Martin Gurri on epistemology; Simon Cooke is wary of YIMBY; Perception and reality about the ability to have a baby; Ed West is pessimistic about conservatism
“Many of your peers will waste their 20s dating and partying; but you should be married with at least one kid by the time you’re 30.”
We were very atypical millennials amongst our peers who got to three by thirty, and are now nearly at six. There were a lot of late nights wondering about the choices that led to being up in the middle of the night changing diapers and bottle feeding, sacrificing career advances, etc., when colleagues and old classmates were getting that next promotion and circling the globe on the next adventure.
Many people waste their 20s partying and dating precisely because most of their peers do so. It’s pretty difficult and requires a peculiar contrarianism to break away when your entire work and social circles are doing the exact same thing.
And there’s very little near-term validation of the choice to step off the party bus and buckle down and start a family early. It takes a long time, if ever, to see the return on that investment.
Good advice that has, of course, been handed down through the ages but ignored by 99% of the people under the age of 30 that entire time, including me. I will be 58 next week and stand in astonishment at just how fast the last 40 years have passed since I graduated from high school. I would do it all differently if I could go back in time.
I often think about what I would do differently. Sometimes things rather trivial, sometimes not. But on the rare occasion I think more deeply I realize any one profound change would likely put me on a path that meant other profound changes I'd want to make were unlikely to even be an option. In other words, I'd like make a whole other set of mistakes.
Simon Cook says, "I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism."
This sounded awfully familiar to me as I've just finished reading David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain, 1945-1951," where the urban planners and social reformers rebuilding the country after the war were quite straightforward in their indifference to what people wanted in terms of housing, and what these educated planners wanted to give them. There were copious surveys taken to find out what people wanted. They wanted a single house with a garden, terraced or not. They wanted suburbs. But anti-suburban snobbery was so strong among the educated planners, that they simply ignored what the surveys told them, and gave the people what they explicitly didn't want: high rises.
A similar thing played out in NYC; "The Power Broker" provides ample evidence that many of the people living in the "slums" were astonished to learn that their homes were slums. In particular they already were enjoying that walkable neighborhood with a lively street atmosphere and a beautiful park - one neighborhood that was razed, more for the elevated freeway than anything else though "slum" was the excuse - had boulevards with wide medians where women could sit and chat and watch their children play.
This dynamic plays out several times in the book, with both 19th century apartment blocks - one woman recalled, I could seat 16 in my dining room! - and with neighborhoods of bungalows.
Charles renouvier, French philosopher (deep impact on William James), makes the point that without ‘free will’ there is no possibility of using thinking, analysis, understanding or reasoning to reach conclusions.
And then, modern thought claims humans don’t have free will.
Most more-or-less accept this.
Luther and Erasmus fought over this in published articles.
Luther clearly won. And Calvin.
Protestant culture turned to political solutions.
Catholic culture held (then) more commitment to free will.
Odd that Catholic Church, a long time institution with strong hierarchy, had some trust in free-will.
Until 1870 when pope declared ‘infallible’.
Lord acton fought this for years. Failed.
Biblical, Jewish , Christian teaching proclaims individual responsibility due to free-will.
Abandoning these ancient traditions hasn’t helped modernity.
I felt like Fauci provided the people with exactly what they desired and good for him. They were fearful and he mollified those fears with school closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing and ultimately a vaccine. The fact that many of these measures appear to have been mostly or completely ineffective is beside the point because he provided a solution that Bill Gates and the rest of the Davos crowd could wholeheartedly support. Even many libertarians were all in on this stuff as any visit to the Marginal Revolution archives will confirm. In short, it wasn’t one man that was the source of the problem, it was we the people. Only a small pocket of outcasts and deplorables thought that a different policy response was possible and better overall.
"Only a small pocket of outcasts and deplorables thought that a different policy response was possible and better overall."
My only quibble would be "small". Wherever people were free to make their own decisions most people choose freedom over fear. In the few elections we had during the height of COVID the freedom side tended to do much better than it normally did.
I don't think we should associate "we the people" with the consensus of a certain class of people in our society, even though that class has a lot of power. That class of people did in fact get what it wanted, but that isn't America (its worth noting that class was a lot more important then ideology when rubber meant the road, as the orange line libertarians mostly sided with their class over their ideology).
I recently returned home to Texas after a trip to visit family in the SF Bay Area. My biggest jaw dropper was the number of people still wearing face masks in California. It’s 2024 and otherwise healthy looking people still feel the need to mask up as if it actually does anything to protect them. Remember the Texas Neanderthals when Abbott decided to lift Covid restrictions in early 2021? That was not just Biden and Newsom calling us Neanderthals. It was a very sizable chunk of the population.
Yes, the numbers against lifting restrictions in 2021 was sizable but in most states it had become the minority by that point.
I'd agree that those advocating the most extreme versions of less restraint in 2020, such as what Sweden did, were a small pocket. But maybe adding those wanting somewhat less r striction meant the number against what happened wasn't so small.
After vaccines were readily available, the majority started taking off their masks and wanting a return to normalcy.
I traveled a bit before vaccines and found many pockets not following the severe restrictions. FL was interesting in that I saw businesses that operated at both extremes, specifically no masks and requiring everyone to mask. Other groups we didn't hear as much about. The Amish didn't mask and I'm pretty sure they never vaccinated. Yellowstone NP closed much of its lodging yet when I was there in September they had crowds as big as peak summer days. My limited interaction with blacks included none who wore masks. Note these last two groups would seem more likely to be Democrats. Not exactly who you'd expect to be part of the covid outcast group.
“Yes, the numbers against lifting restrictions in 2021 was sizable but in most states it had become the minority by that point”
Here was a typical article from right around the time that Abbot lifted the restrictions in Texas. In short, your history is off.
***
CNN) Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are decreasing across much of the United States, but health experts warned that could change if fans gathered Sunday to watch the Super Bowl with people from outside their households.
…
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, "while the instinct may be to celebrate together, we cannot get cocky."
"We must continue doing the things we know are effective at taming the virus: wear a mask, adhere to social distancing, and avoid gatherings," he said. "We can beat this thing, but we must stay smart."
That's especially true after a new study found the highly contagious B.1.1.7 strain, first detected in the United Kingdom, is now spreading rapidly in the US.
My apologies for not being more clear. Vaccinations started Dec 2020 but most people didn't get them until March-April-May and that's when things shifted more strongly.
Be that as it may, I was not referring to CNN nor public health officials. I was specifically referring to the general public. On that note, despite CNN and public health officials, my memory is the Superbowl was well-attended and lots of people had Superbowl parties. The minority definitely was not a "small pocket" at the time of the Superbowl.
PS we see the same tools and process in play on climate change. Anyone that views climate change as merely a problem and not a near term catastrophe is automatically excluded from polite society. Will electric cars really reduce global net carbon emissions in some significant way that moves the temperature needle? This question should not be asked.
I was thinking racism has changed definition much like YIMBY. Once upon a time, you could be against racism by treating others as individuals and not according to their skin color. Now racism includes all kinds of things I'm not at all against and excludes many things I would argue are racist (affirmative action, segregated dorms, identity politics, etc.). Under the current definition, I almost have to be labeled racist.
When Cooke "stopped being a 'YIMBY'" did he just go back to advocating for changes in land use regulations and building codes to allow property owners to create maximum value with their assets, or did he get so made at what some "YIMBYs" say that he decide the status quo was just fine and needed no improvement.
The quote sound so familiar from those whose goal in life is to should about how wrong Progressives are without deigning to suggest what is right.
Paris Club will not get us to optimumCO2 concentration the Atmoslohere.
The power of "ideological group identity branding" is just amazing, whether one is an group insider or outsider, the mind just really wants to turn a vague label into a concept about a movement with high conformity. All of a sudden common ground on some subset of positions becomes a social scene and tribal cult with a doctrine and a stereotypical representative personality type.
It would be better if people didn't try to label themselves and just explained they were in favor of deregulation and loosening the current rules enough to let the market significantly increase supply and lower prices. But then immediately "housing deregulationites" will probably because the next brand name and the whole thing starts over again.
",,,the process for climbing the ladder of prestige in various areas has to elevate the best thinkers. Instead, it can promote individuals and coalitions that come up with ways to game the system."
I think we both agree that this happened in economics, with empty displays of math prowess pushing aside anything that had to do with the real world.
Hopefully Simon Cooke’s apostasy won’t cost him too dearly. Such courage seems to deserve some measured response to go with the invective that is sure to rain down on him.
First, his assertion that:
“At first YIMBYs were consistent in seeing that the way to resolve the housing crisis was to increase the supply of land for development. Depending on where you lived there were different priorities - stopping single family zoning, scrapping urban growth boundaries, removing expectations of planning gain and making the permit process faster and more predictable. “
doesn’t really square with my personal experience reading the YIMBY dogma. But I of course live in a cocoon just as everybody else does. Who has called for increasing the supply of land for development or proposed reforms to urban growth boundaries?
No YIMBY that I can think of wants to do anything other than strip power from local government. Local democracy, you see, is tyranny and must be squashed. Common-sense ideas like repealing urban growth boundaries or maybe raising a little federal revenue by renting out a little of the federal government’s vast land holdings for developing some housing seem utterly alien to the YIMBY establishment. One has to look a bit farther afield to find someone like the great Randal O’Toole (https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/new-feudalism-why-states-must-repeal-growth-management-laws ) who would countenance such heresy. No, the typical YIMBY’s top priority seems to be clearing as much habitable and arable land area as possible and handing it over to taxpayer subsidized solar farms to power the maximum number of server farms as possible. “Solar panels over people” seems like the YIMBY doctrine in a nutshell. How many bills have been introduced to make federal land available for housing development? Senator Mike Lee introduced the The HOUSES Act (Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter Act) in 2022 which would have allowed states to purchase certain general public lands for the purpose of developing new housing to resounding acclaim from exactly nobody. No great YIMBY interest at all in any kind of policy that might improve living conditions in a manner any normal person would appreciate. Absolute crickets on state level requirements in California and elsewhere for all new houses to have electric car chargers and rooftop solar. And absolute crickets from the YIMBY crowd on all of the new rent-control legislation being enacted at state level. Much more important to stomp on local government. Herd all the little people into Regent International style high rise housing complexes (https://thetravelbible.com/the-dystopian-apartment-block-in-china-where-residents-never-go-outside/ )and don’t let them out is something, on the other hand, that they are eager to support. But the little people aren’t drinking the know-it-all classes Kool-Aid and to Cooke’s credit, he seems to recognize this. But I would argue, YIMBY has never been anything but malignant.
It seems that the threat of YIMBY initiatives destroying local neighborhood social capital has been been behind much of the drastic fall in the number and prices of homes being sold that are not in gated or HOA-protected neighborhoods and the reason for the massive expansion of private zoning through home owner associations in which houses command substantial premiums:
- “Gating is a relatively new urban process that has gained significance particularly in the last decade. Low (2003) reports that the number of people estimated to be living in gated communities (GCs) in the United States increased from 4 million in 1995, to 8 million in 1997, to 16 million in 1998. Webster et al. (2002) show that the number of gated and guarded communities and condominiums in the United States almost doubled, starting from a little over 25,000 in 1990 and reaching more than 40,000 in 1998. “ (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597653/ )
The most recent figure I have seen for the number of people living in a gated community is 78 million. It appears that the know-it-all class is going to have to have to exercise quite a bit more coercion to keep the little people in their place.
What joke? I met my wife of over half a century at peoples park riot at UC Berkeley. We literally got shoved together by bayonet point from the National Guard. It worked out well with both children also going to Berkeley and both getting Ph.D.s.
My hot take is that the best way to bring down housing prices is to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction and 1031 exchanges. Phase both out over 20 years. The NAR would never let that get through congress.
(I speak as both a homeowner and real estate investor.)
Re: meeting chicks -- an early episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is about abortion protests, with two characters choosing different sides based on which girls they're attracted to.
If we want fewer YIMBYs to be adjacent to meddling progressives, maybe conservatives in more functional states should get real about the lousy choice Americans get: cities you can’t afford children in or cookie cutter subdivisions and McMansions with no green spaces or sense of community that you can maybe drive to a Chilis from.
Wake me up when the US is overrun with places like Amsterdam to choose from, because where we are today Cooke is complaining about is ultimately a phantom and not something the market is allowed to offer Americans.
Northeast US boroughs are underrated, and sadly for people who would like to start families like myself, extremely expensive. I feel like deregulating the ability to build townhomes, accessory units, and mid rises would go a long way to finding a much better balance than we get today.
As government will always intervene in one way or the other - whether it's affordablity or complex regulations or density bonuses for supposed park $ or parking requirements or in the other direction, the much more significant outlay that is building or expanding roads to nowhere at the behest of buddy land speculators, and all those crappy schools that are gifts to the sprawl merchants - I'd much rather see the $ go to continuing to grow food where we currently grow food. This is not perhaps something an Englishman could understand, however.
I don't doubt that radicalism is a way to meet chicks and also that church is a way to find wives but that seems quite different from getting men to vote for the opposing party, never mind that the spread in men voting Republican, women Democrat has been increasing here in the US.
My last city agonized over affordability and how to mandate it - I never did understand the complicated arrangement by which people would own homes built on the city's former airport, without those homes appreciating in the normal way when it was time to sell; this required a permanent bureaucratic overlay I guess.
Many formula and lotteries (!) and carrots and sticks were tried. I didn't follow the details much as I never could care about where people slept in the way that the left did (what went on in the bedroom should be no one's concern but where that bedroom was, was another matter) - but the distinctly funniest one I remember was a midrise condo building (I think it was the one for which had to make way a suddenly-beloved Taco Cabana, which Taco Cabana did have a rather sweet view and location). In order to receive a greater height allowance or a greater number of market-rate units or something, the city made the developer promise to offer music lessons to underprivileged people in the ground floor space.
I am sure no one remembers this but me. I feel people should trust my recollection though - as I frequently explain, I have no gift for invention.
Unfortunately, as so often happened, the wrangling over this took such awhile that I believe it was overtaken by the financial crisis and so no music issued from that building.
Meanwhile when something was ultimately built there, some of the residents were dismayed to find that the developer hadn't bought out the billboard hard by - so for some the view was of a beer ad.
But billboards and their removal were the bread-and-butter of an earlier urbanism, which must now be thoroughly discredited. The uglier things are, the more sure you may be that you've got the right people in the right places.
“Many of your peers will waste their 20s dating and partying; but you should be married with at least one kid by the time you’re 30.”
We were very atypical millennials amongst our peers who got to three by thirty, and are now nearly at six. There were a lot of late nights wondering about the choices that led to being up in the middle of the night changing diapers and bottle feeding, sacrificing career advances, etc., when colleagues and old classmates were getting that next promotion and circling the globe on the next adventure.
Many people waste their 20s partying and dating precisely because most of their peers do so. It’s pretty difficult and requires a peculiar contrarianism to break away when your entire work and social circles are doing the exact same thing.
And there’s very little near-term validation of the choice to step off the party bus and buckle down and start a family early. It takes a long time, if ever, to see the return on that investment.
"You are not as young as you think you are"
Good advice that has, of course, been handed down through the ages but ignored by 99% of the people under the age of 30 that entire time, including me. I will be 58 next week and stand in astonishment at just how fast the last 40 years have passed since I graduated from high school. I would do it all differently if I could go back in time.
I often think about what I would do differently. Sometimes things rather trivial, sometimes not. But on the rare occasion I think more deeply I realize any one profound change would likely put me on a path that meant other profound changes I'd want to make were unlikely to even be an option. In other words, I'd like make a whole other set of mistakes.
Simon Cook says, "I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism."
This sounded awfully familiar to me as I've just finished reading David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain, 1945-1951," where the urban planners and social reformers rebuilding the country after the war were quite straightforward in their indifference to what people wanted in terms of housing, and what these educated planners wanted to give them. There were copious surveys taken to find out what people wanted. They wanted a single house with a garden, terraced or not. They wanted suburbs. But anti-suburban snobbery was so strong among the educated planners, that they simply ignored what the surveys told them, and gave the people what they explicitly didn't want: high rises.
A similar thing played out in NYC; "The Power Broker" provides ample evidence that many of the people living in the "slums" were astonished to learn that their homes were slums. In particular they already were enjoying that walkable neighborhood with a lively street atmosphere and a beautiful park - one neighborhood that was razed, more for the elevated freeway than anything else though "slum" was the excuse - had boulevards with wide medians where women could sit and chat and watch their children play.
This dynamic plays out several times in the book, with both 19th century apartment blocks - one woman recalled, I could seat 16 in my dining room! - and with neighborhoods of bungalows.
In pondering finding ‘truth’ . . .
Charles renouvier, French philosopher (deep impact on William James), makes the point that without ‘free will’ there is no possibility of using thinking, analysis, understanding or reasoning to reach conclusions.
And then, modern thought claims humans don’t have free will.
Most more-or-less accept this.
Luther and Erasmus fought over this in published articles.
Luther clearly won. And Calvin.
Protestant culture turned to political solutions.
Catholic culture held (then) more commitment to free will.
Odd that Catholic Church, a long time institution with strong hierarchy, had some trust in free-will.
Until 1870 when pope declared ‘infallible’.
Lord acton fought this for years. Failed.
Biblical, Jewish , Christian teaching proclaims individual responsibility due to free-will.
Abandoning these ancient traditions hasn’t helped modernity.
Thanks
Clay
I felt like Fauci provided the people with exactly what they desired and good for him. They were fearful and he mollified those fears with school closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing and ultimately a vaccine. The fact that many of these measures appear to have been mostly or completely ineffective is beside the point because he provided a solution that Bill Gates and the rest of the Davos crowd could wholeheartedly support. Even many libertarians were all in on this stuff as any visit to the Marginal Revolution archives will confirm. In short, it wasn’t one man that was the source of the problem, it was we the people. Only a small pocket of outcasts and deplorables thought that a different policy response was possible and better overall.
"Only a small pocket of outcasts and deplorables thought that a different policy response was possible and better overall."
My only quibble would be "small". Wherever people were free to make their own decisions most people choose freedom over fear. In the few elections we had during the height of COVID the freedom side tended to do much better than it normally did.
I don't think we should associate "we the people" with the consensus of a certain class of people in our society, even though that class has a lot of power. That class of people did in fact get what it wanted, but that isn't America (its worth noting that class was a lot more important then ideology when rubber meant the road, as the orange line libertarians mostly sided with their class over their ideology).
I recently returned home to Texas after a trip to visit family in the SF Bay Area. My biggest jaw dropper was the number of people still wearing face masks in California. It’s 2024 and otherwise healthy looking people still feel the need to mask up as if it actually does anything to protect them. Remember the Texas Neanderthals when Abbott decided to lift Covid restrictions in early 2021? That was not just Biden and Newsom calling us Neanderthals. It was a very sizable chunk of the population.
Yes, the numbers against lifting restrictions in 2021 was sizable but in most states it had become the minority by that point.
I'd agree that those advocating the most extreme versions of less restraint in 2020, such as what Sweden did, were a small pocket. But maybe adding those wanting somewhat less r striction meant the number against what happened wasn't so small.
After vaccines were readily available, the majority started taking off their masks and wanting a return to normalcy.
I traveled a bit before vaccines and found many pockets not following the severe restrictions. FL was interesting in that I saw businesses that operated at both extremes, specifically no masks and requiring everyone to mask. Other groups we didn't hear as much about. The Amish didn't mask and I'm pretty sure they never vaccinated. Yellowstone NP closed much of its lodging yet when I was there in September they had crowds as big as peak summer days. My limited interaction with blacks included none who wore masks. Note these last two groups would seem more likely to be Democrats. Not exactly who you'd expect to be part of the covid outcast group.
“Yes, the numbers against lifting restrictions in 2021 was sizable but in most states it had become the minority by that point”
Here was a typical article from right around the time that Abbot lifted the restrictions in Texas. In short, your history is off.
***
CNN) Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are decreasing across much of the United States, but health experts warned that could change if fans gathered Sunday to watch the Super Bowl with people from outside their households.
…
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, "while the instinct may be to celebrate together, we cannot get cocky."
"We must continue doing the things we know are effective at taming the virus: wear a mask, adhere to social distancing, and avoid gatherings," he said. "We can beat this thing, but we must stay smart."
That's especially true after a new study found the highly contagious B.1.1.7 strain, first detected in the United Kingdom, is now spreading rapidly in the US.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/07/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html
My apologies for not being more clear. Vaccinations started Dec 2020 but most people didn't get them until March-April-May and that's when things shifted more strongly.
Be that as it may, I was not referring to CNN nor public health officials. I was specifically referring to the general public. On that note, despite CNN and public health officials, my memory is the Superbowl was well-attended and lots of people had Superbowl parties. The minority definitely was not a "small pocket" at the time of the Superbowl.
PS we see the same tools and process in play on climate change. Anyone that views climate change as merely a problem and not a near term catastrophe is automatically excluded from polite society. Will electric cars really reduce global net carbon emissions in some significant way that moves the temperature needle? This question should not be asked.
Good example.
I was thinking racism has changed definition much like YIMBY. Once upon a time, you could be against racism by treating others as individuals and not according to their skin color. Now racism includes all kinds of things I'm not at all against and excludes many things I would argue are racist (affirmative action, segregated dorms, identity politics, etc.). Under the current definition, I almost have to be labeled racist.
When Cooke "stopped being a 'YIMBY'" did he just go back to advocating for changes in land use regulations and building codes to allow property owners to create maximum value with their assets, or did he get so made at what some "YIMBYs" say that he decide the status quo was just fine and needed no improvement.
The quote sound so familiar from those whose goal in life is to should about how wrong Progressives are without deigning to suggest what is right.
Paris Club will not get us to optimumCO2 concentration the Atmoslohere.
DEI will not get us to a colorblind society
etc.
Tell us something we don't know, like what will!
In another post, someone described YIMBYs as "wanting to live their college lifestyle for the rest of their life" which seems accurate.
The power of "ideological group identity branding" is just amazing, whether one is an group insider or outsider, the mind just really wants to turn a vague label into a concept about a movement with high conformity. All of a sudden common ground on some subset of positions becomes a social scene and tribal cult with a doctrine and a stereotypical representative personality type.
It would be better if people didn't try to label themselves and just explained they were in favor of deregulation and loosening the current rules enough to let the market significantly increase supply and lower prices. But then immediately "housing deregulationites" will probably because the next brand name and the whole thing starts over again.
",,,the process for climbing the ladder of prestige in various areas has to elevate the best thinkers. Instead, it can promote individuals and coalitions that come up with ways to game the system."
I think we both agree that this happened in economics, with empty displays of math prowess pushing aside anything that had to do with the real world.
Hopefully Simon Cooke’s apostasy won’t cost him too dearly. Such courage seems to deserve some measured response to go with the invective that is sure to rain down on him.
First, his assertion that:
“At first YIMBYs were consistent in seeing that the way to resolve the housing crisis was to increase the supply of land for development. Depending on where you lived there were different priorities - stopping single family zoning, scrapping urban growth boundaries, removing expectations of planning gain and making the permit process faster and more predictable. “
doesn’t really square with my personal experience reading the YIMBY dogma. But I of course live in a cocoon just as everybody else does. Who has called for increasing the supply of land for development or proposed reforms to urban growth boundaries?
No YIMBY that I can think of wants to do anything other than strip power from local government. Local democracy, you see, is tyranny and must be squashed. Common-sense ideas like repealing urban growth boundaries or maybe raising a little federal revenue by renting out a little of the federal government’s vast land holdings for developing some housing seem utterly alien to the YIMBY establishment. One has to look a bit farther afield to find someone like the great Randal O’Toole (https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/new-feudalism-why-states-must-repeal-growth-management-laws ) who would countenance such heresy. No, the typical YIMBY’s top priority seems to be clearing as much habitable and arable land area as possible and handing it over to taxpayer subsidized solar farms to power the maximum number of server farms as possible. “Solar panels over people” seems like the YIMBY doctrine in a nutshell. How many bills have been introduced to make federal land available for housing development? Senator Mike Lee introduced the The HOUSES Act (Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter Act) in 2022 which would have allowed states to purchase certain general public lands for the purpose of developing new housing to resounding acclaim from exactly nobody. No great YIMBY interest at all in any kind of policy that might improve living conditions in a manner any normal person would appreciate. Absolute crickets on state level requirements in California and elsewhere for all new houses to have electric car chargers and rooftop solar. And absolute crickets from the YIMBY crowd on all of the new rent-control legislation being enacted at state level. Much more important to stomp on local government. Herd all the little people into Regent International style high rise housing complexes (https://thetravelbible.com/the-dystopian-apartment-block-in-china-where-residents-never-go-outside/ )and don’t let them out is something, on the other hand, that they are eager to support. But the little people aren’t drinking the know-it-all classes Kool-Aid and to Cooke’s credit, he seems to recognize this. But I would argue, YIMBY has never been anything but malignant.
It seems that the threat of YIMBY initiatives destroying local neighborhood social capital has been been behind much of the drastic fall in the number and prices of homes being sold that are not in gated or HOA-protected neighborhoods and the reason for the massive expansion of private zoning through home owner associations in which houses command substantial premiums:
- “Nearly 4 in 5 single-family homes built in 2021 in the U.S. were part of HOAs. New housing construction has grown across the board since 2009, but new housing that's incorporated in HOAs has grown about four times faster than housing that's not.” (https://www.portlandrealestate.com/blog/where-and-why-more-new-homes-are-getting-wrapped-homeowner-associations/ )
- “Gating is a relatively new urban process that has gained significance particularly in the last decade. Low (2003) reports that the number of people estimated to be living in gated communities (GCs) in the United States increased from 4 million in 1995, to 8 million in 1997, to 16 million in 1998. Webster et al. (2002) show that the number of gated and guarded communities and condominiums in the United States almost doubled, starting from a little over 25,000 in 1990 and reaching more than 40,000 in 1998. “ (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597653/ )
The most recent figure I have seen for the number of people living in a gated community is 78 million. It appears that the know-it-all class is going to have to have to exercise quite a bit more coercion to keep the little people in their place.
What joke? I met my wife of over half a century at peoples park riot at UC Berkeley. We literally got shoved together by bayonet point from the National Guard. It worked out well with both children also going to Berkeley and both getting Ph.D.s.
My hot take is that the best way to bring down housing prices is to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction and 1031 exchanges. Phase both out over 20 years. The NAR would never let that get through congress.
(I speak as both a homeowner and real estate investor.)
Re: meeting chicks -- an early episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is about abortion protests, with two characters choosing different sides based on which girls they're attracted to.
If we want fewer YIMBYs to be adjacent to meddling progressives, maybe conservatives in more functional states should get real about the lousy choice Americans get: cities you can’t afford children in or cookie cutter subdivisions and McMansions with no green spaces or sense of community that you can maybe drive to a Chilis from.
Wake me up when the US is overrun with places like Amsterdam to choose from, because where we are today Cooke is complaining about is ultimately a phantom and not something the market is allowed to offer Americans.
Northeast US boroughs are underrated, and sadly for people who would like to start families like myself, extremely expensive. I feel like deregulating the ability to build townhomes, accessory units, and mid rises would go a long way to finding a much better balance than we get today.
As government will always intervene in one way or the other - whether it's affordablity or complex regulations or density bonuses for supposed park $ or parking requirements or in the other direction, the much more significant outlay that is building or expanding roads to nowhere at the behest of buddy land speculators, and all those crappy schools that are gifts to the sprawl merchants - I'd much rather see the $ go to continuing to grow food where we currently grow food. This is not perhaps something an Englishman could understand, however.
I don't doubt that radicalism is a way to meet chicks and also that church is a way to find wives but that seems quite different from getting men to vote for the opposing party, never mind that the spread in men voting Republican, women Democrat has been increasing here in the US.
My last city agonized over affordability and how to mandate it - I never did understand the complicated arrangement by which people would own homes built on the city's former airport, without those homes appreciating in the normal way when it was time to sell; this required a permanent bureaucratic overlay I guess.
Many formula and lotteries (!) and carrots and sticks were tried. I didn't follow the details much as I never could care about where people slept in the way that the left did (what went on in the bedroom should be no one's concern but where that bedroom was, was another matter) - but the distinctly funniest one I remember was a midrise condo building (I think it was the one for which had to make way a suddenly-beloved Taco Cabana, which Taco Cabana did have a rather sweet view and location). In order to receive a greater height allowance or a greater number of market-rate units or something, the city made the developer promise to offer music lessons to underprivileged people in the ground floor space.
I am sure no one remembers this but me. I feel people should trust my recollection though - as I frequently explain, I have no gift for invention.
Unfortunately, as so often happened, the wrangling over this took such awhile that I believe it was overtaken by the financial crisis and so no music issued from that building.
Meanwhile when something was ultimately built there, some of the residents were dismayed to find that the developer hadn't bought out the billboard hard by - so for some the view was of a beer ad.
But billboards and their removal were the bread-and-butter of an earlier urbanism, which must now be thoroughly discredited. The uglier things are, the more sure you may be that you've got the right people in the right places.