The Brief Case #3: Environmentalists Schism Over Housing Policy
Plus, why housing policy is hard to visualize and more lessons to journalists on covering stadium subsidies.
Note: This post has been updated with a new development below
Housing
Crisis Greens vs. Cautious Greens: How Housing Policy Is Tearing Environmentalists Apart
At The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas has a great piece on a battle in Minneapolis over housing policy. Minneapolis became one of the first major cities to remove single-family zoning. Several environmental groups sued the city, fearing it would create unchecked growth that would negatively impact the environment. Meanwhile, the pro-housing movement has touted the positive environmental benefits of more density. While Demasas sympathizes more with the pro-housing side, her piece provides more nuance to the anti-growth faction of the environmentalist debate to try to explain their deeper motivations.
On its face, the battle in Minneapolis is a fight over what types of housing should go where. But the debate is also revealing generational, ideological, and temperamental divides within the large umbrella of the environmental movement. And how these disputes are resolved will shape the future of cities, the politics of growth, and the contours of American liberalism.
I began to think of those who favored the Minneapolis plan as the “Crisis Greens.” They saw environmentalism largely through the lens of climate change and urgently demanded more government action to address the problem. They were less enamored of process than their opponents were, and less wary of change. And those skeptical of the plan, those involved in the lawsuit and those outside of it, I termed “Cautious Greens.” They were suspicious of development and sweeping government action. They saw environmentalism as encompassing varied lifestyle concerns and were thus much more focused on local impacts. But perhaps most telling, the Cautious Greens were apt to ask, with some bewilderment, What’s the problem with just taking our time?
[ . . . ]
The historian Jake Anbinder advises against “the blinkers of the NIMBY framework.” Instead of seeing the Cautious Greens as self-interested, hypocritical homeowners, we might better understand them as adherents to an ideology deeply enmeshed in American politics. Incubated during a succession of development failures by Big Government, the Cautious Greens remain scarred by the highway construction and rapid suburbanization that characterized America’s built environment in the postwar era. Anbinder traces the historical development of anti-growth liberalism through a “wide array of local skirmishes whose participants had only a vague sense of being part of the same war.”
[ . . . ]
Last year, two law professors, J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, coined the phrase “the Greens’ Dilemma” to describe the tension between 20th-century environmental statutes designed to slow or halt new development and a climate crisis that necessitates building faster and more than ever before. If your primary concern is lowering carbon emissions to prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change, stopping or slowing development is good if what’s being developed is bad. In that world, it’s easy to band together with classic NIMBYs like homeowners who hate development, because your causes are aligned. But when the country needs transmission lines to connect renewable energy to the grid or carbon pipelines to ensure that greenhouse gas doesn’t diffuse into the air—or when it needs new housing to accommodate growth—the coalition begins to fracture.
Indeed, this divide is found in more than just housing policy. Alec Stapp of the think tank Institute for Progress has regularly pointed out how environmentalist groups have repeatedly sued to block renewable energy projects. Just this week, environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit to stop a $10 billion transmission line that would carry energy produced by wind power that would cross “one of the most intact, prehistoric and historical . . . landscapes in southern Arizona.” Stapp calls this version of environmentalism “outdated,” and I tend to agree. Like the housing affordability crisis, the climate crisis is an emergency that requires a rebalancing of priorities.
A similar dynamic can be seen in Nashville, albeit on a much smaller scale. A group called “Save Nashville” claims to be a “cooperative” of “environmentalists and conservationists” that “formed to protect Nashville, Tennessee’s remaining green spaces and rivers.” Beyond Tweeting some pretty ableist and homophobic things, this account has been primarily devoted to fighting an apartment complex in Bellevue, one of Nashville’s suburbs. In a reply to Councilmember Sean Parker, they try to blame stress on our energy grid during the freezing temperatures last week on high-density housing developments (including one that hasn’t been built yet).
It doesn’t appear that Save Nashville has enough momentum or resources to challenge any upzoning in Nashville, legally speaking. However, other groups have recently sued high-density developments over (sometimes legitimate) environmental concerns. The conflicts between the pro-housing movement and environmental groups will likely not subside anytime soon, especially as the YIMBY movement continues to grow around the country.
Update: After this was posted, Save Nashville deleted their X account.
We Can’t Easily Visualize Housing Shortages or Proposed Solutions
At his Substack Up Close & Political, Toby Muresianu provides a very insightful analysis of why some people experience a disconnect regarding housing supply and prices: we can’t see shortages in this sector as well as we can for other goods.
Housing shortages look different because when housing is rented or sold it doesn’t go anywhere, it remains in public.
Also, most people looking for housing aren’t in public where we can see them. They’re at home searching online on Craigslist or Apartments.com.
With housing, demand is largely invisible, while supply is not just visible—it appears to be all around us. This makes the reality that demand is greater than supply counterintuitive.
He also explains how the image of a shiny new, expensive-looking apartment complex doesn’t always signal the downstream effects of increasing the housing supply:
The problem that we want to solve is high housing costs across the region. But this doesn’t seem like a solution to that: it looks like high cost housing!
The construction of new buildings in areas with rising housing costs also often leads people to get the causality backwards—assuming that the rising housing costs must be a result of new construction rather than a response to it.
The effects of initial visual impressions are also very psychologically strong. They are extraordinarily hard to shift even after better information becomes available, which could explain why people who initially perceive new buildings as too expensive can remain skeptical even if it turns out they are actually low-income housing.
His entire post is worth a close read, and pro-housing groups should keep in mind this visual disconnect as they advocate for more density.
Stadium Subsidies
More Lessons for Journalists Who Report on Stadium Projects
More announcements about new publicly subsidized stadium projects usually mean more terrible news coverage about those projects. Recently, there’s been talk of taxpayer-funded stadiums/arenas in Alexandria, Virginia (for the Washington Capitals and Wizards), St. Petersburg, Florida (for the Tampa Bay Rays), Kansas City (for the Royals), and Chicago (for the White Sox), among others. Last week, I wrote about how journalists in Nashville and elsewhere can and should do better regarding how they frame their reporting.
At Field of Schemes, Neil deMause takes on some recent reporting on the new arena in Alexandria Living magazine in an article titled, “Monumental Arena Expected to Pay for Itself, City Officials Say”:
The first red flag here is “officials say”: Much like it’s bad journalism to take police reports at their word, basing your report entirely on the claims of politicians who support a project is media malpractice. (The second red flag is “financial consultant”: Sanderson turns out to work for an investment firm, and he’s a lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in architecture, with no economic training.) There’s nothing wrong with reporting what elected officials or even unelected consultants are saying, but they shouldn’t be allowed to craft the narrative of your story, let alone the headlines that will be all that many people will read during their morning doom scrolls.
And the central claim here — that tax revenues from a new development don’t exist if the project isn’t built — is fundamentally wrong, as any economist could have told the magazine’s writers if they’d bothered to call one. For starters, there’s the substitution effect, which is the principle that if people spend money in one place, they’re not spending it someplace else, so a lot of that tax money would have been collected elsewhere in the city or the state if Virginians had done something else with their evenings rather than go see a Caps or Wizards game. (Some would be cannibalized from across the river in D.C., certainly, but not all of it.) And then there’s also the but-for problem, which is that the idea this is all free tax revenue assumes that nothing would be built on the site without the public spending, which is also flagrantly untrue.
[ . . . ]
But then, this is the whole point of tax increment financing: Not to come up with clever ways of funding projects without tapping public dollars, but rather to come up with clever ways of using public dollars while claiming you’re not. Anyone reading the words “Monumental Arena Expected to Pay for Itself” would reasonably expect that this means an Alexandria arena won’t use money that local government would otherwise have available to spend on other things like schools and health care, but it absolutely will.
Again, as I have argued and as Neil stresses here, the common journalistic mistake of equating stadium supporters (who generally have a political or financial stake in the project) and opponents (which includes independent experts who have studied the issue for decades) for the sake of “balance” does a huge disservice to readers when that context is omitted from the reporting. And it’s usually always left out or, worse, more space is given to the flashy claims by policymakers and paid consultants than to detractors.
Quick Hits:
J.C. Bradbury on X: “Yes, just like any other normal private business development, get a yard sign to show your support!” (Referring to the Potomac Yard Arena Supporters offering . . . yard signs for their stadium project)
Patrick Hedger on X: “If [the Potomac Yard Arena plan] is so attractive, why is the government involved? Only the best deals require loans subsidized by taxpayers hundreds of miles away… or something.”
Jeremy Horpedahl on X: “In 1980, unaffordable housing was mostly confined to coastal South California. By 2000, it had only really spread to the NY-Boston corridor. Before the pandemic, it had spread up the West Coast, the Mountain States, and Florida. Today, unaffordable housing is everywhere.”
Minjee Kim on The Case for Mass Upzoning: “ . . . mass rezoning is not only justifiable but also one of the most cost-effective and least risky policy solutions for tackling housing affordability and supply challenges in the United States.”
Alex Nowrasteh & Ilya Somin on The Case Against Nationalism: “In a country like the United States, nationalism is (ironically) a schismatic ideology that turns normal policy disagreements into a debate over which side of the political spectrum represents the "real" Americans.”
Angele Latham at The Tennessean: “New House bill would expand who can challenge books in Tennessee public schools”
M. Scott Carter at The Oklahoman: “Oklahoma bill making journalists get licenses, drug tests sparks First Amendment pushback.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.