One thing I think about a lot is this question of whether it makes sense to dismiss a whole viewpoint or political philosophy, or at least to distrust it a bit, based on the way the people who support it comport themselves.

You see this with a frequent debate between a subset of the YIMBYs (“Yes In My Back Yard,” housing advocates/zoning reformers) and some regular people or other housing advocates who take a somewhat different rhetorical approach or have some policy disagreements.

As I’ll explain further below, I think “YIMBYs are annoying” is kind of tendentious, but that’s the allegation: that a lot of people in that movement are smug or hectoring or pushy or what have you. These labels get blurred online, and there are “annoying” people in the general housing and urbanism issue area who wouldn’t call themselves YIMBYs. But I’m sure sometimes they get lumped in.

I’m thinking of cycling advocates who say things like “If you park in a bike lane, I should be able to break your mirror.” Or the people who started an increasingly absurd parody of a guy who said he bought a big SUV to keep his family safe, where they got to imposing his words about safety over giant Star Wars vehicles and things.

As a regular person with no background in this just other than years of following it and self-teaching, I have to remind myself that these folks probably don’t want motorists to die in car crashes. This stuff is a mix of anger at the dangers non-motorists face on the road combined with a kind of snarky humor that the internet seems to incubate.

Now I have my own kind of abstract ways around this: The YIMBYs (or whatever the other annoying people are) as a movement of sort of just happen to be the vessel for a generally important idea, and the particularities of how that movement formed and behaves are incidental to the substance of the idea.

Which is true. But politics is not just about ideas. Good ideas are not self-executing. It’s about the implementation of ideas given, and based on, real-world incentives. The strawman version of this whole thing is “YIMBYs are annoying on the internet so I think we shouldn’t build housing.”

But the much more valid and understandable version of it is more like this: People who are smug and condescending and annoying and unprofessional in public—even if it’s just on social media—are likely to be the kind of people whose ideas are not empathetic or thorough or well-considered. They are likely to be uninterested in negotiating and compromising and considering other viewpoints. Snark and sarcasm are the enemies of earnestness and nuance. I do not trust people who carry on in that manner with weighty matters of public policy which potentially affect us and our communities.

This is not absolutely true, but it’s more likely to be true than not. Or at least, you’d not be unreasonable to think so. So rejecting the ideas held by people like that is a kind of rough, but not illogical, insurance against bad or badly implemented policy.

Now, the funny thing is, I have never found the YIMBY or YIMBY-adjacent folks I know in real life (and I know or have at least met and chatted with quite a lot of them) to actually be like this. Most of them are quite concerned with finding ways to communicate their views to regular people. Many are aware of the concerns a lot of people outside of housing advocacy have about development. Yes, of course, some of their answers or talking points will be unsatisfying to those who disagree with them on substance. But I find that the majority of the “YIMBYs are annoying and smug” stuff comes out of social media, not real life.

I think people producing public-facing communications should be very aware of how they come across to audiences outside their own silo. I also think “regular” people should have more curiosity about ideas, and not dismiss a whole area of inquiry based on a small number of people. The phenomenon of devotees of an idea making it look unfairly bad is a very old and common one. It’s very human. It’s human to be annoyed by other people. But we need each other, and the most annoying don’t have to own the good ideas.

Related Reading:

“I Like My Opinions, Why Would I Want New Ones?”

“Streets Closed to Vehicular Traffic”

Car-Free Cities Don’t Feel “Radical”

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