Alain Bertaud: evaluation

Transcript context

…But the so-called nice cities — have any of them overcome NIMBY and seen YIMBY win? And if not, why are you optimistic? What will change? Ha! Maybe I’m not optimistic. [laughter] I think that maybe, in cities where you have the house itself is not your only way of saving, have a better chance of being YIMBY. If people perceive that the only way of saving money for their retirement is in their house — their house is some kind of an ATM machine — then they don’t want any competition. I remember in Washington some years ago, there was a letter to the Washington Post. Somebody was saying, “How is it possible that in Fairfax County they allow more houses, where my house has increased in value in the last five years by only 5 percent?” They thought that was a legitimate case. If your house increases by only 5 percent, then you should stop every other house so that your house will go. So if people consider that this is one of their… I think it’s a question of property right. We have a system which decreases your property right within the boundary of your lot or your apartment. You see this morning, for instance, in the New York Times, somebody get fined $15,000 because they installed a dryer and a washing machine in a basement. So that’s a decrease of property right. At the same time, you increase the property right outside your boundary, but it’s a negative property right. You are allowed to prevent people from building what they want. This dilution of property right, I think, is a big cause of NIMBY. How do we reverse it? I don’t know. Because in a way, it seems very democratic and legitimate to have a say about what your neighbor is doing. You say, “Well, I’m preserving the character of the neighborhood.” Well, if the character of the neighborhood has to be preserved in Manhattan, if it was preserved 50 or 100 years ago, there would be no Manhattan. Would the political economy work better if building regulations were either done strictly at the state level, or maybe even at the neighborhood or even the street level? As opposed to city and county?…

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