Since I just came upon an online discussion where somebody called me a left NIMBY, just for clarification: if your housing policy strategies don't contain up-front protections for poor people, then no, you don't get my support.

Market-rate housing already has an army of people and interests advocating for it. My school has a whole program of brilliant professors on real estate development with billionaire/millionaire beneficiaries of our development systems. They advocate for more development.

The world doesn't need me to do that. Maybe that's what you feel called to do, that's your gig, but it doesn't need me. Do growing cities need housing? Yes, they do. It goes without saying. Where and how that housing goes in is the question, it's always BEEN the question.

And I find kicking the can down the road on that question with simple supply advocacy less interesting than the policy details of how do we take care of existing residents and future residents *at the same time*

without, again, kicking the can down the road on those questions and going with clearly shakey, if not downright discredited, ideas that benefits trickle to people on a timeline that is of any use to them. Poor people can't wait.

If that makes me a left-NIMBY, fine. What I think and what I believe and whether people like me doesn't matter in the world. What matters is that we try to do the best we can to craft humane policies and markets.

Housing shortages are vicious, but so are redevelopments, and any planning professor that acts like these two things can't be true at the same time is, in my opinion, incompetent. I refuse to define away the painful parts of the world I work in for analytic convenience.

So the basic rule for me: is the proposal likely to low consequence for poor people? (Like parking reform or basic missing middle upzones?) Yes? Fine. IF it is has risks for poor people, does it have up-front, first-benefit, first-protections for poor people? Then I'm in, again

If it doesn't, I'm generally out. Because giving away key moments of leverage in the development process without securing social policy protections and protections is, in my opinion, malpractice. Again, if that makes me the dreaded NIMBY, then fine.

If you can't live with these general principles then I really don't mind if you don't follow me. I won't wind up playing in traffic.