I kept thinking about markets where artificial scarcity might actually be desired because of an indirect effect of abundance. An example that comes to mind is private hire cars. Advocating for “abundance agenda” in this market would – at face value – relieve similar pressures: increase the overall supply of private hire cars would make them more accessible, lowering the cost for everyone who needs one.
We have seen this experiment play out with the forced deregulation of the industry by the arrival of Uber/Gig-economy-ride-hailing in cities across the world. VC subsidies aside, the supply of cars has increased dramatically, and so has access and usage of the services. It has also put pressure on space: pulling people from using alternative modes of transport, such as public transport or bicycles or even walking, increases travel times for everyone using roads. We have also seen an increase in air and noise pollution.
Similar to the medical guild, scarcity in private hire car drivers have had the effect of protecting their income. In this case, however, this protection might be desired. Gig-economy wages have sometimes dropped before minimum wage.
Ok, so this is true, you are talking about negative externalities - like people want cheap steel, but the steel mill produces pollution, which is a negative externality for its neighbors, so we want to manage that by taxing the pollution or something.
Economists have known forever that in cars produce a lot of negative externalities - they kill people, they create congestion. When you get on the road, you create traffic for everyone else. But instead of taxing cars, we subsidize cars - you don't pay to use the road, you generally don't pay for parking. We are now talking about subsidizing gas, even.
The known solution is to stop subsidizing cars and to charge people for the road space they take up when driving and parking. This is called congestion pricing and I believe only Singapore, London, and Stockholm have it. New York has been close to passing it for a while now but it seems more questionable than it was.
Congestion pricing seems to be accepted after it has been passed, but it is very hard to get through politically. No one accepts that they have been the recipients of subsidies of all these years and they see it as a new tax.
The point is that all cars create negative externalities, not just for-hire vehicles. In fact private vehicles arguably create more negative externalities because they require parking at each end, which consume a ton of expensive scarce urban land, and people push for parking to be subsidized by the state (free parking). We actually do tax for hire vehicle rides in many places but never private cars (in the US).
Also, in the case of taxi medallions, they achieve their goal of reducing congestion, but not necessarily the goal of improving wages. Medallions were rented to drivers, so the rents got captured by their owners, but driver wages were still at or below minimum wage. If we want to improve the income of a group of people, it's more efficient to just send them money instead of giving them money indirectly in a way that distorts price signals.
Something that is creating a ton of negative externalities or is being publicly subsidized isn't really adding to abundance - you are just creating scarcity of something else (pollution-free / safe streets, urban land that could be used for housing instead of parking, also whatever you are taxing that is paying for the subsidy to drivers - the revenue that you are not raising through congestion pricing has to be made up somewhere else).
NIMBYism creates a lot of problems for society, but I think it has to be acknowledged that people support it because they see it as positive for their own neighborhood - it excludes poor people, reduces local congestion (by creating more congestion elsewhere) and so on. But it's a collective action problem the same way taxes are a collection action problem - we would all like to pay less taxes individually but we very much don't want to live in a society where everyone can opt out of paying taxes.
Please don't mistake the follow critique of one of your statements to imply that I don't believe in housing scarcity:
You said
"…This made artificial scarcity even more popular; not only could existing residents preserve their communities, but existing property owners could now generate extraordinary levels of passive income and wealth by gouging desperate future would-be residents. The median home price today in San Francisco is an astounding $1.5 million…"
I will acknowledge that the rising prices *might* subconsciously influence existing homeowners (like me) to support NIMBYism and the consequential artificial scarcity.
However, I see this kind of comment thrown into housing articles all the time, but I have never seen support offered for this, nor have I ever in my 25 years of homeowning met another homeowner who has expressed anything that suggests they remotely feel this way (in fact the opposite, typically). Instead I see a lot of sincere, the very misguided, ideas about character of the neighborhood, overcrowding, etc. Often citing the example of a poorly done nearby gargantuan house or poorly cited multiplex.
I only raise the issue, because to the degree we mischaracterize our opponents, we will have a bad strategy for combatting it.
Ok, so, I do acknowledge this point has some merit, but let me try to offer an analogy:
1. People hate billion-dollar public subsidies for billionaire sports owners. If you do a survey, I'm sure you will find 0% support for the concept. The rich sports owners can afford to build their own stadiums, and in fact they do in a lot of places.
2. A billion dollars spread over 30 years is just not a lot of money in many places. I'm ignoring interest and so on, but say in the State of New York, with 20 million residents, that's like $2 per person per year.
3. People looooove their local sports teams. Even if they don't pay to attend games, they watch them for free on TV, follow them in the news, talk about them with their friends and co-workers and neighbors. Also, for smaller cities, it's the only thing where they can compete on par with a bigger city on a national stage, and people like that. People are usually furious if their team leaves, unless it's really disliked.
The conclusion that politicians come to is that supporting publicly funded stadiums is a political slam dunk. They publicly justify it with economic impact studies and union job claims that everyone acknowledges are total bullshit, but they leap at the chance to be the politician that kept the home team in town. This is what Kathy Hochul did in New York last month for the Buffalo Bills and everyone was like, fair play, she got herself a bunch of votes for the upcoming election. Her opponents couldn't very well come out and say they don't support the BIlls.
You will never run into anyone who thinks paying extortion money to NFL owners is good policy, but politicians look at voters' demonstrated preferences and know what they have to do.
Politicians know that voters care a *lot* about property values, congestion, free parking, the right to veto development in their neighborhood, and special tax breaks for property owners. (At least this is true in California.) They say they care about affordable housing and whatever but so far they haven't voted that way - and so they get exactly what they vote for.
I will concede that of course no one is going around saying "stop development so we can gouge the next generation" but as a practical matter, voting for anyone that supports a certain set of priorities that match up to that is about the same thing. It's just that people today don't talk about it as much out loud. People say they care about affordable housing but it feels like it's like saying you believe in the economic benefits of a publicly funded stadium - really?
Also I think in the past it was more common for people to be more explicit about property values as a driver of politics - there was that homevoters book a while back that said (approvingly) that people basically vote for what raises their home values.
Great essay, but I’m not sure you convincingly refute the “foreigners and speculators” argument. A critic might say that sure, vacancy taxes haven’t worked, but new housing stock is still being inhabited by outsiders (from other countries, other regions, etc) drawn in by the construction of the new housing. How would you respond to that?
Well, states like California that have very little new housing stock still have plenty of outsiders moving in. Without new housing, the outsiders just displace current residents. Outsiders aren't drawn in by new housing, they're drawn in by economic opportunity more than anything else. New housing makes it possible to accommodate outsiders without displacing current residents.
What often gets lost is that freedom of movement is crucial to the functioning of a healthy economy. If we want to have a productive software industry (for example), we have to let skilled software workers gather in one place so they can collaborate and learn from each other and so on. We should expect skilled software workers to originate from all over the world, so there will have to be a decent amount of movement. The same logic holds true for any other industry, be it aerospace or petroleum or anything else. I wrote a longer essay about this a while back:
Also it's amusing that the biggest NIMBYs usually turn out to be themselves outsiders by any reasonable definition - they usually were born in another state or region. They just redefine outsiders to mean anyone who hasn't lived in their city as long as they have, rather than someone who is from elsewhere.
Your argument that progressives want scarcity is simply wrong. Progressives want Medicare 4 All, which is the opposite of enforcing scarcity. Progressives see housing as a human right, which is the opposite of enforcing scarcity. To make your backwards argument you cite the some of the richest cities in America and say hey look- these "progressives" are enforcing scarcity. But those aren't progressives or progressive policies- those are rich people enforcing scarcity.
My point is that *self-identified* progressives are clearly the ones that shift the balance of power toward NIMBYism in the places where it matters. Consider:
1. 90%+ of San Franciscans are Democrats (who almost universally think of themselves as progressive)
2. The majority of SF voters support NIMBY policies.
3. In fact, the NIMBY wing of SF politics is the "progressive" wing (as opposed to the "moderate" wing), and everyone accepts that.
Ergo, self-identified progressives seem to be driving NIMBY policy in the richest cities in America, which is really where NIMBYism matters (the cities with less economic opportunity have less demand anyway).
Clearly there is also a large minority of progressives who are opposed to scarcity! But the point of the essay is a lot of our problems stem from people who fervently believe they are doing the right thing, even when they are just self-interested and have bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Ok I'll buy that. But do you make that point in the essay? Seems important to clearly state that the ideals of progressivism are clearly anti-scarcity, even though some people acting under that label are not. Performative neo-liberalism is indeed a problem within the Corporate owned Democratic party, but you do a disservice to the real progressives, and everyone really, by convoluting who stands for what.
The original point of the essay was to look at how we form our convictions and get sucked in by conspiracy theories.
The *ideals* of progressivism are clearly anti-scarcity, but the many of the practitioners don't embrace it. The NIMBYs aren't some fringe wing of the Democratic party, they are firmly in power in most blue cities and states.
I am arguing this is not a case of performative anything - I live in California and people don't complain that much about steeply progressive income taxes and so on. We probably disagree here but I don't think people are reflexively hypocritical.
I am saying NIMBYs truly believe in progressivism, and live it, but we come by our convictions via emotion. Self-interest bias creeps in, and also people assume that if they oppose wealthy developers they must be doing the right thing. And then once you become a NIMBY activist and go to meetings, that really pounds it in - at that point, your brain won't even countenance the fact that you might be the problem - after all, you're a good person, developers are bad people, and your community seems to be in good shape.
The conspiracy theory part comes when people present evidence that scarcity is bad - your brain wants to find evidence that your narrative and beliefs are correct so you end up embracing implausible conspiracy theories that you would have rejected in a normal situation. It's how people resolve cognitive dissonance.
NIMBYs don't want to hurt the less fortunate any more than 19th century doctors wanted to kill their patients. But this is how we naturally think, and so it's up to us to be aware of that and always be asking ourselves if we are just responding to confirmation bias or if what we think makes sense.
Clearly the other side is much more prone to this kind of thinking, but I thought that was implicit in the title (Scarcity Truthers).
The only way legal way to exclude high-crime populations from your neighborhoods in the US is through prohibitively high home prices. So of course people who want to live in desirable locations (near amenities, jobs, "good schools"), but don't want to get beaten, robbed, raped, or murdered, or have their children beaten up in school, oppose measures that would reduce home prices. There's a reason NIMBYism really showed up in force in the 1960s-1980s; this was when US cities were getting destroyed (eg murder rate tripled in NYC) by the Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society. This is why progressives, who tend to be urbanites, tend towards NIMBYism: because they can't politically support the measures that would be required to render post-Civil Rights American cities safe. Living near poor urban populations in the US is legitimately dangerous and highly unpleasant, in a way that wasn't true pre-Warren Court. Combine this with the effects of immigration (even when dealing with low-crime populations, like Asian immigrants, people are willing to pay a premium [or, in the case of poorer groups like Mexican immigrants, American blacks, and early 20th century Italian immigrants, form gangs to keep outsiders out by force] to avoid diversity and live in racially, ethnically, and socially homogenous neighborhoods) and you get strong, but unspeakable (in polite society) incentives to oppose the sort of housing poor people could afford. Cut down on immigration and bring back legal freedom of association, and you'd probably take most of the strength out of NIMBYism. Until then, YIMBYism is basically telling wealthy urbanites that you want them brutalized and surrounded by foreigners.
Is it really your impression that skyrocketing rents in San Francisco over the last decade have led to falling crime rates?
The urban NIMBYs I'm talking about are opposing market-rate development in their exclusive neighborhoods - which in their specific neighborhood would mean that new residents only need to be making $200k a year to move in instead of $250k a year, not exactly affordable to the urban poor. That does ultimately mean that urban poor can live a bit closer, because new development in the center soaks up rich people that would otherwise have created gentrification in outlying neighborhoods, but there is no chance it results in poor people in their neighborhood.
Progressive NIMBYs actually support the current status quo of rent control, affordable housing mandates and Section 8, which actually keep poor people in their neighborhoods, so there's no hypocrisy there specifically. The issue is that the status quo only helps a few lottery winners, and leaves a shrunken pie for 99% of the working poor to fight over. They can see that they have provided tangible assistance to a lucky few and live in denial of the obvious truth, that their policies make most low-income households much worse off.
There definitely is a subset of NIMBYs in middle income neighborhoods that are specifically trying to keep poor people out of their neighborhoods - a recent example is the suburbanites trying to make it illegal to rent SFHs in their neighborhoods in the South.
There definitely is a strain of nativism that motivates NIMBYism everywhere, but in big cities, it takes form of trying to preserve the population as it was 30 years ago - in fact they oppose gentrification, which would result in being surrounded by richer people. Progressive New Yorkers and San Franciscans aren't the kind of people who are sitting at home and watching Fox News and consuming Tucker Carlson/brown menace propaganda.
Housing costs and NIMBY activities have skyrocketed in other places than the U.S., too.
I am from the Czech Republic, a 99,9 % white European country, where the prices of real estate have escaped any rational limits recently and where a single NIMBY organization can hold 20 or more developments including highways and railways in check for years.
We are not the only ones with the same problem. Hungary has a very conservative government, Viktor Orbán would be considered a devil in human form in Californian progressive circles. And Hungarian NIMBY and real estate problem is as crazy as the one in San Francisco.
Your writing is just go good. Thank you
Very interesting.
I kept thinking about markets where artificial scarcity might actually be desired because of an indirect effect of abundance. An example that comes to mind is private hire cars. Advocating for “abundance agenda” in this market would – at face value – relieve similar pressures: increase the overall supply of private hire cars would make them more accessible, lowering the cost for everyone who needs one.
We have seen this experiment play out with the forced deregulation of the industry by the arrival of Uber/Gig-economy-ride-hailing in cities across the world. VC subsidies aside, the supply of cars has increased dramatically, and so has access and usage of the services. It has also put pressure on space: pulling people from using alternative modes of transport, such as public transport or bicycles or even walking, increases travel times for everyone using roads. We have also seen an increase in air and noise pollution.
Similar to the medical guild, scarcity in private hire car drivers have had the effect of protecting their income. In this case, however, this protection might be desired. Gig-economy wages have sometimes dropped before minimum wage.
Ok, so this is true, you are talking about negative externalities - like people want cheap steel, but the steel mill produces pollution, which is a negative externality for its neighbors, so we want to manage that by taxing the pollution or something.
Economists have known forever that in cars produce a lot of negative externalities - they kill people, they create congestion. When you get on the road, you create traffic for everyone else. But instead of taxing cars, we subsidize cars - you don't pay to use the road, you generally don't pay for parking. We are now talking about subsidizing gas, even.
The known solution is to stop subsidizing cars and to charge people for the road space they take up when driving and parking. This is called congestion pricing and I believe only Singapore, London, and Stockholm have it. New York has been close to passing it for a while now but it seems more questionable than it was.
Congestion pricing seems to be accepted after it has been passed, but it is very hard to get through politically. No one accepts that they have been the recipients of subsidies of all these years and they see it as a new tax.
The point is that all cars create negative externalities, not just for-hire vehicles. In fact private vehicles arguably create more negative externalities because they require parking at each end, which consume a ton of expensive scarce urban land, and people push for parking to be subsidized by the state (free parking). We actually do tax for hire vehicle rides in many places but never private cars (in the US).
Also, in the case of taxi medallions, they achieve their goal of reducing congestion, but not necessarily the goal of improving wages. Medallions were rented to drivers, so the rents got captured by their owners, but driver wages were still at or below minimum wage. If we want to improve the income of a group of people, it's more efficient to just send them money instead of giving them money indirectly in a way that distorts price signals.
Something that is creating a ton of negative externalities or is being publicly subsidized isn't really adding to abundance - you are just creating scarcity of something else (pollution-free / safe streets, urban land that could be used for housing instead of parking, also whatever you are taxing that is paying for the subsidy to drivers - the revenue that you are not raising through congestion pricing has to be made up somewhere else).
NIMBYism creates a lot of problems for society, but I think it has to be acknowledged that people support it because they see it as positive for their own neighborhood - it excludes poor people, reduces local congestion (by creating more congestion elsewhere) and so on. But it's a collective action problem the same way taxes are a collection action problem - we would all like to pay less taxes individually but we very much don't want to live in a society where everyone can opt out of paying taxes.
Please don't mistake the follow critique of one of your statements to imply that I don't believe in housing scarcity:
You said
"…This made artificial scarcity even more popular; not only could existing residents preserve their communities, but existing property owners could now generate extraordinary levels of passive income and wealth by gouging desperate future would-be residents. The median home price today in San Francisco is an astounding $1.5 million…"
I will acknowledge that the rising prices *might* subconsciously influence existing homeowners (like me) to support NIMBYism and the consequential artificial scarcity.
However, I see this kind of comment thrown into housing articles all the time, but I have never seen support offered for this, nor have I ever in my 25 years of homeowning met another homeowner who has expressed anything that suggests they remotely feel this way (in fact the opposite, typically). Instead I see a lot of sincere, the very misguided, ideas about character of the neighborhood, overcrowding, etc. Often citing the example of a poorly done nearby gargantuan house or poorly cited multiplex.
I only raise the issue, because to the degree we mischaracterize our opponents, we will have a bad strategy for combatting it.
Ok, so, I do acknowledge this point has some merit, but let me try to offer an analogy:
1. People hate billion-dollar public subsidies for billionaire sports owners. If you do a survey, I'm sure you will find 0% support for the concept. The rich sports owners can afford to build their own stadiums, and in fact they do in a lot of places.
2. A billion dollars spread over 30 years is just not a lot of money in many places. I'm ignoring interest and so on, but say in the State of New York, with 20 million residents, that's like $2 per person per year.
3. People looooove their local sports teams. Even if they don't pay to attend games, they watch them for free on TV, follow them in the news, talk about them with their friends and co-workers and neighbors. Also, for smaller cities, it's the only thing where they can compete on par with a bigger city on a national stage, and people like that. People are usually furious if their team leaves, unless it's really disliked.
The conclusion that politicians come to is that supporting publicly funded stadiums is a political slam dunk. They publicly justify it with economic impact studies and union job claims that everyone acknowledges are total bullshit, but they leap at the chance to be the politician that kept the home team in town. This is what Kathy Hochul did in New York last month for the Buffalo Bills and everyone was like, fair play, she got herself a bunch of votes for the upcoming election. Her opponents couldn't very well come out and say they don't support the BIlls.
You will never run into anyone who thinks paying extortion money to NFL owners is good policy, but politicians look at voters' demonstrated preferences and know what they have to do.
Politicians know that voters care a *lot* about property values, congestion, free parking, the right to veto development in their neighborhood, and special tax breaks for property owners. (At least this is true in California.) They say they care about affordable housing and whatever but so far they haven't voted that way - and so they get exactly what they vote for.
I will concede that of course no one is going around saying "stop development so we can gouge the next generation" but as a practical matter, voting for anyone that supports a certain set of priorities that match up to that is about the same thing. It's just that people today don't talk about it as much out loud. People say they care about affordable housing but it feels like it's like saying you believe in the economic benefits of a publicly funded stadium - really?
Also I think in the past it was more common for people to be more explicit about property values as a driver of politics - there was that homevoters book a while back that said (approvingly) that people basically vote for what raises their home values.
Great essay, but I’m not sure you convincingly refute the “foreigners and speculators” argument. A critic might say that sure, vacancy taxes haven’t worked, but new housing stock is still being inhabited by outsiders (from other countries, other regions, etc) drawn in by the construction of the new housing. How would you respond to that?
Well, states like California that have very little new housing stock still have plenty of outsiders moving in. Without new housing, the outsiders just displace current residents. Outsiders aren't drawn in by new housing, they're drawn in by economic opportunity more than anything else. New housing makes it possible to accommodate outsiders without displacing current residents.
What often gets lost is that freedom of movement is crucial to the functioning of a healthy economy. If we want to have a productive software industry (for example), we have to let skilled software workers gather in one place so they can collaborate and learn from each other and so on. We should expect skilled software workers to originate from all over the world, so there will have to be a decent amount of movement. The same logic holds true for any other industry, be it aerospace or petroleum or anything else. I wrote a longer essay about this a while back:
https://philo.substack.com/p/this-land-is-my-land
Also it's amusing that the biggest NIMBYs usually turn out to be themselves outsiders by any reasonable definition - they usually were born in another state or region. They just redefine outsiders to mean anyone who hasn't lived in their city as long as they have, rather than someone who is from elsewhere.
Your argument that progressives want scarcity is simply wrong. Progressives want Medicare 4 All, which is the opposite of enforcing scarcity. Progressives see housing as a human right, which is the opposite of enforcing scarcity. To make your backwards argument you cite the some of the richest cities in America and say hey look- these "progressives" are enforcing scarcity. But those aren't progressives or progressive policies- those are rich people enforcing scarcity.
Well, no true Scotsman...
My point is that *self-identified* progressives are clearly the ones that shift the balance of power toward NIMBYism in the places where it matters. Consider:
1. 90%+ of San Franciscans are Democrats (who almost universally think of themselves as progressive)
2. The majority of SF voters support NIMBY policies.
3. In fact, the NIMBY wing of SF politics is the "progressive" wing (as opposed to the "moderate" wing), and everyone accepts that.
Ergo, self-identified progressives seem to be driving NIMBY policy in the richest cities in America, which is really where NIMBYism matters (the cities with less economic opportunity have less demand anyway).
Clearly there is also a large minority of progressives who are opposed to scarcity! But the point of the essay is a lot of our problems stem from people who fervently believe they are doing the right thing, even when they are just self-interested and have bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Ok I'll buy that. But do you make that point in the essay? Seems important to clearly state that the ideals of progressivism are clearly anti-scarcity, even though some people acting under that label are not. Performative neo-liberalism is indeed a problem within the Corporate owned Democratic party, but you do a disservice to the real progressives, and everyone really, by convoluting who stands for what.
The original point of the essay was to look at how we form our convictions and get sucked in by conspiracy theories.
The *ideals* of progressivism are clearly anti-scarcity, but the many of the practitioners don't embrace it. The NIMBYs aren't some fringe wing of the Democratic party, they are firmly in power in most blue cities and states.
I am arguing this is not a case of performative anything - I live in California and people don't complain that much about steeply progressive income taxes and so on. We probably disagree here but I don't think people are reflexively hypocritical.
I am saying NIMBYs truly believe in progressivism, and live it, but we come by our convictions via emotion. Self-interest bias creeps in, and also people assume that if they oppose wealthy developers they must be doing the right thing. And then once you become a NIMBY activist and go to meetings, that really pounds it in - at that point, your brain won't even countenance the fact that you might be the problem - after all, you're a good person, developers are bad people, and your community seems to be in good shape.
The conspiracy theory part comes when people present evidence that scarcity is bad - your brain wants to find evidence that your narrative and beliefs are correct so you end up embracing implausible conspiracy theories that you would have rejected in a normal situation. It's how people resolve cognitive dissonance.
NIMBYs don't want to hurt the less fortunate any more than 19th century doctors wanted to kill their patients. But this is how we naturally think, and so it's up to us to be aware of that and always be asking ourselves if we are just responding to confirmation bias or if what we think makes sense.
Clearly the other side is much more prone to this kind of thinking, but I thought that was implicit in the title (Scarcity Truthers).
The only way legal way to exclude high-crime populations from your neighborhoods in the US is through prohibitively high home prices. So of course people who want to live in desirable locations (near amenities, jobs, "good schools"), but don't want to get beaten, robbed, raped, or murdered, or have their children beaten up in school, oppose measures that would reduce home prices. There's a reason NIMBYism really showed up in force in the 1960s-1980s; this was when US cities were getting destroyed (eg murder rate tripled in NYC) by the Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society. This is why progressives, who tend to be urbanites, tend towards NIMBYism: because they can't politically support the measures that would be required to render post-Civil Rights American cities safe. Living near poor urban populations in the US is legitimately dangerous and highly unpleasant, in a way that wasn't true pre-Warren Court. Combine this with the effects of immigration (even when dealing with low-crime populations, like Asian immigrants, people are willing to pay a premium [or, in the case of poorer groups like Mexican immigrants, American blacks, and early 20th century Italian immigrants, form gangs to keep outsiders out by force] to avoid diversity and live in racially, ethnically, and socially homogenous neighborhoods) and you get strong, but unspeakable (in polite society) incentives to oppose the sort of housing poor people could afford. Cut down on immigration and bring back legal freedom of association, and you'd probably take most of the strength out of NIMBYism. Until then, YIMBYism is basically telling wealthy urbanites that you want them brutalized and surrounded by foreigners.
Is it really your impression that skyrocketing rents in San Francisco over the last decade have led to falling crime rates?
The urban NIMBYs I'm talking about are opposing market-rate development in their exclusive neighborhoods - which in their specific neighborhood would mean that new residents only need to be making $200k a year to move in instead of $250k a year, not exactly affordable to the urban poor. That does ultimately mean that urban poor can live a bit closer, because new development in the center soaks up rich people that would otherwise have created gentrification in outlying neighborhoods, but there is no chance it results in poor people in their neighborhood.
Progressive NIMBYs actually support the current status quo of rent control, affordable housing mandates and Section 8, which actually keep poor people in their neighborhoods, so there's no hypocrisy there specifically. The issue is that the status quo only helps a few lottery winners, and leaves a shrunken pie for 99% of the working poor to fight over. They can see that they have provided tangible assistance to a lucky few and live in denial of the obvious truth, that their policies make most low-income households much worse off.
There definitely is a subset of NIMBYs in middle income neighborhoods that are specifically trying to keep poor people out of their neighborhoods - a recent example is the suburbanites trying to make it illegal to rent SFHs in their neighborhoods in the South.
There definitely is a strain of nativism that motivates NIMBYism everywhere, but in big cities, it takes form of trying to preserve the population as it was 30 years ago - in fact they oppose gentrification, which would result in being surrounded by richer people. Progressive New Yorkers and San Franciscans aren't the kind of people who are sitting at home and watching Fox News and consuming Tucker Carlson/brown menace propaganda.
Housing costs and NIMBY activities have skyrocketed in other places than the U.S., too.
I am from the Czech Republic, a 99,9 % white European country, where the prices of real estate have escaped any rational limits recently and where a single NIMBY organization can hold 20 or more developments including highways and railways in check for years.
We are not the only ones with the same problem. Hungary has a very conservative government, Viktor Orbán would be considered a devil in human form in Californian progressive circles. And Hungarian NIMBY and real estate problem is as crazy as the one in San Francisco.