Crushing NIMBYism is critical to the future of American democracy
By 
Coastal elites who have made building multifamily housing somewhere between effectively impossible to outright illegal in most of their jurisdictions are, among other things, the best friends the Republican Party ever had:
As California goes, so goes the nation, but what happens when a lot of Californians move to Texas? After the 2030 census, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley will likely be forced to reckon with its stagnating population and receding influence. When congressional seats are reallocated to adjust for population changes, California is almost certain to be the biggest loser—and to be seen as the embodiment of the Democratic Party’s failures in state and local governance.
The liberal Brennan Center is projecting a loss of four seats, and the conservative American Redistricting Project, a loss of five. Either scenario could affect future presidential races, because a state’s Electoral College votes are determined by how many senators and representatives it has. In 2016, after her loss to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton argued that she’d “won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward”—an outlook that she contrasted with Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. But now Democrats’ self-conception as a party that represents the future is running headlong into the reality that the fastest-growing states are Republican-led.
According to the American Redistricting Project, New York will lose three seats and Illinois will lose two, while Republican-dominated Texas and Florida will gain four additional representatives each if current trends continue. Other growing states that Trump carried in this month’s election could potentially receive an additional representative. By either projection, if the 2032 Democratic nominee carries the same states that Kamala Harris won this year, the party would receive 12 fewer electoral votes. Among the seven swing states that the party lost this year, Harris came closest to winning in the former “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—at least two of which are likely to lose an electoral vote after 2030. Even adding those states to the ones Harris won would not be enough to secure victory in 2032. The Democrat would need to find an additional 14 votes somewhere else on the map.
Population growth and decline do not simply happen to states; they are the result of policy choices and economic conditions relative to other states. Some states lose residents because their economy hasn’t kept up with the rest of the country’s. But in much of blue America, including California and New York, economic dynamism and high wages aren’t enough to sustain population growth, because the skyrocketing cost of shelter eclipses everything else. The amenities that these states offer—the California coastline, the New York City cultural scene—start to look like the historic molding on a house with its roof caved in. Policy failures are dragging down the Democrats’ prospects in two ways: by showing the results of Democratic governance in sharp, unflattering relief, and by directly reducing the party’s prospects in presidential elections and the House of Representatives.
The core lie of NIMBYism is that making building housing illegal is needed to prevent “gentrification.” But this is nonsense. You can’t keep rich people from bidding for housing in places they want to live by preventing it from being built — you can’t just price out people (erstwhile residents very much included) who can’t afford it:
California, New York, and other slow-growing coastal Democratic strongholds have taken an explicitly anti-population-growth tack for decades. They took for granted their natural advantages and assumed that prosperity was a given. People willingly giving up their residencies in these coastal areas is a sign of how dismal the cost of living is.
While the media are likely to pick up on anecdotes about wealthy people complaining about tax levels and political norms in liberal states, data show that population loss is heavily concentrated among lower-income people and people without a college degree. In an analysis of census data, the Public Policy Institute of California found that more than 600,000 people who have left the Golden State in the past decade have cited the housing crisis as the primary reason.
NIMBYism is bad in itself, because it greatly raises the cost of living. It is bad politically in a context in which red states are proud of their cities and want them to grow while blue jurisdictions are dominated by various kind of anti-growth crackpots, And it is also a civil rights issue — how many women have to live in states that ban abortions because they can’t afford to live in states where abortion is legal? How many trans people are being priced into states going to war on them? Overcoming NIMBYs and proving that blue states can govern competently is one of the most urgent tasks facing the liberal faction in America, and perhaps the most important one.
In related news, this article about how insanely difficult it is to build apartments in NYC [gift link] is must-reading. This is an indefensible and corrupt process that benefits nobody but some landlords, their lawyers, and a few greased-in insiders and fixers. People defending this system out of some misguided sense of “authenticity” or because of a failure to understand basic economic concepts and unambiguous empirical data are gullible dupes in the kindest construction who are allies of people who want to destroy democracy in America.