Recently on Twitter I saw this clip of a Nextdoor exchange from a Montgomery County, Maryland housing advocate/YIMBY:

If you look at the clipped bit from someone Mike was arguing with, you’ll see a lot of typical NIMBY talking points. Housing advocates are ideologically driven lefties; they’re developer or real-estate shills (there was a bit further up about “who’s paying you?”); that building housing doesn’t really lower prices anyway; etc.

In other words:

• Housing advocacy is a special interest, in the pejorative political sense, not a general or public interest

• Homeowners who embrace new housing are disloyal and aligned against the interests of the neighborhood

• Housing is just one element of a broader, suspicious leftist agenda (race, climate change, etc.)

But what really stands out to me in that Nextdoor rant is this: “Question is: why should any of this be our policy objective in the first place? You’ve never made a case for why it’s imperative to attract those marginal new residents.”

And increasingly this is my answer: none of this is a “policy objective.” YIMBYs/housing advocates aren’t a political movement and don’t represent an agenda. They are the particular people who happen to have picked up the universal fact that housing has to keep pace with population, and pushed to restore that reality, through, necessarily, political means. Because it was law and policy which ossified our housing market, it is law and policy which have to roll back those artificial restrictions. But that does not mean that doing so is a political project, per se. That question from the Nextdoor commenter is in essence analogous to asking, “You’ve never made a case for why it’s imperative to grow enough food to feed everybody in the country.”

What YIMBYs/housing advocates want is, for me, fundamentally a course correction, or restoration, of what is, or should be, or once was a kind of civic, social, economic, maybe even metaphysical normal. Housing advocates aren’t the ones who “want” anything; that’s applying a language of agenda to a movement whose agenda is to permit what is natural. Housing advocacy is a basic public good which is forced to subsist in a particular political movement. That is, I hope, temporary. Because first, everyone should be a housing advocate. And second, “housing advocate” should come to be a peculiar, anachronistic concept. There were people who *didn’t* think housing was good?

All of the political stuff from either side—cities are good for climate change, rolling back single-family zoning is good for racial justice, urbanism is pro-natalist, etc.—may or may not be true. It’s framing; it’s a way of taking the underlying material issue—that housing has been artificially decoupled from broader population and economic trends, and must be recoupled again—and understanding it through a particular political philosophy or selling it to a particular audience. Though it is probably sincerely held, it is something like marketing. Dismissing the underlying need to build housing because you don’t like someone’s political framing of that need is like denying that there are actually cars in the showroom because you don’t like the dealership salesman.

The necessity of building housing is one step up from the necessity of breathing clean air or having enough food. Nobody will deny those things are important (even if they’re polluters, say, who don’t really care). Housing belongs to this sort of pre-political—or perhaps ur-political—category of issues. A world in which there is essentially freedom to build—again, that is, a world in which housing is coupled to demographics and economics—is natural and normal, at least in a political-legal culture like the United States. It is the default state. It was our old normal. For about a century now, we’ve been operating a housing market in a highly distorted, anomalous state. Our economy has been a body with a severed limb. Housing advocates are the surgeons trying to reattach it.

Supposedly, this exchange occurred before Ronald Reagan underwent emergency surgery after his attempted assassination:

Surrounded by the bright lights and masked surgeons, Reagan whispered, “Please tell me you’re Republicans.” The lead surgeon, an avowed Democrat, answered, “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”

Not today, but one day, maybe, because the freedom to live and the freedom to move in a great big country precede most politics, we will all be housing advocates.

Related Reading:

Prices Aren’t Metaphysics

Strip Down

Misunderstanding the Meaning of “Housing Crisis”

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