People Who Support Affordable Housing Should Support Housing for Rich Assholes
Not that all rich people are assholes, but really: either way
I’ve long been amused by what I call “in-between fallback arguments”. These are the arguments that people make when they can’t or won’t defend their actual position. A classic in-between fallback argument was “It’s okay if you’re gay as long as you don’t flaunt it,” as if a reasonable compromise was for gay people to buy a garden shed and bury it underground so they’d have some place to go to when they felt the need to gay it up. “Schools should teach evolution and creationism” was another in-between fallback argument; this put a personal religious belief on par with a fundamental scientific concept. And I, personally, would have been fine with that if the religious belief being taught was my belief that life was created by the really big beaver who lives in the lake near my house.
A popular in-between fall back argument these days is “I oppose this high-end housing development because what we need is affordable housing.” This argument is ubiquitous in left-NIMBY1 world; any Twitter thread about housing or public meeting about a high-end development project will include it in some form. It sounds reasonable, because it ostensibly champions the interests of poor people at the expense of the rich. And who wants to side with yuppies and real estate developers, i.e. the villains in every ‘80s slobs vs. snobs comedy? Unfortunately, I think people who make this argument misunderstand the situation; in most cases, building high-end housing is compatible with — and will probably directly contribute to — the cause of providing more affordable housing.