The Veto

This article, read aloud:

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email

Every American city runs on two documents. The first is the comprehensive plan, full of housing and transit and clean energy and opportunity. The second is the zoning hearing, where all of it dies. NIMBYism is the operating system underneath both: the standing arrangement by which everybody gets the city they say they want, in theory, at a hearing scheduled for a weeknight, provided it is built somewhere else. I wrote earlier tonight about John Wilson's concrete movie and the cheap, dangerous Washington I loved; this is the sequel, because the veto is the reason that Washington is gone. The paradox is total and nobody in the room ever has to look at it whole. They want the affordable city and they veto the apartments. They want the jobs and they veto the employer. They want the climate saved and they sue the wind farm. Each want is sincere. Each veto is sincere. The sum of the two sincerities is a country that cannot house its own children, power its own internet, or shelter its own homeless, and experiences all three failures as things that happened to it.

The catalogue of wants and vetoes

Housing first, because housing is where the paradox does its deepest work. The same neighborhoods that plant the welcome signs and demand affordable housing pack the hearings to stop the four-story building, on grounds of character, parking, schools, shadows. They hate gentrification and fight new construction, which hands the newcomers a smaller stock of old apartments to bid against each other, and so produces the displacement they marched against. They defend the park against the apartment tower, and the parking lot against both, and the historic laundromat against everything. San Francisco ran the pure experiment: 469 Stevenson Street, a proposal for 495 homes, 73 of them affordable, on a surface parking lot with 176 spaces. The Board of Supervisors voted 8–3 in October 2021 to throw out the environmental certification and send it back for more study. It was re-approved in 2023. In 2026 the site is still a parking lot. The lot won. Rent control protects the people inside and locks the people outside into a lottery. Every element has a defender. The sum has a name, and the name is a 1.4 percent vacancy rate in the largest city in America.

Then energy. The climate voter sues the offshore wind farm for the view, the solar farm for the farmland, the transmission line for the corridor it crosses, although the electrons have to travel somehow and the alternative to the line is the blackout or the gas plant. Cape Wind spent sixteen years dying off Cape Cod, opposed by the wealthiest waterfront in America wearing environmental language, and it died, and the same coast now demands faster decarbonization at conferences. Then data centers, the newest battleground, and mine: Northern Virginia carries a huge share of the planet's internet traffic through Loudoun County, and the counties want the tax revenue, which is enormous and funds the schools everybody praises, while the hearings fill with people demanding the cloud be hosted in some less scenic jurisdiction. Everybody wants the internet. Nobody wants the servers. Then the social services round: the encampment must be cleared and the shelter must be elsewhere, a policy that has been run at full scale for decades and yields exactly what it is designed to yield, which is encampments.

And do not let the blue neighborhoods off this table, because they built the table. Send the rehab, the halfway house, the supportive housing, the affordable apartments into the reddest county in America and you get an honest fight. Send them into the deep-blue, Dem-as-hell, DSA-as-hell neighborhoods, the ones whose platforms are written in the language of housing as a human right, and you get the same fight wearing better vocabulary. Marble and Nall measured it and titled the paper like a verdict: "Where Self-Interest Trumps Ideology." Liberal homeowners embrace the redistributive program in the abstract and join the conservatives to kill the building on their street. The altruism is genuine at the scale of the platform. It is the address that breaks it. Boys Town, the flop house, the recovery residence, the shelter: objectively altruistic choices, each one, in the exact vocabulary of the people who then organize to keep all of them somewhere else. Except and unless it is not in their backyard is not the exception to their politics. At the hearing, it is the whole of their politics.

The psychology, which is worse than hypocrisy

Hypocrisy would be an improvement. A hypocrite knows. The research on this is almost tender toward the people in the hearing room, and it convicts the rest of us instead. Start with the arithmetic of attention: the costs of any project arrive at one address, in person, with construction noise; the benefits scatter across a million strangers and arrive late. Loss aversion does the rest. Losing a view, a parking spot, a quiet street registers at roughly twice the voltage of an equivalent gain, and the gain on offer, a slightly less insane regional rent, is too diffuse to feel at all. Add William Fischel's homevoter: the house is the largest asset most families own, it cannot be diversified, and it cannot be insured, so its owner quite rationally treats every zoning decision as a shareholder vote on the only stock in the portfolio. Add the finding, out of UCLA, that telling people the developer will profit raises opposition by twenty percentage points, double the effect of the traffic warning, independent of the project's merits, which is the laboratory form of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Monkkonen and Manville, the two researchers, wrote the conclusion themselves: some opposition is motivated "not by residents' fears of their own losses, but resentment of others' gains." The nose was never the point. The face is the developer's, and it must not be allowed to smile.

And the renters are not innocent, which is the finding that ruins the easy version of this story. Hankinson at Harvard found renters in expensive cities opposing the building on their block at rates close to the homeowners', while supporting more housing in the abstract, citywide, everywhere it would not touch them. Everybody is a YIMBY at the scale of the map and a NIMBY at the scale of the street. The views are both real. They are simply never required to meet.

The process is the cheat code

They never meet because the process is built to prevent the meeting. Einstein, Glick, and Palmer read the minutes of the republic: the people who show up to housing meetings are older, whiter, wealthier, likelier to own, and overwhelmingly there to say no. The people who would live in the building cannot attend. They do not live there yet. Some of them are children. Some of them are working the shift the meeting is scheduled against. The nurse who will take a job across town in three years and discover she cannot afford to live within an hour of it has no seat, no microphone, and no address the notice can be mailed to. The future is the only constituency with no lobby, and so the future loses every hearing, unanimously, on the record, with public comment.

The objections, meanwhile, are renewable resources. Fix the traffic and the objection becomes shadows. Fix the shadows and it becomes the school seats. Fix the schools and it becomes a beetle, a view corridor, a historic district application filed the week the project was announced. I do not claim every objection is fake. I claim the sequence is diagnostic: when no concession ever changes the answer, the answer was never about the concession. It was about the veto, and the veto is about keeping the world at the exact resolution it had on the day the objector arrived.

The worked example: Queens, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not invent any of this, but she gave it its cleanest modern performance, and the performance deserves study. In November 2018, Amazon chose Long Island City, Queens for a headquarters campus: 25,000 jobs, two and a half billion dollars of investment, and roughly three billion in public incentives that Cuomo and de Blasio had offered in secret. The objections were real. The subsidies were corporate welfare, the process was a back room, and Amazon's labor record was what it was. A person could oppose that deal in good faith, and plenty did.

Then watch what the argument became. The goal at the start was the material position of ordinary people in Queens. The goal at the end, the one that got celebrated when Amazon withdrew on February 14, 2019, was that Jeff Bezos had been denied something. Those are different goals, and only one of them puts a paycheck in anybody's pocket. And then came the sentence that should be carved over the door of every economics department in America: if we were willing to give away three billion dollars for this deal, we could invest three billion dollars in our district ourselves. No. The three billion was mostly tax abatements on activity that now would never occur, revenue from a campus that would never exist. Canceling the deal did not free up a fund. It freed up a talking point. There was no three billion. There never had been. There was a choice between a flawed deal and no deal, and no deal won, and the victory lap was run on a track built over the difference.

The sequel is the part both sides quote, so quote all of it. Amazon came to New York anyway, quietly, leasing Manhattan office space and hiring thousands, unsubsidized, which the opponents call vindication. Fine. Thousands are not 25,000, Manhattan is not Queens, and the people of Long Island City got the worst cell in the table: no campus, no incentives fight to win, no jobs program, and the centerpiece site, a Department of Education warehouse on Vernon Boulevard, sat idle for six years before the city got around to asking what else might go there in 2025. The billionaire was denied his subsidy and kept his company. The neighborhood was denied the employer and kept the rent. Everybody at the hearing got what they said they wanted. That is what winning looks like under the veto.

And the postscript has my address on it. The campus did not die. Half of it moved. Amazon's other 25,000 jobs went to Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, promptly rebranded National Landing, because even a neighborhood gets a sexier name when the payroll is coming. I live up Columbia Pike from it. The towers are built, the workers are there, the lunch trade is brisk, and the tax base Queens held a hearing about pays for Arlington things now. That is the whole geography of the veto in one commute: the jobs move to wherever the room says yes, and the room that said no keeps its principles and its parking lot.

The sum

I live in Arlington, in the shadow of the largest data-center market on Earth, in a county that wants world-class schools, low taxes, a full tax base, and nothing built. I am surrounded by the paradox the way you are surrounded by weather. So here is the whole of it, once, in one place, where it has to look at itself. A civilization is a list of things nobody wants next door: power plants, substations, transmission lines, landfills, sewage works, warehouses, shelters, apartments, servers. Every item on the list is load-bearing. The veto does not abolish the need; it exports the need to whoever has the least power to refuse it, and bills the rest of us in rent, in blackouts, in commutes, in children living three states away. The cheap city I loved survived because nobody with a veto wanted it. The expensive city replaced it the moment they did. NIMBYism is the machine that performs that replacement and then holds a hearing about affordability. The hearing is sincere. The machine does not care. It only counts the room, and the room is always, only, the people who already live there.

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email