I don't even live in Silicon Valley, but it seems like every local dork on Twitter that tweets stuff like "Build Baby Build" has Dev Ops or "Full Stack Engineer" in their profile.
STEMbrain inclines people toward thinking that social problems are optimization problems that could be solved if only leaders came to their senses and just tweaked and implemented the right policy, and techbros are also basically in the perfect material and intellectual position to internalize the homo economicus models that underlie econ 101 and its application to the housing market.
growing up upper middle class generally makes you solidly out of touch with the working class
YIMBYism is people moving in the right direction, but getting stuck on policies that don't work. The issue has never been housing availability, it's been the hoarding of housing ownership.
It's pretty much like libs vs chuds in my view, YIMBYs are annoying and wrong cause they left any concept of socialism at the door, but not 100% wrong. NIMBYs are 100% idiot jackasses.
You might find me occasionally alongside the YIMBYs when NIMBYville Santa Monica takes a massive L, or in their fight to densify NIMBY-Mecca San Francisco, but it doesn't mean they are gonna solve everything cause their stances are chock full of liberalism.
It is true that building more housing won't fix the fundamental issues. But it won't make them worse either.
Bigger apartments are good because they slightly reduce rent and more density is better for public transit. California just made it legal to build apartments without parking lots near metro stations so those would be really good.
My apartment is rent controlled because it is older then 15 years old. New construction in California isn't rent controlled in the beginning though. It's quite old,. has asbestos in the walls, so it is cheaper than the other places nearby.
Rent increases in a neighborhood always make people unhoused and new construction reduces the rent slightly. It's not a solution to that at all.
Hopefully removing parking minimum requirements lets some non-luxury things are built. Cars are expensive so it is dumb that an apartment targeting towards people without cars could not be built.
Usually YIMBYs (the annoying neolib kind) mean no parking, no transit, no regulations on housing, let developers do whatever and let it rip. Before regulations came in, there didn't use to be clean air standards or light or fire considerations, nor protections like ADA. They want slums for the poors and nice condos for them with no parking and no transit ("hire a cab ya bum").
The socialist resolution to the contradiction of housing is to decommodify it entirely and provision housing based on need instead of profit. Keeping it as a market commodity means slums or this half fucked thing we have now where there's tons of houses out there that are empty but people are not allowed to live in them because they aren't profitable.
Yes, we want to build - we need to build - denser and dignified housing for all, that can also be energy efficient and built out of carbon neutral/negative materials and techniques. Yes, it'll probably be in some former rich fucks backyard that he was hoarding.
In California at least YIMBYs aren't about stopping the state from having regulations as much as they are against stopping city council from blocking all construction
because they live in the Bay Area which is a suburban carbrained hellhole
Every tech problem gets solved by either throwing infinite amounts of computational power at a problem or, failing that, infinite amoutns of money to subsidize wages for your tech product (guy doing gig work).
To the man who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail
They want to be landlords because they have money, but not enough to buy into the shit that already exists.
I don't think these people have trouble buying houses. Most projects supported by YIMBYs would be bigger apartments managed by companies as opposed to a house that someone can buy and be the landlord of
These people do have trouble buying houses, at least on their own — work in tech and lived in an expensive non-SF city before the pandemic started and the only engineers who owned their houses/apartments/condos were at least mid-30s and had a spouse who was also in tech or other high-paying jobs
Sure the housing market is too expensive for them too it seems. My main point is that most yimby projects seem to be apartment complexes so it wouldn't be an opportunity for them to become a landlord. At least that's the case in my area where everything is either a single home or an appartment with hundreds of units
There might be yimbys who are focussed on condos and stuff but I don't think that is the case
They want to be NIMBYs but are stuck paying $3k/mo for a shithole apartment.
My favorite orange hell site stories start with "My CEO roommate..."
They're probably just repeating what they read on Hacker News.
Because yimbyism wants a metropol that represents their idea of what a city for them looks like, not a city for anyone else, or one that reflects the thirty to fifty years that passed since that vision was created.
They make a lot of money but still can't afford a good house in the places they work/live, which was basically promised to them their whole lives.
A lot of them will also have traveled more internationally and seen that cities in other parts of the world don't suck ass.
spreadsheet-brained techbro here, can confirm that the formula is marxism
