I think Yonah Freemark is being far too harsh on Ryan Avent’s The Gated City, which I very much enjoyed and which advances a Glaeserian densification agenda I’ve long supported:

To fight the problems associated with NIMBYism, Avent proposes a number of ideas: Allowing neighborhoods to “limit development… so long as it’s willing to either buy the land in question or pay the land’s owner to comply;” or providing cities a limited “zoning budget” or “historical preservation budget” that would force political leaders to pick only the most important battles to fight; or requiring developers to throw out offset fees for the “supposed costs of the redevelopment.”
These, however, are solutions that only an economist — whose vision of society is shaped by monetary costs and benefits — would appreciate. Note Avent’s dismissal of the efforts of the people he berates as NIMBYs, arguing that their efforts require low private costs, which he minimizes as “Just the time to circulate petitions and attend council meetings.” The only thing that would make NIMBYs understand their actions, he seems to suggest, would be forcing neighbors “to buy a property in order to limit development.” In these cynical statements, Avent not only implies that community organizers get their way easily (compared to their hard-working real estate foes) but falls back on a solution that allows no role for actual democracy, in which public contestation or conflict plays a role in the decision-making discourse at the political level.
Ironically, this effort in favor of more density is admirable, as is the author’s sense that much of the battles NIMBYs fight are grounded in the fact that “the haves are reluctant to share with the have-nots.” It is hard to fault Avent for developing clever approaches to a difficulty that has probably only gotten worse over the past few decades.
Avent’s argument in favor of the value of increasing densities is solid; he demonstrates that there are significant productivity and income gains that flow from metropolitan areas with people in more concentrated living conditions. And there are significant progressive values that are lost without that density: “When Americans ration access to economically dynamic places with high housing costs, it isn’t the rich that suffer most. It’s the middle- and low-income households who must accept long, costly commutes or move elsewhere.”
But are the people who live in gentrifying neighborhoods simply expected to accept that a market logic suggests that their neighborhood needs to change and that they can prevent a new project only by putting up millions of dollars they do not have to buy the land? Is the market the right decision-maker when it comes to the shape, structure, and economic composition of a city neighborhood? The Gated City asks us to assent.

People who live in gentrifying neighborhoods accept the market logic than they have a broad scope to choose what they can and cannot do with their after-tax dollars. Why do we give them quite so much power to shape the built environment of an entire neighborhood? That is, why do people who can afford to live in a particular neighborhood have total authority while, say, residents of the entire municipality, who might have an interest in increasing city-wide prosperity, do not?

Yonah frames this as democratic versus anti-democratic tendencies. I would frame this as a question of which democratic constituency is allowed to hold sway. Perhaps a particular gentrifying neighborhood should be allowed to secede and to become a true gated community, surrounded by a moat or high defensible barriers of some other kind. But as long as a particular gentrifying neighborhood is part of a larger city, residents of depressed areas and other constituencies will necessarily contribute to shaping its landscape. And even if the neighborhood in question secedes, municipalities are creatures of state governments.

Over the years, we’ve decided that some policy domains are subject to democratic authority at different levels. I often disagree with the decisions we’ve made, e.g., I don’t think that Medicaid should be a joint state-federal program, to name one example. But there is nothing sacrosanct about the notion that the economic prospects of an entire city or region should be left in the hands of homeowners in a single neighborhood — unless, as Avent specifies, the homeowners in question are willing to buy contested swathes of property. Homeowners can and should have considerable leeway in protecting their own property from eminent domain abuse. They should also have fairly wide scope to alter their properties. Zoning laws might be “democratic.” But they also strip property owners of the ability to realize their plans and ambitions, which could involve carving out a small apartment from an existing property in order to make life of a single-parent installation artist economically viable. Can we thus characterize zoning laws as anti-family or anti-freedom?

What Avent is doing is not making a case against democracy as such. Rather, he is asking that we engage broader democratic constituencies in questions that are mistakenly viewed as narrow, local, and marginal. Working-class residents of New York city’s outer boroughs need to understand that historical preservation and anti-upzoning efforts in affluent Manhattan neighborhoods are actually making them poorer than they need to be. And we all need to understand that when affluent homeowners in affluent neighborhoods seek to impose their expensive aesthetic sensibilities on the rest of us, we have a right to ask them to put their money where their mouths are.