I voted you up because you're correct, in that the only solution is construction and there are people that are doing everything in their power to avoid that truism.

But I don't think it is a left/right issue. In certain regions it may be the left, in others the right, but generally it is subset of both that have investment in artificial scarcity. It's just the justifications that change depending on ideology.

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deeg 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm very progressive in some ways but I do think progressives make this particular problem worse, often with good intentions. Both sides are equally NIMBY but liberals also have:

- More environmental regulations that can be used by NIMBY.

- Attempts to solve the using various forms of rent control, which make it worse.

- Related: conservatives favor less regulation, which leads to more construction.

- Liberals hate for (or at least distrust of) landlords. Some of this is well-deserved but I've seen liberals oppose good policies because it will "help landlords".

Lastly, home owners--including liberals--like to see the value of their property go up and tend to favor policies that make it so. It would be nice if we could get people to stop looking at their homes as financial investments.

	▲	peder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And despite saying that they're the party of YIMBY, in practice we can clearly see that Democrats simply aren't. They'll say that they allowed ADUs, but then Dallas will come along and build 10,000 homes in the time it took Seattle to simply debate ADUs. At some point you have to look at the actual results of policy.

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justonceokay 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

See NIMBYs all down the west coast. I bet 90% of city dwelling homeowners would identify as “democrat or further left”, but are very conservative with the character of their neighborhood.

In my experience the bulders and tradesmen who are more right-wing have more to gain from allowing more and faster construction and are more interested in removing laws and restrictions.

A lot of this comes from the attitude in the 60s and 70s where the liberal strategy was to sue the government to stop them from destroying the environment. People from that era saw the smog and the flammable rivers and are generally against development , even though today’s development processes are starkly different from back then.

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peder 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, it's not an inherently left vs right thing. Today NIMBYism has been largely a left-wing phenomenon, with really high end housing developments that are politically untouchable by housing projects.

The answer is always the same tho: make it easy to build housing, and build more housing. Keep building housing until there's a glut of supply.