I think ZoomerCretin took the effort of going over the two articles in a more thorough fashion. I simply skimmed through, but am roughly familiar with the type of arguments Dean Preston and the prog side of the city would make.

I will try to go over the main type of accusations and refute them as best I can. I previously created a deck for an internal presentation at my company that you can peruse for a broad overview of how I see the whole thing [0]. You can find charts and some sources there backing what follows.

Note that the movement is actually quite diverse and the exact opinions vary, but I will try to summarize in good faith what we stand for.

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Accusation: A common argument would be that we are "market fundamentalist" and that we believe in "trickle down economics".

This accusation seems to be made so that the audience lumps us with Tea Party conservatives and George W Bush. I find it laughable. Yimby Action members are on average left-of-center. I would probably fall on the right-most side of the spectrum and still would be far from the Tea Parties and GWBs of the world.

In reality, we tend to look at the data and draw conclusions based on economic principles. The truth is that we have been under producing housing for decades now. It's a widespread issue in the West, but it is particularly acute in the Coastal US and other anglophone countries.

We know it is a supply issue because reliably rents are go up as rental vacancies go down and viceversa. Same holds for prices (though I think rents are a better metric, given that housing prices bolt in a layer of speculation). We know that supply is constrained because of ridiculous laws because you can see it in data as the one shown in this article, and because you see alternatives such as Tokyo where building is relatively unhampered, has been growing over the last decades and yet has kept stable housing costs.

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Accusation: That we are astroturfing for developers and only care about developer's giveaway.

This is just an attempt to create a boogeyman and then connecting everything to it. They chose to make developers the boogeyman instead of landlords, unsurprisingly because most of those making the accusations are landlords themselves.

Every building that has ever existed had a developer (in the general sense) behind it, and profited in one way or another. That's why they built, because it made sense for them. We engage in transactions where one party makes a profit in exchange for generating something valuable for the other party. This is good. We don't want to give away money to developers, we want them to be able to perform their productive function in society.

Landlords are not necessarily bad either. Owning is not necessarily for everyone, so there must be a rental stock. Landlords manage that rental stock and there is value in that.

What is actually bad is having a fixed housing stock that continuously appreciates and extracts increasingly higher rents. We think this is our current situation, and the only way out of it is to make it easy to add more to the housing stock.

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Accusation: We are against government all intervention in the housing market.

This accusation again is used to try to scare those that are currently hurt the most by the housing situation from joining our side. But it is far, far from truth.

We think that shelter being a basic necessity should be regulated to an extent. We believe there should be a proper system for how and under what conditions a landlord can evict a tenant.

We aren't against government investment in housing, be it via vouchers or by developing public housing. In fact, most of us would readily admit that even in the ideal world you will need some government effort to keep the poorest among us from falling into homelessness.

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I hope this helps.

[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O1_oW0Ci2SJEIIhXzuzV...