YIMBY and the education reform movement -- part one: questions of class and technocracy

I've been thinking about the similarities between the education reform movement we spent so much time discussing a dozen years ago and the YIMBY movement we've been focusing on for the past few years. I had originally intended on doing a medium length post on the subject, but the more I think about it the more I realize it's going to take more than one trip.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the education reform movement was a bunch of management consultants and rich white and Asian people swooping in to show poor black and Hispanic people how things were done, but that would capture a great deal of what was going on back during the height of the movement. This was nowhere more obvious than with Teach for America, a tiny but wildly overhyped program that took kids from elite colleges, gave them a crash course in teacher prep, then dumped them in the classroom with highly mixed results.

The hagiographic coverage that TFA teachers got at a time when career educators in genuinely tough urban and rural schools were being routinely demonized was more than a little contradictory, but it made perfect sense when you remembered two things. First, around the turn of the millennium, the education reform movement's worldview was the standard narrative, so widely and unquestioningly accepted by the press that editors who would reflexively both-sides even the clearest of issues would give reform advocates a free pass to say anything they wanted unchallenged. Second, the upper echelons of journalism are disproportionately made up of the children of elite families. It's not that surprising that alumni of Ivy League universities will be more impressed by a rich kid who chooses to do a two year stint teaching in Inglewood than they are by poor kids who go to state schools then choose to devote their lives teaching their communities. It's sad, but it's not surprising.

Class and economic status play a different role in the YIMBY movement, but not that different. In both cases, the world is viewed predominantly through a six or seven figure lens. Much of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate comes down to old money versus nouveau riche, the "we were here first crowd" versus the "we've got the money why can't we live by the beach?" crowd.

In terms of coverage and rhetoric, the focus of the housing discourse is completely dominated by a handful of enclaves for the rich. The plurality of American housing stories are about a wealthy, medium-sized (17th largest by population) urban exurb that is unique to the point of being an outlier along so many dimensions that many researchers avoid using it as an example. Here in Southern California you are more likely to find a discussion of the tiny postage stamps of Santa Monica and Venice than about all of East LA. Even the housing crisis of the Central Valley was largely ignored until someone came up with the bright idea of pushing the narrative that the explosion in prices was caused by rich tech bros moving to Bakersfield. (Quick side note. This is and always has been bullshit. Bakersfield is not a town that is going to attract the wealthy and trendy, particularly not in a time of global warming. I'd argue that they don't know what they're missing. Like the late Jonathan Gold, I'm very fond of the town, but even I wouldn't want to spend August there.)

Not only are poor and lower middle class people underrepresented in the YIMBY movement, there is considerable tension between the movement and those housing advocates who primarily come from and speak for people below the median income line. There are sharp divides over issues such as rent control, public housing, vacancy rates, and the trustworthiness of developers. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong on each of these issues (though, for the record, I tend to favor the YIMBY positions within reason). The point is that the movement's perspective is one of successful people, economists, and developers. There's nothing wrong with that perspective, but they don't speak for everyone.