There is also the economic dimension that guarantees the political problem you are pointing to... because housing is so expensive and treated as a de facto retirement asset, it is rational for current homeowners to oppose change as potentially economically ruinous for them personally. It might be.
If my choices in my retirement account had a chance of driving your retirement account down 20 percent, you'd get pretty interested in participating in my investment process...
This also makes information about how the process will conclude -- predictability -- an important opportunity. If I know what could be built next door, that can get priced in when I buy the place.
Here in northern California, it feels like we could improve the standing of all parties on this dimension. The perception is that the planning and building standards processes are not predictable and have an incredibly broad range of possible outcomes. Incumbent owners feel threatened that big players can do something awful, while they fear trying to repair a deck without an inspection tripling the cost.
Half the point of YIMBY is that in the end building stuff isn’t a democratic outcome, it’s more of the nature of property rights. Or: who cares if other people oppose it, I should have the right to do it anyway because it’s my stuff and my land as long as its not actively dangerous. Just like I can buy my own toothbrush and decorate my apartment however I like, even if other people may find it tasteless and dumb.
The trouble is that property rights are never a safe base for YIMBY, because your house requires utilities and infrastructure that go across other people's land.
The difference of course is that folks are paranoid that, unlike your toothbrush choices, your experiment in brutalist tower building may impact the value of my cottage next door. What I own when I own property has always worked this way... you can't dig a trench on your lot that causes my ground to lose support and slide away, even if the trench is on your side of the line. It reasonable to claim that planning is there to protect my property rights, and it is reasonable to defend one's major asset from impairment.
But, unlike the right to lateral support, the content and process of these claims seems to have become unknowable and unmanageable.
So this is interesting because the logic works backwards as well: who are you to prevent me from improving my major asset by building onto it? That’s a serious impairment to my potential housing value.
As they say, your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.
Property rights are a bundle of rights guaranteed and delineated by law and policy. The right to lateral support limits your ability to dig trenches, even if that means it is more expensive for you to get your oil or gold out of your land. That goes back I think as far as the law of Solon in Ancient Greece.
What you can (and can't) build (with or without a hearing about it) should be clear when you bought the place. If you thought that you bought an exemption from the right of lateral support, or that you had the right to put up a 32-story tower in a suburb without a hearing, or that you bought the Brooklyn Bridge, you were misinformed.
The challenge is that, in the last 50 years, the process for knowing, defining, and adjudicating conflicts about these rights has become unmanageable and unpredictable. You don't really know what you can build. You don't really know what your neighbor can build.
I agree on the fact that the rights are unknowable, which is a big issue, tho I think I’m also trying to point out that the typical way that people argue for restricting property rights has a flaw in it, in that they rarely consider the opportunity cost - the cost to me in not being able to modify my property is arguably equally as valid as the cost to you of me modifying my property, and needs to be well balanced against each other.
My usual banal comment (similar point to Charlotte above) - your footnote 1 is very important - I grew up in Doncaster. You can examine the court records on “Donnygate” for all the rational reasons people around here are sceptical of how YIMBYism looks in reality. That is not the end of the discussion at all, but YIMBY will do a lot better when it engages with the problem.
your footnote is very important, and not just for communities but also for people involved in both the politics and the bureaucracy of planning — why on earth should *developers* of all people be assumed to be motivated by anything other than pure profit? so much left yimbyism really can’t answer this question.
Absolutely. To the extent that I am capable of being of any use to British public life at all, it's probably because I am on reasonable speaking terms with both the Abundance crowd and the people working on citizens assemblies and might be able to facilitate the two sides talking to each other. It seems as clear as day to me that the only way forward for Abundance is to go all in on participatory democracy.
I was under the impression that the issue with nimbyism was that it has subverted representative democracy with local control and radical environmental and planning activism...... Ohhhh i see your point! You want to swamp out the whingy nimbys with the participatory democracy? Japanese readjustment etc etc.
Only that people's objection to things is temporal, very often. No one wanted any of the new houses built on my street 5 years ago. Now the disruption has ended and nice people have moved in, everyone's delighted with the change.
This happened on our street. The nice people moved in, and we like them, but they still built suburban style houses with big set backs and no sidewalk in an urban neighbourhood with small setbacks and well used sidewalks, and they look silly. They have supplied a natural experiment in the benefits of walkable urban design. Everyone hangs out and chats on the stoops and sidewalks on the old side of the street, even all the nice neighbours from the burbs.
Just because there is genuine underlying political conflict doesn't mean that procedures can't make matters worse. The corollary is that improving procedures can improve matters. I suggest reading this thread on the proposed Canadian economic zones: https://bsky.app/profile/isaiahbishop.bsky.social/post/3mp53gi4owk2v
I am a great fan of consultation and consent. But it is hard. Nobody can authoritatively speak for the "no" side, and bind it consensually. This isn't always fatal. Often enough, the "no" side consists of a few sensible activists supported by a relatively tractable base. A decent deal is possible. But on some hot-button issues, many of the activists are purists and they lead the base. Sensible activists have very little negotiating power since a sensible solution will not mollify the base and will disempower the sensible activists. Consultative negotiation ain't gonna work.
(And then there was BLM: moderate demands backed by purist rhetoric. Politics is complicated!)
If you find yourself in a position where you have a large constituency of bona fide stakeholders who, for reasons you may or may not approve of, are fundamentally opposed to the thing you’re trying to build, then it is at least possible that consultation “not working” is in fact the system working as it ought to.
All good points. But doesn't this just require more design creativity? Say, you'll build the thing but make sure it has beautiful murals and hanging plants, if they're worried about obstruction of views, which is common. Build community space where the neighborhood can go for free to experience the NIMBY lifestyle but go back to an efficient and effectively designed home.
NIMBYism seems to be to be fundamentally about entitlement. I am entitled to not have to put up with this imposition. But this isn't actually at odds with building better, you just have to give them more valuable things than what they're giving up. I think the real issue here is we have forgotten local community and instead live online, where you can easily block out unwanted things.
But IRL you can't, and you should be offering a better world through community space design rather than taking the land by eminent domain.
"Political" might be synonymous with "who's going to pay for this?" The participatory democracy approach will tend to push it in that direction.
But a lot of yimbyism and nimbyism is sociological too, a mix of grassroots alliances and weaponized-sociology astroturf campaign, depending. This is a distinct dimension from politics. In the US also there's a lot of "race" involved, inevitably, and the yimbys and nimbys can change sides pretty quickly.
At least those three dimensions: the complexity of the accountability process, the politics, and the sociology.
Thanks Dan, that gets to the root of the problem. But I'm more hopeful. It seems to me that well-located NIMBYs must be conflicted, must have some sense of how valuable their properties become when permitted to replace a house with 10 or 20 apartments. I suggest that what they need is a new kind of property listing, one that solves their coordination problem when they try to assemble land on the required scale. My solution is here (https://crowdlands.substack.com/p/an-appeal-for-a-new-kind-of-property?r=uc0l). It can be seen as crowdsourcing applied to land. There is also a spinoff for participatory democracy.
My mantra is that process should complement judgement; it should not substitute for it. Unfortunately, I think that is easier said than done, particularly when there is no clear political consensus or when there is consensus in the abstract but not in the concrete (ba-dum-tss!).
There is also the economic dimension that guarantees the political problem you are pointing to... because housing is so expensive and treated as a de facto retirement asset, it is rational for current homeowners to oppose change as potentially economically ruinous for them personally. It might be.
If my choices in my retirement account had a chance of driving your retirement account down 20 percent, you'd get pretty interested in participating in my investment process...
This also makes information about how the process will conclude -- predictability -- an important opportunity. If I know what could be built next door, that can get priced in when I buy the place.
Here in northern California, it feels like we could improve the standing of all parties on this dimension. The perception is that the planning and building standards processes are not predictable and have an incredibly broad range of possible outcomes. Incumbent owners feel threatened that big players can do something awful, while they fear trying to repair a deck without an inspection tripling the cost.
Half the point of YIMBY is that in the end building stuff isn’t a democratic outcome, it’s more of the nature of property rights. Or: who cares if other people oppose it, I should have the right to do it anyway because it’s my stuff and my land as long as its not actively dangerous. Just like I can buy my own toothbrush and decorate my apartment however I like, even if other people may find it tasteless and dumb.
The trouble is that property rights are never a safe base for YIMBY, because your house requires utilities and infrastructure that go across other people's land.
I was just going to mention your toothbrush...
The difference of course is that folks are paranoid that, unlike your toothbrush choices, your experiment in brutalist tower building may impact the value of my cottage next door. What I own when I own property has always worked this way... you can't dig a trench on your lot that causes my ground to lose support and slide away, even if the trench is on your side of the line. It reasonable to claim that planning is there to protect my property rights, and it is reasonable to defend one's major asset from impairment.
But, unlike the right to lateral support, the content and process of these claims seems to have become unknowable and unmanageable.
So this is interesting because the logic works backwards as well: who are you to prevent me from improving my major asset by building onto it? That’s a serious impairment to my potential housing value.
As they say, your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.
Property rights are a bundle of rights guaranteed and delineated by law and policy. The right to lateral support limits your ability to dig trenches, even if that means it is more expensive for you to get your oil or gold out of your land. That goes back I think as far as the law of Solon in Ancient Greece.
What you can (and can't) build (with or without a hearing about it) should be clear when you bought the place. If you thought that you bought an exemption from the right of lateral support, or that you had the right to put up a 32-story tower in a suburb without a hearing, or that you bought the Brooklyn Bridge, you were misinformed.
The challenge is that, in the last 50 years, the process for knowing, defining, and adjudicating conflicts about these rights has become unmanageable and unpredictable. You don't really know what you can build. You don't really know what your neighbor can build.
I agree on the fact that the rights are unknowable, which is a big issue, tho I think I’m also trying to point out that the typical way that people argue for restricting property rights has a flaw in it, in that they rarely consider the opportunity cost - the cost to me in not being able to modify my property is arguably equally as valid as the cost to you of me modifying my property, and needs to be well balanced against each other.
My usual banal comment (similar point to Charlotte above) - your footnote 1 is very important - I grew up in Doncaster. You can examine the court records on “Donnygate” for all the rational reasons people around here are sceptical of how YIMBYism looks in reality. That is not the end of the discussion at all, but YIMBY will do a lot better when it engages with the problem.
your footnote is very important, and not just for communities but also for people involved in both the politics and the bureaucracy of planning — why on earth should *developers* of all people be assumed to be motivated by anything other than pure profit? so much left yimbyism really can’t answer this question.
Absolutely. To the extent that I am capable of being of any use to British public life at all, it's probably because I am on reasonable speaking terms with both the Abundance crowd and the people working on citizens assemblies and might be able to facilitate the two sides talking to each other. It seems as clear as day to me that the only way forward for Abundance is to go all in on participatory democracy.
I was under the impression that the issue with nimbyism was that it has subverted representative democracy with local control and radical environmental and planning activism...... Ohhhh i see your point! You want to swamp out the whingy nimbys with the participatory democracy? Japanese readjustment etc etc.
The protesters were always in the minority. It was and is the opposite of democracy, rule of the loudest and most extreme.
Only that people's objection to things is temporal, very often. No one wanted any of the new houses built on my street 5 years ago. Now the disruption has ended and nice people have moved in, everyone's delighted with the change.
This happened on our street. The nice people moved in, and we like them, but they still built suburban style houses with big set backs and no sidewalk in an urban neighbourhood with small setbacks and well used sidewalks, and they look silly. They have supplied a natural experiment in the benefits of walkable urban design. Everyone hangs out and chats on the stoops and sidewalks on the old side of the street, even all the nice neighbours from the burbs.
Just because there is genuine underlying political conflict doesn't mean that procedures can't make matters worse. The corollary is that improving procedures can improve matters. I suggest reading this thread on the proposed Canadian economic zones: https://bsky.app/profile/isaiahbishop.bsky.social/post/3mp53gi4owk2v
I am a great fan of consultation and consent. But it is hard. Nobody can authoritatively speak for the "no" side, and bind it consensually. This isn't always fatal. Often enough, the "no" side consists of a few sensible activists supported by a relatively tractable base. A decent deal is possible. But on some hot-button issues, many of the activists are purists and they lead the base. Sensible activists have very little negotiating power since a sensible solution will not mollify the base and will disempower the sensible activists. Consultative negotiation ain't gonna work.
(And then there was BLM: moderate demands backed by purist rhetoric. Politics is complicated!)
If you find yourself in a position where you have a large constituency of bona fide stakeholders who, for reasons you may or may not approve of, are fundamentally opposed to the thing you’re trying to build, then it is at least possible that consultation “not working” is in fact the system working as it ought to.
Agreed, since you use the words "large" and "bona fide."
All good points. But doesn't this just require more design creativity? Say, you'll build the thing but make sure it has beautiful murals and hanging plants, if they're worried about obstruction of views, which is common. Build community space where the neighborhood can go for free to experience the NIMBY lifestyle but go back to an efficient and effectively designed home.
NIMBYism seems to be to be fundamentally about entitlement. I am entitled to not have to put up with this imposition. But this isn't actually at odds with building better, you just have to give them more valuable things than what they're giving up. I think the real issue here is we have forgotten local community and instead live online, where you can easily block out unwanted things.
But IRL you can't, and you should be offering a better world through community space design rather than taking the land by eminent domain.
"Political" might be synonymous with "who's going to pay for this?" The participatory democracy approach will tend to push it in that direction.
But a lot of yimbyism and nimbyism is sociological too, a mix of grassroots alliances and weaponized-sociology astroturf campaign, depending. This is a distinct dimension from politics. In the US also there's a lot of "race" involved, inevitably, and the yimbys and nimbys can change sides pretty quickly.
At least those three dimensions: the complexity of the accountability process, the politics, and the sociology.
Thanks Dan, that gets to the root of the problem. But I'm more hopeful. It seems to me that well-located NIMBYs must be conflicted, must have some sense of how valuable their properties become when permitted to replace a house with 10 or 20 apartments. I suggest that what they need is a new kind of property listing, one that solves their coordination problem when they try to assemble land on the required scale. My solution is here (https://crowdlands.substack.com/p/an-appeal-for-a-new-kind-of-property?r=uc0l). It can be seen as crowdsourcing applied to land. There is also a spinoff for participatory democracy.
My mantra is that process should complement judgement; it should not substitute for it. Unfortunately, I think that is easier said than done, particularly when there is no clear political consensus or when there is consensus in the abstract but not in the concrete (ba-dum-tss!).