It's nonsensical because it's too limited. Housing is like health care in that the market is sorely lacking in its ability to distribute those resources equitably--pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong. I'm advocating for socialized housing, not tweaking the knobs of the market until it comes out fair. Moreover, nimbyism is a lot like the solutions for environmental problems that stop at consumer boycotts and individual choices to recycle or reduce water usage. Good things, but predicated on individual virtue over systemic changes.

Finally, nimbyism is resentment about gentrification in reverse. I find objections to gentrification pretty convincing--why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood?

TLDR a lot of the description of the problem (IE nimbyism) depend on the market continuing to do what it's doing, and I think the market is the problem to begin with.

> pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong.

I'm all for public housing too (more competently executed than last time, please), but Tokyo is a good example of prices being fairly reasonable relative to the size/prosperity of a metro area, and that's been done with the market.

Besides, you'd need to upzone for public housing complexes anyway. There's no conflict here between the socialized solution and the market one, really. The government can make what public housing it can do, and the market can handle the rest.

> why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood?

Because it turns them into reactionary assholes? Because land is in fixed quantity and quality, so letting people with a monopoly on it command even their neighbors to not let people in is a terrible idea? Because mandatory single-family home zoning is classist bullshit that is designed to keep out the poor and working class? It's economic segregation, pure and simple, and you can't be economically progressive while supporting it.

One of the starkest changes going from the US to live in Munich was that suddenly, I didn't notice neighborhoods being obviously rich or poor or middle-class most of the time. Nearly all of them are sort of middling, and have people with an obvious variety of incomes. Even if I focus on it, it's hard to slot neighborhoods into a particular income bucket. And the most obvious cause of this is that SFH-only zoning does not exist here, not in Munich and not anywhere in Germany. Thus, would-be rich neighborhoods cannot keep out the working class by making sure that nobody can build fourplexes or apartments that might be more affordable.

edit: to be clear, I'm not categorically opposed to community input on neighborhood design. But letting specific neighborhoods and cities decide on zoning density has been an unmitigated disaster. So yeah, let's maybe not do that.

> Housing is like health care in that the market is sorely lacking in its ability to distribute those resources equitably

This is simply untrue, in that it depends on how regulations have set up those markets. There are plenty of markets around the world that distribute both housing and healthcare far more equitably than the US (e.g. Germany).

The problem is that regulatory capture in the US has prevented regulation that would allow equitable distribution. We allow homeowners to prevent equitable distribution of property that doesn't even belong to those homeowners, because the homeowners feel that they have the right to not see an apartment building a few blocks over. For healthcare we set up markets so that really encourage such a disconnect between the payor, care giver, and patient such that nothing can be performed efficiently, and that care givers and paors are incentivized to raise prices as high as possible.

These are market failures, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a market that would work; we just need to choose to regulate the markets into working like the examples we know.