YIMBYism And The "Forgotten" Places

Could a general spirit of opportunity-seeking bring back economic growth?

The writer A.M. Hickman, a traditionalist Catholic living in post-industrial upstate New York, is interesting. Some of his opinions are a bit much for me, but his writing on this semi-forgotten post-industrial landscape—almost, in his telling at least, post-civilizational—is fascinating to me. There is a certain romanticism in decline.

For example, from one of his social media posts:

Been out in some of the most desolate and depopulated country in NYS these last couple of days.

The post-industrial regions of the Adirondack Park are truly strange. Many towns have lost more than 50% of their population since 1960. In quite a few of these towns, there are no longer any publicly-operating businesses at all.

But it turns out that when iron mines and paper mills shut down, not everybody actually leaves. A certain percentage of the inhabitants and their progeny stay on indefinitely, scraping by in what anyone could reasonably call total obscurity and isolation.

Many are likely commuting an hour (or much longer on snowy roads) to fairly low-wage jobs. Others are marginal self-employed types, and others are content with a combination of welfare, hard liquor, scrap metal, and long days of hunting and fishing. And a handful of lucky ones, of course, work for the DOT or the school. Tourism is virtually non-existent this far north and west.

That idea—that when the economy goes, the people don’t necessarily leave—is a little “fall of Rome,” isn’t it? The Romans were still there after the fall of the empire. They were the same people even as their world fell apart. And after the dark ages, Rome came back, and today we can trace a line of continuity all the way from those days to the present.

This makes me think, as I thought about last year when I’d just finished the book, of the thesis of Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, and the overall thrust of the YIMBY movement. YIMBYism is about housing; Stuck is about the relationship between housing and mobility, and a probing of the downstream effects of the housing crisis artificially reducing mobility and opportunity-seeking.

Here is how, for me, these two seemingly divergent things—the “forgotten” places, and the housing crisis and economic opportunity—are related. I wonder whether the mainstream success of the YIMBY movement—that is, the restoration of the idea that it is completely normal and good to building housing to keep pace with jobs and residential demand—could actually help revive these “forgotten” places.

I think there are two broad versions of YIMBYism, or at least two emphases. One is basically big-city boosterism, and is an effort by and for urbanites in the handful of high-growth, high-wage, particularly housing-crunched cities. These are, almost by definition, the places where the YIMBY movement has the most purchase. One of them, San Francisco, is the city which birthed the movement.

Then secondly, there is also the subtly different emphasis of Stuck’s housing-mobility synthesis. This is a more general idea about seeking opportunity: of housing as the means by which people can access opportunity. “Seeking opportunity” certainly overlaps with moving to one of those 3-5 top cities. But it is not always the same as that, and there must be other places where opportunity can be found.

Now I think some housing folks hear anything like this as If you just didn’t buy espresso and avocado toast you could afford a home or why don’t you just move to [economically downscale, remote community where you have no ties] so you can afford a house? Housing advocates often feel that talking about alternative places to live is just repackaged NIMBYism.

I’m not suggesting that