I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
Perhaps my view is too California-brained, but homeowners here like high prices because it gives more flexibility to downsell, they can get large home equity loans, and Prop 13 ensures they won't be paying full property tax (at least if they've been living there for a while). Even for those planning on living there until they die, their children would still like to inherit a valuable place.
At any rate, I didn't intend to limit the reasons to just price. The solution is to build more housing, but building housing is unpopular, and it isn't hard to see why. So we end up with bad policy like rent control instead.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.
The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.
> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.
Community is still community in a condo.
>>"pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away"
Imperceptibly different from the argument JD Vance makes against immigrants. Maybe rethink that tack.
Go to Manhattan and tell me that housing isn't built because of NIMBYism. It's: RTO (very important!), cost of land (land isn't increasing in volume), end of tax subsidies (programs that gave developers tax breaks), zoning (hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing - is that what you consider the correct line?), jobs (the economics of people moving to a place) and many many many more factors.
About once a week someone with a singular conception of the world of housing comes and you need to open their minds up a bit.
You want to lower housing costs? Maybe increase public transportation, give workers rights to work from home, and invest in expanding the suburbs by making them more dense. But don't do that until AFTER you've established the infrastructure piece. Not everyone wants to live in LA or Austin and spend hours in cars.
If you don't do these things then people all want to live in the same place, which is far more impactful than this "NIMBYism" thing, not everything is your local HOA or little town's regulations.
“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
About half of US adults own their home. It goes up to ~2/3 if you include adult children, grandparents, etc. that live in the house but don't own it.
I wasn't trying to dance around this fact; my point is that a large fraction of the voting public has their interests aligned with keeping home prices high (presuming that these non-owning residents share interests with the people that do own the home).