YIMBYs

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

NFL in DC is the ultimate lefty YIMBY-NIMBY showdown

A pair of announcements by the National Football League in collaboration with Washington, DC has local citizens more excited than ever about football’s future in the capital city – but it’s also attracting opposition that stands to create a YIMBY versus NIMBY showdown on the left on the biggest national stage.  For YIMBY futurists on the left, whether you’re talking about Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda or Matt Yglesias’s dreams of a billion Americans, the possibility on offer by the NFL and the Washington Commanders seems ideal to achieve great things for the city.

Monday

Joel Kotkin

The West faces a new type of housing crisis

Throughout the West, particularly the Anglosphere, housing costs are ravaging the middle class. Homeownership, long the key to social mobility, is on the decline, particularly among younger generations and minorities. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, house prices in high-income countries have been rising “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades,” causing the standard of living “to stagnate or decline.” Unlike previous housing crises, this one is not primarily caused by mass displacements due to wars or natural disasters or population growth.

housing

Thursday

Addison Del Mastro

NIMBYs to the left of me, YIMBYs to the left

First disclosure: I do not appear in this book. I say that only because — second disclosure — I consider myself a YIMBY, and I am familiar, at least online, with many of the characters and figures quoted or interviewed. However, I learned a lot about this loose movement and found it fascinating to read a book on a phenomenon that I would have trouble viewing with a detached, scholarly distance. Yes to the City, by the cultural sociologist and urban policy scholar Max Holleran, must have been a difficult book to write, not least because YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) is as much a rallying cry or a slogan as it is a movement, let alone an organization. The YIMBY nemesis, NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”), is equally amorphous.

yimby