My city, like many in the US, is facing rising rents and a shortage of low income, or even just affordable housing. The city has been preempted by the state from passing any sort rent control, public housing options or really any thing other than what the developers want to build.
In the face of a drought of affordable housing developers have offered the city the exact opposite of what we need, more luxury housing. They claiming that the increased supply will cause wealthier renters to move into the new housing, which will open up space in market rate housing for middle income renters to move in which should open up space in low income housing for the poor to move in. The housing will trickle down.
The developers will first claim that this trickle down housing policy will lower rents, until anyone interrogates it. Under scrutiny, they eventually concede that it only slows down the rate of increasing rent. Not a solution. Barely a stop gap. But any alternative has been foreclosed upon. So in our thirst for affordable housing developers offer to piss in our mouths. And the YIMBYs fucking beg for more. Piss in our mouths, we are thirsty.
NIMBY’s suck because they dress up what’s fundamentally them wanting to maintain their home value and keeping undesirables out as “cultural preservations.”
YIMBY’s suck because they use their position as a thought-terminating cliche where you either agree with their position of giving developers everything they want or you’re a NIMBY. Also, 9 times out of 10 they’re hypocrites who either balk at the idea of public housing in their backyard, or qualify their support in the same way that they say makes people NIMBY’s when it comes to luxury development.