America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals

Farhad Manjoo writing in the New York Times brings the fire:

Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Cities are the standard geographical unit of the global economy. Dense urban areas are quite literally the “real America” — the cities are where two-thirds of Americans live, and they account for almost all national economic output. Urban areas are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly improving public transportation and increasing urban density. More than that, metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.

Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. The bill would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds.

…Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

I applaud the fire, although it’s amusing to me that Manjoo treat this as big discovery (“I am struck by an unsettling thought.”). Look, this isn’t new! Progressives created zoning and other housing regulations to exclude people they didn’t like from “their” neighborhoods. Nor, by the way, is the desire to exclude limited to “wealthy” liberals (Manjoo surely knows this but is afraid of punching down). It’s also amusing that Steve Sailer has been making exactly the same point about hypocritical Malibu liberals for years, the only difference being that Manjoo wishes to shame liberals into giving up NIMBYism while Sailer wants to shame them into giving up national diversity. I call a pox on both their houses and support individual property rights at both the local and national levels.