YIMBY Is NOT the Opposite of NIMBY

When government affects development -- be it to encourage it or discourage it -- it violates the right to private property.

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At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reports that Virginia's governor has proposed land regulation reform as a means of reducing housing costs in Virginia.

The plan is called "Make Virginia Home," and Somin quotes a summary from City Journal. That summary reads in part:

Image by the Commonwealth of Virginia, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

... The press release announcing Youngkin's Make Virginia Home plan acknowledges the supply problem, promising to "promote increasing the supply of attainable, affordable, and accessible housing across the Commonwealth..."

Make Virginia Home also hints at permitting and other regulatory reforms, such as streamlining environmental review and making it easier for developers to meet mandated wetlands and stream-mitigation requirements ...

In addition to reforming, streamlining, and even eliminating some land-use regulations via state preemption, Youngkin's plan also mentions an incentive to encourage localities to make such reforms on their own. Specifically, it calls for creating "reasonable linkages" between discretionary state funds and local government housing policies. In essence, discretionary state funding would flow to localities that liberalize land-use regulations. Local governments could still erect barriers to new housing, but they'd risk losing money.

Finally, the plan mentions building codes, an underappreciated factor behind high housing prices. Today's codes too often focus on marginal safety improvements, showing no concern for the higher costs of compliance. Some simple reforms would help. [bold added]

On the surface, this sounds encouraging, but don't forget the times we live in: Republicans and Democrats are fundamentally the same these days, each embracing fascism -- nominal private ownership of property, but with use-by-permission when not outright dictated by the government.

We see this here in the fact that Youngkin is "reforming" and "streamlining" laws that shouldn't be on the books at all -- without any hint at a longer-term goal of repeal.

It is thus not surprising that Youngkin's proposal is likened to similar ones from blue states:

...The measures Youngkin is considering are similar to those recently enacted in liberal blue states, such as Oregon and California. A recent Virginia Mercury article that dubbed Youngkin the state's "YIMBY-in-Chief" compared him to liberal California Democrats, who have recently pushed through major zoning reforms. [links omitted]

Interestingly, the post notes this not so much because YIMBY isn't a free-market idea -- but because Republicans have recently been NIMBY-ish!

(That last is not surprising: The origin of that attitude lies in a desire to basically bring back restrictive covenants, but absent arguments for why they should be legal and often also, I am afraid, truly individualistic reasons for wanting to do so.)

So, by the looks of it, although Youngkin -- like Florida's Ron DeSantis or Georgia's Brian Kemp -- would be a vast improvement over Donald Trump as a 2022 Presidential contender, he is not the classical liberal/champion of laissez-faire we need and I'd love to see.

The best news from this is that there is at least a willingness to consider that government meddling is to blame for the problem. That is something, and it is not to be sniffed at, but Youngkin is no principled champion of property rights, as far as I can tell.

It will be up to others, it seems, to make the most of this agenda item in the public debate. We can start by noting that the government's job is to protect property rights, and not to encourage or discourage development by trampling those rights in the process.

-- CAV