Personally, I believe that the pervasive sense that things have gone wrong is an effect of feeling economically stunted. I think it feels spiritual, but it's got a specific and direct economic cause: When the next generation is doing worse economically than the previous one, people have all kinds of dark psychological and political responses. Responses that are self-defeating and irrational.
What I'm worried about is that we won't have time (or political will) to fix the economic problem before the resulting irrational reaction blows shit up.
I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the polling says that members of every district are substantially more pro-housing than politicians believe they are. That's one of the points that I'm trying to make in this article: people in your district will reward pro-housing work and economic growth more than incubants believe they will.
On the other hand, 80% of the work we do at YIMBY Action is organizing visible constituencies in districts to incentivize politicians taking pro-housing positions. The phrase I always say is "politicians get to the heads of parades; we are building a parade."
And on a third hand, I do think we can build an ever-bigger parade by getting people who think they benefit from the status quo to realize they don't actually. Small businesses benefit from housing. Suburbanites complain that teachers can't afford to live in the school district and they're loosing people. etc etc etc. I think those arguments are permeating and softening a lot of housing-resistant districts.
I'm super curious about why you think YIMBY-ism is passive. I feel like the main criticism we've often gotten is that we're too in-your-face with our advocacy.
Personally, I believe that the pervasive sense that things have gone wrong is an effect of feeling economically stunted. I think it feels spiritual, but it's got a specific and direct economic cause: When the next generation is doing worse economically than the previous one, people have all kinds of dark psychological and political responses. Responses that are self-defeating and irrational.
What I'm worried about is that we won't have time (or political will) to fix the economic problem before the resulting irrational reaction blows shit up.