Enrico Moretti, the Housing-Environment Crisis and YIMBY
I can't say it any better than Enrico Moretti in his New York Times op-ed on the severe housing and environmental crisis raging in the Bay Area, brought to painful light by the recent wildfires in Napa and Sonoma counties. As Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley, puts it:
Bay Area urban progressives, by fighting new housing in their neighborhoods, cause more sprawl on the rural fringes. I’m a committed environmentalist, and it made me rethink the way I engage with such issues: For example, I was a member of the Sierra Club for a more than a decade. But because of all the unwise battles waged by the San Francisco chapter against smart housing growth in the city, I quit to support other environmental groups.
Just like fires, bad housing policies can carry horrendous social and environmental costs.
The same crisis is afflicting most high barrier-to-entry cities like Seattle, Portland, Boston and Boulder, where I live.
It's progressivism as parochialism on a regional scale, with global (warming) effects. And it's got to stop, or at least evolve.
Evolution in this case looks something like the Yes In My Back Yard movement, a loose collection of activists, many in their 20s and 30s, from around the US and the world who want to see more, denser housing and mixed-use, with a strong dose of thoughtful urban design, in cities like Oakland and San Francisco to address head-on the affordability/inclusiveness problem, not to mention the climate challenge, so many communities are facing. The very first annual YIMBY conference was held in Boulder in 2016. The second in Oakland in July.
So there is hope. It's name is YIMBY.
