Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
stepping into a war zone. That's a strong way
to start. I think it's appropriate. But I'm not
talking about a conflict fought with, you know,
tanks or drones. This is a war fought with zoning
codes, environmental impact reports, and some
very, very angry letters to the editor. Right.
It's the battle of the public hearing. Exactly.
We're looking at the invisible architecture that
decides who gets to live where, how long your
commute is, and honestly, whether or not the
entire global economy actually functions properly.
It sounds a bit hyperbolic when you put it that
way. Does it? I mean, zoning codes determine
the fate of nations. But when you really peel
back the layers, and we're going to do that today,
that's not far from the truth. We are talking
about the collision between local control and,
well, national necessity. We're talking about
the battle for the backyard. The clash between
NEBY and a YMB. Precisely. And these are terms
that people hear all the time now. All the time.
But before we get into the heavy stuff, and believe
me, we have a lot of heavy stuff today. From
the mechanics of the housing crisis to the sociology
of wind farms, we need to set the terms of engagement.
Lay the groundwork. Yeah. Let's treat this like
a legal deposition. I think most people have
heard the acronym NEBY, but let's define it properly.
What exactly are we talking about here? Okay,
so in the blue corner, you've got the incumbent
champion, N. Yim By. It stands for not in my
backyard. Right. This refers to opposition by
residents to a proposed development in their
local area. And the key nuance here, the really
important part is the my. The my. Yeah. They
might actually support the development in the
abstract. They'll say things like, yes, of course,
society needs prisons or yes, we absolutely need
more high voltage power lines for the grid. We
need green energy. We need green energy. But
the second the map shows that power line crossing
their property or that wind. behind spoiling
their view, the answer becomes a very, very hard
no. Right. It's the gap between we need this
and I want this. That's a perfect way to put
it. And then in the red corner, you've got the
challenger. This is a movement that has really
only organized as a big political force in, say,
the last decade or so. Okay. YMBY. Yes. In my
backyard. The counter movement. It's a direct
response. It's a movement that explicitly advocates
for increasing the supply of housing, for increasing
density, and for building public transit, even,
and this is the key, especially in their own
neighborhoods. So our mission today isn't just
to look at two groups shouting at each other
at a town hall meeting. No, no. We want to get
under the hood. That's it. Understand the machinery
beneath the shouting. Why do people fight so
hard to stop a duplex from being built down the
street? Why has this counter movement sprung
up that unites of all people, socialists and
libertarians? That's a very strange coalition.
And maybe the most important question of all,
we need to audit the bill. What is the actual
tangible cost of saying no all the time? And
that cost, as we're going to see, is staggering.
We've got sources today from all over the place.
We're looking at economic papers by people like
Shia Moretti. We've got case studies from the
Tokyo suburbs, the streets of San Francisco.
So this isn't just a U .S. thing. Oh, not at
all. It's a global phenomenon. London, Sydney,
Toronto. You see the exact same dynamics playing
out everywhere. OK, so let's start at the beginning.
The history. Because NMB feels like a word that
has always existed, right? Like taxes or traffic.
Yeah. It just feels like part of the furniture.
But it has a birthday. It does. It really emerges
in the late 1970s and then it properly catches
fire in the early 1980s. But here's the interesting
thing. It wasn't originally about housing. It
wasn't. Not at all. It wasn't about preserving
neighborhood character in leafy suburbs. It was
about hazardous waste. Seriously, like toxic
waste. Exactly. The earliest citations we can
find come from the Atomic Energy Commission and
from disputes about waste management facilities.
It was literally people saying, please do not
bury radioactive sludge in my backyard. OK, hold
on. To be fair. If I'm playing devil's advocate
right out of the gate here, that sounds like
a perfectly rational objection. It is. If someone
wants to put a nuclear waste dump next to my
kid's swing set, you bet I'm going to be an NMBY.
100%. And that's where the term got its initial
moral weight. It was a genuine defense mechanism
against real... tangible environmental hazards.
So what changed? Well, as we moved into the 1980s,
the usage started to drift. It started to broaden.
You had politicians like Nicholas Ridley. He
was the British conservative secretary of state
for the environment. And he started using the
term to describe people who were opposing development
that the government felt was necessary. Ah, OK.
So it went from save us from actual poison to.
Stop complaining about the new bypass road. That's
the shift, exactly. And then pop culture came
in and just cemented it in the public consciousness.
You know the comedian George Carlin? Of course.
A legend. In 1992, he did a special called Jammin'
in New York. And he has this brilliant, absolutely
scathing bit about NMBWise. I think I remember
this. He diagnosed it as a drawbridge mentality.
That was his phrase. The idea is... I have moved
into this nice neighborhood. It is perfect right
now. I've got my piece of the pie. Pull up the
drawbridge. Pull up the drawbridge. That's it.
No one else comes in. No more traffic. No more
people. I got mine. You stay out. That feels
like the turning point, right, where the term
stops being descriptive and becomes an insult.
Absolutely. Because now if you call someone an
M -O -Y. You aren't calling them a protector
of their family. You're calling them selfish.
It implies a lack of civic duty. It implies you're
putting your own personal comfort, your own little
bubble above the genuine needs of the wider society.
But let's pause there for a second because I
want to push back on this idea that it's just
selfishness. I mean, it can be. But when we look
at the list of reasons people actually give for
objecting to development, some of them seem.
pretty practical on the surface. They do. The
number one objection you see in the literature
is almost always traffic and infrastructure.
Always. The traffic is already terrible. Right.
If I live on a quiet little cul -de -sac and
you propose a 200 unit apartment complex on the
corner, my first immediate thought is, I'm never
going to find a parking spot again. And it's
going to take me 20 minutes just to get out of
my own driveway in the morning. Is that an irrational
fear? It's not irrational at all. In fact, what
it really is, is a failure of trust. A failure
of trust in whom? In the city. In the government.
People oppose density because they don't trust
the city to upgrade the infrastructure to match
the new population. They're afraid they'll get
all the new people before they get the subway
upgrade or the new school or the wider road.
And are they wrong? Historically, they're often
right. The development comes first and the infrastructure
improvements lag by years if they come at all.
OK, so that's the practical side. But then there's
the big one, the financial side. For the vast
majority of people, certainly in the US, UK,
Canada, their home is their piggy bank. It's
everything. It's their retirement fund. It's
the only real wealth they have ever accumulated.
This is so crucial to understanding the psychology
here. We have constructed an entire economy where
homeownership is the primary vehicle for wealth
accumulation for the middle class. So homeowners
are understandably hypersensitive to anything
that might threaten that asset's value. It's
not just a home. It's a 401k with a lawn. That's
it. So if there's a perception, notice they say
perception, it doesn't even have to be true,
that... A new development will lower property
values. The homeowner reacts as if you are trying
to physically rob their bank account. It's just
rational asset protection from their point of
view. It is. And then you layer on top of that
the more demorphous quality of life arguments.
Like what? Pollution, noise, light. If you live
near a proposed wind farm, you aren't just worried
about property value in the abstract. You're
worried about the shadow flicker from the blades
on your living room window every single morning.
You're worried about that low frequency hum that
you can't escape. And then we get to the most
powerful and maybe the most problematic phrase
in the entire indie arsenal. I know which one
you're going to say. Neighborhood character.
Neighborhood character. It sounds so lovely,
doesn't it? It evokes these images of white picket
fences, historic brownstones, a unique sense
of place. It's warm and fuzzy. But there's a
but coming. There's a big but. But it is very
often weaponized. Neighborhood character is legally
vague enough that it can mean almost anything
you want it to mean. So you can just pour your
own objections into that bucket. Exactly. It
can mean... I don't like modern architecture
or I don't like the shadows a tall building might
cast. But historically, and we see this in the
data, it often serves as coded language. Coded
for what? It's code for I don't like the kind
of people who I imagine would live in that new
building. So we're talking about exclusion. Social
and economic exclusion. Yes. When the character
you are passionately trying to preserve requires
that no home in the neighborhood costs less than,
say, a million dollars, you are implicitly saying
that you want to exclude anyone who can't afford
that price tag. You're preserving a demographic
character as much as an architectural one. And
this often comes up with even more charged language
around crime and safety, doesn't it? It's the
next step. You see a proposal for a drug detox
center or a homeless shelter or even just a block
of affordable housing. And suddenly the flyers
go up warning about public safety. The fear factor.
The stigma is incredibly powerful. There's a
deep seated belief that density or low income
housing automatically brings crime. Now, the
data on this is very complex and in many cases
shows that well -designed mixed income developments
don't actually increase crime rates. But the
fear of it is visceral. And fear drives turnout
at those city council meetings. Fear gets people
out of their houses on a Tuesday night like nothing
else. OK, so we have this toxic brew of rational
fears about traffic. deep financial anxieties
about home values, and then some, let's say,
less noble instincts about social exclusion.
But why does this dynamic play out the exact
same way in London, in Sydney, in New York, and
in Toronto? There seems to be a structural reason
why the NMBYs almost always win these fights.
There is. And it comes down to a fundamental
concept in political economy. It's often called
concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. Okay,
let's unpack that. That sounds a little academic.
How does that math work in the real world? Okay,
let's take your example of an airport expansion.
A new runway is a diffuse benefit. Diffuse meaning
spread out. Spread out very thinly. It means
millions of travelers get slightly cheaper flights.
There are more flight options. The regional economy
grows a little bit. But that benefit is spread
so, so thin. If I save $50 on my flight to Chicago
once a year, I'm happy about it. But I'm not
going to take a day off work to go down to City
Hall and testify in favor of. That runway. Right.
The benefit to you as an individual is negligible
in the moment. You don't really feel it. Exactly.
But the costs, the costs are concentrated. They
fall entirely on the few thousand people who
live directly under the new flight path. They
get all the pain. All of it. They get the noise.
They get the vibrations that crack their windows.
Their daily lives are significantly negatively
impacted. So they are highly, highly motivated.
They're desperate. They will organize. They will
pool their money to hire lawyers. They will show
up to every single meeting for years. This is
what's known as the collective action problem.
The small group with a huge concentrated incentive
to say no will always out -organize the massive
silent majority that has a tiny diffuse incentive
to say yes. That makes perfect sense. That's
why we all want electricity, but absolutely nobody
wants the power plant next door. That's the perfect
analogy. And this intensity, this energy, has
birthed a whole new vocabulary. Our sources provided
this incredible list of acronyms that have evolved
from NIMBY. It's like an alphabet soup of opposition.
It really is. The movement or the mindset has
radicalized in some places. Let's run through
some of the best ones. I think everyone knows
NIMBY by now, but have you encountered BANANA?
Oh, yes. B -A -N -A -A. Build absolutely nothing
anywhere near anything. Or sometimes near anyone.
Right. And that captures a mindset that has really
moved beyond just protect my yard into a general
philosophy that all development itself is inherently
bad. You see this in certain sort of... extreme
environmentalist circles or in ultra -conservative
preservationist groups. Okay. And then there
are the KV people. CAVE. Citizens Against Virtually
Everything. That one feels a little mean -spirited,
doesn't it? Like something a frustrated city
planner would mutter under their breath after
a long meeting. It's definitely pejorative, absolutely.
But it does describe a very real demographic
that exists in local politics. These are the
people who show up to oppose the tax hikes, the
sewer rate increases, the new library, and the
new housing. They just want the status quo frozen
in amber forever. Now, we need to talk about
the darker side of this alphabet soup. We touched
on exclusion earlier, but there are terms that
explicitly call out the racial and class dynamics
at play. One that really stood out to me in the
research was N -M -M -A, N -I -M -N. Not in my
neighborhood. How is that meaningfully different
from N -M -B -Y? It sounds almost the same. The
distinction, and this largely comes from the
work of authors like Entero Pietila, who studied
the history of housing in Baltimore, is that
NIM is specifically linked to the history of
redlining and racially restrictive covenants.
Ah, so it's not about a structure, it's about
people. Exactly. It's about maintaining the racial
or ethnic homogeneity of a district. It's not
in my backyard, but applied to a demographic
group rather than a physical building. And then
there's the acronym that completely flips the
power dynamic on its head. PIBBY. Place in black's
backyard. That is incredibly blunt. It's jarring
to even say. It's meant to be. It's a term that
comes directly out of the environmental justice
movement, specifically from the groundbreaking
work of the sociologist Robert D. Bullard. It
describes the path of least resistance. What
do you mean by that? Well, think about it. If
rich, predominantly white communities are effective
in MEYs, if they have the lawyers, the free time
and the political connections to stop the incinerator
or the waste treatment plant from being built
in their town. Where does that facility go? It
doesn't just disappear. Society still needs to
treat its waste. Right. It has to go somewhere.
So it goes to the community that lacks the political
capital and the resources to fight back. And
historically in the United States, that has been
poor, black or other minority communities. So
successful NMBism in one place directly creates
environmental racism in another. That is the
direct and unavoidable consequence. Yes. Your
victory is their burden. There was one more in
the notes that I found kind of cynical, but also
completely believable. Reverse in MB. Ah, yes.
This is the politician's favorite trick. It sounds
like it. It's basically not in my backyard unless
there's a lot of federal money involved. You
see this constantly after natural disasters.
A politician who usually preaches small government
and local control will suddenly stand in front
of a camera in the wreckage and say. My district,
my backyard has been devastated and we need federal
funds now. So they're using the backyard framing
to demand resources instead of rejecting a project.
Precisely. It's a way of saying my problems matter
more because they're happening here. OK, so we've
established the psychology, the vocabulary, the
whole ecosystem of opposition. But I want to
move to what you call the main event. The price
tag, because you mentioned earlier that this
isn't just about local annoyance or aesthetic
debates. The sources you sent over cite a study
by Cheyenne Moretti that threw out a number that
honestly made me do a double take. One trillion
dollars. Yes. One trillion dollars in lost wages.
It's a mind boggling figure. How do you even
begin to calculate that? How can local zoning
laws cost the entire U .S. economy a trillion
dollars? It's a fascinating and powerful economic
mechanism, and it all relies on a concept called
agglomeration. Agglomeration, like a big cluster.
Exactly. Think about Celadon Valley in the 90s
or the auto industry in Detroit in the 40s or
Wall Street in New York City today. Why are wages
so much higher in those places? It's not just
the cost of living. It's because when you pack
smart, talented people and specialized companies
into a dense geographic area, they become more
productive. They feed off each other. Ideas spread
fast. You can find the exact software engineer
you need because they all live within a 20 -mile
radius. You can find the exact venture capitalist
you need. This is the agglomeration effect. So
the city itself, the density, becomes an engine
of productivity. A massive engine. A software
engineer in San Jose is literally more productive.
They create more economic value than the exact
same engineer with the exact same skills working
in a small town in Montana. Not because they're
smarter, but because of the network effects of
the city around them. OK, I follow that. That
makes sense. So where does the trillion dollar
loss come from? The loss comes when you break
that engine. Shea and Moretti's argument is that
because of NMBY restrictions, because cities
like San Francisco, San Jose and New York made
it functionally illegal to build enough housing
to accommodate everyone who wanted to work there.
Workers couldn't move. So that engineer has to
stay in Montana. Right. or the teacher or the
nurse or the biotech researcher, they have to
stay in lower productivity regions because the
rent in the high productivity superstar cities
is mathematically impossible for them. And that's
a drag on the whole economy. A massive drag.
This misallocation of labor, having millions
of people working in places where they are less
productive than they could be, dragged down the
total U .S. GDP by as much as 36 percent between
1964 and 2009. And that lost productivity adds
up. That's the trillion dollars. It's the money
we didn't make because we locked people out of
our most successful cities. That is just wild.
We usually think of a housing crisis in personal
terms like I can't afford my rent. But you're
saying it's actually. America as a whole is poor.
We are collectively poor. We have deliberately
capped our own growth potential to what preserve
the skyline of certain neighborhoods. OK, but
let's bring it down from that 30 ,000 foot GDP
level to the human level. The most visible and
devastating cost of all this is obviously homelessness.
The correlation is undeniable and it's heartbreaking.
You can try to blame homelessness on any number
of factors, drugs, mental health, personal choices,
even the weather. But the single strongest statistical
correlation in the data city by city is the cost
of rent. It's that simple. It's that simple.
When the median rent in an area exceeds roughly
30 to 32 percent of the median income, homelessness
rates begin to explode. It's a simple, brutal
game of musical chairs. If you have 100 people
in a city and only 90 available apartments they
can afford, 10 people will end up on the street.
It doesn't matter how hardworking or sober those
10 people are, there are no chairs left. There
was a story in the notes from Vancouver that
really illustrated how these NMB battles impact
daily life in ways that go way beyond just housing.
Yeah. The daycare shortage. Oh, this is such
a perfect tragic example of quality of life arguments
gone completely wrong. What happened? Vancouver
had a massive shortfall of daycare spots, something
like 15 ,000 spots short. Parents are desperate.
on waiting lists for years. A local daycare provider
found a suitable location, they had the funding,
and they wanted to expand to take in more kids.
And the neighbors blocked it. They did. They
organized and they stopped it. What could possibly
be the objection? We hate children. Not explicitly,
of course. The official objections were noise
and traffic. Noise and traffic. The sound of
children playing outside during the day. The
traffic from parents dropping their kids off
at 8 a .m. and picking them up at 5 .00 p .m.
And the city council bowed to that pressure and
rejected the daycare's expansion permit. So to
preserve the quiet morning coffee of a handful
of neighbors, dozens of families were left without
essential child care. That is the tradeoff in
action. It's not abstract. It's real. That really
clarifies the stakes. It's not just about shiny
skyscrapers. It's about the basic infrastructure
that allows families to function. And then looking
at the structural costs, we have to circle back
to segregation. We do. We mentioned PIBY and
the environmental justice angle, but the data
on zoning itself is just stark. The invention
of single family zoning. These laws that say
you cannot build anything other than one detached
house on a large lot was often implemented explicitly
to replace racial covenants after the Supreme
Court struck him down as unconstitutional. Wow.
So when the court said you can no longer put
in the deed that black people can't buy houses
here. The cities pivoted. They said, OK, we'll
just ban the type of housing that lower income
people, which included a large proportion of
minority families, could afford. No more duplexes,
no more apartment buildings. So it's economic
segregation that functions as a proxy for racial
segregation. Exactly. And that legacy is still
with us. Today, the U .S. has a nationwide shortage
of about 7 .4 million affordable homes for extremely
low income households. You don't get a number
that big by accident. You get it by decades of
deliberate policy choices. So the pressure builds.
Rents skyrocket. The national economy drags.
Homelessness gets worse. And eventually, a counterforce
has to emerge. It has to. Enter the YMBYs. The
yes in my backyard movement. It really feels
like they just appeared out of nowhere in the
last, what, 10 years? Where does this come from?
Well, the term itself was actually floating around
in the 80s among nuclear power advocates, funny
enough. They were trying to push a yes in many
backyards message for power plants. But the modern
political movement as we know it is really a
child of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s.
Ground zero for the housing crisis. The absolute
epicenter. You had the second tech boom. Facebook,
Google, Uber. They were hiring thousands and
thousands of people, high salaries, great jobs.
But San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon
Valley cities were building almost no new housing.
A recipe for disaster. Total disaster. You had
these stories of 25 -year -old software engineers
making $150 ,000 a year who were still living
in dorm -style bunk beds because there were simply
no apartments to rent. And of course, when those
tech workers can't find housing, they just use
their high salaries to bid up the price of the
existing. housing stock. Pushing out the teachers,
the artists, the firefighters, the people who
make a city run, the displacement was brutal.
So a group of activists, many of them young tech
workers themselves, started saying, wait a minute,
the problem isn't the new jobs. The problem is
the lack of walls and roofs. And this is important
context from the sources. The movement got some
serious early funding from tech leaders, right?
It did. People like Dustin Moskovitz from Facebook,
Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp, the Collison brothers
who founded Stripe, they put money into early
YMBY organizations. Which I imagine gives the
movement a specific flavor. It made some people
suspicious. Oh, absolutely. It allowed critics
to immediately paint YMBYs as nothing more than
shills for big tech or for big real estate developers.
You just want to help your rich friends get richer.
But the coalition that actually formed on the
ground was much weirder than that. It's one of
the weirdest and most fascinating political alliances
in modern politics. You called it the strange
bedfellows coalition, and that's perfect. It's
a perfect political horseshoe. It is. So on the
left flank, you have the modern liberals, the
urbanists and the environmentalists. What's their
motivation for wanting to build more? For them,
it's about climate injustice. They know that
transportation is the single biggest source of
carbon emissions in the U .S., about 29 percent
of the total. And that's mostly cars. Mostly
cars. If you force people to live in low density
sprawl, they have to drive everywhere for everything.
If you let them live in dense, walkable cities
with good public transit, they walk, they bike,
they take the train. So for them, building dense
housing is a core climate solution. And the justice
angle. They view exclusionary zoning as a tool
of racial and economic segregation that needs
to be dismantled as a matter of civil rights.
Okay, so that's the left. Pretty straightforward.
Who are they holding hands with on the other
side of the aisle? The libertarian right. The
free market absolutists. Wait, how does that
work? What's their motivation? For them, it's
all about property rights and deregulation. They
look at a zoning kind of that says you own this
piece of land, but you are forbidden from building
a duplex on it. And they see government tyranny,
a violation of their fundamental violation of
their property rights. They believe that if you
just get the government out of the way, remove
all these burdensome regulations, the free market
will efficiently solve the housing shortage.
So you literally have socialists marching alongside.
Ayn Rand libertarians, both demanding that we
build more apartment blocks. It's a bizarre sight
to behold, but it's been surprisingly effective.
But there's a massive point of contention here,
a real philosophical divide that we need to address,
because I think a lot of our listeners probably
stumble on this exact point. It's the supply
and demand argument. My MBYs say build more of
anything, even luxury housing, and overall prices
will go down or at least stabilize. But a lot
of people hear that and think, wait a minute.
If a developer built a shiny new tower with two
bedroom apartments renting for $4 ,000 a month,
how does that possibly help a regular person?
Doesn't that just induce more gentrification?
This is the core debate. It's the absolute heart
of the matter. The economic concept the YMBYs
rely on is called filtering or sometimes vacancy
chains. OK, can you explain that mechanism? How
is a vacancy chain supposed to work? Right. Imagine
a housing market like a ladder. The very top,
you have the wealthiest person in a constrained
market. A city where no new luxury housing is
being built. That rich person doesn't just vanish.
They still need a place to live. So what do they
do? They go into a nice middle class neighborhood
and buy a beautiful old Victorian house. And
then they renovate it. Right. They gut renovate
it and they outbid the middle class family who
wanted to buy it. So the middle class family
gets. Bump down a rung on the ladder. Exactly.
They have to go look in a slightly cheaper working
class neighborhood. And with their budget, they
end up outbidding the working class family that
live there. And that working class family gets
pushed out of the city entirely or into a much
worse apartment. That's displacement in action.
OK, so the vacancy chain or filtering theory
says what? It says if you build that shiny new
luxury tower, the rich person moves there. They
happily pay for the new construction and the
fancy amenities. And by doing so, they leave
the beautiful old Victorian house alone. The
middle class family can then buy the Victorian.
The working class family gets to stay in their
apartment. By adding supply at the top, you relieve
the pressure all the way down the chain. Does
the data actually support that? Because I have
to be honest, it sounds a little bit like trickle
-down housing, which has the same ring as trickle
-down economics, a theory with a pretty bad reputation.
It's very controversial, and the research is
mixed. Some older studies showed that filtering
does happen, but it's incredibly slow. It can
take decades for a unit that was once luxury
to become truly affordable to low -income people.
So it's not a quick fix. Not for affordability.
However, a lot of newer research suggests the
effect on rents across the board is much faster.
When you build a lot of new units, even expensive
ones, the overall vacancy rate in the city goes
up. When there are more empty apartments, landlords
lose their leverage. They can't just hike your
rent by $500 a month because you have other options.
You can actually move. But not everyone buys
that logic. Yeah. Not by a long shot. And this
brings us to the organized opposition to the
way me wise. And it's not just the grumpy neighbor
with the leaf blower. There is a very coherent
ideological opposition on the left. Yes. This
is where we get yet another acronym, P -H -M
-B -Y. P -H -I -M -B -Y. Which it stands for?
Public housing in my backyard. So these are the
folks who say market rate housing is the enemy.
That's their core belief. They argue that private
for -profit developers exist for one reason,
to make a profit, period. They will never, ever
build housing for the very poor because there's
simply no margin in it. So they're supply skeptics.
They are deep supply skeptics. They believe that
housing isn't like widgets. They fear that building
new luxury buildings just changes the neighborhood's
vibe, attracts even more rich people to move
and what they call induced demand and actually
accelerates the process of gentrification. So
for them, the answer is we want 100 percent affordable,
publicly funded social housing or we want nothing.
And what about the opposition from the right?
Well, you have the populist right. If you look
at the rhetoric from people like, say, Donald
Trump or Tucker Carlson, they have very effectively
framed YMB policies, especially things like ending
single family zoning as a direct attack on the
American dream. The classic they are coming for
your suburbs. It's that exact line. The radical
left wants to abolish the suburbs. They want
to force your town to build low income housing
next to your beautiful home and destroy your
property values. It becomes a defense of local
sovereignty against what they see as overbearing.
state or federal mandates. So the Whamby Whys
are really stuck in the middle. They're getting
shot at by the far left for being corporate shills
and developer cronies, and by the far right for
being socialist destroyers of the suburban way
of life. It is a very tough political place to
be. Okay, let's ground all this theory in reality.
We've talked about the ideas, but the best way
to really understand the trenches of the NMB
wars is to look at the battlefields. And we have
some incredible, almost unbelievable case studies
from the sources. Let's start with the Green
Conflict, the fight over energy. This is one
of the great ironies of the modern age. You have
entire communities of people who, on paper, Believe
fervently in climate change, they vote for green
energy policies, but they will fight to the death
to stop the actual infrastructure required to
deliver it. And Cape Cod is the classic textbook
example of this, right? Cape Wind Project. It
was supposed to be America's first major offshore
wind farm, a massive, ambitious project. But
it was proposed to be built in the waters off
the coast of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
Home to some of the wealthiest and most politically
connected people in the entire country. Exactly.
We're talking about the Kennedy family, among
others. And they fought it and they killed it.
But they didn't kill it by saying climate change
is a hoax. No, that's the key. The arguments
were never about the science. The arguments were
visual pollution. They said it will spoil the
pristine natural horizon. They said it will hurt
the local fishing industry. They tied it up in
litigation and bureaucracy for so long that the
project eventually just withered and died on
the vine. There was a counterexample from Australia
in the notes that I absolutely loved. It was
like a piece of performance art. The Manly Beach
prank. Oh, this was just brilliant political
theater. So there's a prominent Australian politician
named Zali Stegall. And she's a huge advocate
for climate action. Her political opponents,
who wanted to expose what they saw as the hypocrisy
of wealthy environmentalists, started a petition.
What was the petition for? To build a massive
wind farm right on Manly Beach, which is this
iconic, beautiful, world -famous surf spot right
in the heart of her wealthy electorate. A completely
tongue -in -cheek proposal, obviously. Yeah,
totally. Nobody actually thought it would be
built, but it forced the conversation. It was
a way of asking the question, you say you want
wing energy. Here's a spot with a lot of wind.
Do you want it here on your beautiful beach?
It perfectly highlights that deep discomfort.
Okay, then there's high -speed rail. Another
massive infrastructure project. Look at the UK's
HS2 project. It has been an absolute disaster
of delays and ballooning costs. And a huge part
of that is local opposition. You have these staunchly
conservative constituencies in the countryside
revolting because the proposed train line cuts
through their pristine fields and tunnels under
their historic villages. And they don't even
get to use it. That's the rub. They get all the
noise and all the construction disruption, but
the train doesn't actually stop there. It just
whooshes by at 200 miles per hour on its way
from London to Birmingham. Concentrated costs,
diffused benefits. Textbook case, right there.
Okay, but let's get into the real housing wars.
Because there is one story from San Francisco
that I think perfectly absurdly encapsulates
the entire process. The historic laundromat.
The saga of 2918 Mission Street. This should
be made into a movie. It's a tragicomedy. Set
the scene for us. What was the proposal? Okay.
You have a property owner, a man named Robert
Tillman. He owns a laundromat. It's a simple
one -story building in the Mission District.
He wants to tear it down and build an eight -story
residential building with 75 apartments. In the
middle of the worst housing crisis in San Francisco
history. Sounds like a slam dunk, right? A no
-brainer. You would think. It took him nearly
five years to get it approved. Five years. Why?
What could possibly take five years? The opposition
threw everything at the wall to see what would
stick. A local activist group called Collier
24 opposed it because they feared it would cause
gentrification. But the tactics they used were
pure bureaucratic warfare. First, they demanded
shadow studies. Shadow studies. Yes. The city
had to commission a detailed analysis of whether
the proposed new building would cast a shadow
on a nearby playground. And not all day, just
specifically in the late afternoon for a few
months of the year. The argument was that losing
a sliver of sunlight on a sandbox was legitimate
grounds to deny housing for 75 families. That
is just maddening. The level of absurdity is
off the charts. But it gets so much better. When
the shadow argument didn't completely work, they
pivoted. They then argued that the laundromat
itself was a historic resource. A historic laundromat.
What did George Washington wash his socks there?
No, the argument, and I'm not making this up,
was that a local community organization had briefly
rented some office space above the laundromat
back in the 1970s, and therefore this unremarkable
stucco building was a priceless cultural monument
that had to be preserved. That feels like they
weren't arguing in good faith. It feels like
they were just exploiting the rules to get what
they wanted. That is the very essence of weaponized
NMBism. You take the environmental and historic
preservation laws, which were written with very
good intentions to save redwood forests and actual
historic buildings, and you twist them to freeze
a city in time and stop any and all change. I
want to pivot now to Japan, because in a lot
of urbanist and YMBY circles, Japan is often
held up as this kind of paradise where you can
build anything you want. There's no opposition.
But the history there is incredibly... shockingly
violent. It is not a paradise of social harmony.
Not at all. You just have to look at the Sam
Rizuka struggle. This was the battle over Narita
Airport, the main international airport outside
Tokyo back in the 1960s and 70s. The government
wanted to build a massive new airport. The local
farmers who had worked that land for generations
said no. And they didn't just write angry letters
to the editor. No, this was not a polite town
hall meeting. The farmers formed alliances with
radical far -left student groups. They built
fortresses, literal towers made of steel and
wood on their land to physically block the construction
of the runways. They dug networks of underground
tunnels to stage surprise attacks. It turned
into an actual war. It was a low -grade civil
war. There were pitched battles with thousands
of riot police. Protesters used Molotov cocktails.
Riot police used water cannons and battering
rams. Several police officers and protesters
were killed over the course of the struggle.
It delayed the airport's full completion for
decades. That really puts the fight over historic
laundromat. into perspective. It shows that the
desire to defend one's home and one's land is
a primal, powerful human instinct. It's not just
a quirky American thing. There's another Japanese
example in the notes, the Odakyu Railway, that
shows a different and maybe more modern outcome.
Right. The Odakyu Line is a major commuter railway
that runs into Tokyo. The commute was becoming
crushing. You've seen the videos of station attendants
literally shoving people into the packed trains.
They desperately needed to expand from two tracks
to four tracks to increase capacity. But the
line ran through Setagaya. A wealthy, dense residential
district. And the local NMBYs fought it for decades.
They took the railway to court over the land
acquisition. They organized, they protested,
they refused to sell their small parcels of land.
So what did the railway company do? Did they
give up? No. They realized they would never win
the land war on the surface. So at an enormous,
mind -boggling expense, they tunneled. They built
the new tracks underground and stacked the railway,
with express trains on one level and local trains
on another. They literally went under the MBYs
to get the project done. That is an incredibly
expensive workaround. It's the price of resistance.
Sometimes it's cheaper to spend billions on tunneling
than it is to fight for years in court. Let's
quickly touch on what the sources call institutionalization.
Institutional NIMBYism Because sometimes the
NIMBY isn't an individual homeowner. Sometimes
it's an entire neighborhood fighting a powerhouse
institution like a university. And Berkeley,
California is the prime example. You have UC
Berkeley, one of the world's great public universities.
The state of California needs to educate more
students. Demand is through the roof. But the
homeowners in the city of Berkeley, many of whom
are wealthy alumni themselves, sued the university.
They sued them to do what? To cap student enrollment.
They sued to stop. the university from admitting
more students. On what grounds could they possibly
sue to stop kids from going to college? They
use a powerful state law called CEQ, the California
Environmental Quality Act. They argued successfully
in court that students are a form of environmental
pollution. You're kidding me. No, the argument
was. More students mean more noise, more trash,
more traffic, more parties. Therefore, under
the law, an increase in the student population
is a negative environmental impact that must
be mitigated. And a judge actually agreed and
ordered the university to freeze enrollment.
Imagine getting your acceptance letter to your
dream school and then having it revoked because
a neighbor is worried about noise from a party.
It completely redefines the idea of students
from the future of our society into an environmental
contaminant that needs to be controlled. And
maybe the most heartbreaking case of all comes
from Ashtead in the UK. This one, I have to say,
just made me angry to read. It should. It's an
awful story. A well -known military charity wanted
to buy a large house in the town and convert
it into a respite center for the families of
severely wounded soldiers. These are parents
visiting their sons and daughters who have lost
limbs in war who are getting treatment at a nearby
specialist hospital. A noble cause if there ever
was one. And the neighbors opposed it. They fought
it tooth and nail. At first, they used the standard
excuses, traffic, noise. But then they went further.
They argued in public meetings that having military
families in the neighborhood might increase the
risk of a terrorist attack in their town. That's
just unbelievable. No heroes in my backyard?
It strips away all the polite veneer, doesn't
it? When you find yourself arguing that your
parking spot is more important than the family
of a wounded soldier, you really have to take
a hard look at your priorities. So we've tainted
a pretty grim picture here. a world completely
gridlocked by acronyms and lawsuits and shadow
studies. But the sources suggest the tide is
starting to turn. We are actually seeing some
solutions emerge. We are. The sheer scale of
the housing crisis in many places has become
so acute that it's forcing governments to finally
act. They are realizing that decades of local
control has, in many ways, failed. So they are
moving towards state control. Let's talk about
some of the legislative weapons being deployed.
California seems to be leading the way here with
laws like SB 35. How does a law like that actually
work? SB 35 is fascinating because it fundamentally
changes the rules of the game. It creates a trigger.
Here's how it works. Every city in California
is assigned a housing quota by the state. A certain
number of new homes at various income levels
that they must plan for. This is called the RHNA
number. And what happens if they don't meet that
number? if they just ignore it. If they fall
behind on building their fair share of housing,
the trigger in SB 35 is pulled. And that trigger
strips the city of its discretionary review powers
for certain housing projects. What does discretionary
review mean in plain English? It means they lose
the ability to say no for subjective reasons.
It means if a developer proposes a new apartment
building that follows all the written objective
zoning rules, it's not too tall, it's set back
from the street, it has the right number of units,
the city must approve. So no more five -year
battles over historic laundromats. Exactly. No
more 50 public hearings. No more demanding a
shadow study. They can't debate the aesthetics
or the color of the bricks. It turns what was
a political process into a simple administrative
checklist. That is a massive, massive power shift
from local cities to the state. It's the state
basically telling the cities, you had your chance
to govern responsibly and you blew it. So now
mom and dad are taking over. And then there's
the Minneapolis 2040 plan. This was truly revolutionary
at the time. Minneapolis became the first major
U .S. city to effectively end single family zoning
across the entire city. Now, to be clear, they
didn't ban single family houses. No, not at all.
You can still build them. All they did was say.
On any residential lot where you are currently
allowed to build a single house, you are now
also allowed to build a duplex or a triplex by
right. It's a subtle change, but a really powerful
one. It is. It faced a lot of legal challenges,
of course, from local homeowners. But the intent
was to gently increase density everywhere, little
by little, rather than concentrating all the
new growth into huge towers in just one or two
neighborhoods. And we also have international
success stories to look at. Auckland, New Zealand,
for example. Auckland is the global poster child
for YMBY policy success right now. Back in 2016,
they implemented a massive citywide upzoning
plan. They allowed for townhouse -style medium
density across huge swaths of the city that were
previously reserved for single -family homes.
And did the sky fall? Did the city descend into
chaos? No. But a construction boom started. And
most importantly, rents stabilized. While many
other cities around the world saw rents explode
after the COVID pandemic, Auckland's rents stayed
relatively flat because for the first time in
a long time, housing supply was actually keeping
up with demand. It proved the basic econ 101
theory actually works in the real world. It did.
If you build it, prices will, at the very least,
stabilize. There is one specific solution from
the notes that I found really charming. It's
this unexpected combination of religion. And
real estate. Yeah. Y -I -G -B -Y. Yes, in God's
backyard. This sounds like a joke, but it's a
completely serious policy proposal. It is, and
it's brilliant. Just think about how much land
is owned by religious institutions. Churches,
synagogues, mosques. They often have these enormous
parking lots that are completely empty six days
a week. And many of these institutions have a
mission to help the poor. They want to build
affordable housing. They want to, but the zoning
stopped them. You can't just put an apartment
building in a zone that's designated for a church.
So California passed a law called SB4. It effectively
rezones all that land. It allows religious institutions
and nonprofit colleges to build 100 % affordable
housing on their property, bypassing most of
the local opposition and red tape. And the sources
say this one law could unlock up to 170 ,000
acres of land for development in California alone.
That's huge. Perfect alignment of a moral mission
with practical housing policy. Finally, there's
a really clever idea that's being floated in
London called Better Streets. This one feels
very democratic and bottom up. It's a very clever
psychological hack. Right now, the dynamic is
if I want to add a story to my house, all my
neighbors hate it because they get the construction
noise and the disruption, but they get no personal
benefit. All costs for them all benefit for me.
Exactly. The Better Streets proposal flips that.
It suggests that the residents of a single street
can get together and vote. Just the people on
that one street, not the whole neighborhood.
Just the street. If, say, a two -thirds majority
of the residents on Maple Street vote to allow
higher density on their block, say, converting
their single houses into multi -story mansion
blocks, they can collectively grant themselves
planning permission. But why would they ever
do that? Why would they vote for more density
on their own quiet street? Money. The incentive
is that if the entire street upzones together,
all of their property values skyrocket at the
same time because their land is now much more
valuable to developers who can build more on
it. Ah, I see. It turns the prisoner's dilemma,
where everyone is incentivized to block everyone
else, into a cooperative game. Exactly. It becomes...
If we all agree to do this together, we all get
rich. And as a bonus, the city gets a lot more
housing. I really like that. It aligns the individual
financial incentives with the broader social
good. It makes the diffuse benefit of more housing
into a very concentrated benefit for the people
making the decision. So we've covered the history,
the psychology, the trillion -dollar economic
cost, and some of the potential solutions. How
do we synthesize all this? When you step back,
what's the big takeaway from this deep dive?
I think we have to recognize that this is at
its heart a tragedy of the commons. We have designed
a system where the most rational, logical behavior
for an individual homeowner, which is protect
my biggest asset, stop change, keep things as
they are, is collectively destructive for the
society as a whole. And it creates that political
horseshoe we talked about earlier. Right. As
the columnist Farhad Manjo pointed out in a piece,
you end up with this bizarre situation where
wealthy, progressive Democrats in San Francisco
and conservative, small government Republicans
in the suburbs are, in practice, functionally
identical. They both use their political power
to pull up the drawbridge and keep new people
out. It forces all of us to kind of look in the
mirror. It really does. It's very easy to be
a YMBY in the abstract. Yes, of course we need
more renewable energy. Yes, we absolutely need
more homes for the homeless. But the real question
is, are you a YMBY when the proposal is next
door to you? And that is the challenge I want
to leave our listener with today. The next time
you're walking down your street and you see one
of those laminated signs zip -tied to a lamppost,
Notice of Proposed Development, what is your
gut reaction? Do you see a threat? Do you see
a nuisance is the first word that pops into your
head. Traffic. Or do you see a neighbor? Do you
see a young family that needs a place to start?
Do you see the wind farm that's going to keep
the lights on for everyone? Because if we don't
build here, we are making an active choice to
push that development there. And there usually
means either sprawling out into nature, creating
longer commutes for everyone, or burdening a
disadvantaged community that doesn't have the
power to fight back. The backyard, it turns out,
is a lot bigger than we think. It is indeed.
Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll see you
next time.