Gah, I hate these buildings.
Matt Yglesias has a his latest piece out, on the racial justice politics of zoning reform.
One thing he said in particular stuck out to me:
This is 2021, not 1961, and there are plenty of non-white homeowners who have NIMBY views.
This is absolutely true!
I think it's really underappreciated the extent to which gentrification has driven this. There's certainly a minority of suburban non-White NIMBYs who genuinely have bought into the suburban dream, and per Matt’s Novicoff-ist line which I happen to agree with, they should probably be approached like any other suburbanite, IE with the non-racial-justice case for reform.
But I'd also emphasize that gentrification-engendered NIMBYism is inherently different from its suburban counterpart, and may be the political key to urban zoning reform fights. I don’t want to engage in too much stereotyping here1, but let’s draw a broad sketch of what the stakeholder landscape in most cities consists of:
Big Business: Major commercial real-estate interests.
Rentiers: Mid- and low-level landlords.
Elites: Upper-class, almost-exclusively White homeowners, living in elite enclaves.
“Average Joes”. Middle- and lower-class, mostly-White homeowners, generally living in lightly-mixed but often historically exclusionarily-zoned urban neighborhoods.
The Bad Areas.2 Neighborhoods too poor to be gentrified, mostly Black and brown.
Hipsters. Already-gentrified neighborhoods, mostly full of young and White renters
Endangered. And finally, neighborhoods with gentrification either targeted or underway, also mostly Black and brown.
The first two can generally be bought off for the right political price, or overcome by popular opposition - NIMBYs already regularly win that battle, which is why we’re all here today. Elites will almost always see zoning reform as an assault on their privilege, and while powerful, they’re electorally outnumbered, and their land footprint is often too small to make a difference in the housing conversation anyways. Average Joes will almost always see zoning reform as an assault on their home values, if not their racial bubbles, and their high enfranchisement means they’re pretty immune to gentrification. The Bad Areas are sadly the most disenfranchised from the conversation, but to the extent they participate, are often fearful they’ll be targeted next. The Hipsters consist of Millennials who aren’t leaving the nice Millennial-ized neighborhoods they love, but feel oh-so-bad about gentrification, and will buy the racial justice case for zoning reform hook-line-and-sinker. The Endangered are enfranchised enough to participate in politics, and have a lot to lose.
The actual electoral punching weight of each stakeholder group may vary from city to city, but in the archetypal American city, the Average Joes, Bad Areas, Hipsters, and Endangered are the most numerous, and therefore electorally relevant. Average Joes contain the most reliable Republicans, but are mostly moderate Democrats, the Bad Areas and Hipsters are reliably Democratic, and the Endangered are reliable-to-moderate Democrats.
Thus, we can expect the Endangered and the moderate Joes to be the critical swing groups in the politics of urban zoning reform. Right now, both of these groups default to NIMBY, so NIMBY is the policy of the land.
Now, for the Joes, the Novicoff-ist approach is pretty straightforwardly applicable. Nothing more to see here.
The real problem is, for the Endangered, not only is the Novicoff-ist approach tone-deaf and doomed to failure, but the racial justice pitch falls flat too!
“Well, you see, exclusionary zoning codes were enacted by racist White people to enforce segregation.”
Yeah, that says pretty much nothing about the gentrification by which the Endangered are… endangered. No wonder it’s convincing nary a soul. And it’s actually kind of insulting, because it’s reducing Endangered POC to their race, instead of speaking to their interests.
Even when you specifically tailor the narrative to gentrification, it’s a twisted, windy path to any meaningful conclusion:
“Racist exclusionary zoning restricts development to a trickle, and pushes what little of it gets allowed into a handful of neighborhoods like yours, so what we really need to do is deregulate all the developers who have been screwing over you and people like you for the past 3 decades. Also, forcing them to agree to carveouts or having government institute rent controls that immediately help you, are definitely not the things to do - in fact, they’re counterproductive, don’tcha know!”
I mean, come on, guys. I’m no natural salesman, but even I know that’s a hard sell.
As discussed here and by Matt, we already have counter-narratives to left-NIMBYism that can be reasonably expected to work (racial justice). We have a Novicoff-ist counter-narrative for both White and non-White suburban NIMBYs, and they’re probably less compelling, but can win the day eventually.
But what would really help turn the tide, especially in the suburbs, is to have cities lead the way in demonstrating successful zoning reform. Cities are already optimally laid-out for densification, unlike suburbs with all their winding subdivisions and weak infrastructure. And they’ve already got solid Democratic majorities, so enacting reform is more a matter of getting the right stakeholders onside than winning fraught battles over suburbs heavily contested in today’s national politics, and thus subject to unexpectedly flipping against us for wholly unrelated reasons. Success in the cities would provide the compelling case needed to flip enough moderate suburbanites from NIMBY for statewide and federal majorities, but it all hinges on flipping those Endangered swing voters first.
Thus, we need a new counter-narrative to the “anti-gentrification-NIMBY” of the Endangered. It needs to simplify our case into an easier sell, without misdirecting the audience towards the wrong policies3. It can’t betray the basic economics of YIMBY (zoning is keeping us from reasonably meeting supply), but it can’t bore people with stodgy Econ 101 digressions.
So here goes:
“Zoning reform is about you and you alone deciding what to do with your property. Not your neighbors, not some developer, not the city council who exploits your votes, and not the suburbanites who call your home a hellhole. Change is inevitable, and I think if we’re all honest with ourselves, we want our neighborhoods to grow and prosper, we just don’t want them to be bulldozed or taxed out from under us. The best zoning code is one that reflects this incremental reality, not one that lets that loud, paranoid jerk neighbor of yours starve us of growth, and not one that lets the city council sell you and your tax dollars out to rich developers who only build luxury condos for annoying Millennials.”
There. Something like that. It may be long, but it can easily be divided into a handful of sub-pitches that we test on different market segments. It’s moderate, like the people we hope it to reach, it flatters their pride in their homes and neighborhoods, appeals to their dignity and common sense, and also to ubiquitous tropes of American political culture. Wins all around!
The value here isn’t in the specific strategy prescription. The specifics of the message, who it’s directed to, and what resonates with them, will always vary by locality. Local mileage will vary. But the point is to establish a framework for identifying recognizable stakeholder groups and crafting appeals to them.
Epilogue
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the things I want to explore in this… blog (?)… is the power and function of narrative. One such narrative - hopefully a good one! - that I want to build up, is about how the Democratic activist base have a tendency to think in simplistically ideological terms, while the moderates who tend to end up being our politicians, think in simplistically political terms. The main source of acrimony in Democratic politics today is the attempt to square these competing tendencies with each other.
For example, left-NIMBYs observe housing inequality, and look for first-order solutions based on their moral beliefs about politics. Poor and middle-class POC are being gentrified out of neighborhoods, and all housing is unaffordable, so obviously we need affordable carveouts and rent controls for those people. Problem solved, right?
The politicians, on the other hand, are getting harangued by the base on their left, lectured by centrist technocrat bloggers, and have years of first-hand experience with NIMBY backlashes seemingly rising out of nowhere from the Elites, the Average Joes and increasingly now the Endangered. The best solution most of them see is to aim for the most inoffensive reforms possible. It’s easier to keep building luxury condos, because they keep the Mayor happy, they please campaign contributors, and it’s easier to ignore or gut-out the desperate pleas of the Endangered than to upset the bigwigs.
Untying this and other knots is not an easy task. It’s easy enough for me to sit here typing from my couch, and proclaim what needs to be done, but politics is hard. People don’t like listening. And in a very real way, they’re justified - their problems are far more important to them, than your ideology and commentary. But getting the right people to listen, people more politically talented than me, is the first step between my couch and real action. Whether it’s my ideas, or ideas influenced by me, or ideas in criticism of mine, it’s not for nothing. I refuse to give up hope.
Write smarter, not harder.
That’s the mantra. And it means that we need to build this understanding of how these groups of stakeholders will react to our own messages. And how to disseminate them. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.
Let’s say, “archetype”, if you will.
If this were the 90’s or 00’s, an arrogant middle-aged edgelord White guy like me would have said “The Hood” or “The Ghetto”, but let’s be better than this.
We see this danger in the “rise of the robots” narrative, where accidental demagogy by leaders like Andrew Yang threatens to point us towards idiocies like “robot taxes”. (cf Noah Smith)