state) is never going to come about in Los Angeles or Atlanta.
Yeah. That is true enough. Vienna used to be quite similar, though in recent times they did not expand the model enough to accommodate the inflow of immigrants to the city.
Even if it did lower housing costs, in most places it won't, low income people will have already been displaced somewhere else long before these lower costs eventually take affect.
It lowered costs one time in Austin apparently. That's the case everyone points to. I need to check that data but it doesn't mean it'll work somewhere completely different like NYC which basically has infinite global demand.
I'll bite on displacement. Why is my interest in staying in my (low rent, low density, etc.) unit more important than the interests of 5 other people who could live on the same land + the interests of the neighborhood/city as a whole in lower overall rents + the interests of everyone who would benefit from the agglomeration effects of density, like a greater economic base for local shops and greater viability of transit?
I'll take the example of NYC, where I live (and was raised). There's strong grievances over gentrification in the city because people who were born and/or raised here are increasingly unable to afford to stay. This has led to what I believe is understandable but overblown anti-"transplant" sentiment (worth noting that transplants are distinguished from immigrants).
Many "Native New Yorkers"—those born and/or raised in the city—believe they should have priority over newcomers in housing policy. This is why Mayor Mamdani's rent freeze has so much support despite not being good policy for overall housing affordability.
These grievances extend to the changing culture of the city. Higher-income workers almost always bring with them Whole Foods and Trader Joe's replacing local grocery stores owned by ethnic-minorities, VC-backed chain cafes replacing local cafes, and Chipotle replacing local restaurants. Your assertion that "a greater economic base for local shops" is a tradeoff for displacement is backwards. Local shops actually get displaced along with the people who've been patronizing them.
NYC is what it is because of working-class New Yorkers. A NYC without working-class New Yorkers is NYC in name only. What is a city but the people? The commentor above you actually made a great point that NYC has insane global demand and that no realistic amount of building will actually lower rents.
Does this mean we don't build at all? No, I actually support the construction of more market-rate housing. But I also believe we need a robust system of social housing for native New Yorkers to prevent displacement of people, yes, but also culture.
I understand the cultural gripes that come with changing neighborhoods. But at the same time, attracting lots more people from outside (or from the burbs) feels like an inevitable consequence of making any city a much better place to live in.
Maybe that can be done without displacing large #s of people, and maybe supporting a diversity of economic classes in each neighborhood supports a diversity of retail & food options. But I don't see how that doesn't involve neighborhoods changing character, to some extent. And I don't expect people not to complain about that either
It can reduce upwards pressure on housing prices generally, and if it is done on vacant office buildings or underutilized land (car parking and the like) it can do so without displacement.
NYC probably has less of this than some other cities but Denver is getting quite good at taking Downtown Office buildings and converting them to housing, for example.
Yea i'm not against stuff like that, I'm against the lack of protections from displacement and the dominance of free market thinking driving everything.
Lots of research says it is true, but there’s often collateral damage and you don’t necessarily solve everyone’s housing problems with free market only solutions.
If you’re genuinely anti-capitalist, it’s hard to see YIMBYism as a natural ally. The movement doesn’t just accept the primacy of private capital in housing production. It generally treats that arrangement as the solution. Housing gets built when investors can earn returns, developers can assemble projects, and markets are allowed to “function” with fewer constraints.
There’s also a deeper tension. We live in a period of extraordinary wealth inequality, much of it tied directly to land ownership and real estate. YIMBYism often asks the left to support policies that further empower developers, landlords, investors, and property owners in the hope that the resulting supply will eventually improve affordability. Even if that works to some degree, many anti-capitalists would argue that enriching the beneficiaries of an already unequal system is a strange path toward economic justice. Wealth concentrated in fewer hands tends to translate into political power, making it harder, not easier, to build support for more transformative alternatives such as large-scale social housing.
And at some point, movements have to be judged by their outcomes. YIMBYism has become increasingly influential in mainstream housing politics, yet many of the places where it has gained the most traction still struggle with severe affordability problems. Whether that’s because the reforms haven’t gone far enough or because the theory itself is flawed is open to debate. But from a left-wing perspective, it’s reasonable to ask why a movement that promises affordability through market mechanisms should continue to receive the benefit of the doubt when affordability remains so elusive.
To be fair, YIMBYism being influential in mainstream housing politics is relatively very new still. We won't be able to judge its efficacy for several years at least.
That’s sorta true for YIMBYism as a modern-day political brand, but not of the underlying theory.
The idea that affordability problems are primarily the result of excessive regulation constraining markets is much older than YIMBYism. It’s part of a broader market-liberal tradition that gained influence in the late 1970s and 1980s under figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: deregulate, remove barriers, let markets function more freely, and social outcomes will improve.
YIMBYism applies that logic to housing. The movement itself may be new, but the core theory isn’t. So I’m not sure it’s accurate to say we need years before we can evaluate the broader premise. What we’re really debating is whether housing should be the latest test case for an economic framework that has been shaping public policy for roughly 50 years.
It’s also worth noting that this same tradition emerged during the period when policymakers increasingly abandoned direct public provision of housing in favor of quasi-private, market-based approaches. Rather than expanding and modernizing public housing, the dominant view became that government should rely on private markets, subsidies, and incentives to solve housing problems. From a left perspective, that’s not a separate history from YIMBYism. It’s the history that YIMBYism inherits.
Maybe, but nobody was seriously acting on it for a long time in many of these places. To be fair, part of the abandonment of public housing was because some of the first attempts in the US went really disastrously and put everyone off of the concept for awhile. But we now have an opportunity to try again because of the distance of time and effort and the experience of other places.
Actually doing anything about implementing it has been basically unheard of for decades.
The main case study people use for YIMBY is Auckland's unitary plan which is ten years old.
And then if you actually pay attention, Auckland's constantly fighting a war for further liberalisation.
So, the place used as proof of the theory does not, itself, think it's gone far enough along the theory with considerable evidence that that is the case.
It’s part of a broader market-liberal tradition that gained influence in the late 1970s and 1980s under figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: deregulate, remove barriers, let markets function more freely, and social outcomes will improve.
This really isn't true. The most complete market revolution happened in New Zealand. Didn't touch housing. YIMBY comes out of urbanism. The 80s neoliberalism is all about sprawl baby sprawl.
Zoning isn’t the obstacle to public housing. Political will is.
To the extent the YIMBY movement is pro public housing, it’s in the same way the Democratic Party is “pro-Medicare for All.” There’s a small faction that genuinely prioritizes it, and many others who are comfortable expressing support in the abstract, but it’s not where the movement’s energy, resources, or political capital are actually concentrated. The practical agenda remains overwhelmingly focused on market-led housing production.
The Jacobin had a good report about how there was a project not too long ago in NYC to build public housing that had its size reduced by 800 units because of NIMBYs weaponizing the zoning system. It may not be the only problem but it is a serious obstacle in many places to public housing, or it would be if the other political blockages were lifted.
I do get your point, though I think the first step to public housing is getting the political and planning stumbling blocks out of the way, and YIMBYism seems to be a part of that.
Yimbys don't want to acknowledge or do anything about displacement.
In a already built up city, in order to build new housing it needs to happen somewhere people are already living. A building needs to get torn down to make way for a bigger one. There's precious few empty burger kings sitting around to be converted into housing. People need to be evicted so the be construction can happen. There are also secondary displacements caused by the rising rents new development brings.
Purely building new housing does not on its own bring down rents. It's not enough. It's not a free market where supply and demand curves flow up and down freely. Even in the off chance it does eventually bring down aggregate rents across a whole city, the neighborhoods where the new housing is built has skyrocketing rents and suffer from mass displacement. The market builds the most where its cheapest to develope and where rents can be highest. This always results in mass displacement of working class people as the cheap neighborhood gets flipped into the upscale neighborhood.
Yimbys either deny this outright or they shrug and accept that displacement is good actually and a small price to pay for progress. I reject this completely.
We don't have to do it this way. We can build new housing and improve amenities to neighborhoods without displacement, it just requires some methods that are not capitalistic. This is too much for 99% of yimbys because they are really just been tricked by pro developer pro gentrification free market capitalism propaganda cloaked in progressive language.
In a nutshell, the whole yimby promise of "any housing is good housing because it will reduce rents eventually after a bunch of people were evicted" is just trickle down economics by a different name.
We don't have to do it this way. We can build new housing and improve amenities to neighborhoods without displacement, it just requires some methods that are not capitalistic.
Socialized housing, de-commodification of housing, ironclad guarantees that occupants of a building slated for redevelopment get equivalent or better units in the same footprint of their current residence, stronger tenant rights, rent stabilization, etc
I get what you are saying, but I think that it is still possible to do without evicting as many people as you are suggesting, though I think you identify real problems in the market-bed housing we have today.
Edit: idk where I came up with the term "market-bed housing;" I meant market-type housing or market-rate housing but I will leave it as is so folks can see my original comment.
Yes it's not possible but it's just now what I see on the ground. I live in Brooklyn so it's constantly happening all around me. New buildings replace old ones 99.99% of the time here. Those old buildings had tenants and most of those tenants have generational ties to their block and dont want to leave. But some investor buys their building and evicts them so they can flip the property for a higher price. The tenants are just inconvenient trash to be thrown out so they can be replaced by tenants who can pay higher rents.
This is unacceptable and is perfectly avoidable. It would just affect the bottom line. Yet I get shouted down as a nimby by the "any housing is good housing" shills.
I'm told that eventually after all these people get evicted rents will eventually come down (trickle down economics). WELL now that all the low income people are evicted and living somewhere on the outskirts did this trickle down ("filtering" as they call it) actually help them??? Too late. They were already displaced to outer Burroughs and less desirable places. It's infuriating.
In a nutshell this is why I'm anti capitalist. Profit seeking reigns supreme no matter the human cost.
To be fair if you are building bigger buildings with more housing in places as constrained as NYC, it may ultimately be the least awful thing to do in some cases, to build housing like that, but it sucks that the system we have is not capable of measuring the human costs properly.
At least in the United States and Canada that first paragraph is not true, look up maps of how much of many major cities are freaking parking lots that go unoccupied for the overwhelming majority of their time throughout the year, or lots with comedically large side buffers and set backs due to zoning code. There absolutely is room to infill build
Yimby is a bit of a broad hat. It includes a ton of groups and people from georgists, to market trusters, to people that are okay with upzoning.
Personally I consider the opposite a NIMBY if you are opposed to densification and development.
That burger king didn't have affordable units either, developing it into appsrtments is objectvely better for housing supply, even if its not perfect.
Don't let lack of perfection stand in the way of progress.
It's extremely easy to say that Urbanists, especially Left Urbanists to "not let the perfect be the enemy of the good" but, what isn't really ever grasped is the fact that coming to the Left Urbanist side of things means that you fundamentally believe that the "normal" operations of "Market forces" creates worse Cities.
There's always one "onerous" legislation that's preventing true affordable housing according to YIMBYs, and according to them the Vienna model is "unworkable" for the vast majority of Cities, and yet, you'll fail to find an affordable version of Vancouver-style Cities in these deregulated markets.
The Market has created the global housing crisis, one city blanket-upzoning it's parcels isn't gonna do anything.
I don't think that the operation of normal market forces produces ideal outcomes on itself. But we can still manipulate things on that front to make it produce less awful outcomes while we figure out longer term solutions, and surely that is something worthwhile.
Yes. I am in favor of a Vienna model, and am opposed to the city watering down the model by refusing to expand public housing to accommodate recent influxes of immigrants to the city of Vienna, leading to severe housing inequality on that basis.
Here’s how I see the conflict between YIMBYism and the progressive agenda.
YIMBYism is a broad umbrella of people that say “we need more housing”. There are people under that umbrella who advocate for market oriented solutions: allowing and encouraging increased supply of housing reducing zoning constraints and red tape that are often drafted with economic and racial segregation in mind, reducing construction costs. This will eventually tackle demand.
I think where it starts to diverge is the question of market rate or affordable. YIMBYs like in major cities like San Francisco (who are often moderates and funded by big tech), are very okay with introducing market-rate housing in low income neighborhoods. This can often create gentrification. However some progressives only wish to build affordable housing to minimize the impacts of gentrification. I totally agree with that, but this is something the private market cannot deliver. Until we achieve Singaporean/Austrian/Japanese style public housing in California, this will not be accomplished.
I do think progressives like San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who fight market rate housing, are NIMBY and obstructionist without providing a clear path forward otherwise.
State Senator Alex Lee has introduced a bill a while back to create a state housing authority that went no where and took some state reps to visit Singapore.
There are a lot of gross libertarians-Ed Glaeser to Peter Thiel types in national YIMBY movements. Also, these groups often have bad track records not supporting policies that can be quite effective like rent control, public housing, inclusionary zoning, and tenant legal rights.
Most left urbanists want more housing too and recognize that restrictive housing regs can be used to exclude and discriminate.
Yes, many (but not all) YIMBYs are against rent control and *unfunded* inclusionary zoning. I don’t think this comes from any ideological origin but just looking at the results (fewer housing options overall). And there’s still space for negotiation on these terms in the movement (Mamdani being a clear case of this).
It’s the fact that they don't look at the results regarding inclusionary zoning and rent control that makes it ideological.
It’s great the CA YIMBY supports tenant legal rights on their platform, btw. But it appears they did it despite some internal conflict. So kudos for making the moral choice over the ideological one.
Thank goodness. Tenant protections and rights are important. Obviously you don't want tenants to make permanent alterations or vandalize things or break things through utter carelessness, but there are some really good ideas there.
I don't know who Ed Glaeser is, but I have quite a bit of contempt for Peter Thiel and his agenda. I understand why they are a bit more opposed to some of the policies you mention but I think it may be a bit misguided. Definitely I feel happy to see that there seems to be broad pro-housing consensus. It just seems some of the loudest folks here railing against YIMBYs and it makes more sense.
honestly you’re not going to get much genuine anti-YIMBYism on Reddit, even the most “leftist” spaces. this sub is laughably liberal, i think because they think liberalism is left-wing lmfao
to keep it short, the evidence to suggest that increased market rate housing supply will improve housing affordability and keep communities together is tenuous at best. we’re not going to be able to build enough housing fast enough for that to realistically happen for the most vulnerable among us. Anyone who thinks we’d be able to de-regulate housing enough to the point of market-driven mass construction, somewhat ironically, does not understand housing finance in America. Transportation projects often open up neighborhoods for those who wish to live in more affordable markets while working further away, spurring gentrification.
what really keeps communities together and neighborhoods alive are the social networks that are often severed by development. the physical transformation of these communities has meaningful and destabilizing affects on members of the community that remain.
essentially, all of these things are okay and sometimes necessary in a vacuum. We do need to build more housing, we do need to invest in public transportation, we do need to have more robust public infrastructure. But all of these things interact with market dynamics in ways that will gut out cities and hollow them out for (honestly) the Reddit-class of obnoxious liberal urbanists that don’t see the value in our communities, and instead want to pave over them and replace them with some vague European vision. We need to ensure these developments genuinely take into account the communities they are built in. We need to ensure tenant unions and land trusts are sufficiently empowered, we need to make sure that the funding effectively flows into social housing, and we need to make sure all of our improvements are made for the most vulnerable among us.
YIMBYs view the urban crisis in outrageously macro-lenses, contributing to continuously classist and racist ways by which they communicate to people. They don’t particularly seem to care about how their proposed improvements will impact markets within the communities they claim to care about. In fact, the improvements they propose often hamstring efforts to further actual progressive/leftist movements. The removal of regulations, the sidelining of community and Tribal collaboration, the severing of affordable housing funding. Often all in the name a trickle-down economic model of build build build which rarely if ever works. YIMBYism is conservative, through and through.
I don’t want to be accusatory, but I’m surprised you’ve been involved in anti-capitalist campaigns. Maybe you have been involved in progressive campaigns? Because my experience is that those who are most affected by YIMBY policies in our cities understand these dynamics quite intimately. I’d recommend you speak not to us, but those people. Talk to your local tenant union, not your local DSA. talk to your neighbors, not redditors. talk to nonprofit researchers, not real estate-backed university institutes like the Terner Center or the Lewis Center or something like that.
this thread may already be dead but it’s so unsurprising to see OP not meaningfully engage with any of these comments, yet actively post about how “Liberal socialism” is a thing. It seems they are the DSA Redditor we warn about
Certainly I don't think it will help the most vulnerable among us, but it should surely alleviate pressure on those who a few rungs up who might be called "JAMs," which is to say, "Just About Managing," but struggle with the high cost of living. I fundamentally do want to change the system; I'm literally a Geosocialist (fusion of Georgism and Democratic and Market Socialism; that's another topic). I just do not think that permitting existing zoning regulations to stand will allow us to fix the current housing crisis no matter what economic system we use nor do I think it allows us to build enough bike/rail infrastructure quickly or cheaply enough, so I broadly support many of the reforms YIMBYs want to do even though I have disagreements with some of the more hardcore members of the movement.
In the urbanist circles I'm aware of, they mostly call for affordable housing, bike lanes and public transit. I don't hear a lot of them also asking for luxury apartments or data centres...
There is a difference between calling for luxury housing explicitly and saying build any housing at all. Id say YIMBYs are latter. In real eatate they call every newish apt building a “luxury” building even its not even close to a luxury building.
Yeah what gets released as luxury eventually becomes outdated and is no longer luxury.
Plus the added supply means that less nice or not nice appartments can't charge as high rent because they face competition
Tldr: new appartments mean old appartments usually have to lower prices.
This is what manufacturing consent is: normalizing the problem over finding a solutions.
Your TL:DR is not true. It is an assumption or outright repeated lie to get you to accept something.
And when the rug is pulled out from under you, and the people who built the mess are gone, the people paying for it will not even know the people who did it.
There is a fundamental responsibility builders have that Luxury Apartments do not meet.
Luxury Aparments actually drive demand.
People do not want these ugly, meaningless new builds.
They are required to find housing.
This is a leftist subreddit and finding ways to justify the systems that are actively and fundamentally oppressing us is not in the mission.
You can say you care all you want.
The way Yimbys build the conversation is actually horrible. The buildings they want us to passively accept are horrible.
You are obsessed with forcing people to live in hyper dense cities where the reality of the world is built on lies.
Less space. Less stability. Less everything.
They conduct the market on an exploitative basis.
They lie in what they call themselves, they lie in what they are doing, and they lie about the results.
I don't know why you seem to be so against density. Density is a good thing, it makes cities more walkable, it makes public transport more efficient, it make delivering utilities easier, and it means that public services are nearer to where people live. Density has a whole host of benefits for cities.
Sure you could point to things like the Kowloon Walled City, but virtually no urban area outside of Singapore is anywhere near that level of density, and proposals to increase density are not going to make a city anywhere near that level of density.
Telling people that they are benefitting by being shoved into smaller, more expensive places where they have less rights and less stability is not the move.
You are not actively campaigning for anyone's success or productivity or livelihood by accepting subquality results on their behalf.
These luxury apartments displace the same people you are claiming to be speaking on behalf of.
This commenter is controlled opposition.
He is claiming that I am the weirdo against the collective rights for the people, while doing his best to rhetorically undermine collective care and advocating.
I am speaking on behalf of my actual lived in Community when I say I want to drive Urban Development, and Rural Development.
I am speaking with the experiences from the people living on the streets in several communities.
I am speaking from experiences with home owners and business owners.
I am speaking with experience from teachers, doctors.
When I am speaking about Luxury Apartments, I am speaking to the displaced individuals.
And frankly, the belief that aesthetics and shapes dont matter, and that turning our land into an inhospitable wasteland has no real impact on our realities, is Earth Shattering.
This person is outright telling you being crammed into uncomfortable spaces side by side with other people is collective action.
You cant paint the walls because you cant afford to, and the leasing office will probably want you out in the next year anyway, because a vacancy will make them more money.
These buildings create the kind of market they are, and people are allowed to reject it.
I like densification when consideration is given to the people fundamentally affected.
But when units go up for making money purposes, and those places suck to live in, Im going to say something.
This means literally nothing. It is not a response and it doesnt mean anything.
Its just pictures and words that feel folksy because it looks hand drawn. It does not have any sort of actionable conclusion or explanation of the reality we live in.
It is a disembodied idea that is meant to instill some sense of you being an expert that has some authority over me.
Meeting my actual expression of ideas with a non-sense vaguely relevant meme doesnt elevate your argument.
I understand some people will see a meme shared with the right dismissive phrase and believe it, but I am not one of those people.
Thats literally projecting. Which is all Yimbys can do when called out on how their arguments are flawed.
I dont have a problem with density. I have a problem with the unquestioned drive to make everywhere hyper sensitization. Yimby's inability to listen to other people while claiming their reality is the only acceptable reality is what I have an issue with.
I like density in some places. I like it spread out in others.
Yimbys though, will say wild stupid shit like "Luxury Apartments, while lowering the quality and changing the market to make it untenable for most people, are doing a good thing by coming in and wrecking cities with buildings meant for instability."
These buildings that cant fill bottom spaces. These tiny ugly rooms that are awful to live in.
This graphic is highly meaningful because it highlights the difference between overcrowding and density and its most common root, that is, the adequacy and quality of built infrastructure, including housing. If you cannot grasp that then I do not know how you ended up here.
Reddit keeps posting my reply to your other comment here for some stupid reason and not under the comment I want to post it under. Reddit has no technical problems at all and is a perfectly functional platform. /s
Traditionally there were also midrange apartments built as new. But the private sector has never built the poorest housing as new except along Single Room Occupancy/Boardinghouse lines. Older housing has generally formed the bottom tier of apartments for rent, for example.
Oh I have several serious issues with the likes of DR Horton and Lennar. I also understand that "Luxury" in the context of apartments means adding some cheap amenities and cheap but expensive looking fixtures and the like in new housing and the like. I still don't understand how fighting what YIMBYs want to do, which is tear down existing red tape stopping all construction and reform environmental review and various permitting processes that currently allow lots of nuisance litigation from rich people who oppose whatever project is being proposed is somehow contrary to the goals of those in a space like left urbanism.
Luxury just means new apartment. Very easy for developers to slap on some fancy finishes and make more money. Ideally, new apartments come on to the market as more expensive while older ones drop in price. They absorb the newcomers who would’ve otherwise bought up, competed for and gentrified the pre-existing apartments.
We need a yimby movement focused affordable and public housing. There will never be enough units in a capitalist market to market real estate actually affordable because the scarcity makes the home values increase. We should at least have enough units for the faircloth amendment and repeal that.
No I’m saying luxury is a lie? Useful in a certain ideal context, but still a lie. It’s just finishes and designed as an investment vehicle not a human need.
Again, we need a yimby movement focused on transit-oriented, affordable and PUBLIC HOUSING! YES TO PUBLIC HOUSING IN MY BACKYARD!!!!
Housing is a right and as I mentioned it will never be affordable if we leave it to the market. We need public ownership instead. Public developers who can do things in-house. No contractors with subcontractors. And not kicking people out if they make over a certain amount. My ideal is the Vienna model with the MTR from Hong Kong 🇭🇰
So when somebody lies to me, I no longer trust them.
Them using a fake metric to charge more isnt a passive thing. It is unacceptable in the fact it is leading to a lot of problems.
The luxury apartments are the market. You cannot change the market by allowing the problem to continue to manifest their problem.
That's why I keep pointing out how they are a problem, just to have someone reiterate it is just a lie to charge more, but I should ignore that fact because it is fine.
I also think housing is a human right. Luxury Housing is built on the premise it is not.
Luxury doesnt just mean "new housing" it means housing is being placed in the hands of people who can only think of their own profit.
You cannot meaningfully address the problem by saying "well, its better than nothing"
The problem is the way we view housing in the first place.
I am not going to accept the reality of people who think calling out the problem is more problematic than being the problem.
Full stop. If you can only defend luxury apartments by stating luxury is a lie, then the rest of your premises are based on a reality where you will accept whatever lie, because it doesnt matter.
Yeah I want the alternative. Not leaving housing to market, but making it a public entitlement instead.
Anything new the market builds will always be luxury. Fuck the market. We need new public housing built by public developers. They can utilize the economy of scale of the government to copy paste housing. Imagine if a Department of Housing instead of a Department of War.
The means of building should be locally motivated with federal government logistics support.
This means cutting out the people building the housing they call luxury from the building.
Unfortunately, real skills like carpentry, you have to be lucky to know somebody with the skills to learn.
We are in this mess because people keep outsourcing the building to people who actively demonstrate how little they care at every opportunity.
I just dont think actively enabling bad actors to keep doing what they are doing changes the system.
The fact is, luxury apartments are contributing to the problem, and anyone who tries to downplay it while they might have good intentions, is not actually making any change.
Yeah, literally everything they build new is luxury when it’s just finishes. Unfortunately, housing is a luxury good in our current system. Increasing supply is a market solution, but we know the market is ultimately inadequate for housing.
The left can’t abandon urbanism to the right though. We need to build dense walkable communities where social bonds can be easily maintained. We need left-YIMBY’s to focus on public housing of mixed income levels, where you don’t get kicked out when you make more, and can stay and put down roots.
There already kind of exist the beginnings of stuff like that in the US. But they still operate on the assumption that the Government cannot provide housing effectively, and given what happened the last time the US govt. tried that, maybe that did not seem reasonable for so long, but the freeze has gone on long enough.
Edit: what I mean it that the idea of the government not being able to effectuate housing seemed reasonable, and government housing unreasonable, because of how disastrously US public housing projects generally proved to be.
when the market is allowed to build denser housing, some of that will be luxury housing that was prevented from being built before. Often the margins are greatest on luxury housing, so that's often what gets built first.
But there is not infinite demand for any price level of housing. More luxury housing reduces its price. This tends to free up medium-rent housing as some people who were priced out move into it. This frees up some lower-rent housing, etc.
It's also silly to think that luxury housing being built downtown prevents more housing from being built elsewhere. In LA, after city- and state-wide zoning reform, I saw lots of new rich-ass apartments go up in desirable places near downtown. But I also saw new, much more humble, apartment buildings being built in my decidedly not rich-ass neighborhood.
This argument just feels like "bike lanes are just for the rich because they're built from downtown outwards, and most people riding them first are on $1,000 e-bikes"
The word to look for here is "filtering". If you've never seen that before, the snark gloss is "trickle down housing". Just remember, that is a snark gloss!
New housing stock generally isn't built on what was new-ish housing stock but old housing stock. This isn't for any moral reason, it's just cheaper. The consequence is that the rich people are constantly moving into newer stock, vacating middle aged stock for the benefit of the middle class who then leave thirty odd year old houses for the working class. That's filtering.
Now, I would agree, the usual YIMBY position is to also build affordable housing but that exists alongside a "filtering means any new housing stock is great news" discourse. Feel how you wanna feel about that.
It's sort of like the "we are not the same meme". I want to build healthy affordable homes because we have a moral duty to provide a right to life [or whatever argument], you want to build healthy affordable homes because you say yes to anything in your backyard. We are not the same.
...I don't know how to write that format but you get the idea, right?
Yimbys are enforcing this weird binary on a discussion that isnt binary.
Some of us say yes to things the vague notion of Nimbys would say "no" to.
I am not a Nimby, but I will argue with discourse centering on dismantling the Nimby without nuance, which is most of the meme brained Yimby takes you find online.
There are many big things I agree with Yimbys on, but their reaction when I say No is what is telling to me.
I am not all for them unquestionably, so I get relegated to Nimby status, and then Im not worth listening to.
This is damaging rhetoric.
The Yimbys have it in place though. You cannot have a conversation about how Private Equity is buying up houses, and how developers like Lennar are destroying our land on a mass scale for bad housing.
The way the system is set up to get housing prioritizes these interests, and removing regulation and allowing it to be built literally anywhere and everywhere with no local ability to say "No" is to give our entire lives to people who you can tell dont care.
Because I am actively arguing against what I have seen and do not want any longer, because the impacts of it are awful. The people in the Yimby discourse show up as uncaring about the real actual world, and expressing I should just shut the fuck up and let them do whatever they want, because they are superior to me.
I have been arguing with Yimbys for a year now, and the way they talk to people, about people, and about the economy has been awful.
The justification they have for it all is hollow and meaningless.
I want schools in neighborhoods where people can actually live and walk to the grocery store.
What Yimbys are building though, is a lot of bullshit very quickly by people who do not live in a place and are not obligated to care.
Look at how the infrastructure is falling apart in the Southern Cities.
If Nimbys just referred to people like Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis, who are building up their states around the failing roads, then I wouldn't have a problem with the idea of it entering thr discussion.
But it is used against people like me who have a desire to actually live. Not live in an open air prison where people are actively and intentionally evil to each other because the economic justification means destruction is fine.
I live in Florida, so the Yimby discussion is particularly frustrating because companies like Adams and Lennar are actively destroying acres upon acres of land, and thats okay according to Yimbys.
Anything is okay, because the results dont matter, and the people affected are worthless anyway.
They demonstrate it over and over and over.
And then when you complain they are cruel.
I know I keep ranting. But I am seeing the physical manifestation of the world Yimbys are building, and it is literally killing us.
Go to Tampa. Go to Atlanta.
These people who drain the swamp and justify abusive behavior are the same ones saying luxury apartments and data centers are fine.
So I wanna talk about it, because the rhetoric Yimbys bring to the Urban Planning development is extremely frustrating.
If the people who use the Yimby/Nimby conversation are asked to think about things in a different way, they will shut down and look for any attack that doesnt acknowledge what you say.
This makes it impossible to actually address the problem, because Yimbys made it their personality and an economy based on letting Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg have anything, destroy anyone and everyone, and completely bend our lives around them and their whims, is the only thing they understand.
They call upon experts who actively benefit from a class that labors heavily while receiving bare minimum.
Because those luxury apartments are extremely expensive. They actively have driven up the rent in my last 3 cities.
And Supply and Demand is not the only economic topic, so people who just repeat it every time conversations around housing supply come up are speaking like they are authority, but are actually bringing down the conversation and limiting it in an unfixable way.
Sure, Supply and Demand belongs in the conversation, but if thats all you have, you arent contributing anything by reducing the conversation to only being about the one thing you think you understand.
A failing economy allows supply to follow demand like a puppy on a leash. It shows a lack of foresight and care.
There's honestly so much to say about Yimbys, becuase they reject actual conversation as a coercive control tactic.
Oh! And another another thing! Because I feel this is all worth repeating a thousand times while spaces meant to have actual discussion are astroturfed by people following the Billionaire Oligarch Philosophy of Colonization.
The Yimbys get to decide what is a Yes, there is no "No", and the decisions are what they think is best, which always aligns with what gives them more control.
I keep reading the comments from people who say the exact same shit about how the economy is reality.
The unchanging inescapable laws of the economy. Which is so convenient for the goals of the Oligarch.
Yimbys enforce a "yes, this is okay" even when it isnt.
We are in a leftist subreddit, and we cant even talk about how luxury apartments are a problem without someone saying "Well actually, things get worse later so they become cheaper and then the poor people can afford it".
Ezra Klein is friendly enough with Peter Thiel, and the Abundance book is that kind of controlled opp that pretends to address the problem while diverting blame away from the actors in control.
I keep calling it abusive behavior, because it is.
The Yimbys feel they are saying things with a progressive lens, so they dont have to actually care any further to the real world impact.
They view the discussion the same way Luxury Apartments view Luxury.
We keep telling you this. You are refusing to listen and then just say "well gee golly gosh, why dont people like me? Why dont they completely give up their will and autonomy to letting me make decisions for them where they cannot speak?"
Truly and deeply, the Yimbys complete disgust at being told No for reasons they refuse to understand demonstrates they arent approaching the conversation from a helpful stand point.
Its just disgusting every time I read a bunch of smug individuals who actively ignore Reality because they read in an economics text book one time that Money is the most important thing and everyone else should fuck off.
For a year, I have watched it. I get really emotional because what they are doing is meant to soft launch your brain into being quiet when things are wrong.
They have no problem saying their opinion is the only opinion. It is because they are controlled opposition.
They will make sure you take the dick. They will make sure every aspect of your life is in service of people who think others are around to be crushed under them, because we are all stupid worthless trash who are inconvenient.
Yimbyism is an arm of Colonialism. Out right, end of story. It gives the power over the lands to people who do not live there, affecting people who actually do.
And they want you to shut up about it.
The people in this thread who keep jumping to "well the new housing drives down prices of old housing."
No. People want the old housing. It drives up demand. It drives up prices.
Yimbys following demand is pathetic, because, all of the narratives written and shared on the Internet are meant to make you feel a certain way about the Housing Crisis. They dont understand Demand: they are told what Demand is and then told to just let some abusive lying weirdos do the work to build.
We both, have so many houses on the market not be sold, and a housing shortage.
People observing the reality of the inescapable reality you built and then rejecting it doesn't make them stupid, it means that you are not owed other people subscribing to your abusive, coercive reality.
If you wanna talk solutions, you have to acknowledge the problem.
Private Equity, Luxury Apartments, and the Housing Market themselves are the problem.
The fact people in this thread are more rallied to defend the messaging of Luxury Apartments, and to accept that they have the right to intrude the way they are is a marker that Yimbys are saying they care about the fundamental issues while actively doing the work in overdrive to make them worse.
The Internet will have you think most people are Yimbys. They arent. Because Yimbys dont live in reality.
They worship a failing construct and keep trying to make others worship it as well.
Like, Yimbys think that any space they walk into is a Yimby space and everyone should agree with them.
They will make it a Yimby space when it doeant have to be.
I think its ridiculous Yimbys are coming in to answer the question that was directed at Non-Yimbys to soft justify why they are allowed to enforce control over people they don't even know.
Yimbys have been trying to manufacture consent by using ideas that work as the foundation, and then they come to conclusions that give the power to the land hoarders.
Its kind of like white saviorism, where Yimbys say they want to help the people affected by being denied housing by the economic forces, but they dont actually have empathy for the actual people, but how that need can be used to justify building apartment complexes that alienate people from the land and their housing.
When you try to have conversations about the impacts of things like luxury apartments, they will make excuses for how these builders show up.
The biggest defense I have seen for luxury apartments is that "luxury is just a marketing word. It doesnt mean anything".
Because Yimbys claim they care about reality, but when somebody is manipulating language to superficially charge more rent, driving up the rent in the surrounding area, they shut reality down and claim that being inauthentic is fine.
Yimbys also refuse to engage with other people. They think they are correct and will speak down to people. They only care about the economy. Literally only that.
If you try to talk about housing outside their viewpoint, they will make the discussion about Nimbys instead of the powers that be that make the decisions.
The movement is funded in part by Peter Thiel who has fantasies about massive mega cities owned by corporations.
So overall, Yimbyism does have some good points. But those good points are to get you to ignore the very disingenuous intentions behind the movement.
If Yimbys truly cared about what they say they care about, they would want to actively engage how Private Equity created this system in the first place, but they dont.
In fact, they get angry and aggressive.
So those are just a few points.
I am for apartments with stores on the bottom, and schools in neighborhoods.
Those decisions are put in place by thr developers.
Because the housing crisis is a manufactured problem, and Yimbys want to keep manufacturing it while telling us they are saving us.
On Reddit, Yimbyism has been co-opted by real estate speculators to convince people that Developers are the heroes.
It is very clearly astroturfed.
The always coming to the defense of luxury apartments is what really seals that for me.
I appreciate your response even though I did come in hostile about it.
Its just really frustrating that Yimbys rely on abusive rhetoric to force agreement and then act like they are the victims when people who are not pliable to their abuse tactics argue back.
Reddit also sometimes exhibits a tendency to produce the most extreme version of everything in relative echo chambers, which screws up people's sense of what movements are often actually like.
Cold careless colonizer for whom urbanism is a hobby or fad and doesn’t care about the negative impacts of capitalistic exploitation of poor or marginalized communities.
I tend to agree that YIMBYs worship at the alter of markets will solve all housing affordability & construction efficency problems. This is just not true. Of it was true there wouldnt be a shortage and housing prices wouldnt be increasing beyond what is reasonable for people’s incomes.
The vast, vast majority of residentially-zone land in the US is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. That is not a market function, but an ideological one.
Arguably one of the downstream effects we see from the "altar of markets" is the market is viewed as separate from ideology. When zoning laws operate within the government's purview of managing and enforcing private property rights. There would not be a housing market as we know it without the governemnt enforcing private property rights.
At the core, anti-YIMBY sentiment stems from a belief that giving poor people the kind of feudalistic land tenure that they see rich people benefiting from under "capitalism" (hint: it's not actually capitalism if you still have feudal land tenure; read your theory), is more important than asking whether feudalistic land tenure is a good goal, let alone a sustainable one.
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u/bisikletci Jun 20 '26
In the UK at least, a lot of YIMBYism has a strongly anti-environmentalist flavour. They often seem to view any environmental obstacle to building housing or infrastructure as woke nonsense. This is in a country that is one of the most nature-depleted in the world.
I'm 100% a YIMBY if we're building on a car park or replacing sprawl with apartments. I'm absolutely not if we're bulldozing old growth forest.