A fundamental problem with YIMBYism in NYC is that the city is not designed to be ‘affordable.’
It’s less a real estate supply and demand question and more that of an extremely expensive public sector.
It’s not in the city’s interest fiscally to attract more middle class NGO types who are essentially doing ‘back office intellectual work’ because those people are a net negative fiscally and they don’t pay much in taxes nor do they do work that meaningfully benefits the city (eg running small businesses, providing services, offering useful technical knowledge, etc. - NYC is a very complex 19th/ 20th century ‘machine’ that takes a lot of work to keep running).
The most important people in NYC by far are the ultra rich, then maybe some very highly paid professionals, then the petit bourgeoisie and private sector working class, then maybe the public sector working class. The wordcel/ NGO types are a net NEGATIVE and the real project of DSA politics is to change the terms of political economy to make circumstances more favorable to them as a class. Specifically what this involves is a more bespoke welfare state: they don’t want to live in housing projects or work administrative jobs in the DOE. They want $200k a year NGO jobs doing Good Things and for the city to seize housing from landlords in hipster neighborhoods so they can live there.
We get distracted by some of the bizarre ideological concoctions (eg ‘Islamo communism’) but what they’re trying to engineer is actually an interesting political project - it’s an update to the old ethnic patronage schemes but instead of being a member of an ethnic bloc the way you ‘get in’ here is based on degree type, employment sector, and Omnicause affirmation. This ‘class identity’ sounds very tenuous, incoherent, and contrived but they are making a run of it (while making a lot of enemies - we’ll see how it goes).
With their resounding victory over Australia 🇬🇧 in today’s soccer game, America is now:
1. The preeminent soccer power on earth
2. The oldest and greatest country on earth
3. The country that single handedly won both world wars
4. Undefeated in wars
The Europoors are furious