YIMBYism as Industrial Policy

[rcpt]

Home building is the largest manufacturing job in the nation.

Want to bring manufacturing jobs to the US? You don't need some insane tariff policy, all you need to do is allow people to build housing on land that they own.

Bonus: this will grow GDP by double digit percentage points instead of throwing into another recession https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...

[bombcar]

Home building is rampant in some areas, it's just not in the insanely VHCOL coasts.

Tax incentives or other reasons to have companies offer jobs in places like Milwaukee or Boise reduces housing pressure on the big cities.

What we used to have is smaller (in area) cities, who were not governed in lock-step, and if housing was needed, entire new cities would pop up (sometimes called suburbs, but check them - often they're their own legal entity).

[janalsncm]

Mountain View, California looks like this:

https://www.commercialcafe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites...

It is home to (or adjacent to the home of) the most valuable companies in the world.

The reason it doesn’t look like Shenzhen is because 1) Americans invest a huge portion of their life savings into their homes which means 2) preventing that asset from depreciating is important and 3) scarcity is the easiest way to accomplish that and 4) homeowners have disproportionate political power to do so.

As long as these (by national standards) mediocre houses keep appreciating, homeowners will fight change.

[rcpt]

1,2,3 are also true in Shenzhen. It's 4 that's different here.

[ameliaquining]

It's not trivially obvious that upzoning would be bad for property values. If it becomes possible to build a giant apartment building on a plot of land in a high-demand area, that makes developers willing to pay substantial sums for it. (The homeownership paradigm does cause various other problems, though.)

[mistrial9]

such a broad subject, with so many stakeholders.. really, starkly different stakeholders.. yet the topic is "Industrial Policy" so, worth a mention is a collection of thinkers in the USA and elsewhere, who envisioned synergetic clusters of heavy industry.. where the waste products of one can be handled or repurposed into another distinct endeavor, at close range.. also limiting the brownsfields left as industry moves on.. one search term is "Industrial Ecology" .. Ford Motor Company sponsored some unique works at that time, with that thinking.. all the more relevant today

[crq-yml]

Our lack of building is directly tied to dollar reserve currency policy. We export a lot of dollars; other countries export goods to the US and end up with dollars. The things they can invest their dollar in are dollar-based assets. That results in the massive consumer sector and bubble dynamics. Simultaneously, calls to "reinvest in America" fall on deaf ears, because this reserve currency model needs free trade, and free trade allows capital to uproot and leave a place, whether in a direct sense or through creative loopholes. So long as the balance sheet of the assets is prioritized, the country cannot invest in its people, because that will show up as a cost(in tax, benefits, or regulation). Balance-sheet efficiency means consolidating and centralizing profits while outsourcing costs, and what is actively supported by policy and investment is whatever the market is hyped for(dot coms, social media, crypto, AI), which results in technical development towards the ends of oligarchs. Nothing new can be built unless it's pitched in terms of profit and market share.

The current regime is the endgame: The distortions grew large enough to cause a flip to mercantalist policy-making and winner-loser dynamics. It has a short-term logic to it, but it is also incompatible with where we are. All the biggest businesses in modern America were built around dollar debt, consumerism and outsourcing, and all the workers were likewise tied to either the fortunes of these businesses or the government itself. All it'll do is produce a crisis, which can only resolve through a more holistic policy framework.

[Hammershaft]

Lack of urban building has nothing to do with the reserve currency (beyond making imported housing materials cheaper) and everything to do with NIMBY's steering municipal politics to choke development.

[daedrdev]

Yeah nimbyisn isnt just blocking homes. Its rampant for every project. High speed rail in california has spent billions and years fighting nimbys. Every factory, every buisness, every job often faces nimbyism to try and keep out economic growth because the area will be slightly buiser lmao.

[dkarl]

As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.

[ToucanLoucan]

Not endorsing here but it's not like that's not over entirely nothing. Our car-centric infrastructure means anywhere that is busy is basically impossible to navigate, which... I mean nearly every other G20 nation has a much more diverse transportation system than us, and car focused infrastructure is by far the most inefficient way to move people. It's why I'm still a remote worker despite loving my job, coworkers, and the office: I don't want to deal with commuting in a major metro. Numerous others who work where I do regularly clock commutes in the 30 minute range to travel 10 miles. It's absurd.

And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course.

Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.

[redacted_ib]

The USA needs to shift its mentality towards this if we ever hope to get high speed rail that's up to par with other developed countries

[bluGill]

There is a reason for all the restrictions. Some of it is bad reason, but we have done some really stupid things as well. Anyone who wants to be YIMBY (which includes me) needs to come up with ways to figure out how not to do the bad as well.

[skyyler]

I can assure you that the homeless people in San Francisco are not why San Francisco doesn't look as advanced as Shenzhen or even Chengdu.

The parts of the city that don't have many homeless people are still old and decaying looking compared to modest Chinese cities.

[loeg]

I can assure you, 90% of Seattle just looks like it's been taken over by SFH zoning NIMBYs (because it has), with no drug addicts or homeless in sight.

[TimorousBestie]

Comparing homeless people and drug addicts to zombies is not helpful.

Instead we could talk about returning to the horrors of the involuntary hospitalization era pre-Reagan, or we could talk about the current push to incarcerate the entire class in order to use them for forced labor (Grants Pass v. Johnson, 2024).

The most humane solution would be to house them and give them a robust social assistance network, of course, but that’s obviously so far off the table that it fell out the Overton Window.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Dehumanizing rhetoric is dangerous and something we must not engage in.

[hnav]

sf midmarket and seattle downtown maybe, everywhere is a bit hyperbolic

[lazyasciiart]

No; be as resistant to local environment change as you are to global climate change. If you’re not doing anything about the second then don’t do anything about the first. (If you are doing something about the second, you probably know better than to try and prevent housing being built in a location that is not threatened).

[cyberax]

Nah. NIMBY keeps cities livable, we need more of it.

And it works. A great example from Europe: Copenhagen. It's the world's best city in several rankings.

How did it get there? By using every inch to build "affordable housing"?

Nope. It got there through ruthless population control measures, that actually _reduced_ the Copenhagen population: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...

[JumpCrisscross]

> the world's best city in several rankings

…by the Danish tourism board?

> through ruthless population control measures

The best city people choose not to live or have kids in. Got it.

[loeg]

"Affordable housing" (sub-market rate lotteries subsidized by increasing the cost of market rate housing) is IMO more of a NIMBY policy than a YIMBY one. The net effect is market rate housing gets more expensive, which hurts everyone except the lucky lottery winners.