Here in SoCal I see a massive generational divide. People over 40 tend to be NIMBY and against things like public transit. People under 40 are completely the opposite, especially about LA's expansion of subways and light rail.
I can't speak for LA, but I know many apartment-dwelling renters who are also NIMBYs. It's a general fear of change us humans have, coupled with in many cases for property owners a direct financial reward for resisting change.
I think it's partially a California thing. Coming from New York I was profoundly baffled to see people trying to stop trains from coming to their neighborhood.
Moved to LA from Chicago. I will never for the life of me understand anyone who can be against trains. The train system in Chicago was great, I lived without a car for four years, and never had a problem. Now I'm stuck in traffic to get anywhere, and it's miserable.
It is basically a chicken and egg problem. We all own cars because we don't have viable trains like Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc. No one supports trains because we all already have cars and don't want our taxes going to trains we won't use.
In the US, many people associate trains with 24/7 whistles. Remove that noise pollution, and living within 30km of the tracks becomes much more tolerable.
Oh most people in California are very pro-train, they just don't want them close to their homes. We like the convenience, environmental friendliness and you might even say Europeanness of trains, but no one wants to put up with the noise and lower property values that go along with having them run through your back yard.
Tell the truth...when you were in Chicago, did you want to live next to the "L"?
with the caveat that the SF-LA HSR project seems to be a boondoggle that will cost the state billions more than it probably should.
Yes. I only wanted to live next to the L train. If I were apartment hunting, and it wasn't a quick walk to an L stop, that apartment went straight to the bottom of the list.
And when I sought roommates, my place being steps to a blue line stop meant I got literally 70 emails within the first few hours of posting the ad.
I think a lot of people in California have literally never seen the inside of a train. As a result, they can't imagine ever incorporating in to their lifestyle, and it represents, more than anything else, a change in life that might, someday, threaten their ability to drive everywhere. Of course, they have a hard time seeing how their driving everywhere affects everyone else, because it's all they've ever known. (E.G. killing loads of walkers and cyclists, emitting horrible pollution linked to myriad diseases, forcing songbirds to change frequency, demanding that land be used to let their car sleep instead of letting people sleep, and generally destroying street atmosphere and liveliness).
Growing up in the central valley I took Bart ONE TIME as a kid, and it's still a highlight of my entire damn childhood. I suppose I may like trains more than most, but after that my goal in life was mostly to escape suburbia.
Oh God no. Try to build something, anything in Manhattan. Ever heard of air rights? Those don't exist anywhere else but developers will pay millions just to add a single floor to their building.
That's a real thing. But I don't hear the anything like the passionate, reflexive, absolutist, paranoid anti-development attitudes and the corollary mental gymnastics from common people. It's that attitude I find baffling.
I've said this before but... I really do not get California's obsession with cars. Of all the places you'd want to be walkable, one that is nice outside almost all the time and gets no real winter to speak of seems like an ideal spot. But no... all the walkable cities are in areas that get run over by a glacier for six months out of the year.
Rent control is partially to blame for this, in that it creates a huge de facto landlord class out of a group of people who would otherwise have a strong incentive to keep housing prices affordable. They can even reap financial windfalls from rising housing prices by negotiating buyouts.
(I say this as someone who personally benefits from rent control. It shouldn't exist.)
If you own a sfh, you want development around you... The denser your lands zoning is, the more it's worth. Add infrastructure and the value goes up too.
It's more complicated than that. Yes by increasing density, you are increasing supply of housing units, but you are also increasing the demand for your property - as now it's not only a single family that would be looking to buy it but but someone building a highrise. Also, counterintuitively, because your allowing houses to be torn down for apartment buildings etc, the supply of SFH actually goes down, and there will always be demand from some for SFH over condos etc. And since most cities can't keep up with the number of people who want to live in them, by allowing more young people to move to the city in apartments, your also increasing future demand as they grow up.
You want offices near you but no more housing, so that people work near you and are forced to live closer to you, and have to buy houses near you for ever-increasing prices.
And people who own homes (older than most of the population) are used to driving everywhere, they don't want people constantly walking in front of their houses. They all want their own cul-de-sacs.
It's more complicated than that. Yes by increasing density, you are increasing supply of housing units, but you are also increasing the demand for your property - as now it's not only a single family that would be looking to buy it but but someone building a highrise. Also, counterintuitively, because your allowing houses to be torn down for apartment buildings etc, the supply of SFH actually goes down, and there will always be demand from some for SFH over condos etc. And since most cities can't keep up with the number of people who want to live in them, by allowing more young people to move to the city in apartments, your also increasing future demand as they grow up.
> Yes by increasing density, you are increasing supply of housing units, but you are also increasing the demand for your property
So both remain in balance, prices don't increase and you get little or no financial benefits. Also, a house surrounded by high rises in a very busy street has far less relative value than a house in a quiet street where your kids can play around. Cities bring strangers, crime, pollution, noise, etc.
But if you increase job density without increasing housing density, then you reap massive financial benefits from increasing housing prices.
Without bringing job density into the equation, the demand is much much higher from the land value increase when zones move up. Is not at all unheard of for a SFH that was worth max 500K on the SFH market to be bought for over a million by developers when an area has gotten upzoned. Now, going back to jobs, in practicality, allowing upzones, also tends to bring way more jobs - more coffee shops / corporate towers etc.
"Is not at all unheard of for a SFH that was worth max 500K on the SFH market to be bought for over a million by developers when an area has gotten upzoned."
Yes, but that's only for holdouts, which is a game of chicken. And after the developers build around you, you're done, your home value plunges as you're surrounded by traffic and apartments.
"Now, going back to jobs, in practicality, allowing upzones, also tends to bring way more jobs - more coffee shops / corporate towers etc."
The two are unrelated. Cities have a lot of exclusive-use commercial or residential areas. You can increase the same jobs without having more residents, which increases value for the home-owners.
So you think, having more retail space, more office buildings, more construction, etc is unrelated to jobs. Yep makes sense... What do you really think is more valuable a block of houses in San Francisco among many other blocks of houses, or if there was still any, a block of houses where a highrise could be built in Manhattan? Note also what's happening in the US is cities are disproportionately getting more expensive, people want to live near density. Jobs that used to be out in corporate parks, are moving, because non of the younger generation wants that life style. This is also why one of the cities that's increasing density and rezoning the fastest, Seattle, keeps having the highest increase in value for single family homes.
Can you point out concrete examples of home values plunging? Because every time I've heard it mentioned, starting in South Carolina when some black families moved into my white neighborhood, it hasn't happened.
No that's not how it works. Most SFH owners are more concerned with quality of life issues (traffic, crime, noise, school access) than with property values.
Ya emphasis on that. California is one of the lowest footprint places you can live. Everyone we squeeze out is potentially another person blasting AC at 11 cents a kWh in Arizona.
Very true. Also, the divide is between long term residents and recent transplants. I have fights with people on Nextdoor everyday who rally neighbors to fight any development in our suburban city
I live in SF (Mission Bay) and just went to the "Mission Bay Citizens Advisory Council" meeting last night for the first time. It was _absurd_ the amount of NIMBYism being spewed from folks over 50 (who accounted for more than half of the occupants in the room, mind you...) whereas the folks nearer to my age were open to the ideas being proposed and discussed.
I knew it was bad, but I was bit taken aback.
However, I did get a little discouraged that there was a lack of people my age trying to get involved, though. People can complain all they want... but until they do, it won't change.
At least your neighborhood meeting was at night. In Noe Valley, half the neighborhood council meetings were on Tuesdays at 10:30am or some such when only the specific demographic that was favorable to their policies were most likely to be free.
I went to the meetings of the South Park (San Diego) planning board and it was similar. I could afford to do so because I was wfh at the time and set my own schedule. Taking two hours out of your day is something that's a lot easier for older folks, in general.
Many owners of SFH in LA are NIMBYs because they know that higher density means lower quality of life.
It doesn't necessarily have to mean lower quality of life. But, in LA, that's what has happened most of the time.
New three or four story apartment buildings next door to a SFH means less sunlight and the elimination of privacy throughout the yard.
More people means more traffic jams, more wear and tear on roads, more crime, more unfamiliar strangers driving too fast on their once-quiet streets, more pollution, and higher demand on a very limited police force, parks, recreational facilities, schools/colleges, airports, open spaces, etc.
The LA city government manages infrastructure and resources in a sub-par way. New resources of all types are simply not forthcoming fast enough to meet with increased demand. The city government fails to keep up with existing needs for repair of: water, sidewalk, street infrastructure under current levels of demand.
And it's not only quantity: often the quality of new infrastructure (e.g. Red Line train seats) is allowed to detoriorate to a state where it's rather dirty and unpleasant.
Yep. A lot of people in the thread are talking about home values, housing scarcity, etc. All homeowners care about is quality of life--that's NIMBYism. Construction, even if it adds value, is a nuisance and can cause other problems. Trains can increase foot traffic and increase the accessibility for vagrants. That's the exact argument I've heard against connecting Hollywood to the beach from the people in Beverly Hills.
I feel like LA city government has been doing better about sidewalk and street repair the past few years. It could be coincidence and certainly isn't exhaustive.
Ehh? I'd say density is correlated with a higher quality of life. More restaurants, bars, culture (museums, art openings, music), more opportunities to expand your network of friends, etc.
but, for others, the drawbacks of high density, often outweigh the advantages. these are the people who go to local neighborhood council meetings and scream.
also note that, in Los Angeles, the city council and the mayor can, and very often do, approve changes to zoning in accordance with the wishes of real estate developers (who usually donate to their political campaigns).
it's not like LA's NIMBY homeowners are a tyrannical group with infinite power. they're very often overridden by the politicians.
much of the drive behind LA's NIMBY movement is the absence of true city plans for homeowners to rely upon. the name of the game is spot zoning variances: a developer proposes a project which requires a zoning change and then pays off the local politicians with campaign contributions.
homeowners, caught by surprise, react vociferously ... and then lose.
Those things are nice, but I'd like to know whether you have ever lived directly next to them (as opposed to just close enough to get to them when you want).
I grew up in a scenic neighborhood in Berlin, with lots of bars and restaurants and dance clubs in former factory yards, and it was pretty annoying at times. Drunken people get loud, and you don't want them to have a midnight singing contest right outside your bedroom window. Occasionally someone would drive around the block blasting music at full volume. And so on.
I think most people would much prefer to live in a quiet neighborhood, with all the action happening within walking distance just outside of it.
Baby boomers are a very self centered and selfish generation. They'll leave debt that will take generations to pay down, increased the age millennials can retire , and bankrupted most of the pension plans. Because of poor financial planning(45% have no retirement savings, 33% have pushed off retirement), they aren't retiring leading to less jobs of millennials. Its very like them to have a NIMBY attitude.
I just read on yahoo finance that social security could be drastically cut by 2028-2034 if nothing changes. Like at what point do we simply refuse to pay into the system if were are going to be shafted?
It's going to get defunded, either now or when it runs out of money. So you can either raise the retirement age now, cut benefits now, or get totally screwed when it runs out of money in a couple decades.
That's the worst case, huh? You're sure that people aren't going to continue living longer past retirement age, having fewer kids, and entering the workplace later and later since a Master's degree is rapidly becoming the new high school diploma?
Also, removing the income limit would be a massive tax hike (12.4 percentage points, split between employee and employer). The taxes already went up this year for sufficiently-high income individuals in that the income limit was raised from $118,500 to $127,200 (a 7.3% increase).
Could you imagine how quickly this comment would be flagged if the same thing was said about millennials?
Baby boomers are no more or less selfish than every generation that came before them and every generation that will come after them. They are just the ones in control at the moment so everything gets blamed on them.
There is a supportable argument to be made that the Depression/WWII generation pushed for many of the policies which, temporarily, drastically improved life for the average American and effectively created the much-lauded "American middle class". And a supportable argument to be made that their children promptly froze, rolled back or outright repealed those policies and gains upon reaching an age when they wielded significant political power.
Without arguing about terms like "selfishness", the motivation can be laid on the economic conditions those generations faced. Depression-era Americans grew up in a time of great economic hardship, and so pushed for legal and social safety nets (Social Security, labor unions, etc.). Their children grew up in a time of economic ease, and so had no understanding of or motivation to preserve those things, and saw them as impediments to their further enrichment (if we get rid of the union, my business is more profitable; if we slash entitlement programs, my taxes are lower, etc.).
A good parallel is the anti-vaccine movement in the US. The threat of serious vaccine-preventable diseases is fading from living memory, as most parents of young children today have never lived in a situation where such diseases were a realistic consideration. Thus they see no benefit from vaccines, and over-value the rare side effects (and believe, out of fear, charlatans who fabricate claims that vaccines cause problems those parents are familiar with).
I agree that environmental factors shape a generation. People react to the world they were raised in. I just think it is silly to ascribe personal traits like "selfishness" to those reactions.
I also think you are attributing these actions to the wrong generations. FDR was born in the 1880s, he wasn't part of the depression/WWII generation. However both Reagan and George HW Bush were. We didn't get the first baby boomer president until Clinton in 1993. Countries are usually controlled by people in their 40s-60s. You can't blame the baby boomers for things that starting happening when they were in their 20s and 30s.
I live in Colorado and am constantly perplexed at the presence of blocks full of million dollar houses down the road from hundreds of acres of cow pasture (not parks mind you, actual cow pastures that smell like cow shit).
Edit: These are not super nice houses either. They're just small 1-2k sqft houses built on top of each other. The problem is, when some developer manages to obtain one of said cow pastures from the city/rancher (many are city owned and leased to ranchers) they just pack it with 4k sqft mcmansions with barely enough room for a driveway between them. I don't know anyone who wants a 4k sqft house for $650k
In many cities in CA (and around the US) you can't do that.
There are "anti-poor-people" laws, restricting the minimum lot size (in some cases, 1 acre in certain areas of Mountain View, for example), and restricting the number of SFU you can build in a single lot to 1.
I grew up in a town with one of those so-called "anti-poor-people" laws, with the minimum lot size being set to 1 acre. Except it was more to make sure that the area stays rural than it was to discriminate against poor people (plenty of whom did and still do live there).
Ah, then it seems like it might be very similar to one of the problems in California. If that increases the construction costs by too much (two fully separate foundations, frames, sets of infrastructure runs, whatever), then there's more money to be made by building only for the top of the market.
Or maybe there's zoning in place to (giving it the benefit of the doubt) prevent it from just turning into "two 600K 2k sqft houses".
In CA this comes about in the form of "the additional cost of furnishing this condo/apartment building in a way that will sell for 5K/mo or 1.xM+ versus targeting the middle of the market is small enough that we'd be leaving massive amounts of money on the table."
So there's a very loud debate going on about how much this construction just attracts wealthy or high-income outsiders who otherwise would live elsewhere (and so doesn't have any trickle down benefits on the rest of the housing stock) vs actually helping people who currently live in the area.
I'm not aware of any areas with the political will to really substantially push back against top-of-the-market targeted construction, though.
"If that increases the construction costs by too much (two fully separate foundations, frames, sets of infrastructure runs, whatever), then there's more money to be made by building only for the top of the market."
Building a good house costs a few hundred thousand dollars. Just a lot size in those areas is worth a few million dollars.
Building costs aren't the constraint. Land availability is, mostly due to zoning laws.
"then there's more money to be made by building only for the top of the market"
Housing again follows supply and demand. It doesn't matter the size or luxury of a house, if there's nobody willing to buy it, prices will drop.
> Housing again follows supply and demand. It doesn't matter the size or luxury of a house, if there's nobody willing to buy it, prices will drop.
But it doesn't necessarily follow it in a straightforward manner in any particular location.
If you knock over a building of 5 crappy old apartments in a dense area to build a bigger building with 10 new, bigger, luxury units, it's easy to imagine scenarios where the net effect is more supply but also an even larger increase in demand:
- If the new units are condos, it's unlikely those displaced renters are going to be served by the new building.
- If the units are much more luxurious they could attract wealthy commuters to move into town, who otherwise may have been outside of the demand sector for the units because of lack of AC, or in-unit washer/dryers, or whatever. (I'll admit to being this sort of housing consumer.)
- Alternately, they could attract absentee tenants who would rather just leave the place vacant and just use it as a second home. Or AirBNB it most of the time. Or (if condos) use it as a assumed-relatively-safe asset or investment.
Things are complicated. And in places like SF, LA, and NYC, people do have enough money and are willing to buy right now. So the question is how do we best help the ones with less money short of "just build enough new luxury condos until all the rich people in the world are satisfied"?
Apparently in NYC the last few years we've just about built all the 50+M condos that the market can bear - that's a long way from helping the people who could only afford 100k.
That's an oversimplification. I want a 10k sqft house for $3 but that option isn't on the table. I think the GPs point is that the desirable/optimal options may not be available
Good. There has been a Yimby movement for a while in Seattle which has built several times the housing of San Francisco and Oakland combined over the last few years: http://www.spur.org/news/2017-06-15/keep-building-oakland. , and while it is still getting more expensive it is doing much much better than the Bay Area at keeping cost down. All the while, being an equally good place to live (I prefer Seattle by leaps and bounds, many prefer San Francisco.). As a result of this, Seattle is also growing at 3X the rate of San Francisco.
If only people would be as passionate about population control as they are about YIMBY and NIMBY. There is a problem that hits at a majority of these issues and it's a planet's ability to sustain populations. We're out of balance and everyone wants to preach about how it's everyones right to squirt out 6 kids instead of limiting it to one or two, and get the issues under control.
How about paying people to have a vasectomy after they have 2 kids?
But that will never happen because if birth rates decrease who will support the ponzi scheme pensions? In all seriousness the resources required for the average American lifestyle and population density is sustainable. The growth rates of some developing nations are pretty terrifying though.
I'm not convinced that population control is needed, at least in the US. The total fertility rate in the US is under 2, which means we are no longer going to be growing in population, but declining; immigration aside.
So then you need population control on the unnaturally and rapidly-growing portions of the world. Especially if they can not afford to take care of those additional children properly.
Birth rates are dropping all over the planet. Mexico is at 2.24 and dropping 0.03 every year, which means they'll be at ZPG in only 8 years.
Canada is already at NPG. Italy is at 1.39.
Now on to the third world. Even Bangladesh is at 2.18, which is 1/3 of what it was in 1960. Pakistan is at 3.62, but was at 6.02 in 1990. China is at 1.56.
Most of the high birth rates are in Africa, which is approx 1/7th of the world's population. Ethiopia's is 4.40 but was 7.25 in 1990. These places also have high (infant and adult) mortality rates, which is a big reason people still have a lot of children.
Now globally... We are at 2.45, down from a peak of 5.06 in 1964, and 3.35 in 1990. And we're dropping at an average of about 0.0238 every year since 2000, which puts us at ZPG globally in 19 years.
The reason for this is simple: Human rights, a move away from subsistence farming, women's rights, access to birth control. Pushing for these things is working, and there's no reason to think that we have to implement any other plan, especially not something that leans authoritarian in any way. We just need to keep doing what we're doing, and doing it better.
Our problem then becoming a looming population crash, not overpopulation.
The article is talking about California. We obviously aren't talking about Niger, Somalia, Mali, Chad, Angola, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the only places with TFR ≥ 6.0).
If this is something you have to talk about, it's not something that's going to get done. Places that don't have this problem don't come up with a catchy phrases to talk about it.
I attended a day of the conference mentioned out of casual interest because I live nearby and was mildly and pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the attendees are serious activists and definitely getting things done in their cities, especially Seattle.
If you replace the property tax with an LVT, the problem could be solved already. Lower property tax encourages developments and renewals. Higher land tax incentives efficient use of land and somehow makes yimby a more attractive option.
Question: I believe it's "well known" (I could be wrong but I've seen it enough times and I think it makes sense) that building more roads or widening existing ones does not solve traffic problems in the long-run (because people adjust their behavior to the presence of new roads and therefore drive more).
So I guess my question is...is there any evidence that building more housing will alleviate home / rent prices? Fundamentally, the prices are high because people really want to live in these places. If you build more housing, won't that just enable more people to live there, which will re-establish a local equilibrium?
Going back to the traffic analogy - the solution isn't to build more roads; it's to add mass-transit options, increase density, reduce people's desire to drive, etc. Is there analogous stuff that can be done for housing? Maybe building more housing is a part of it, too - I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. But it does seem like there are feedback effects in play that will prevent increased supply alone from solving the problem. Manhattan has twice the population in half the area (so, about 4x as dense) but they don't exactly have affordable rent.
Uhh your analogy kinda falls apart as people dont really "use more space" as housing increases unlike where one can easily drive more.
There is plenty of evidence for more housing decreasing prices. And there is actually a limit to how much people will demand to live in a place. Thats why people commute far from outside sf into it for the lower housing prices.
Of course increasing public transportation would also help. Albeit sf surrounding suburbs also have rent control policies so building reallly far away just increasing traffic a lot.
> Thats why people commute far from outside sf into it for the lower housing prices.
That's kind of what I'm saying, though - won't those people just move into SF when the prices drop low enough, and therefore bring the price right back up to where it was? I'm modeling this as if the supply of "people who want to move to San Francisco" is effectively infinite?
Is San Francisco with 3 million people going to have higher, lower, or the same median inflation-adjusted rent compared to now?
No it wouldnt bring the price back to the original. Its simple supply and demand. I mean of course the price would decrease more if no one moved in. But the price would still decrease. If it didnt decrease than those people would could afford to live in sf would already be living there.
Plus even if there is a hypothetical price floor (which doesnt happen) where people will move into sf, at least everyone is closer to sf so less traffic.
As I understand it, induced demand (for traffic) is thought to be the result of everyone who used to drive 15 miles to work now driving 25, so there's more net driving.
For housing, you've only got one body, so I'm not sure the same situation applies.
Although, it would be interesting to see if the availability of affordable housing results in more newborns. I know I felt a lot more comfortable having a kid when I moved somewhere more affordable (though I'm kind of shocked how many people think kids need a giant house - I just wanted a 2 bed apt).
The elephant in the room is that much of the US, SF Bay Area included, is still reeling hard from restrictive zoning laws that were extremely racially motivated.
Minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, R1/R2 designations et al. were intentionally written into zoning laws so that PoC could not afford to move into primarily white neighborhoods [1].
It might sound like a random tangent, but many of these zoning laws are in the books today, and are the ones used by NIMBYs to restrict new developments in their town.
[1] Extensively covered in the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Since we just warned you and you don't seem interested in using this site as intended (i.e. for thoughtful conversation, not political flamebait), we've banned this account.
But how do you explain the issue of NIMBYism not being as big an impediment in Texas or Nevada, you know, where one might expect those motives to be the same or maybe more prevalent?
Land is cheaper, so those sorts of laws aren't as big of a factor.
That's starting to no longer be the case in Nevada if you're in Reno or Vegas, since Californians (myself included) fleeing California's high cost of living are driving up real estate prices (the rest of Nevada is fine for now AFAICT; just the cities that are an issue).
It depends on whether you see all the impediments that are actually present. Many of them are invisible to people who are white and/or affluent, since they never affect such people and most such people don't have enough close ties to people sufficiently different from themselves to hear firsthand stories.
so there is a meeting with buzzwords and more but unless they are changing who is running the cities and counties this is just a cash and headline grab without any hope of real results.
the push needs to be find candidates for office who believe the problem is a real as you do and then work to see them obtain office. you are going to get past the liberal establishment which has maintained this status quo for years if not decades by getting in the NYTimes. You need to get into city hall. you are going to go up against a wall of feel good phrases and heaps of guilt for all the issues you will cause; likely environmental; and its best to show how letting more people in a smaller area is better than having them commute.
what is the coverage of this event in California? Does anyone actually know about it or is it smothered in back pages?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadTell the truth...when you were in Chicago, did you want to live next to the "L"?
with the caveat that the SF-LA HSR project seems to be a boondoggle that will cost the state billions more than it probably should.
Yes. I only wanted to live next to the L train. If I were apartment hunting, and it wasn't a quick walk to an L stop, that apartment went straight to the bottom of the list.
And when I sought roommates, my place being steps to a blue line stop meant I got literally 70 emails within the first few hours of posting the ad.
Growing up in the central valley I took Bart ONE TIME as a kid, and it's still a highlight of my entire damn childhood. I suppose I may like trains more than most, but after that my goal in life was mostly to escape suburbia.
(I say this as someone who personally benefits from rent control. It shouldn't exist.)
You want offices near you but no more housing, so that people work near you and are forced to live closer to you, and have to buy houses near you for ever-increasing prices.
And people who own homes (older than most of the population) are used to driving everywhere, they don't want people constantly walking in front of their houses. They all want their own cul-de-sacs.
So both remain in balance, prices don't increase and you get little or no financial benefits. Also, a house surrounded by high rises in a very busy street has far less relative value than a house in a quiet street where your kids can play around. Cities bring strangers, crime, pollution, noise, etc.
But if you increase job density without increasing housing density, then you reap massive financial benefits from increasing housing prices.
Yes, but that's only for holdouts, which is a game of chicken. And after the developers build around you, you're done, your home value plunges as you're surrounded by traffic and apartments.
"Now, going back to jobs, in practicality, allowing upzones, also tends to bring way more jobs - more coffee shops / corporate towers etc."
The two are unrelated. Cities have a lot of exclusive-use commercial or residential areas. You can increase the same jobs without having more residents, which increases value for the home-owners.
Which is exactly what is happening in the US.
How much would solar panels on the roof offset your AC energy usage?
What a time to be alive.
I knew it was bad, but I was bit taken aback.
However, I did get a little discouraged that there was a lack of people my age trying to get involved, though. People can complain all they want... but until they do, it won't change.
It doesn't necessarily have to mean lower quality of life. But, in LA, that's what has happened most of the time.
New three or four story apartment buildings next door to a SFH means less sunlight and the elimination of privacy throughout the yard.
More people means more traffic jams, more wear and tear on roads, more crime, more unfamiliar strangers driving too fast on their once-quiet streets, more pollution, and higher demand on a very limited police force, parks, recreational facilities, schools/colleges, airports, open spaces, etc.
The LA city government manages infrastructure and resources in a sub-par way. New resources of all types are simply not forthcoming fast enough to meet with increased demand. The city government fails to keep up with existing needs for repair of: water, sidewalk, street infrastructure under current levels of demand.
And it's not only quantity: often the quality of new infrastructure (e.g. Red Line train seats) is allowed to detoriorate to a state where it's rather dirty and unpleasant.
I feel like LA city government has been doing better about sidewalk and street repair the past few years. It could be coincidence and certainly isn't exhaustive.
Ehh? I'd say density is correlated with a higher quality of life. More restaurants, bars, culture (museums, art openings, music), more opportunities to expand your network of friends, etc.
but, for others, the drawbacks of high density, often outweigh the advantages. these are the people who go to local neighborhood council meetings and scream.
also note that, in Los Angeles, the city council and the mayor can, and very often do, approve changes to zoning in accordance with the wishes of real estate developers (who usually donate to their political campaigns).
it's not like LA's NIMBY homeowners are a tyrannical group with infinite power. they're very often overridden by the politicians.
much of the drive behind LA's NIMBY movement is the absence of true city plans for homeowners to rely upon. the name of the game is spot zoning variances: a developer proposes a project which requires a zoning change and then pays off the local politicians with campaign contributions.
homeowners, caught by surprise, react vociferously ... and then lose.
that's LA's version of a "planning process".
http://www.laweekly.com/news/city-halls-density-hawks-are-ch...
I grew up in a scenic neighborhood in Berlin, with lots of bars and restaurants and dance clubs in former factory yards, and it was pretty annoying at times. Drunken people get loud, and you don't want them to have a midnight singing contest right outside your bedroom window. Occasionally someone would drive around the block blasting music at full volume. And so on.
I think most people would much prefer to live in a quiet neighborhood, with all the action happening within walking distance just outside of it.
Governments aren’t like households. They get to print their own money, so budgeting freak outs that apply to one don’t really apply to the other.
Also, removing the income limit would be a massive tax hike (12.4 percentage points, split between employee and employer). The taxes already went up this year for sufficiently-high income individuals in that the income limit was raised from $118,500 to $127,200 (a 7.3% increase).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
Baby boomers are no more or less selfish than every generation that came before them and every generation that will come after them. They are just the ones in control at the moment so everything gets blamed on them.
Without arguing about terms like "selfishness", the motivation can be laid on the economic conditions those generations faced. Depression-era Americans grew up in a time of great economic hardship, and so pushed for legal and social safety nets (Social Security, labor unions, etc.). Their children grew up in a time of economic ease, and so had no understanding of or motivation to preserve those things, and saw them as impediments to their further enrichment (if we get rid of the union, my business is more profitable; if we slash entitlement programs, my taxes are lower, etc.).
A good parallel is the anti-vaccine movement in the US. The threat of serious vaccine-preventable diseases is fading from living memory, as most parents of young children today have never lived in a situation where such diseases were a realistic consideration. Thus they see no benefit from vaccines, and over-value the rare side effects (and believe, out of fear, charlatans who fabricate claims that vaccines cause problems those parents are familiar with).
I also think you are attributing these actions to the wrong generations. FDR was born in the 1880s, he wasn't part of the depression/WWII generation. However both Reagan and George HW Bush were. We didn't get the first baby boomer president until Clinton in 1993. Countries are usually controlled by people in their 40s-60s. You can't blame the baby boomers for things that starting happening when they were in their 20s and 30s.
It is worth remembering that NIMBYism and real estate prices are one of the biggest drivers of inequality in the world.
Housing doesn't have to be expensive. It is, mostly, due to political reasons.
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2164734...
Edit: These are not super nice houses either. They're just small 1-2k sqft houses built on top of each other. The problem is, when some developer manages to obtain one of said cow pastures from the city/rancher (many are city owned and leased to ranchers) they just pack it with 4k sqft mcmansions with barely enough room for a driveway between them. I don't know anyone who wants a 4k sqft house for $650k
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/121929267_zpid/globalr...
I'd love to have that option compared to just seeing 650sqft condos for ~$650k in/near my neighborhood in CA. :)
There are "anti-poor-people" laws, restricting the minimum lot size (in some cases, 1 acre in certain areas of Mountain View, for example), and restricting the number of SFU you can build in a single lot to 1.
Or maybe there's zoning in place to (giving it the benefit of the doubt) prevent it from just turning into "two 600K 2k sqft houses".
In CA this comes about in the form of "the additional cost of furnishing this condo/apartment building in a way that will sell for 5K/mo or 1.xM+ versus targeting the middle of the market is small enough that we'd be leaving massive amounts of money on the table."
So there's a very loud debate going on about how much this construction just attracts wealthy or high-income outsiders who otherwise would live elsewhere (and so doesn't have any trickle down benefits on the rest of the housing stock) vs actually helping people who currently live in the area.
I'm not aware of any areas with the political will to really substantially push back against top-of-the-market targeted construction, though.
Building a good house costs a few hundred thousand dollars. Just a lot size in those areas is worth a few million dollars.
Building costs aren't the constraint. Land availability is, mostly due to zoning laws.
"then there's more money to be made by building only for the top of the market"
Housing again follows supply and demand. It doesn't matter the size or luxury of a house, if there's nobody willing to buy it, prices will drop.
But it doesn't necessarily follow it in a straightforward manner in any particular location.
If you knock over a building of 5 crappy old apartments in a dense area to build a bigger building with 10 new, bigger, luxury units, it's easy to imagine scenarios where the net effect is more supply but also an even larger increase in demand:
- If the new units are condos, it's unlikely those displaced renters are going to be served by the new building.
- If the units are much more luxurious they could attract wealthy commuters to move into town, who otherwise may have been outside of the demand sector for the units because of lack of AC, or in-unit washer/dryers, or whatever. (I'll admit to being this sort of housing consumer.)
- Alternately, they could attract absentee tenants who would rather just leave the place vacant and just use it as a second home. Or AirBNB it most of the time. Or (if condos) use it as a assumed-relatively-safe asset or investment.
Things are complicated. And in places like SF, LA, and NYC, people do have enough money and are willing to buy right now. So the question is how do we best help the ones with less money short of "just build enough new luxury condos until all the rich people in the world are satisfied"?
Apparently in NYC the last few years we've just about built all the 50+M condos that the market can bear - that's a long way from helping the people who could only afford 100k.
They exist. You just gotta wander from the coast and check the Central Valley instead.
Someone does, or they wouldn't sell. That's kind of how it works.
But that will never happen because if birth rates decrease who will support the ponzi scheme pensions? In all seriousness the resources required for the average American lifestyle and population density is sustainable. The growth rates of some developing nations are pretty terrifying though.
source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Canada is already at NPG. Italy is at 1.39.
Now on to the third world. Even Bangladesh is at 2.18, which is 1/3 of what it was in 1960. Pakistan is at 3.62, but was at 6.02 in 1990. China is at 1.56.
Most of the high birth rates are in Africa, which is approx 1/7th of the world's population. Ethiopia's is 4.40 but was 7.25 in 1990. These places also have high (infant and adult) mortality rates, which is a big reason people still have a lot of children.
Now globally... We are at 2.45, down from a peak of 5.06 in 1964, and 3.35 in 1990. And we're dropping at an average of about 0.0238 every year since 2000, which puts us at ZPG globally in 19 years.
The reason for this is simple: Human rights, a move away from subsistence farming, women's rights, access to birth control. Pushing for these things is working, and there's no reason to think that we have to implement any other plan, especially not something that leans authoritarian in any way. We just need to keep doing what we're doing, and doing it better.
Our problem then becoming a looming population crash, not overpopulation.
2) In California, any significant changes to property taxes will likely require a majority vote via a ballot initiative.
For those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
So I guess my question is...is there any evidence that building more housing will alleviate home / rent prices? Fundamentally, the prices are high because people really want to live in these places. If you build more housing, won't that just enable more people to live there, which will re-establish a local equilibrium?
Going back to the traffic analogy - the solution isn't to build more roads; it's to add mass-transit options, increase density, reduce people's desire to drive, etc. Is there analogous stuff that can be done for housing? Maybe building more housing is a part of it, too - I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. But it does seem like there are feedback effects in play that will prevent increased supply alone from solving the problem. Manhattan has twice the population in half the area (so, about 4x as dense) but they don't exactly have affordable rent.
There is plenty of evidence for more housing decreasing prices. And there is actually a limit to how much people will demand to live in a place. Thats why people commute far from outside sf into it for the lower housing prices.
Of course increasing public transportation would also help. Albeit sf surrounding suburbs also have rent control policies so building reallly far away just increasing traffic a lot.
That's kind of what I'm saying, though - won't those people just move into SF when the prices drop low enough, and therefore bring the price right back up to where it was? I'm modeling this as if the supply of "people who want to move to San Francisco" is effectively infinite?
Is San Francisco with 3 million people going to have higher, lower, or the same median inflation-adjusted rent compared to now?
Plus even if there is a hypothetical price floor (which doesnt happen) where people will move into sf, at least everyone is closer to sf so less traffic.
For housing, you've only got one body, so I'm not sure the same situation applies.
Although, it would be interesting to see if the availability of affordable housing results in more newborns. I know I felt a lot more comfortable having a kid when I moved somewhere more affordable (though I'm kind of shocked how many people think kids need a giant house - I just wanted a 2 bed apt).
Minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, R1/R2 designations et al. were intentionally written into zoning laws so that PoC could not afford to move into primarily white neighborhoods [1].
It might sound like a random tangent, but many of these zoning laws are in the books today, and are the ones used by NIMBYs to restrict new developments in their town.
[1] Extensively covered in the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
That's starting to no longer be the case in Nevada if you're in Reno or Vegas, since Californians (myself included) fleeing California's high cost of living are driving up real estate prices (the rest of Nevada is fine for now AFAICT; just the cities that are an issue).
the push needs to be find candidates for office who believe the problem is a real as you do and then work to see them obtain office. you are going to get past the liberal establishment which has maintained this status quo for years if not decades by getting in the NYTimes. You need to get into city hall. you are going to go up against a wall of feel good phrases and heaps of guilt for all the issues you will cause; likely environmental; and its best to show how letting more people in a smaller area is better than having them commute.
what is the coverage of this event in California? Does anyone actually know about it or is it smothered in back pages?
It is all over the San Francisco and Oakland reddits.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/barf-density-loving-sonja-trauss-r...