Thread by @Noahpinion

1/A quick thread about NIMBYism, rent, clustering, and geographic inequality.

Basically, I'm going to argue that while housing-NIMBYism is bad, business-NIMBYism could (gasp!) sometimes be good.

2/So, there's this idea that if you stop, say, San Francisco from building new houses, you'll raise rents and make it hard for businesses to move to the city, thus pushing businesses out and eventually lowering rents.

This is really headass and stupid, for several reasons.

3/First, raising rents now to eventually (hopefully) lower rents later is a bad deal. It pushes a lot of poor and middle-class people out. It's like burning down your house today in order to prevent your house burning down tomorrow.

4/Second, yes housing-NIMBYism will hurt companies a bit, but it'll hurt poor and middle-class people a lot more. Yuppies will moan about the rent but they'll pay up. And lots of families and vulnerable people who *can't* just pay up will be forced to move.

5/A related - but also bad - idea is that housing-NIMBYism in cities like SF will force tech and other high-value industries to disperse to declining regions. That you can revitalize Cleveland by harassing Uber out of San Francisco with high rents for Uber workers.

No.

6/This idea fails for the same reason housing-NIMBYism fails to protect low-income renters.

Tech yuppies and their employers will grumble and pay up, and it'll be poor and working-class people who get forced out of SF instead.

We've seen this happen in SF. We have the proof.

7/So yes, housing-NIMBYism is bad and stupid.

BUT, let's talk about business-NIMBYism.

Amazon's decision not to put HQ2 in NYC is Exhibit A.

8/Business-NIMBYs in NYC basically harassed Amazon out of town. Now Amazon will build only in Nashville and D.C. So there's a good chance it'll now make the Nashville offices bigger than it otherwise would have.

https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/1096088995417804800

9/Pushing a million businesses out of NYC would be very bad for NYC. But pushing out a few big ones like Amazon won't hurt the city much - it'll still have its clustering effects, its startup scene, its publishing and finance industries etc.

But it could help Nashville a lot.

10/If you want to squeeze high-value businesses out of big superstar cities in order to encourage growth in mid-size cities in overlooked regions like Tennessee, at least do it directly by keeping out businesses. Don't try to do it indirectly by raising rents!

11/Selective booting of businesses - as long as it doesn't get out of hand and destroy a city's cluster - might also help keeps rents down.

To a first approximation, rent = # of jobs / # of houses. experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employ…

12/You hear a lot about yuppies commuting (Google buses!). But really, most people live where they work. So if you put a tech business office in a city, yuppies will come to that city.

13/IF you can limit the number of businesses in a city without making the city less attractive for businesses (a big if), you can probably put downward pressure on rents without causing a local economic crisis.

14/Of course, business-NIMBYism is a risky strategy, because if you do it too much, you might just lose your cluster entirely - businesses might stampede out of the city, causing a local recession and impoverishment.

But as long as this doesn't happen, you're fine.

15/The absolute WORST is when you approve a bunch of new office space while simultaneously blocking new housing construction.

This was SF supervisor Jane Kim's approach: sf-planning.org/article/mayor-…

16/If you're in SF or NYC and you want to be a NIMBY, please please be a business NIMBY instead of a housing NIMBY.

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