“Bourgeois thought observes economic life consistently and necessarily from the standpoint of the individual capitalist and this naturally produces a sharp confrontation between the individual and the overpowering supra-personal ‘law of nature’ which propels all social phenomena. This leads both to the antagonism between individual and class interests in the event of conflict…and also to the logical impossibility of discovering theoretical and practical solutions to the problems created by the capitalist system of production.”
—Georg Lukács, History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics
Yesterday, the venerable New York Times published “Twilight of the NIMBY”, promptly sending the most annoying people online into a righteous tailspin. The overall thrust of the argument, as far as I’ve seen, is that individual NIMBYs (that is, homeowners) maintain an outsize, tyrannical influence on the actions of municipal governments. This assumes two things: that, a), municipal governments act with the best interests of their constituencies in mind (lol) and b) that homeowner’s associations and various other interest groups composed of local owners of residential property act may act as a class with coherent organization, political development, and goal creation.
Anyway, the piece endeavors, as most contemporary partisans do, to present the insipid YIMBY/NIMBY divide as something which maps nicely onto the absurdly oversimplified left/right political compass schematic. The usual tricks are all wheeled out: YIMBYs are against austerity, they believe in demolishing insidiously segregationist zoning laws, they believe in lowering rents by increasing supply. The YIMBY figure in this particular article, Marin County local developer Phil Richardson, is presented in a sympathetic light as an old man given his life to a dream to build 25 sensible condos. Whatever. I don’t care. But here’s the meat of the article:
How does a place that prides itself on progressive politics [read: California] have so many policies that exacerbate inequality? How do homeowners whose window signs say they welcome every oppressed group rationalize a housing system that has caused their own children to flee?
Ms. Kirsch does not deny that California has a housing problem but has a different narrative about why. In her telling the state’s problems have little to do with the lack of housing — a diagnosis that unites basically every liberal and conservative economist along with the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations — but instead blames investors who buy single-family houses, big technology companies, and inequality generally.
She wraps her opposition to development in a “small c” conservative philosophy that a smaller local government is better and more responsive to its citizens than a bigger one further away. Where many people see gridlock, she sees having her voice heard — and in the midst of a brutal housing crisis, fewer people want to listen.
“It feels like huge forces conspiring to take away control from people at the lowest level at which they live,” she said.
Just to be clear: you’re not going to catch me advocating for a blanket NIMBYism, because I don’t care, and moreover, the entire -IMBY dyad is predicated on erroneous and insane principles which fundamentally distort the issues at hand to such a degree as both collapse into irrelevance almost instantly, built atop a shitty frame of left and right (and secretly left and secretly right, as seen above) political prescriptions wherein a white “lefty” Sierra Club member and homeowner find themselves rubbing shoulders with broader community activists. This NIMBY position, which in reality is more of an anti-development position, is already a rearguard stake taken up by some minorly capitalized investors (homeowners) who find themselves facing down the privations of other, more diversely invested capitals. Consider, again, the construction process. At the beginning, a landowning capitalist may sell usage by title to a developer, who then works with a contractor to build homes, and then sells the titles to these homes to individuals or other capital owners, such as the much reviled Invitation Homes or Blackstone. The developer is indiscriminate in this sale – all they usually care about is the initial mortgage, at which point payments are made to the bank which the developer, content in their having turned a profit, is free to skip all the way to.
If this new title owner happens to be a large firm, rather than an individual owner-occupant, the balance of power shifts subtly. They now are granted the capacity to turn around the title they purchased for their own profits. In the case of Blackstone, a relatively new entrant into the single-family housing market, they prefer reaping their profits in the form of absolute rent, that is, charging piecemeal for access to their capital property on the land. Blackstone and other firms also make use of their sustained high profits gained in the process of title-holding and -selling to continue the process of title acquisition beyond the local context and in some cases nationally. This grants the ability to engage in large-scale economic organization. To put it in baby terms, Blackstone owns a 64 count box of crayons, whereas the owner-occupier has only one.
To return to Lukács, this serves to “confer near-monopoly status on a number of giant individual capitalists. Objectively, then, the social character of capital was brought into play with great energy but in such a manner as to keep its nature concealed from the capitalist class. Indeed this illusory elimination of economic anarchy successfully diverted their attention from the true situation”. Put simply, the planned activities of the great national capital firms who own residential capital present the appearance of a suspension of the natural activities of the market. However, in fact, it is precisely those “natural” forms which enable Blackstone to exist. Nevertheless it is absolutely crucial to say here that Blackstone is not really the enemy that NIMBY types are usually engaging with; that would be speculators and contractors, not the shadowy absentee owners of already-existing houses. Bear in mind that competition between buyers only exists prior to the actual sale (duh); that Blackstone’s purchases en masse may be driving up home prices means nothing to the owner-occupier, who in fact is enjoying seeing their home valuation rise. Additionally, Blackstone is not rolling out diplomats to local meetings because they have no need to, because their entire organization exists precisely in accordance with the way capital is currently structured with respect to home ownership. There is essentially nothing they need to change at the local level. If anything, a municipality may welcome Blackstone et al. because an owner of a property (due to taxes etc.) is far preferable to it being bank-owned and vacant.
To return to the individual owner-occupier, they are a rather more complex story. From an economic point of view, we may call them petty bourgeois; that is, they are an owner of capital, but may or may not have worked for real wages and then invested in capital with the money gained as payment for their sale of their labor time over many years. In any case, upon purchasing a piece of residential capital, their outlook changes; they seek to defend their investment in their capital, both physically and bodily against destruction, but also on future terms. At bottom, we may say that the classic NIMBY homeowner perceives threats to their continued capitalization in the construction and title-selling activities of other capitals (and remember, all capitals involved in the land-based sector of the economy are rivals when it comes to future sales, no matter the size). The individual owner-occupier’s fear largely springs from the fact that where a larger capital may find it acceptable to take losses (sales below a market price or production price) if their overall profitability remains sufficient), an individual owner-occupier has no such luxury; their home appears to them as an inert lump of capital to be exhumed at a future date. However, given the owner-occupier’s lack of market information and future sight, their activity in the defense of this future profit consists almost entirely of militating against the activities of other capitals in the here and now (this is similar to William Frischel’s argument, but foregrounds the economic impetus over the “emotional” one). To put it simply, the owner-occupier is forced to combat the activity of developers and builders because their activity undertaken on a local level eats into the uniqueness of their particular commodity (their house) and threatens to lower its value should that activity continue unabated. Note that this is not necessarily about supply in the broad sense but about the diminution of uniqueness which forms the backbone of an owner’s ability to command an absolute rent.
It is crucial to note the loneliness and solitude of this crusade, even if these home defenders appear in the ranks of otherwise good community organizations; they are, at bottom, appearing there for the preservation of their capital (even and especially if they don’t know it!). As Susan Kirsch says in the inciting NYT article:
“I suppose it is just that feeling of home,” she said. “Just that feeling of home and the safety and security and groundedness that goes with having a safe place to go to at the end of the day, where you can believe you can have security, you don’t need to worry about how are you going to have money for both food and insurance and dental care for your kids and all of those things, that metaphor of home as a place of comfort.”
Note the curious and confused political and cultural descriptors attached to both sides of the debate: home, safety, security, progress, inclusion, growth. In one corner, community groups ally with petty bourgeois, in the other, local governments and property capital writ large. I want to be clear here, as well, that plenty of NIMBY small owners run with these rather reactionary bromides and, beginning from their economic monomania to preserve uniqueness and thereby investment returns, find it much easier to, instead of tilting at the activities of gargantuan capital firms involved in development, instead attack the would-be buyers of their commodities, often along individual lines (read: they become overtly racist). Though they remain utterly enthralled to the ultimate goal of their class – the pursuit of profit – this lodestar may not necessarily be known to them; to be sure, the reactionary character of the American mind proffers any number of avenues to modulate their insane self-obsession into socially permissive psychotic hatreds of other groups. In this sense, the individual owner-occupier may also find themselves just as easily as making common cause with the right.
At the end of the day, and as I’ve noted before (sorry) the fight is, at its current stage, limited to a manichean struggle between fractions of capital that see themselves as rivals. However temporary this present moment may be, it is crucial to be understanding that the owner-occupier is no more a friend of the organizer than any firm may be; and that, likewise, the community board meeting is not the only arena of politics. To put it simply, at no point should we fight for or with owners of capital, no matter their size. Kinda stupid to have to say that but here we are.