YIMBYs Versus NIMBYs: The Jewish Proxy War On White Communities
There is no greater litmus test for human liberty than the right to decide what kind of community you and your family live in. Since the advent of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the Northeast, California, and Midwest, and later the passing of the Civil Rights and Fair Housing acts, white Americans of all political persuasions and economic statuses have fled urban enclaves for suburbs and, in more recent years, even further out to sprawling semi-rural exurbs in hopes of escaping the rampant violence and general state of decay and alienation brought by new neighbors.
The primary strategy used to limit diversity in neighborhoods and towns has been for town councils to pass local zoning regulations preventing dwellings more accessible to minorities from being built. Today, a very well-funded coalition of real estate capitalists, Silicon Valley billionaires, conservatives, libertarians and anti-white leftists who call themselves “YIMBYs” (Yes In My Backyard) are pushing federal and state officials to begin undoing single-family zoning rules in white communities in the name of the free market and racial equity.
They have achieved a degree of success in several states and localities, though they continue to encounter fierce grassroots resistance. The Biden administration, Democrats, and some Republicans (including Todd Young of Indiana, who represents some of America’s safest suburbs located around one of its most dangerous cities) have sought to tip the scales nationally through federal activism aimed at overruling the democratic will of local communities and put the power to decide their quality of life in the hands of wealthy developers and speculators through offering billions in incentives in exchange for loosening their zoning regulations. Every effort YIMBYs have put forward has hit a solid brick wall, as the places targeted by these policies continue to reject these “opportunities.”
For decades, white people — whether Democrat or Republican — have defeated these impositions from activists, billionaires and politicians in order to live and go to school away from an increasingly racially incoherent and dysfunctional America. NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) on the right argue that constructing low-income housing in their communities will increase the crime rate, raise their tax burden, overwhelm public services, and cause their property values to plummet. Left-wing NIMBYs likely share these concerns, but have made more dishonest arguments more palatable to blue state courts and governments, such as that new housing will lead to gentrification disparately impacting minorities or that development will harm the environment. These left-NIMBYs have nevertheless successfully organized to block minority-friendly YIMBY reforms in places as liberal as San Francisco and Minneapolis as effectively as conservative homeowners. Activist judges and legislators also have to live somewhere, after all.
Elite commentators eager for more housing development argue that by increasing supply, the booming demand for real estate can be met and America’s soaring housing costs can be reduced. Businessmen want more housing in order to reduce the local price of labor (especially through the mass importation of illegal aliens, as seen in states pioneering anti-zoning laws like Utah), while their leftist allies argue that YIMBYism will undo the historical effects of “redlining” by granting minorities access to the greater economic and educational benefits whites have historically created in suburbs.
The first problem with this argument is that redlining, to the extent it ever was a major factor, no longer exists and has not for several decades. Today, blacks continue to pour out of big cities and into the suburbs, which according to the most recent census, are now home to 50% of all black Americans. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, East Asians, and Indians of all types have also seen their suburban population grow at an accelerated pace. If suburbia is the “American Dream,” then they are partaking in it.
But America’s social planners are not happy. According to data examining this rapid suburbanization of minorities since the 1980s, all of the social problems that plague non-white urban enclaves have only followed them to the inner-ring suburbs they were supposedly once excluded from, proving the fears of NIMBYs warranted. Even in an era of heightened crime rates and depolicing, big cities have become safer since the 1990s, but that is thanks in large part to the violence, gangs and poorly performing schools following blacks and Mexicans to previously white and successful nearby suburbs that are now horrible ghettoes. In many instances, the issues minorities have in urban areas such as a lack of functional services and existing in a general state of anarchy have been worsened by suburbanization, as the tax base of these smaller communities collapses and municipalities are unable to cope with the rising criminal and social problems. Rather than making housing more affordable in minority urban areas through government planning and subsidies, real estate speculators want to accelerate the deliberate process of pushing non-whites into middle class suburbs to build new luxury condominiums for wealthy urban transplants.
For those on the receiving end of this internal migration, the news is grim. One 2022 study found that the value of a home begins deteriorating as soon as a single non-white household appears nearby. Increased diversity, including of peaceful and quiet Asians, continues to trigger white exoduses across the country, leading to whites from every walk of life leaving “mature” (communities built before the 1960s closer to urban areas) suburbs with fewer zoning restrictions for new and more rural developing ones that retain desired population mixture through legal loopholes such as obscure environmental regulations and ever more complicated residential restrictions, such as putting limits on the height of a dwelling, that make these new neighborhoods more akin to gated communities. On the education front, it has been found that whites in diversifying suburbs simply stop sending their kids to public schools, adding the financial burden of home schooling or private school to the mix.
As minorities leave cities, the children of white people living in increasingly remote areas have been simultaneously repopulating abandoned urban centers in pursuit of social and employment opportunities, a process pejoratively referred to as gentrification.
Studies of upzoning inside Chicago, Jersey City, and New York City have uncovered that unleashing real estate development according to supply and demand principles has actually driven housing prices up, largely due to the fact that landlords are often absentee speculators who would rather their high rises remain vacant than reduce their investment’s value by lowering rent prices. Political pressure on these entities, many which are foreign investors, to house more poor minorities never gains traction. Young whites from exurbs — some who hypocritically engage in performative “woke” politics — are going around the minority heavy suburbs in the middle to turn inner cities into segregated white majority enclaves, while working class and middle class hoping to preserve their white suburbs and towns struggle to keep the influx of minority refugees out or leave.
While some whites playing this cat-and-mouse game are wealthy, many are working people often enduring absurdly long commutes and laboring at two or more jobs in order to afford a decent place for their family to live. The top concern for any parent looking to move is good schools, but “good schools” can only be produced by “good kids” — a euphemism for white (or sometimes Asian) kids, as shown by school research websites that have no qualms listing racial demographics.
The dwindling number of officials (liberal or conservative) willing to defend the rights of communities to maintain single-family zoning have argued that locals are rejecting poor people, rather than diversity, in hopes of creating the unfair impression that low-income white people are the problem NIMBYs are trying to avoid. Studies have consistently replicated data showing that wealthy blacks have higher rates of violent crime than poor whites, while other peer-reviewed studies have shown that white students coming from homes making under $10,000 a year score higher on standardized tests than blacks who come from households earning $100,000 a year. The drastic expansion of single-family zoning after the Supreme Court found overt racial exclusion was illegal in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) suggests that the intent isn’t to exclude little old ladies counting their pennies or low-income whites. Sociologists have shown that white homeowners are inclined to leave areas even when new minority entrants are in the same income bracket as locals.
The American housing experience is fairly unique in the developed world and reveals an inherent flaw in heavily multi-racial experiments. In racially homogenous nations like Austria (95%+ European) and Singapore (overwhelmingly East Asian), the state builds heavily socialized housing for low-income tenants, and the policy is popular and uncontroversial. Libertarians and leftists are correct when they excoriate NIMBYs as thinly veiled white nationalists when they present novel strategies such as labeling their community a mountain lion preserve or deploying conservative small government arguments for collectivist efforts to prevent a landowner from doing what they want with their property to keep racial diversity out.
The Elites Versus The People
NIMBYism is not partisan, it is group self-interest and strong racial instincts, conscious and subconscious, are at play. Surveys show that the overwhelming majority of Americans fall lean left on the economics of housing and want to lower the price of real estate, but on the other hand, similarly high numbers believe increasing the housing supply in their area will not reduce prices or make their neighborhoods better. Various YIMBY lobbyists, such as the Zuckerberg Chan Initiative, have at times even been forced to concede that the NIMBYs are correct on this matter, yet they continue to push for anti-zoning laws in spite of it.
YIMBYism, thanks to billionaires backing it with limitless resources, is a visible and dominant yet minoritarian opinion (including in California, where white liberals are organizing a 2024 ballot initiative to preserve single-family zoning) that has a more ideologically rigorous bent, including from extremists on the left and right. Leading intellectual pioneers include free market fundamentalist lawyer Bernard Siegan, Harvard libertarian economist Edward Glaeser, Substack neo-liberal opinion writer Noah Smith, former Vox editor Matthew Yglesias, New Century Foundation leftist Richard Kahlenberg, and anti-segregation activist Leah Rothstein.
These influential YIMBYists are all Jewish. In a cursory examination of 10 recently published journal entries neurotically documenting a so-called “white diversity exposure” index or characterizing white communities with single-family zoning as the root of minority problems have in all but two cases at least one discernibly Jewish author.
YIMBYism versus NIMBYism, in other words, is a proxy conflict between whites and Jews.
The Jewish advantage is overwhelming. YIMBYs are able to flood the press and opinion columns with their narratives while suppressing NIMBY counter-arguments due to the Jewish control of the media. Figures such as Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, GitHub’s Nat Friedman, and various slumlords are pouring millions of dollars into Gentile-fronted YIMBY activist groups, along with YIMBY crusading Jewish politicians such as Scott Wiener and Senator Brian Schatz.
Battles between Jewish YIMBYs and white NIMBYs have been playing out across the country. We can see a microcosm of this dynamic playing out in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Jewish real estate developer Arnold Karp’s multi-year campaign to build multiple unit housing on a property he owns is being rejected for a third time by locals.
Besides the profit motive in the heavily Jewish and highly lucrative real estate world, a deep Jewish distrust of white defiance in any form shades the YIMBY side of the debate. In Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, a 2019 book written by Jewish YIMBYist Boston University academic Katherine Levine Einstein, she singles out the ability of middle-class white homeowners to use their rights in the democratic process and prevent unwanted development in their community as the main factor behind rising housing prices.
Despite having no political allies, well-funded NGOs, or intellectual advocates, white NIMBYs across America use bloc voting and direct activism to out-organize big business and state legislatures. The rising Jewish chorus of YIMBYs demanding the federal government to step in and crush the NIMBYs is an expression of frustration over an agenda that is so unpopular it fails almost everywhere. For Jews, meeting meaningful resistance at the hands of people who, when they fall into the trap of petty partisan politics, are otherwise completely ineffective, is an enraging experience.
Political leaders, including Democrats, may want to obey their donors and take a more aggressive stance, but the prospect of whites of either party mobilizing to vote for an opponent looms large, especially as white suburbanites become more important in the Democratic coalition. When local fights between YIMBYs and NIMBYs break out in “progressive” blue areas, all but the most fanatical ideologues end up siding with homeowners. When Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign was struggling, the cynical but intuitive Trump began openly campaigning on defending single-family zoning and accused the Biden administration of planning to destroy the suburbs through school bussing style integration. Amidst the turmoil of COVID and the George Floyd riots, as well as Trump’s own disastrous presidency and campaign, the Twitter appeal went widely unnoticed by the public. In the prestige press, however, it triggered a rash of Jewish anger over the president play to “white identity politics.”
The strong record of NIMBY success should not be taken for granted. The YIMBYs are ascendent, and actively carving up and passing legislation in accordance with their agenda. It is only a matter of time before the federal government caves to their demands for a more aggressive integrationist posture. As out of control crime and third worldization continues to push whites out of inner-suburbs to even more isolated places, the system is encountering diminishing resistance as it pushes forward.
The National Justice Party, which has held multiple protests against unwanted housing developments bringing crime and illegal immigrants to white communities remains the only political organization capable of uniting and articulating this sentiment nationwide.
