By Noah Smith (columnist @ Bloomberg) @ noahopinion.subtack.com, Jan. 19

We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods [....]

But leftists can be NIMBYs as well (and remember, leftists and liberals are generally different people). In various cities, concerns over gentrification, environmental preservation, and profits for private developers have hardened into a sort of Left-NIMBY Canon — a standardized, off-the-shelf package of beliefs, attitudes, and arguments that are easy to deploy in opposition to nearly any proposed housing or transit project.

The Left-Nimby Canon goes something like this:

• Allowing private developers to build market-rate housing results in the construction of “luxury” housing instead of “affordable” housing.

• In addition to lining the pockets of developers, this “luxury” housing raises rents in an area, leading to gentrification and displacement.

• People who argue for upzoning, easier permitting, or other policies to allow market-rate housing development are shills for developers, who don’t actually care about housing the poor or driving down rents.

• These shills use the discredited economic theory of “supply and demand” to trick the public into thinking that allowing market-rate housing construction reduces rents.

• Only rent control, or government-operated social housing, can reduce rents.

I’m trying to summarize rather than straw-man this package of ideas. I think it’s mostly wrong, but it’s worth engaging rather than dismissing.

Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs advances the Left-Nimby Canon in a recent piece entitled “The only thing worse than a NIMBY is a YIMBY” [....]