The Cultural Theory of YIMBY

The useful part

This is, in many ways, the conventional story of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) politics. That story isn't wrong per se, but it's missing a critical component: culture. Without understanding the cultural ideas that drive NIMBYism, scholars and housing advocates are flying blind in a storm.

How it works

• For all the marginal cases between those two extremes, culture plays a huge role in what and how much gets built.
• At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the desirability of land use choices is obvious to the locals.
• Virtually everyone would welcome a new bakery taking over an abandoned building.
• No neighborhood wants a new wastewater treatment facility going in next to them.
• I argue that three cultural practices (growth orientation, property rights norms, and positive-sum attitudes) act essentially as gates.

What to take from it

Development will thus, over time, gravitate toward places that can pass all three...

Example or evidence

• The claim that culture matters is sometimes dismissed as hand-wavy or "just vibes," but it's critical to understanding whether building is the default or deviant move, to identifying who has standing to...
• If a place fails on any one of them, it is very likely to underbuild.

Details worth keeping

What are the political precursors to development? Michael Munger has an interesting, and at times persuasive, argument that self-interest combines with particular institutional designs, such as public hearings, to create a prisoner's dilemma where everyone knows that development is in aggregate desirable but wants that development to be in the next town over.