The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed. I’ve seen well-to-do liberals who pretend to be horrified by Trump and “go back to Mexico” casually drop “go back to Ohio” at community board meetings. As if that sentiment is different. Boggles my mind.
I am convinced that there is nothing more than NIMBYs would like - even or maybe especially the ones who call themselves “liberal” - than a hukou policy. If you’re born in Ohio, you have to stay there. No moving for that good job and polluting our charming, quirky nabe with your outsider-ness! Bloom where you are planted!
Berkeley, which has proudly been a sanctuary city (for undocumented immigrants) since the 80’s, is also one of the NIMBY-est places I’ve ever seen. That is slowly changing, though not enough - that jerkwad NIMBY and his faction have apparently successfully blocked a lot of student housing and got UC Berkeley to cap enrollment. And - Berkeley is a college town! Students are what made it what it was! But no, we must have our neighborhood character.
But the point stands, that this very liberal, and I’m sure well-meaning, city, never put its money where its mouth was because “character” and “charm” and all that nonsense.
I wish I had more than one upvote, or some Slow Boring Gold, to give this comment.
And I wish I had more than one upvote to give to you for raging against those asshole NIMBYs that kneecapped UC Berekley's enrollment level. Still makes me seethe with anger.
It made me seethe, too. And not cope. I do not live in Berkeley, though I do live near enough by that I hear news about it all the time. (And pre-pandemic I’d go there with friends to shop and have lunch, but alas for Body Time closing! Yes, I have hoarded China Rain. I also loved the Solano Stroll.) That and the continued guarding of People’s Park as some kind of “must be preserved in amber so that Mario Savio would still recognize it if he arose from the dead.”
For all kinds of reasons, it’s infuriating. Berkeley is, fundamentally, a college town, not a tourist town. Yes, tourists and nearby suburbanites (raises hand) go there, but strolling down College Avenue - notice the name? - is not the point of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is. And you cannot have a college without students, who do have to live somewhere, sorry NIMBYs.
Oh man, when I took a look at People's Park on Google Maps, I was like "WTF is there that there's actually worth keeping? If you're going to make it a park, at least make it a nice park!"
It’s a piece of junk! It’s no place you want to have a picnic or take your kid to play. The only thing guaranteed is some headline saying “We need to identify this person who OD’d in People’s Park.”
Notice the NIMBY organizations are called “Make UC A Good Neighbor” (no, Mr. Rogers would not have approved) and “People’s Park Historical Advocacy Group.” I think I can fill in most if not all my NIMBY Bingo Card with these.
Strong, strong upvote. I use this line all the time to challenge good hearted people who would be abhorred at being tarred as racist or xenophobic from the former when they start to show NIMBY tendencies as they complain about growth from the latter.
My favorite line to use is "Look, we're not going 'Make [city] Great Again' by building a wall around [city] and making [tech company/apartment developer/etc] pay for it".
The place where I go after the left most hard is basically where the labor movement is in the same pool with the NIMBYs, the immigration opponents, and the anti-trade people. It's all the same state imposed barriers to entry, protectionist horseshit.
But only on a super local level. I can't blame SL houseowner for opposing the conversion of his next-door neighbor's house into a 8 family low rise. I do blame them for opposing the same or larger several blocks over by the Metro. But the blame is not for being racist, but for not valuing the good of those who will live in the new residences and the revenue the city will raise.
Eric Adams’s embrace of ‘go back to Iowa’-type rhetoric back when he was Brooklyn Borough President is one of the things that gave me pause about him (although the housing issue has actually been one of the brighter spots for his mayoral admin). I feel like he and Andrew Cuomo unfortunately appeal to a subset of the Dem electorate who would have been MAGA if they had the moral unluck to be born as white southerners or Midwesterners.
>The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed<
Totally. This was an insightful observation by Yglesias. Nimbyism, immigration restrictionism and (increasingly) a general antipathy for population growth all go hand in hand these days based on my internet arguments.
From the way back machine. I remember when the Oregon governor had a sign installed at the California border: Thanks for visiting. But don't move here. (or words to this effect)
Disagree. I've witnessed so many people at community board meetings say they were born in the neighborhood and lived in their home their entire lives. As if that entitles them to something.
Also I'm not sure that's a meaningful difference even if it's true. "I don't believe poor people are entitled to live in my neighborhood" is not really better than "I don't believe immigrants are entitled to live in my country"
These are the people who complain about small town xenophobia where you only get respect if your family is “from here.” But they are heading down the same path - “I was born here and lived here all my life!” Some add that their parents were born here too. I wish they could really hear what they are saying.
This mostly applies to places where property taxes are capped. People living in now-million-dollar homes wouldn't be as anti-development if they actually had to pay property taxes on the true value of their homes.
I don't know if that's true. I mean I talk to these people regularly. They don't usually have the same understanding of cause and effect that your comment implies. They usually blame rising prices on the gentrifiers and see it as part and parcel with the development.
I have the exact opposite reaction. Claiming for protectionist immigration principles simply affirm the basic democratic notion “the government of the people for the people by the people”. The state literally exists to serve its citizens. To the extent that you think immigration will impoverish your citizenry it’s basically your *duty* to limit it. Of course, you may well dispute the premise, but that’s a second order question.
By contrast nimbyism is class snobbery. And worse, it’s class entrenchment. It’s the idea that very often the accident of your birth (when you were born, whether your parents already owned a nice house you could inherit/sell off) should determine all. It’s anti egalitarian and nasty.
I think it’s fair to characterize both under either or both rubrics as “I, a geographic incumbent, believe that newcomers to the relevant area affected by my vote will not redound to my benefit and will reduce my quality of life, and therefore oppose them” - that’s literally the mechanism of action in both cases, and indeed immigration is manifestly anti-egalitarian under the second rubric because citizenship is (to first order) overwhelmingly an accident of birth.
The fundamental hurdle run into by opposing either NIMBYism or immigration restriction under this view is that “geographic incumbents get a say in issues of governance” is literally what citizenship and voting are. YIMBYism differs chiefly in that it has a substantive persuasive argument (“more housing is good”) but also the meta argument that local control of zoning shouldn’t exist (basically because when such control does exist, people vote for zoning.) Conversely, there’s not the same meta-case to be made on immigration because obviously US citizens are the relevant electoral constituency for US immigration policy.
One of the rights of US citizenship is equal protection under the laws in every state, including free movement. As much as some regions would like to prioritize their incumbents for access to housing, all they can Constitutionally get away with is protecting existing tenancies. This is effective in the short term, but people’s needs change over their lives - for example, children grow up and need their own homes. They can’t get them, unless outsiders of similar economic circumstances also can. In the long run, something like “California for Californians” isn’t actually workable. It’s at most “California for this particular generation of Californians.”
Ethnostates may not be desirable, but they are clearly doable, even over thousands of years. NIMBY regions will fail at social reproduction as long as US citizenship is meaningful in this way.
Yes, and the feudal/aristocratic characteristics are one of the best arguments against NIMBYism. This is America. Who your parents are and what land you were born on is not supposed to have this kind of role. This kind of reversion to Old World norms is antithetical to the democratic project. It’s not made any less so because the lords held an election among themselves.
How so? The pro-NIMBY / pro-restriction point is precisely that citizenship is (1) meaningful and (2) overwhelmingly reflects geographic incumbency (local for NIMBYism and national for immigration restriction), which is empirically true. The problem YIMBYs face is that according control of governance based on geographic incumbency is *presumptively legimate* because it’s how every election from school board to POTUS is organized.
US citizenship is meaningful. It confers the right to live in the United States. There’s not a secondary citizenship system at the state or local level. That’s China.
This gets to the heart of the 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres' issue.
If people want to say that there is no meaningful difference between those inside vs outside the boundary of the nation - that it is purely a geographic entity with no other value - then I don't see how you can be that far from basically opting for open borders/unrestricted immigration, and ultimately some form of true global govt.
I don't disagree but I think that in practice you can have "anywhere" mobile types who appreciate the need for the nation state and national solidarity, and also "somewhere" hyper-local types who don't give an F about Uncle Sam.
See: a ton of exurban and rural MAGA types. They rail against government and politicians but they are often fiercely loyal to “their” city, state or place (place in the sense of being proudly rural or whatever).
What? No satrap governors? No Star Crèche? No way! (A reference to the Vorkosigan Saga and Cetaganda, which might derail the conversation but in a fun way.)
It's precisely the same. NIMBY people are genuinely concerned with things like their wealth, traffic, school quality etc and think that are the residents of the relevant polity they should be able to use the state to protect those things at the cost of new entrants. It's just a smaller polity. Identical logic.
except that a neighborhood or town isn't a "polity". It's only the same if you ignore the fundamental division of the world to sovereign states, and don't consider the concept of citizenship qualitatively meaningful above and beyond simple zip code.
P.S. NIMBYISM is a purely economic or class based snobbery, citizenship doesn't work the same way and in fact cuts across class.
I am not a monarchist, so I don't think sovereignty is a metaphysical fact about the world no.
In both the USA and city case, you have governments, which is to say collections of geographically incumbent voters coordinating action through the use of force, to protect the perceived interests of existing voters.
"neighborhood character" or "national culture" it's really the same stuff, just smaller scale. Just as "our parking will get worse and our houses will depreciate" isn't different in kind than "they will burden welfare programs and will decrease wages" are both the material concerns of incumbent voters to whom the government responds.
You're not following through to the proper conclusion of your otherwise impeccable logic. If one is truly committed to immigration restrictionism, one ought to champion NIMBYism because an America characterised by housing scarcity is an America that is a weaker magnet for immigrants.
Not really. You can believe in the power of the state to enforce its laws. Purposefully impoverishing your citizens in order to limit immigration in order to prevent the impoverishing of your citizens doesn't make much sense to me.
To be fair to the racists and xenophobes (ha!!!) I think they’re mostly assuming the immigrants can’t afford to live in the US and that’s why they don’t want them here. Hence Trump’s (still idiotic) statement about “shithole countries” being paired with “why don’t we get more immigrants from [rich, but also white] Nordic countries”
Totally. My only point was that the difference between NIMBYism and xenophobia is not that dramatic- you are using a minimal slice of information about someone (where they are from, what ethnicity they are) to make broad assumptions about their ability to assimilate into your community and improve it (or not deteriorate it). It's wrong either way!
We get a lot of immigrants via chain migration, so while the initial legal immigrants may be relatively high skilled (and thus a clear benefit from the US), once you go down the chain far enough, you lose the ability to ensure that quality.
And then the whole rampant illegal immigration/asylum abuse thing poisons everything.
Homes are scarce resources in the same way that visas are. It’s true that you can only live there if you get one, and lots of seekers won’t, but the arbitrary limitation of quantity is the fundamentally debated question.
My opinion on gambling is there needs to be more friction in the process. Having it be legal is good but having it be two clicks in your phone is bad. You should have to place bets in person at a casino or other location. I also feel the same way about alcohol, here in NC you have to go to an ABC store to buy liquor and it’s annoying to go to another store and the hours are often inconvenient. It doesn’t stop anyone from buying but it makes impulse buys less likely and discourages things at the margin.
The sheer amount of British gambling ads is surreal. Sometimes I watch the UFC via, um, streams that do not involve me purchasing a PPV or an ESPN subscription. So the streams are always off of BT Sport. When I started I just could not believe how many gambling ads you guys have.
On the flip side, I've heard that the rest of the world doesn't have pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about" etc. etc.
They are overwhelmingly on live sport; we don't get nearly as much on other programmes.
It drives me berserk if I'm watching BT Sport or Sky Sports (no, I don't know why one is singular and the other plural). It's always a relief when a game is on BBC (no ads).
The funniest thing is US sports on BBC; they cut to studio analysis when the US network is on an ad break, and you see more of the studio analysts than you do of the players.
Advertising restrictions are always going to run into First Amendment challenges over here in the United States. Tobacco is an exception to that due to the Master Settlement Agreement that headed off other court challenges.
We don't have the First Amendment in the UK, we have lots of restrictions on advertising alcohol as well as tobacco. And we have gambling ads everywhere and I hate them.
Clarence Thomas is probably the only justice that might buy that argument, as he regularly rattles off solo dissents claiming that minors should have no First Amendment rights at all.
I wonder if states could do it as part of their legalization efforts. Basically stipulate that you can open an online casino in state X in exchange for agreeing to forgo advertising in that state as much as possible (ie national broadcasts are okay but local broadcasts or billboards are out). I’m not a lawyer but it seems like the casinos have already agreed to add those problem gambling tags to their ads not sure why you couldn’t get them to go further.
The First Amendment steelman argument I'd try to make is that quotas have already been accepted in other industries, whether they're good or bad, thus there's no need to make this speech restricting quid pro quo.
I thought the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech like it does political speech. After all, the government was able to get cigarette advertisements banned.
We should adopt a version of this for cocaine. You can buy, but only a couple grams every month, and only at state approved stores in the bad parts of big cities
The other thought I had is that gambling should be cash only. I think people would be less willing to place bets if they had to physically hand over bills.
Unfairly sucks if you're geographically far away from those places, though. It'd be interesting to see which towns got screwed the most when you also factor in tribal casinos.
One issue I feel like I'm out of step with most Slow Borers here is my having a considerable disdain for vice laws, where my guard rails get limited to genuine adverse impact on the non-vicers.
I don’t think I ever had an occasion where someone was like “hey, let’s do a responsible amount of cocaine and go to bed at a reasonable hour” it was always “let’s buy what we can afford and do it til it’s gone babbbyyyyyy!!!!!”
Cocaine is a helluvadrug.
I’m fine with cocaine, meth and heroine staying illegal. The desperate and depraved things people will do to get more of those drugs speaks to their non therapeutic and terrible nature.
Weed, shrooms and maybe a few other drugs with less aggressive addictive potential are fine with me though.
Cocaine used to be in coca cola. Its chemical effects are very similar to adderrol. This is to say, doing a little cocaine is perfectly consistent with being employed and normal and doing a moderate amount isn’t so bad if you do it once every couple months on a friday or saturday night. The problem is many people will keep snorting way past any moderate limit, some will od and many will go broke.
It’s an interesting test case for how well guard rails can work.
Welcome, free subscribers! Here's why you should level up to paid:
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Matt's articles are honestly kinda meh, only so-so (1), but the comments section is awesome and you want to be here. Think of Matt's articles as the tax you have to pay in order to participate in one of the best commenting communities on the web. It's worth it!
(1) Not my opinion -- Roman Polanski said this to me once. But if I mention him that tends to derail the conversation.
> But what’s good about them is that a new business is likely to be relatively small, and we want an economy where a new small business that’s superior to other existing small businesses can put them out of business and grow large.
I think we should remember that the currently disparaged juggernauts of Walmart and Amazon both began as small businesses, and their massive success was the result of their superior business practices. Walmart due to their obsession with low prices and by being an early adopter of information technology. Amazon by inventing the online retail business model. Both firms defeated larger rivals by winning over consumers with these improvements.
To learn more, I’d recommend the Acquired podcast, which has some informative and entertaining long-form episodes on the history of both Walmart and Amazon.
The Amazon episodes call back to some commonalities and differences within the Walmart story. It also covers the war between these two firms, including Amazon poaching several logistics leaders from Walmart.
I strongly recommend these episodes to learn the fascinating and entertaining history of these companies. Acquired also have some great episodes on the history of the video game industry as well as the turbulent story of Nvidia’s rise to dominate the GPU industry.
I've noted before, but one of my first personal experiences realizing that "mom and pop" firms were not necessarily better than "big corporate" firms was trying rent off campus housing in college. Or more specifically my friends' experiences. Consistently, my friends' experiences living in "corporate owned" buildings was much more pleasant than my friends who lived in apartments owned by someone as their side gig; especially in regard to maintenance requests.
Matt sort of alluded to this in his "tourist town" aside, but there is definitely a case to be made those certain businesses or certain areas of town being restricted to small businesses can possibly be a good thing. I'm thinking specifically of restaurants. Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*. And it probably is a good thing that certain areas of cities actually do have restrictive zoning and are designated "historical" districts like French Quarter or North End Boston (to bring up two examples I've brought up before). The problem is too many towns and cities don't treat these as exceptions but rather a general rule. So you have situations like San Francisco that basically ban (or severely limit) chains to a degree that is almost certainly harmful to the city's residents. Or in general just how much this is abused to stop all development (when you're trying to designate a gas station as "historic", it might be time to take a step back and ask yourself how you got to this point).
>Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*<
Restaurant variety and quality is richer now than at any time in US history. Being an exceedingly wealthy country, America has championed foodie-ism with gusto for many years now. You can get good Sichuan just about anywhere these days, as Matt is fond of saying. Artisanal this and that (beer, cookies, bread, tea, cheese, chocolate) are practically cliches of life in prosperous urban America. I wouldn't be surprised if the pandemic may have actually *improved* things a bit (or at least will have done so once we're fully over the hump of that crisis in another few years), by culling weaker operations, and freeing up restaurant leases for ambitious, creative chefs.
And as for chains, well, aren't there a lot more of them? When I was a kid I recall, like, five or six big ones, and a few regional chains. But there are now at least a dozen burger chains or more depending on what part of the country you're in, a similar number of pizza chains, quite a good number of Asian chains, multiple Mexican and Tex-Mex chains, fast casual of every stripe, Italian, steak houses, and so on. So, even in that bland exurb you find yourself in when you've travelling on business, you'll probably have a lot more variety than you would've had in a similar situation in the 80s.
I have found this to be one aspect of life that's quite similar in China: the PRC has an extremely robust and lively restaurant chain scene—characterized by a seemingly limitless variety of concepts and a steady stream of new entrants into the market—typically operating out of shopping malls (a lot of Chinese people strongly prefer such establishments, as they believe food safety standards are higher).
Oh, I'm totally with Matt that food quality is one of the more underrated things in life that has gotten immeasurably better the past 20-25 years. I think he also noted before that innovation is often way over associated with Silicon Valley when we should really appreciate places like Chipotle and Five Guys being pretty big innovators in the "fast casual" business. Sort of buttressing your point about there being a greater variety of chains and higher quality chains then existed 20 years ago. Also, this gets murky when we are talking about restaurant groups. I'm sort of thinking of David Chang and how he has multiple establishments just in NYC that range from fast casual to fine dining. Sort of blurs the line for sure as to what we would call a chain.
Having said that, I think I'm on relatively solid ground that the "best" restaurants are one off establishments (want to try to acknowledge that there is a pretty wide berth between celebrity chef and the town diner owned by the same family for 50 years). As a commentator noted below, as much growth as there's been in restaurant options from different cultures throughout the suburbs and in cities we wouldn't have traditionally thought of as restaurant meccas, there are still a variety of places in this country that only have pretty bland options when it comes to food.
I think the point I was trying to say is that one of things that unites the various readers of this sub stack is agreement with Matt that zoning and NIMBY is quite bad and is quite detrimental to this Country in a variety of ways. But that like everything in this world, there are exceptions where restrictive zoning and NIMBY may actually have validity. And one of those exceptions is actual historic neighborhoods and vacation towns where there is a case to be made that it's beneficial to restrict new buildings and restrict businesses to non chain restaurants and non-chain retail (or at least limit).
Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher. Sort of think that could be a whole Slow Boring post as to why that is. Or least a mailbag question.
>Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher.<
Like anything it's not 100%, but yeah, I find this to be a common attitude, and I know people who just very rarely eat at small "whole in the wall" places, of which there are thousands in Beijing. And forget street food. Sadly Anthony Bourdain passed away before developing much of a following here. Part of it might be driven by the very sharp differences between regions, or, more precisely, between rural areas and big cities. Beijing, like most large Chinese cities, is home to gigantic numbers of folks who've come to live here in recent decades from other provinces (mostly in Northern China). Anyway, their hometowns and villages are invariably a lot poorer than Beijing. And I think many of them eschew the rusticity and authenticity of establishments that remind them of home. They live in the big city now, dammit, and want bright lights, fancy decor and pristine settings. And yes, chains here (just like back home) provide consumers with signalling as to the quality they'll receive. (My impression is there's a whole sector of restaurant chains who have highly specialized business models that work best when being operated in the food service spaces available in malls). Similar vibe (albeit a Chinese version) to Cheesecake Factory or Rainforest Cafe. But there's a gigantic number of them (some are no doubt regional). Also, needless to say, I expect you can't afford mall rents, at least not in big cities, unless you're well capitalized. Which usually means a chain.
That’s kind of like the people who lived through the Depression, or who came to newly built suburbs from small towns and farms, embracing packaged food, cake mixes, Jello and so on with such gusto. It was modern, it was scientific, it was sanitary, and consuming it showed they were with-it suburbanites, not hicks and yokels.
Their grandkids and great-grandkids want that “authenticity” and rusticity that Grandma left behind because cake mix saved time, the kids just ate the frosting anyway, and it was so much better being a suburban housewife than a farm wife. The grandkids, of course, get a cleaned up, prettified, often much tastier (not to mention more sanitary because of public health regulations) experience. The grandkids never had to live with the grind that was subsistence farming or being married to one and popping out 10 kids, which gave them a safe distance from the awfulness that Grandma and Grandpa fled.
90% on board with this, though I think it's important to recognize that there's a trade-off: we usually have to pay a premium for the quality / variety bump that comes with one-off establishments.
It’s absolutely true that variety has increased even in bland exurbs over recent decades. But in a place like Bryan/College Station you can’t even get good generic Chinese food (you can get mediocre generic Chinese food) let alone Sichuanese food.
The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed. I’ve seen well-to-do liberals who pretend to be horrified by Trump and “go back to Mexico” casually drop “go back to Ohio” at community board meetings. As if that sentiment is different. Boggles my mind.
I am convinced that there is nothing more than NIMBYs would like - even or maybe especially the ones who call themselves “liberal” - than a hukou policy. If you’re born in Ohio, you have to stay there. No moving for that good job and polluting our charming, quirky nabe with your outsider-ness! Bloom where you are planted!
Berkeley, which has proudly been a sanctuary city (for undocumented immigrants) since the 80’s, is also one of the NIMBY-est places I’ve ever seen. That is slowly changing, though not enough - that jerkwad NIMBY and his faction have apparently successfully blocked a lot of student housing and got UC Berkeley to cap enrollment. And - Berkeley is a college town! Students are what made it what it was! But no, we must have our neighborhood character.
But the point stands, that this very liberal, and I’m sure well-meaning, city, never put its money where its mouth was because “character” and “charm” and all that nonsense.
I wish I had more than one upvote, or some Slow Boring Gold, to give this comment.
And I wish I had more than one upvote to give to you for raging against those asshole NIMBYs that kneecapped UC Berekley's enrollment level. Still makes me seethe with anger.
It made me seethe, too. And not cope. I do not live in Berkeley, though I do live near enough by that I hear news about it all the time. (And pre-pandemic I’d go there with friends to shop and have lunch, but alas for Body Time closing! Yes, I have hoarded China Rain. I also loved the Solano Stroll.) That and the continued guarding of People’s Park as some kind of “must be preserved in amber so that Mario Savio would still recognize it if he arose from the dead.”
For all kinds of reasons, it’s infuriating. Berkeley is, fundamentally, a college town, not a tourist town. Yes, tourists and nearby suburbanites (raises hand) go there, but strolling down College Avenue - notice the name? - is not the point of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is. And you cannot have a college without students, who do have to live somewhere, sorry NIMBYs.
Oh man, when I took a look at People's Park on Google Maps, I was like "WTF is there that there's actually worth keeping? If you're going to make it a park, at least make it a nice park!"
It’s a piece of junk! It’s no place you want to have a picnic or take your kid to play. The only thing guaranteed is some headline saying “We need to identify this person who OD’d in People’s Park.”
UC Berkeley has been trying to get approval to build housing there, and the last I read was that this is being kicked all the way up to the California Supreme Court. What with Gavin Newsom being on the side of YIMBY’s, I am hopeful they will rule in favor of UC: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/03/21/city-council-to-consider-supporting-uc-berkeley-appeal-against-peoples-park
Notice the NIMBY organizations are called “Make UC A Good Neighbor” (no, Mr. Rogers would not have approved) and “People’s Park Historical Advocacy Group.” I think I can fill in most if not all my NIMBY Bingo Card with these.
From what I've seen I've been pleased with Newsom taking CEQA to task over this whole UC Berkeley mess.
Strong, strong upvote. I use this line all the time to challenge good hearted people who would be abhorred at being tarred as racist or xenophobic from the former when they start to show NIMBY tendencies as they complain about growth from the latter.
My favorite line to use is "Look, we're not going 'Make [city] Great Again' by building a wall around [city] and making [tech company/apartment developer/etc] pay for it".
The place where I go after the left most hard is basically where the labor movement is in the same pool with the NIMBYs, the immigration opponents, and the anti-trade people. It's all the same state imposed barriers to entry, protectionist horseshit.
There's some logic to the labor movement's incentives here, even if it's logic that gives very bad results for the population in general.
You can say the same thing for NIMBYs.
But only on a super local level. I can't blame SL houseowner for opposing the conversion of his next-door neighbor's house into a 8 family low rise. I do blame them for opposing the same or larger several blocks over by the Metro. But the blame is not for being racist, but for not valuing the good of those who will live in the new residences and the revenue the city will raise.
Eric Adams’s embrace of ‘go back to Iowa’-type rhetoric back when he was Brooklyn Borough President is one of the things that gave me pause about him (although the housing issue has actually been one of the brighter spots for his mayoral admin). I feel like he and Andrew Cuomo unfortunately appeal to a subset of the Dem electorate who would have been MAGA if they had the moral unluck to be born as white southerners or Midwesterners.
I've always said this - the primary reason Adams and Cuomo are Democrats is because that's how to get elected in NYC and NYS.
>The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed<
Totally. This was an insightful observation by Yglesias. Nimbyism, immigration restrictionism and (increasingly) a general antipathy for population growth all go hand in hand these days based on my internet arguments.
"Don't Californicate [non-California state]" is the proper terminology used here.
From the way back machine. I remember when the Oregon governor had a sign installed at the California border: Thanks for visiting. But don't move here. (or words to this effect)
Good reason not to go to Oregon.
To be fair, this was in the 1970's. I think things have changed.
You've earned your Northwest stripes, you're fine.
Fuck that noise indeed, I'm getting more aggressive in pushing back on that with every passing day.
Disagree. I've witnessed so many people at community board meetings say they were born in the neighborhood and lived in their home their entire lives. As if that entitles them to something.
Also I'm not sure that's a meaningful difference even if it's true. "I don't believe poor people are entitled to live in my neighborhood" is not really better than "I don't believe immigrants are entitled to live in my country"
These are the people who complain about small town xenophobia where you only get respect if your family is “from here.” But they are heading down the same path - “I was born here and lived here all my life!” Some add that their parents were born here too. I wish they could really hear what they are saying.
This mostly applies to places where property taxes are capped. People living in now-million-dollar homes wouldn't be as anti-development if they actually had to pay property taxes on the true value of their homes.
I don't know if that's true. I mean I talk to these people regularly. They don't usually have the same understanding of cause and effect that your comment implies. They usually blame rising prices on the gentrifiers and see it as part and parcel with the development.
It’s actually far worse. Seem my comment above.
Uh...some NIMBYism is definitely "because they were born in a different place", whether those NIMBYs actually cop to it or not.
I hear plenty of good progressives complaining about tech workers who aren’t “from here” ruining the city or neighborhood
I have the exact opposite reaction. Claiming for protectionist immigration principles simply affirm the basic democratic notion “the government of the people for the people by the people”. The state literally exists to serve its citizens. To the extent that you think immigration will impoverish your citizenry it’s basically your *duty* to limit it. Of course, you may well dispute the premise, but that’s a second order question.
By contrast nimbyism is class snobbery. And worse, it’s class entrenchment. It’s the idea that very often the accident of your birth (when you were born, whether your parents already owned a nice house you could inherit/sell off) should determine all. It’s anti egalitarian and nasty.
I think it’s fair to characterize both under either or both rubrics as “I, a geographic incumbent, believe that newcomers to the relevant area affected by my vote will not redound to my benefit and will reduce my quality of life, and therefore oppose them” - that’s literally the mechanism of action in both cases, and indeed immigration is manifestly anti-egalitarian under the second rubric because citizenship is (to first order) overwhelmingly an accident of birth.
The fundamental hurdle run into by opposing either NIMBYism or immigration restriction under this view is that “geographic incumbents get a say in issues of governance” is literally what citizenship and voting are. YIMBYism differs chiefly in that it has a substantive persuasive argument (“more housing is good”) but also the meta argument that local control of zoning shouldn’t exist (basically because when such control does exist, people vote for zoning.) Conversely, there’s not the same meta-case to be made on immigration because obviously US citizens are the relevant electoral constituency for US immigration policy.
One of the rights of US citizenship is equal protection under the laws in every state, including free movement. As much as some regions would like to prioritize their incumbents for access to housing, all they can Constitutionally get away with is protecting existing tenancies. This is effective in the short term, but people’s needs change over their lives - for example, children grow up and need their own homes. They can’t get them, unless outsiders of similar economic circumstances also can. In the long run, something like “California for Californians” isn’t actually workable. It’s at most “California for this particular generation of Californians.”
Ethnostates may not be desirable, but they are clearly doable, even over thousands of years. NIMBY regions will fail at social reproduction as long as US citizenship is meaningful in this way.
Sounds like a problem that could be solved by a return to primogeniture!
Yes, and the feudal/aristocratic characteristics are one of the best arguments against NIMBYism. This is America. Who your parents are and what land you were born on is not supposed to have this kind of role. This kind of reversion to Old World norms is antithetical to the democratic project. It’s not made any less so because the lords held an election among themselves.
This analysis works only if you dispute the democratic premise i.e. if your don’t consider citizenship to be meaningful.
How so? The pro-NIMBY / pro-restriction point is precisely that citizenship is (1) meaningful and (2) overwhelmingly reflects geographic incumbency (local for NIMBYism and national for immigration restriction), which is empirically true. The problem YIMBYs face is that according control of governance based on geographic incumbency is *presumptively legimate* because it’s how every election from school board to POTUS is organized.
US citizenship is meaningful. It confers the right to live in the United States. There’s not a secondary citizenship system at the state or local level. That’s China.
This gets to the heart of the 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres' issue.
If people want to say that there is no meaningful difference between those inside vs outside the boundary of the nation - that it is purely a geographic entity with no other value - then I don't see how you can be that far from basically opting for open borders/unrestricted immigration, and ultimately some form of true global govt.
I don't disagree but I think that in practice you can have "anywhere" mobile types who appreciate the need for the nation state and national solidarity, and also "somewhere" hyper-local types who don't give an F about Uncle Sam.
See: a ton of exurban and rural MAGA types. They rail against government and politicians but they are often fiercely loyal to “their” city, state or place (place in the sense of being proudly rural or whatever).
> It's only a matter of time until we need a Republic.
One with two senators per planet, as God intended it.
What? No satrap governors? No Star Crèche? No way! (A reference to the Vorkosigan Saga and Cetaganda, which might derail the conversation but in a fun way.)
It's precisely the same. NIMBY people are genuinely concerned with things like their wealth, traffic, school quality etc and think that are the residents of the relevant polity they should be able to use the state to protect those things at the cost of new entrants. It's just a smaller polity. Identical logic.
except that a neighborhood or town isn't a "polity". It's only the same if you ignore the fundamental division of the world to sovereign states, and don't consider the concept of citizenship qualitatively meaningful above and beyond simple zip code.
P.S. NIMBYISM is a purely economic or class based snobbery, citizenship doesn't work the same way and in fact cuts across class.
I am not a monarchist, so I don't think sovereignty is a metaphysical fact about the world no.
In both the USA and city case, you have governments, which is to say collections of geographically incumbent voters coordinating action through the use of force, to protect the perceived interests of existing voters.
"neighborhood character" or "national culture" it's really the same stuff, just smaller scale. Just as "our parking will get worse and our houses will depreciate" isn't different in kind than "they will burden welfare programs and will decrease wages" are both the material concerns of incumbent voters to whom the government responds.
Nitpicking here, but an HOA or a historic district overlay is kind of a perverse polity...
You're not following through to the proper conclusion of your otherwise impeccable logic. If one is truly committed to immigration restrictionism, one ought to champion NIMBYism because an America characterised by housing scarcity is an America that is a weaker magnet for immigrants.
Not really. You can believe in the power of the state to enforce its laws. Purposefully impoverishing your citizens in order to limit immigration in order to prevent the impoverishing of your citizens doesn't make much sense to me.
To be fair to the racists and xenophobes (ha!!!) I think they’re mostly assuming the immigrants can’t afford to live in the US and that’s why they don’t want them here. Hence Trump’s (still idiotic) statement about “shithole countries” being paired with “why don’t we get more immigrants from [rich, but also white] Nordic countries”
Totally. My only point was that the difference between NIMBYism and xenophobia is not that dramatic- you are using a minimal slice of information about someone (where they are from, what ethnicity they are) to make broad assumptions about their ability to assimilate into your community and improve it (or not deteriorate it). It's wrong either way!
We get a lot of immigrants via chain migration, so while the initial legal immigrants may be relatively high skilled (and thus a clear benefit from the US), once you go down the chain far enough, you lose the ability to ensure that quality.
And then the whole rampant illegal immigration/asylum abuse thing poisons everything.
(Otherwise, agreed with almost everything else.)
Homes are scarce resources in the same way that visas are. It’s true that you can only live there if you get one, and lots of seekers won’t, but the arbitrary limitation of quantity is the fundamentally debated question.
My opinion on gambling is there needs to be more friction in the process. Having it be legal is good but having it be two clicks in your phone is bad. You should have to place bets in person at a casino or other location. I also feel the same way about alcohol, here in NC you have to go to an ABC store to buy liquor and it’s annoying to go to another store and the hours are often inconvenient. It doesn’t stop anyone from buying but it makes impulse buys less likely and discourages things at the margin.
I'd be a lot happier if there were more restrictions on advertising it. Like there are for advertising tobacco.
The sheer amount of British gambling ads is surreal. Sometimes I watch the UFC via, um, streams that do not involve me purchasing a PPV or an ESPN subscription. So the streams are always off of BT Sport. When I started I just could not believe how many gambling ads you guys have.
On the flip side, I've heard that the rest of the world doesn't have pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about" etc. etc.
They are overwhelmingly on live sport; we don't get nearly as much on other programmes.
It drives me berserk if I'm watching BT Sport or Sky Sports (no, I don't know why one is singular and the other plural). It's always a relief when a game is on BBC (no ads).
The funniest thing is US sports on BBC; they cut to studio analysis when the US network is on an ad break, and you see more of the studio analysts than you do of the players.
Advertising restrictions are always going to run into First Amendment challenges over here in the United States. Tobacco is an exception to that due to the Master Settlement Agreement that headed off other court challenges.
We don't have the First Amendment in the UK, we have lots of restrictions on advertising alcohol as well as tobacco. And we have gambling ads everywhere and I hate them.
Edited my post to clarify, thanks.
I wasn't really criticising - just annoyed that we have exactly the same problem without the legal barrier to fixing it.
I'd have thought that restrictions on advertising age-restricted products to minors should be possible even in the context of the First Amendment.
Would be amusing to see that applied to cars....
Clarence Thomas is probably the only justice that might buy that argument, as he regularly rattles off solo dissents claiming that minors should have no First Amendment rights at all.
I wonder if states could do it as part of their legalization efforts. Basically stipulate that you can open an online casino in state X in exchange for agreeing to forgo advertising in that state as much as possible (ie national broadcasts are okay but local broadcasts or billboards are out). I’m not a lawyer but it seems like the casinos have already agreed to add those problem gambling tags to their ads not sure why you couldn’t get them to go further.
The First Amendment steelman argument I'd try to make is that quotas have already been accepted in other industries, whether they're good or bad, thus there's no need to make this speech restricting quid pro quo.
I thought the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech like it does political speech. After all, the government was able to get cigarette advertisements banned.
Yes, but the test for it is still demanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hudson_Gas_%26_Electric_Corp._v._Public_Service_Commission#Holding
And as I said, much of the remaining ad bans on tobacco came via settlement, to avoid further constitutional questions.
The pre-Murphy v. NCAA legal régime served this purpose well.
We should adopt a version of this for cocaine. You can buy, but only a couple grams every month, and only at state approved stores in the bad parts of big cities
The other thought I had is that gambling should be cash only. I think people would be less willing to place bets if they had to physically hand over bills.
Or maybe it should be mostly illegal except for Vegas and Atlantic City, the way it used to be until 2018.
Unfairly sucks if you're geographically far away from those places, though. It'd be interesting to see which towns got screwed the most when you also factor in tribal casinos.
I can't tell if you're serious but if you are I actually kinda agree.
i’m totally serious.
I don’t like vice laws, but I’ve come to realize there have to be guard rails along some lines, so I actually kind of agree as well.
One issue I feel like I'm out of step with most Slow Borers here is my having a considerable disdain for vice laws, where my guard rails get limited to genuine adverse impact on the non-vicers.
I don’t think I ever had an occasion where someone was like “hey, let’s do a responsible amount of cocaine and go to bed at a reasonable hour” it was always “let’s buy what we can afford and do it til it’s gone babbbyyyyyy!!!!!”
Cocaine is a helluvadrug.
I’m fine with cocaine, meth and heroine staying illegal. The desperate and depraved things people will do to get more of those drugs speaks to their non therapeutic and terrible nature.
Weed, shrooms and maybe a few other drugs with less aggressive addictive potential are fine with me though.
Cocaine used to be in coca cola. Its chemical effects are very similar to adderrol. This is to say, doing a little cocaine is perfectly consistent with being employed and normal and doing a moderate amount isn’t so bad if you do it once every couple months on a friday or saturday night. The problem is many people will keep snorting way past any moderate limit, some will od and many will go broke.
It’s an interesting test case for how well guard rails can work.
Welcome, free subscribers! Here's why you should level up to paid:
"As a paid member, you also have access to the comments section and daily discussion threads...."
Matt's articles are honestly kinda meh, only so-so (1), but the comments section is awesome and you want to be here. Think of Matt's articles as the tax you have to pay in order to participate in one of the best commenting communities on the web. It's worth it!
(1) Not my opinion -- Roman Polanski said this to me once. But if I mention him that tends to derail the conversation.
It probably doesn't even need to be expressly said, but the top tier humor of dysphemistic treadmill is a big selling point for this comments section.
"This, what is it, dysphemistic treadmill fellow is painfully unfunny" -- Roman Polanski.
I am genuinely LOLing at that footnote
> But what’s good about them is that a new business is likely to be relatively small, and we want an economy where a new small business that’s superior to other existing small businesses can put them out of business and grow large.
I think we should remember that the currently disparaged juggernauts of Walmart and Amazon both began as small businesses, and their massive success was the result of their superior business practices. Walmart due to their obsession with low prices and by being an early adopter of information technology. Amazon by inventing the online retail business model. Both firms defeated larger rivals by winning over consumers with these improvements.
To learn more, I’d recommend the Acquired podcast, which has some informative and entertaining long-form episodes on the history of both Walmart and Amazon.
* https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/walmart
* https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-com
The Amazon episodes call back to some commonalities and differences within the Walmart story. It also covers the war between these two firms, including Amazon poaching several logistics leaders from Walmart.
I strongly recommend these episodes to learn the fascinating and entertaining history of these companies. Acquired also have some great episodes on the history of the video game industry as well as the turbulent story of Nvidia’s rise to dominate the GPU industry.
I've noted before, but one of my first personal experiences realizing that "mom and pop" firms were not necessarily better than "big corporate" firms was trying rent off campus housing in college. Or more specifically my friends' experiences. Consistently, my friends' experiences living in "corporate owned" buildings was much more pleasant than my friends who lived in apartments owned by someone as their side gig; especially in regard to maintenance requests.
Matt sort of alluded to this in his "tourist town" aside, but there is definitely a case to be made those certain businesses or certain areas of town being restricted to small businesses can possibly be a good thing. I'm thinking specifically of restaurants. Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*. And it probably is a good thing that certain areas of cities actually do have restrictive zoning and are designated "historical" districts like French Quarter or North End Boston (to bring up two examples I've brought up before). The problem is too many towns and cities don't treat these as exceptions but rather a general rule. So you have situations like San Francisco that basically ban (or severely limit) chains to a degree that is almost certainly harmful to the city's residents. Or in general just how much this is abused to stop all development (when you're trying to designate a gas station as "historic", it might be time to take a step back and ask yourself how you got to this point).
>Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*<
Restaurant variety and quality is richer now than at any time in US history. Being an exceedingly wealthy country, America has championed foodie-ism with gusto for many years now. You can get good Sichuan just about anywhere these days, as Matt is fond of saying. Artisanal this and that (beer, cookies, bread, tea, cheese, chocolate) are practically cliches of life in prosperous urban America. I wouldn't be surprised if the pandemic may have actually *improved* things a bit (or at least will have done so once we're fully over the hump of that crisis in another few years), by culling weaker operations, and freeing up restaurant leases for ambitious, creative chefs.
And as for chains, well, aren't there a lot more of them? When I was a kid I recall, like, five or six big ones, and a few regional chains. But there are now at least a dozen burger chains or more depending on what part of the country you're in, a similar number of pizza chains, quite a good number of Asian chains, multiple Mexican and Tex-Mex chains, fast casual of every stripe, Italian, steak houses, and so on. So, even in that bland exurb you find yourself in when you've travelling on business, you'll probably have a lot more variety than you would've had in a similar situation in the 80s.
I have found this to be one aspect of life that's quite similar in China: the PRC has an extremely robust and lively restaurant chain scene—characterized by a seemingly limitless variety of concepts and a steady stream of new entrants into the market—typically operating out of shopping malls (a lot of Chinese people strongly prefer such establishments, as they believe food safety standards are higher).
Oh, I'm totally with Matt that food quality is one of the more underrated things in life that has gotten immeasurably better the past 20-25 years. I think he also noted before that innovation is often way over associated with Silicon Valley when we should really appreciate places like Chipotle and Five Guys being pretty big innovators in the "fast casual" business. Sort of buttressing your point about there being a greater variety of chains and higher quality chains then existed 20 years ago. Also, this gets murky when we are talking about restaurant groups. I'm sort of thinking of David Chang and how he has multiple establishments just in NYC that range from fast casual to fine dining. Sort of blurs the line for sure as to what we would call a chain.
Having said that, I think I'm on relatively solid ground that the "best" restaurants are one off establishments (want to try to acknowledge that there is a pretty wide berth between celebrity chef and the town diner owned by the same family for 50 years). As a commentator noted below, as much growth as there's been in restaurant options from different cultures throughout the suburbs and in cities we wouldn't have traditionally thought of as restaurant meccas, there are still a variety of places in this country that only have pretty bland options when it comes to food.
I think the point I was trying to say is that one of things that unites the various readers of this sub stack is agreement with Matt that zoning and NIMBY is quite bad and is quite detrimental to this Country in a variety of ways. But that like everything in this world, there are exceptions where restrictive zoning and NIMBY may actually have validity. And one of those exceptions is actual historic neighborhoods and vacation towns where there is a case to be made that it's beneficial to restrict new buildings and restrict businesses to non chain restaurants and non-chain retail (or at least limit).
Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher. Sort of think that could be a whole Slow Boring post as to why that is. Or least a mailbag question.
>Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher.<
Like anything it's not 100%, but yeah, I find this to be a common attitude, and I know people who just very rarely eat at small "whole in the wall" places, of which there are thousands in Beijing. And forget street food. Sadly Anthony Bourdain passed away before developing much of a following here. Part of it might be driven by the very sharp differences between regions, or, more precisely, between rural areas and big cities. Beijing, like most large Chinese cities, is home to gigantic numbers of folks who've come to live here in recent decades from other provinces (mostly in Northern China). Anyway, their hometowns and villages are invariably a lot poorer than Beijing. And I think many of them eschew the rusticity and authenticity of establishments that remind them of home. They live in the big city now, dammit, and want bright lights, fancy decor and pristine settings. And yes, chains here (just like back home) provide consumers with signalling as to the quality they'll receive. (My impression is there's a whole sector of restaurant chains who have highly specialized business models that work best when being operated in the food service spaces available in malls). Similar vibe (albeit a Chinese version) to Cheesecake Factory or Rainforest Cafe. But there's a gigantic number of them (some are no doubt regional). Also, needless to say, I expect you can't afford mall rents, at least not in big cities, unless you're well capitalized. Which usually means a chain.
That’s kind of like the people who lived through the Depression, or who came to newly built suburbs from small towns and farms, embracing packaged food, cake mixes, Jello and so on with such gusto. It was modern, it was scientific, it was sanitary, and consuming it showed they were with-it suburbanites, not hicks and yokels.
Their grandkids and great-grandkids want that “authenticity” and rusticity that Grandma left behind because cake mix saved time, the kids just ate the frosting anyway, and it was so much better being a suburban housewife than a farm wife. The grandkids, of course, get a cleaned up, prettified, often much tastier (not to mention more sanitary because of public health regulations) experience. The grandkids never had to live with the grind that was subsistence farming or being married to one and popping out 10 kids, which gave them a safe distance from the awfulness that Grandma and Grandpa fled.
90% on board with this, though I think it's important to recognize that there's a trade-off: we usually have to pay a premium for the quality / variety bump that comes with one-off establishments.
It’s absolutely true that variety has increased even in bland exurbs over recent decades. But in a place like Bryan/College Station you can’t even get good generic Chinese food (you can get mediocre generic Chinese food) let alone Sichuanese food.