alt Hacker NewsI live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists.
The argument isn't that the left broadly construed opposes housing legalization! Just that there's a prominent faction of them that do. Right-NIMBYs are a much bigger problem across the US.
Thompson recently recorded a podcast episode with Zephyr Teachout, taking the "we shouldn't do anything before we address antitrust" side of the argument; you can listen to it if you think "the antitrust left" isn't a real thing. Understand: the issue isn't antitrust; it's a totalizing worldview based purely on antitrust. Antitrust is probably super important! But where I live, zoning reform is much more important.
Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. They're not talking to the Republicans. Not in the sense they're talking to Democrats, at least. I don't think they could make that much clearer than they have.
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> Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.
“Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China.
It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse.
At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
Politics is local and there's nothing more local than your housing values
> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.
This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala.
People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform.
Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.