This time last year, the must-read book of the summer was Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance. A manifesto for a certain type of West Coast liberal, the book staked out a clear and well-articulated position within one of the emerging quadrants of our current four-way political divide over local zoning and development policy.
Suppose we imagine a grid. On one axis, we have the YIMBYs vs. the NIMBYs. But within each of these groups, there is a left/right divide. And so, we need another axis: left vs. right. And so, there are right YIMBYs and left YIMBYs, right NIMBYs and left NIMBYS.
Abundance spoke very much for the "left YIMBYs." It was a plea for relaxing some of the left's traditional straitjacket regulatory approach to new development for the sake of proving that government can work and solve problems by building.
In articulating this stance, Klein and Thompson knew they risked alienating the "left NIMBYs," who often oppose new development and new clean energy projects for lack of community consultation, or as a violation of local direct democracy or tribal sovereignty for impacted communities, or as a threat to the environment or local ecology.
They also knew that they risked finding themselves in uncomfortable alliance with the "right YIMBYs"—the libertarians and conservatives who hate regulation and the administrative state and would love nothing more than to throw practices of environmental review and community consultation (under federal laws like NEPA) into the trash.
These are the sort of friends no one on the left wants to make. Here as so often, it's hard to tell what's worse: making enemies on the left or winning "undesirable allies" on the right, as Koestler once called them.
And then of course, there are the "right NIMBYs," whom Klein and Thompson couldn't hope to reach anyway. These are the people who oppose new development in order to preserve their restrictive zoning and property values, and many of whom are not so subtly motivated by the goal of preserving white racial hegemony.
(As Matt Yglesias notes, apropos of the "right-NIMBYs" in a recent post on his blog: "One of the main reasons that statewide zoning reforms keep failing in the Northeast is that Acela Corridor Republicans oppose them.")
I listened to Abundance as an audiobook on a road trip last summer, and was mostly convinced by its arguments. But I have been too much of a left-liberal all my life not to be troubled by the obvious objections one could make from the "left NIMBY" side.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been reading Edmund Wilson's 1960 book Apologies to the Iroquois the last few days, and one feels that one is here present at the birth of left NIMBYism in its most thoughtful and sympathetic form.
Wilson was mostly reporting on the political struggle of various Indigenous groups to preserve their lands and treaty rights in the face of government-sponsored hydroelectric projects. In one case, he documents in detail how Native leaders managed to prevail against even the legendary Robert Moses in preserving their lands from his attempt to wield the power of eminent domain.
Most of Wilson's book is confined to Native American issues specifically; but in a penultimate chapter, he draws a larger analogy to the struggle of other communities to preserve their independence and property rights from the ravages of development, "urban renewal," etc. This, he argues, is why the Indian movement was able to gain traction in his era with a wider non-Native audience.
"[W]hat has set off the Iroquois resurgence and caused it to gather power," he writes, "is the gluttonous inroads on tribal property—such as have also been felt by the whites as an encroachment on personal property—by state and federal projects."
Wilson compares this mania for economic development, the building of new hydroelectric dams and power plants, to the compulsive activity of beavers, who build lodges and dams by instinct even beyond their present needs.
"The struggle to restrain these projects is undoubtedly at the present time one of the principal problems of American life," he writes.
Against this perspective stands the villainous figure of Robert Moses—the arch–urban developer who displaced countless communities and crushed innumerable family homes in his beaver-like drive to build and build.
Wilson quotes Moses at one point as warning that the United States, unless it allowed him to displace Native groups without bothering about tribal consultation or treaty rights, risked being eclipsed by "other systems of government more incisive and less tolerant of obstruction."
"The implication," Wilson observes, "would seem to be that those 'more incisive and less tolerant ' systems have distinctly the advantage over us and that 'our democratic system' can hardly survive without becoming less democratic."
One hears in Moses's words a kind of nightmare version of Abundance—"dark abundance," as some have called it—the "right YIMBYism" that looms as an ever-present danger in the background over any too-hasty efforts to overturn protocols for local democratic control and tribal consultation when it comes to new building.
One of the principal objections of Abundance/left YIMBY liberals to the current regime of permitting and environmental review, after all, is that it currently gets in the way even of "clean energy" projects needed to make a green transition to address climate change.
But what are the massive hydroelectric projects that were displacing Native communities in the 1950s if not "clean energy"? They certainly did not produce any greenhouse gas emissions. But that does not mean they were a win for the environment and for our communities. They still wreaked havoc with people's homes and Native people's treaty rights.
When Moses suggested, in so many words, that we perhaps had too much democracy for our own good, he was giving voice to a logical implication of the Abundance position. Here, indeed, is the trade-off. If you want more building, including of new housing and new clean energy projects, you may have to accept that there will be less community consultation and buy-in.
Wilson's book tells some of the human stories that show why that is perhaps a dangerous trade-off to make. Not only were many Native communities cruelly and unlawfully displaced by new development projects in the era he describes—it's also hard not to feel the pathos of his descriptions of even more modest losses that were inflicted in the name of industrial "progress."
"[R]eturning last summer to the village in New York State in which I am writing this," he writes, "I found that—to the horror of many of the inhabitants—a planting of splendid elms that had made a majestic approach to Boonville [...] was in process of being chopped down in order to transform this road into a hour-lane highway for trucking."
The genuine anguish of this image—which I feel even from Wilson's description—calls to mind G.M. Hopkins's poem on the "Binsey Poplars":
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
[...] After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
These are the reasons—real ones, human ones, legitimate ones—why "left NIMBYism" emerged in the first place. For a time in American life, the reign of the engineers and the technocrats really had been allowed to go too far. The mania to build, even at the expense of traditional communities, the local environment, and tribal sovereignty, was unchecked.
There was a time when we really did "hack and rack the growing green," as Hopkins put it—without any procedures of environmental review or tribal or community consultation to provide a counterweight. That's why we passed laws like NEPA in the first place.
Wilson was not wrong, then, that at least in his era, "The struggle to restrain" environmentally and tribally destructive mega-projects was "undoubtedly [...] one of the principal problems of American life." Hence, "left NIMBYism" was born—and had good reason to be born.
So, what are we to do with this now?
We could just say: well, "new occasions teach new duties," as James Russell Lowell put it. Maybe restraining mega-projects and excessive development was the great desideratum of the American mid-century, when Wilson wrote, but now we have gone too far in the opposite direction, and the pendulum must swing back.
We could say, as Matt Yglesias does: yes, it was probably right to resist the worst excesses of urban renewal and eminent domain in the 1950s, but now we have too much local control, too much direct democracy in housing and building policy, and it has become too hard to get a permit even to build the most urgently-needed clean energy and housing projects.
Maybe we just need to bite the bullet, then, on sacrificing some of our environmental review and community consultation standards if we want to ever create the affordable housing and green energy abundance our society needs.
Maybe... but I'm not so sure. I have no doubt that there is some golden mean to be struck here between competing values. We have to somehow strive to get the right balance of direct democracy and government efficiency. But that voice of Robert Moses—the voice of "dark abundance"—haunts me.
I have a hard time believing that a "more incisive and less tolerant" system than ours would be better, and that we need to compromise on democratic values at the risk of trampling on the rights of Indigenous communities and displacing many others.
As Yglesias is always saying, politics involves trade-offs. As Isaiah Berlin would note: many legitimate values are incompatible in this life, and one cannot be realized fully without cost to the others.
But Berlin had a great and needed skepticism against the sort of person who would conclude from this: "well, that just means that if you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. Might as well get cracking. Start building that dam and displacing those communities."
In the end, what happens when people reason in this way, Berlin writes, is that "The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible."
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
[...] even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve, as Hopkins wrote.
Maybe he was a "left NIMBY" avant la lettre. But that doesn't mean he was wrong.
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