YIMBYism And Democrats' Response To Evidence

The parties are not the same

I am a YIMBY!

I think one of the most severe policy failures of the last few decades—particularly in blue states—has been inefficient and bureaucratic housing regulations. Housing prices obey supply and demand. New houses being built is the only way to lower housing prices in the long-run. In the generation of our parents and grandparents, housing was vastly cheaper than it is today, and the main culprit behind high housing prices is housing regulations. Zoning regulations prohibit houses from being built in lots of valuable and marketable locations. Development has become a long-drawn-out political process.

Fortunately, it seems that the Democrats are catching up on this issue. In the book of the summer, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson persuasively argued that we need to build more housing if we want to get serious about the housing crisis. This book was read by a generation of young Democratic staffers. Even Zohran Mamdani, who describes himself as a Democratic socialist, endorsed the abundance book. And the YIMBY wave hasn’t just led to a national conversation but to sizeable policy shifts—YIMBY bills that have passed include AB 130, SB 131, SB 79, and over a hundred others in 2025 alone!

Now, YIMBYism hasn’t completely caught on. There are lots of Democrats who oppose YIMBYism. I recently watched a frustrating debate wherein a local Democratic official proudly cited preventing a housing structure from having six stories as an example of making housing more affordable. YIMBYism is increasingly popular among Democrats, but it hasn’t received universal support.

This is a success case of the Democratic party. It shows the Democratic establishment is willing to change its mind in response to evidence. When it becomes clear that some sort of policy is having catastrophic consequences, Democrats sometimes change their minds.

YIMBYism is right-wing coded. Democrats tend to attribute the world’s problems to wealthy and powerful businessmen, rather than to government regulations. The Republicans are generally the party of deregulation and the Democrats the party of regulation. Housing developers are generally supposed to be the villains, not the heroes, in the oversimplified version of the core Democratic world narrative.

But crucially, even despite a presumption against big developers, Democrats were willing to update in response to evidence. When it became sufficiently clear that, at least in this case, government malfeasance was a major part of the problem, Democrats recognized that fact. They were willing to abandon the narrative in the face of sufficiently strong evidence. That is good. That is the sign of a healthy political party.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Democrats always do this. I think it’s pretty embarrassing how NIMBY (the opposite of YIMBY) the Democratic party was for a long time. The Democrats still have a long way to go regarding overturning burdensome regulations. And it’s pretty unfortunate that the Democrats support pharmaceutical price controls, despite clear evidence that they are horrible.

But at least this shows that the Democratic party can change its mind in response to evidence. Ideology is a significant force but not the only force. Democratic politicians, and the interns who work for them, are often smart people who read the New York Times and Matt Yglesias’s blog. They don’t always support good things, but at least they have not retreated into some black hole where the light of reason can never reach them.

I think it’s helpful to contrast this with the Republican party. As far as I can tell, the modern Republican party is pretty Trumpist. It has a few core bits of its ideology:

1. Most interactions are zero-sum and America is constantly getting ripped off, especially by other countries. This occurs through trade, immigration, and our politicians’ tendencies to constantly make Very Weak Deals, where they get ripped off.

2. America’s policies should primarily aim to benefit Americans! Most policies done partially for the benefit of others—foreign aid, free trade, immigration—are bad for us. We should also generally not intervene in foreign affairs.

3. When 1-2 aren’t applicable, we should mostly be traditionally conservative. For example, the Republican party supports cutting taxes and regulations!

4. Expertise and institutions are generally untrustworthy.

5. Problems are generally easy to solve with sufficient political will. For instance, DOGE—and Trump more broadly—seemed to think you could cut the deficit without eliminating any significant government programs.

Now, imagine a case where there’s a conflict between the ideology and good policy. Can you imagine the Republican party going with good policy? I certainly cannot.

Take tariffs, as an example. Tariffs are bad policy. Roughly 100% of economists agree on this. Economists support tariffs at about the same rate that historians deny the holocaust and geologists think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

But tariffs are quintessential Trumpian ideology. Trumpism sees tariffs as the classic example of weak and feckless leaders making bad deals that get us ripped off by China. Because the Republican party is entirely under the sway of ideology, they oppose tariffs. There is no case of the Republicans abandoning ideology for sense, the way Democrats have with YIMBYism.

The reason for this is that, as Richard Hanania has noted, liberals read and conservatives watch TV. The Democrats are the party of the educated elites. They fashion themselves people who listen to evidence. They grew up watching West Wing and admiring the clear-headed decision making of the characters. Democratic staffers are intellectuals who read and think. Democratic voters aren’t all this way, but they are more educated, on average, than Republicans and they get their news from credible sources. Sometimes good ideas percolate up.

Contrast that with the modern crop of Republicans. The Republican party mostly, these days, watches TV and listens to podcasts. Belief in conspiracy theories is common. The Republican party does not generally believe in the efficacy of the COVID vaccine and thinks the 2020 election was stolen.

Republican staffers are probably a bit better, but a lot of them are like the DOGE staffers—people with internet monikers like BigBallz who post racist memes on the internet. These are people who don’t seriously think through issues, instead preferring to binaristically categorize every position as BASED or not and reject views that aren’t based. No left-wing view is based, of course, and every view that would cause liberals to wrinkle their noses in disdain is automatically based.

Even when they don’t endorse views—holocaust denial, vaccine skepticism, election denial—they can never be too hard on a view that’s based. The primary function of politics, in the mind of the current Republican elite, is to trigger the libs. That is all it is for, and the success of a policy can largely be measured by the extent to which it does that. Aquinas said man’s telos is to glorify God; they believe man’s telos is to trigger the libs.

These are not people who spend very much time carefully reading hostile news sources to see if they’re wrong. Increasingly, the Republican party’s politics are driven entirely by spite.

Now, I don’t want to do the classic political partisan thing of writing a long essay that amounts to little more than saying “see, here is why my party is smart and virtuous and the other party is bad and evil and loves to fraternize with the devil himself.” But I do think this is an area where the Democrats are clearly better. They are, in general, more willing to update their ideological presuppositions.

I have a lot of disagreements with the Democrats. I’m generally more supportive of free markets than other Democrats. But one of the many reasons I feel good about supporting them is that the Republican party has, en masse, totally abandoned reality!