The Affordability Villains

One of the critiques of the YIMBY movement and Abundance politics more generally that you’ll sometimes hear from our opponents is that, because we are not anti-business, we don’t have a villain, and a good political story needs a villain. This isn’t true though. There are plenty of villains in America’s political economy. Five in particular stand out.

But rather than kvetching for 1000 words about these various unhelpful groups, I thought that, since we are going into a long weekend, it might be both fun and conceptually clarifying to talk about these Affordability Villains as if they were comic book villains. So here they are: MAGA-Maoist, The Green Tape Goblin, Safety Net Shredder, The NIMBY, and The Degrowther. They are why life in America is too expensive.

MAGA-Maoist -a mutant hybrid that combines Mao’s desire to tell his people to sacrifice for his personal political projects with the American New Right’s anti-modernity instincts- harnesses the power of economic nationalism like an X-Men power gone wrong. He wields tariffs and trade wars as his weapons of choice. With the zealotry of a true believer, he demands American families pay a lot more for everything from sneakers to smartphones, claiming their financial suffering is a noble sacrifice for his vision of autarky, just like Chairman Mao demanded peasants smelt steel in their backyards while they starved. His battle cry echoes through Walmart aisles: "You WILL buy American, comrade consumer, even if it breaks your bank account…. because my turn-back-the-clock political project demands sacrifice in the form of your family budget!"

Image: Author’s using Dall-E.

The Green Tape Goblin emerges from the shadows whenever America tries to build something useful, wielding her arsenal of multi-year long environmental impact studies, consultation requirements, and endless appeals processes. With a cackle of bureaucratic glee, she wraps critical infrastructure projects in so many layers of regulatory green tape that they either die a slow, expensive death or emerge years later as budget-busting monsters. Her superpower? Turning a simple solar farm or transmission line into a decade-long legal odyssey that costs ten times the original estimate!

Image: Author’s using Dall-E.

Safety Net Shredder stalks the halls of power with his razor-sharp budget blades, slicing through programs that keep America's most vulnerable families afloat. With cold, mechanical precision, he shreds child care assistance, nutrition programs, and housing support. He claims to be doing it in the name of fiscal responsibility but he doesn’t actually save much money. He forces working families to choose between rent and groceries but then he spends every penny squeezed plus more on tax breaks for the very rich. His motto: "Why give people a hand up when you can give them the finger?" as he transforms the economy into a brutal survival game where only the wealthy have a chance at winning.

Image: Author’s using Reve.

The NIMBY prowls the neighborhood with her split personality, one face weeping crocodile tears about "neighborhood character" and traffic concerns, while the other coldly calculates her property values. Like Batman’s nemesis Two-Face, she flips a coin at every zoning meeting: Heads, she claims to care about the environment while blocking dense new housing in underutilized urban areas; tails, she pretends to support affordable housing, just nowhere near her and definitely not in the form of apartments that might cast a shadow. Her ultimate superpower is transforming reasonable sounding civic concerns into weapons of exclusion, forcing teachers, nurses, and young families to live elsewhere. But hey, at least she doesn’t have to experience anything around her ever changing.

Image: Author’s using Reve.

The Degrowther gazes upon humanity with the same cosmic disdain as Thanos, seeing billions of people not as individuals with hopes and dreams, but as a plague consuming Mother Earth's precious resources. With chilling indifference to human suffering, he snaps his fingers to eliminate economic growth, development projects, and material progress believing that returning humanity to pre-industrial poverty is a small price to pay for planetary "balance." His twisted philosophy states: "I am... inevitable. We humans are parasites. Your smartphones, your cars, your comfortable lives —all of it must be sacrificed so that the Earth may thrive."

Image: Author’s using Reve.

This is all fun and games as a conceptual exercise in comic book form, but these Villains do very real damage. MAGA Maoist makes it harder for American families to afford the good life. Walmart has recently announced that tariffs -MAGA Maoist’s favorite policy- are forcing them to raise prices. That makes it harder for American workers to stretch their paychecks.

Green Tape Goblin has made it extremely difficult to build the kind of high-capacity transmission lines that we need to keep energy costs down. That kills jobs and raises utility bills. The Safety Net Shredders in the Trump administration just fired everyone who works for the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program so that program is basically dead. That is going to make it a lot harder and more expensive for poor people to stay warm this winter.

NIMBYs has driven up housing prices across the country and especially in the Northeast and West Coast. Young families can’t afford to buy a house. People of modest incomes can’t afford the rent. The American Dream feels unattainable for lots of people.The Degrowther whispers in people’s ears that maybe children aren’t worth having given climate change — imposing a cost far more insidious than money.

If you’re looking for the villains in America’s political economy, it’s these five. If we want to build a bright American future full of lots of good things for everyone, these are the villains we have to beat. Here’s the good news: we can. Because we’re America.

-GW