You know why the local government is the best government? It's the government I can fire through voting. If the state had more power my votes would also have more power.

I no means abolish federal government but I think the power is out of proportion.

I’m not sure what your point is.

I think the point is local government is more accountable to its citizens than state or national governments and therefore removing something inherently local from its purview, like land planning, would be stupid.

Typical issue of why you vote at all. Your influence to the result drop significantly from your town meeting, to local to state to federal. Obviously you cannot just have local gov otherwise it is impossible to coordinate some project. But some issues are better local.

The problem is which is which and if conflict how to resolve them. Not sure there is an answer.

If a city votes on what to do with the homeless, they might get a solution.

If the entire nation votes on it, the solution will be “send them all to California”.

Things should ideally be done by the lowest level of government that can do the job:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Remove planning rights from local/city government entirely. If the people in districts are allowed to vote on what happens in their own districts they will always vote in a way that represents their own best interests, which is often at odds with people who desire to live in those districts but can't afford to. The only way to end nimby rule is by force. You must use the government to essentially take land and repurpose it.

The reason we don't do this is a lack of political will. But that can change.

> Remove planning rights from local/city government entirely

> You must use the government to essentially take land and repurpose it.

Which government? In your first sentence we removed land planning from the local government.

I think he’s proposing urban dekulakization, so presumably the dispossession and redistribution would be enforced at the national level or at least by state level authorities.

Gotta keep an eye on those totally-not-made-up-for-political-purposes kulaks. First, they'll want to keep all* of the grain they grow, next their homes. Such selfish people.

* - enough to eat, anyway.

So the government should serve the interests of those that aren’t residents to the detriment of those that do?

Yes.

Yes, if you want to address the issue. Whether you should is another question. That is what the higher levels of government do. When the majority of citizens need something, you essentially use threat of violence to take it by force. You will never fix the "nimby problem" any other way.

Communist governments used the threat of violence to take by farmland by force. How did that turn out?

Worked out well in areas like Hawaii and many of the US territories we took by force.

> When the majority of citizens need something, you essentially use threat of violence to take it by force.

Colonialism, applied on behalf of the majority. Only done to their own citizens this time, those citizens othered using terms like “nimby”.

It certainly rhymes with how we’ve done things in the past.

Local governments have finite power given to them by state and federal government. So, the argument is more that state and federal government should actually exercise their authority to fix the underlying problem.

Abstractly hyper local optimization is suboptimal.

Strong statement. Got any proof of that?

All governments get their power from the people who they serve. As soon as they do not serve the interests of the people the represent they should be dissolved. Local government gets its power from the local people and no one else.

> Got any proof of that?

Most obviously their form and powers vary based on the state.

Several hundred years of court cases make there limits clear. Local governments regularly get overridden on all kinds of things.

Local governments are also completely dependent on outside help for all kinds of things. It’s common for them to even lack local police forces let alone a court system. Outliers like major cities seem extremely powerful, but for the most part they have similar powers to HOA’s.

PS: As to getting authority from the governed… Some let people outside the area vote, and a few that give corporations a say.

> Local governments have finite power given to them by state and federal government.

I know it's out of fashion, but the Tenth Amendment appears to say otherwise.

The Tenth Amendment, for whatever it's worth, talks about federal and state governments. Local governments: city, town, village, county, etc., are creatures of their state and wholely subordinate.

You may be misinterpreting how “nor” is used in the sentence.

The 10th makes it clear the constitution gives the federal government specific powers which means those specified powers aren’t available to the states or local governments.

The first draft is a little easier to understand: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” (Which is not) can be flipped to the front so -> “Those powers given to the United States are its alone, all other powers not specifically listed are retained by the States.”

Both versions makes it clear states are losing some power, but they are given a little spin to make it less obvious.

California basically did this[1]. Sadly though the desirable coastal areas are literally full and all spoken for and even without any real zoning anymore there’s nowhere to actually build. So you’re gonna need to eminent domain some Malibu mansions to make room for the non stop line of 1+5s from LA to SF.

It’s also interesting to me how many people propose increasing supply when there is nowhere to build, but can’t even think about reducing demand, say by reducing the all time record in migration. But that’s literally crimethink.

Sure the USA has a ton of empty space. But guess what, that’s because most people don’t want to live in those places. And the places where people do want to live like waterfront cities are geographically full.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-09-17/wh...

As someone who also lives in California, can you point out the parts of the state where there's nowhere left to build? It certainly isn't any of the places I've lived (Beverly hills, SF, East Bay), each of which has seen significant commercial redevelopment in my lifetime. None of them are dense by global standards either. SF only has 25% the population density of Paris, for example.

California can develop all the canyons that keep catching on fire.

Until it’s Kolowoon Walled City from Tijuana to Oregon it’s not enough!

Just build up. Zoning laws are what prevent that. Those need to be changed.

I certainly hope we lack the political will to use force to stop people from voting in their best interests.

- "Remove planning rights from local/city government entirely"

- "use the government to essentially take land and repurpose it"

These are third world tactics.

Ya, that’s basically how China does it.

Anyone who does this will get unelected in the next election, so that’s where the lack of will comes from. You have to sell these ideas to the people first somehow, the politicians aren’t going to commit political suicide to enact them, we are really problem.

You seem to be advocating giving people that don’t live somewhere power over people that actually do live there. This feels quite backwards.

Why don't we get rid of NIMBYism and make sure that actually solves the issue without banning sensible implementations of rent control?

Rent control is a bad policy no matter how you slice it. In general most price controls are counterproductive

For many people, price gouging is conceptually palatable when it doesn't apply to them.

A revision would make more sense, but treating it like a black and white issue is disingenuous.

And yet people vote in politicians who back it.

More basic issues clearly need to be addressed before politicians can repeal rent control and still get reelected.

That's really not true. Rent control has been shown multiple times to actually work in reducing prices, and when quantitative welfare analysis in whether the drop in mobility is worth the drop in prices are done, it's often found to be worth it. There are of course ways to do rent control that are better or worse, some of which may indeed be generally counterproductive, and everyone agrees that it can't solve the problem by itself.

Economics is not even close to being sufficiently precise for you to be able to reason through any appreciable problem from first principles.

Rent control works for some people (e.g. those already living in rent controlled apartments). It also tends to suppress long term supply and improvement of existing supply, and that hurts other people in less visible ways (e.g. people who would have moved into new housing which was never built due to supply suppression, or residents of rent-controlled buildings which gradually fall into disrepair).

In general, we should be skeptical of any policy where those helped are obvious and those harmed are non-obvious or distributed through time and space.

See, that's what I mean about sensible applications of rent control. Having a small class of rent controlled appartements is silly and it's not something you ever want to do, it's only ever a terrible compromise between politicians and landlords that everyone knows is a bad idea.

It doesn't suppress supply when building is already wildly profitable and is just being slowed down by permitting either.

The negative impacts of rent control have been the subject of literally hundreds of empirical studies. It's a known quantity at this point and, when you quantify the impact, it's generally worth it, especially in our current zoning hell. It also helps with price stickiness once supply does increase : as you know, developpers only like to build upmarket appartements, which typically take a decade or more to trickle down to the average person.

The main thing is not to do silly things like only apply rent control to a small portion of appartements, we know it doesn't work, and to allow rent to increase with any reasonably incurred costs. This way you actually incentivize landlords to repair their apartments, you reduce the mobility risk, etc...

Non-market housing is basically rent controlled and very productive. I'd say it's the most productive rent control as if you get enough of it (30-40%), the market almost align to non-market housing and landlords have to compete on housing quality.

Just have sf associations build non-market housing. En masse.

Rent control is a limit on margins. That makes it a declaration that builders can only scale up profits on volume, which is what is necessary anyway in regions that are largely built out but still massively short of supply. Which means that it’s aligned with the goals and even predicted dynamics to the point where it’s little more than a formalized constraint.

Complaining about it is basically an admission that either other more important factors are keeping supply from happening or that the purported market benefits if/when it does might not be real.

Quite possibly both. As far as I can tell even when there are no obstacles the market isn’t interested in adding supply to the point of diminishing marginal returns, and unit prices do not fall on supply movement, only demand drops.