“Starving Marvin" for localities
Or: why coastal NIMBYs and their enablers are responsible for poverty and advancing authoritarianism
In 2010, the philosopher Michael Huemer wrote a paper called “Is There a Right to Immigrate?”, in which he laid out a case that closed borders are a prima facie rights violation. In essence, the reason for closing borders lies with the people advocating for closing the borders, not those who advocate for freedom of migration.
The paper is a good read overall, but I’m going to specifically focus, as Bryan Caplan does in Open Borders, on the “Starving Marvin” thought experiment. Imagine that Marvin is starving and is on the verge of death. However, there is a market from which he is able to buy bread, which will prevent him from starving to death. On his way to the market, Marvin is accosted by Sam, who prevents him from getting to market and buying bread. Marvin goes home and starves to death.
Huemer posits here that Sam’s actions are not only wrong, but they are equivalent to an act of murder. Marvin would not have died if it were not for Sam’s actions. If Marvin were poor and Sam prevented him from getting to the market where he could be an order of magnitude richer, then Sam is responsible for keeping Marvin poor.
In the case of immigration, Marvin represents the millions of immigrants from poorer countries who would come to America to willingly accept a job who are barred from doing so due to the United States government’s (Sam’s) actions. Immigration restrictions, in this sense, are responsible for keeping people around the world in poverty and oppression.
This logic applies to intra and inter-state migration, too. If Samantha wants to move from rural Texas to San Francisco in order to escape a heinous abortion law, and she’s forcibly stopped from moving by John, then it’s fair to say that John is responsible for keeping Samantha in a state that denies her basic rights. Similarly, if Jason wants to move from rural Kern County to Los Angeles to grow his income and get out of poverty and is forcibly stopped by Charles, then Charles is responsible for keeping Jason in poverty.
Of course, the logic doesn’t map one to one — we do not have internal migration controls in the United States (however much coastal NIMBYs want to port the hukou system), but there are effective migration controls through high rents and housing scarcity. Suppose, in the first example, Samantha wasn’t forcibly stopped from moving to San Francisco by John, but John and a few of his friends got together and dropped CEQA lawsuits against various apartment buildings that Samantha would have lived in, driving up rents to the point where she is unable to live in San Francisco.
In this case, John and his friends are still responsible for keeping Samantha from fleeing oppression, but he doesn’t share the entirety of the blame. Institutions like the local and state governments that enable NIMBYs like John are also partially to blame, as well as elected officials that pass restrictive laws to stop new housing construction.
The gains from liberalizing housing laws and building a lot more housing are vast — Hsieh and Moretti found that underproduction of housing in just New York and the Bay Area led to 14% lower GDP by 2009 than had those regions been at the median level of land use regulation (and surely these effects have compounded significantly since 2009). This amounts to about $9,000 per worker in 2009.
Since the gains from zoning liberalization are vast, and the de facto migration controls imposed on people through them are unjust, it is fair to say that local officials should be the ones to make the justifications that lead to this trillion dollars of lost economic activity, and, most importantly, their reasoning should be strong enough to justify this trillion-dollar loss of economic activity. “Neighborhood character” and “parking concerns” simply do not cut it, in my view.
In addition to effectively keeping the United States in a stagnant economic state, coastal NIMBYs and their enablers in local government hold responsibility for hindering people from “voting with their feet” to escape tyrannical state governments. In Texas, Florida, Missouri, Idaho, and so on, right-wing Republicans are increasingly writing laws that take aim at marginalized groups like women and transgender people.
The best way for marginalized people facing an onslaught of local and state government tyranny to make their lives better is to move to states and localities that are less tyrannical. Since NIMBYs and local governments consistently hinder people from moving through various land use regulations, they are essentially responsible for keeping women and trans people in tyranny through their actions stopping them from moving to freer cities and states.
As Stan Oklobdzija writes, right-wingers will only continue to ramp up their attacks on marginalized people, and it is incumbent on states like California to accommodate people who may be fleeing oppressive regimes. If they refuse to, as I hope I’ve shown here, they do not have anyone to blame but themselves for right-wing authoritarianism.
However, there is a slight bit of hope: cities and states in liberal, coastal areas don’t need to continue their anti-housing practices that keep people in poverty and under authoritarian Republican regimes. They can do some very simple things: legalize housing and pass laws to stop NIMBYism.