"Luxury" construction causes high rents like umbrellas cause rain

The NIMBY mindset persists in the face of evidence.

Imagine if you went outside and saw that it had started to rain, and that people on the street were opening their umbrellas. And imagine that you ran around waving your arms and saying “Stop! Stop! Umbrellas make rain worse!!” People would think you were a silly person, and rightly so. But why don’t people think that umbrellas make rain worse? After all, everyone knows that rain typically starts to intensify shortly after people start opening their umbrellas. But we have a good causal theory of why rain happens, and we know that umbrellas have nothing to do with it; we know that the…

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