California is a great state in many ways, but it'd be a stretch to say it's even half assed a solution to its housing problem: they've quarter assed it at most. And it does someone no good for a state to be great in many ways if they can't afford to live there.
The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.
Well they did just pass a bunch of laws last year to upzone the whole state, crush NIMBY zoning BS and lower permitting requirements for dense development near transit stops.
Builder’s remedy is already being applied against NIMBY communities like Santa Monica and Redondo beach, no take backs.
It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction.
Sure they’re doing it 20-30 years later than they should have but they’re certainly not sitting on their hands right now.
Newsome knows he needs to show that he really addressed the massive headline problem that everyone hears about California before he can have a serious crack at the presidency, or else he’s never going to overcome the “California bad because mismanaged by Democrats”
> Well they did just pass a bunch of laws last year to upzone the whole state
Have you seen the particulars of that law that upzoned the state? It's actually extremely weak:
"* Benefits homeowners NOT institutional investors. Recent amendments require a local agency to impose an owner occupancy requirement as a condition of a homeowner receiving a ministerial lot split. This bill also prohibits the development of small subdivisions and prohibits ministerial lot splits on adjacent parcels by the same individual to prevent investor speculation. In fact, allowing for more neighborhood scale housing in California’s communities actually curbs the market power of institutional investors. SB 9 prevents profiteers from evicting or displacing tenants by excluding properties where a tenant has resided in the past three years."
Translation: will be used only sparingly, because it's illegal to do it with a standard case of a corporation replacing existing housing with more housing. How many owner occupiers are interested in this and can afford this kind of redevelopment?
"Respects local control. Homeowners must comply with local zoning requirements when developing a duplex (height, floor area ratios, lot coverage etc.) as long as they do not physically preclude a lot split or duplex. This bill also allows locals to require a percolation test for any duplex proposed to be on septic tanks."
Translation: still lets local NIMBYs restrict density.
"It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction."
It's the right direction yes, but as you say, it's the kind of thing that should've been the response to the much weaker housing crisis of 20-30 years ago, not the much more serious one now.
local NIMBY density restrictions still have to comply with all the other state laws regarding submitting plans to increase housing units.
If the state says no that’s not enough units you are just jerking us around, then the municipality is out of compliance and builders are basically autopermitted to build whatever they want (oversimplifying but look at builder’s remedy - it’s already being applied).
One of the important wrinkles is that there’s no take backs, once the city is back in compliance they can’t go back and stop things that were permitted in the meantime. It’s a very serious “fix it on your own terms or we’ll fix it for you and you won’t like it” approach.
Santa Monica is getting like 5000 new housing units all at once, 800 of them affordable housing, in tall apartment buildings because they threw a fit and refused to get in compliance and they found out just how serious the state is.
NIMBYs wail and gnash their teeth but all it does is expose that their “plans” are all a load of BS smoke and mirrors to max out boomer property values. If the plans were good enough, they’d be in compliance with the state and get to keep the “character of their neighborhood” or whatever.
I take a dim view of "approve more density or we'll sue you". That's more than nothing, sure, but it'll inevitably lead to less housing than just outright requiring various upzoning rules, as various cities do the minimum or even less and fight things in court.
Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them. I know the newer regulations have more teeth, but when you know the other party is hostile to helping people to begin with, it makes more sense to me to explicitly set all the rules up front.
> I take a dim view of "approve more density or we'll sue you".
That's not the rule.
The rule is “approve developments such that you meet state housing requirements or lose your ability to deny planning approval to otherwise legally-compliant developments”.
There is no suing involved: the requirements are known up front, and the consequence of not meeting them is automatic.
> Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them.
Yes, that's why they changed the consequences from just “lose access to certain funding, and lose preference points in applications for other funding” to be that plus losing the ability to block housing developments.
Yeah, one of the reasons I like builders' remedy is it flips the courts' status quo bias on its head - the thing that's tired up in court is city limitations, not construction. That endless delay, even then anti-construction interests lost in the end, was still enough to kill projects economically.
Super weird comparatively as a regulatory framework, but uniquely suited to dealing with California-style procedural obstructionism.
It’s not “approve more density or we’ll sue you” it’s “approve more density yourselves or literally any state-compliant development is auto approved and you have no recourse, also state compliance is easier now.”
If you follow this stuff, these changes are the ones that have finally broken the impasse with these towns - it’s literally already working. The state has come in hard and fast to show it’s for real.
> It it'll inevitably lead to less housing than just outright requiring various upzoning rules
Sure but I’m sure they did their homework and figured out that would be harder to pass in legislature, defend in courts, and defend politically. Giving the towns some chance to increase housing units their way is more politically defensible.
I think it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty darn good solution, better than waiting longer for a more optimal one.
The laws being passed aren't enough. They have a bunch of caveats (SB-9, for example, has a long list of disqualifiers) that limit the utility of any particular bill and making actually using it difficult. The builder's remedy has been on the books for what, about thirty years? Only now is it starting to see some use.
California needs to dramatically cut back on its land use restrictions and figure out how to streamline everything. Even a typical (nominally uncontroversial) single-family home can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to entitle before anybody even breaks ground. It's madness.
Unfortunately, it's simply not in the culture of the people of the state to want to pursue cost-efficiency or reductions in bureaucracy.
California has not even ¼-assed it. The governor stated in 2018 that we were short 3.5 million homes, which might be approximately correct or at least in the ballpark, and as a state we were going to build them by 2025. That pace should have been 2 million homes by now, but only about 350k units were actually built.
Where does one build 3.5 million houses? The housing needs to be where jobs / etc, are. It should also be where resources are. A good deal of the state has water issues regularly; additional part of the state can't keep the power on due to - heat waves, fires, over use, winds, cats farting.
The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county).
What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof.
Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built.
Just replacing a lot of old urban single-family homes with triplexes would be enough to get significantly ahead of housing issues in many major US cities, including in California.
Unfortunately, the sheer regulatory expense of new housing is such that it's not worth it for anyone to try any project short of big apartment/condo buildings.
The demand for new housing in California is high enough to absorb pretty significant costs and I'd be willing to bet regulatory expense is not even in the top 3 factors driving building costs (and definitely not the top 2), so saying it's "not worth it" seems like it ignores the top of the market (which tends to be the market migrating in to CA) that's willing to pay a premium for what they want where they want.
With some of the recent changes to building policies I think we're going to find out that NIMBY local policy and regulation aren't the fundamental problem, but we're up against the limits of how capital naturally engages with building projects: chasing demand towards the high end of the market and staying well back from diminishing marginal returns.
When I look at the link, it seems to contain a spreadsheet with no information, but let's say $150k is true.
Market prices of homes in places like Freemont tend to run from the high 6 figures through the low 7. Knock off $150k and we have maybe a 20% price reduction (probably closer to 15%). Nice to have but hard to figure out how that represents the largest portion of anything.
Land homes sit on costs more than $150k, maybe north of twice as much in Freemont-like areas (unless the lot is weird, inaccessible, or otherwise has issues that make it difficult to build on).
I'm not sure how one is going to get total materials and labor to come in less than $150k for most single family homes in CA. Maybe with small square footage and a good deal of luck with labor and materials? You tell me how to build for less than $120/sqft and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's all ears.
Seems to me to get regulatory expense to be the single largest item for building a home, we'd have ignore land, then play the game of lumping together all such expenses while splitting out building and labor, and even then I'm still not sure how it actually adds up.
I don't think anyone is proposing to installed another 8 million people in Mendocino. Places like San Francisco and the East Bay have tons of water rights because they were originally outfitted for tens of millions of residents before being suddenly down-zoned around 1970. The East Bay Municipal Utilities District currently serves less demand for water than it did in 1980 because of systemic efficiency improvements, despite the fact that the served population increased 50% since then.
Also, there is the small fact that apartment dwellers use a tiny fraction of the water of people who live in detached houses.
In short, there is plenty of water in various major metropolitan areas.
I'm not sure what place you are describing but a place like Chico could easily double their population, and should do so. There are a string of silly towns that are squatting on ideal locations (Chico is one). The state should use its budget to incentivize growth in those places. A town like Chico, or Lodi, or Stockton, or even Sacramento should get slathered in cash if it builds housing in a smart way. The state should pick up the tab for things like pipes and roads and utility undergrounding in smart growth cities.
No. Established cities tend to be not in flood plains due to survivor effect. Chico, Lodi, Sacramento, and even Stockton are above 100-year floor areas for the most part. Typically the most flood-prone areas are the oldest parts of old downtowns and the newest sprawl where they are gobbling up marginal land.
(California has nowhere to build they say... see above link.)
Build several hundred high-rise apartments with several thousand of residents each. There you go. Housing for a million people in the space of not even a square mile probably. Add in generous amounts of entertainment venues, coffee shops, live music, some parks, and a bunch of office buildings.
This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking
"What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?"
you ask
"What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?"
The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions.
As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with
"It is because the world is run by bad people"
This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
When it comes to housing, the napkin solution is correct. There are no technical or practical problems with it. To many, there are aesthetic and social problems with it, and we choose to prioritise those. That’s not a given.
All problems requiring this type of collective action are social problems.
There are many vacant houses in the U.S., and many cheap houses -- pretending this is about shortage of physical housing is just foolish.
This is about shortage of desirable housing, and instead of stopping to ask what are the mechanisms that cause desirable housing (for you) to be so expensive, you just assume the problem is like a shortage of lumber or "space" or something equally irrelevant. If you build lots of affordable housing in Livermore, what would happen is that Livermore would stop being desirable for you, and you would end up wanting to live in some satellite area that was created outside of Livermore in which the exclusivity was maintained. Then good jobs would move there, because over the long term, the jobs follow the skilled workers and not the other way around. Then your utopian project in Livermore would find itself turned into a low income area where there is a shortage of good jobs, and most of the good jobs are elsewhere, in more exclusive areas, that are within commuting distance of the Lab. Then the Lab would find itself having trouble hiring enough people, and it would open satellite offices elsewhere. Then you would complain about a shortage of housing there, and want to rinse and repeat, not understanding why your intervention failed to solve the problem.
A good example is San Francisco. Most tech jobs were in Santa Clara county, not San Francisco. But a lot of tech workers enjoyed living in SF and did a long commute. Then tech companies realized they could hire more easily if they opened offices in San Francisco. Then companies began to be founded there, etc. All of a sudden, lots of tech jobs in SF. The jobs follow the skilled workers, and skilled workers have a lot of options in terms of picking where they want to live. They vote with their feet, and the jobs follow. How did the jobs end up in Santa Clara? Or Belmont. Through a similar process. Jobs chase high skilled people.
So you have to come to grips with why people that have a lot of choices choose to live in expensive, more exclusive areas. Why does the average high income person really not want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of poor people? Or, for that matter, even average income person? Why this hatred towards average people (something that can easily be found even on this site)? Why are they willing to commute elsewhere, and even take a pay cut, to be in a more exclusive area that is surrounded by other high income people? (And so signals to employers to open an office nearby). This is a social issue, not about lack of nails or space or a shortage of lumber.
I think we have opposite assumptions here. Afaict, young upwardly mobile professionals love density and (income++) diversity. SF was kinda sketchy before it got gentrified by tech, no? Tenderloin was bad, I’ve heard? The notion that people primarily move from less to more exclusive places don’t match with what I see. And people who are actually poor can’t afford new construction, so poor people (and the real social problems they often have) aren’t going to move into unsubsidised new-builds. Will upper-middle class people move away from an area just because craftsmen move in? Area you sure you’re not getting the causality the wrong way around? High-income people move out of area for various reasons not related to their neighbors, property values fall, lower-income people can afford to move in. That sounds more plausible to me.
I do have some arguments in favor of your position, but they’re mostly specific to the US: 1. Many people’s primary retirement plan and emergency fund is often their house, so property values are exceptionally important to them. 2. School funding per student goes down if less wealthy parents move to the district. 3. Violence in poor neighbourhoods can get really bad. None of this is God-given, though, which is why nimbyism isn’t quite as bad in many other countries. And while important, these factors don’t seem to be dominant.
I think you are ignoring the racial angle here. San Francisco became trendy because it was a major urban center, a walkable city, with less than a 6% black population, and that population was relegated to the Bayview area, which of course did not become popular with tech workers as a residential destination. You have a similar situation for Seattle. And Austin. Or Portland. But why is there is no big tech gentrification happening in South Chicago? Or DC? Or Houston? Or Gary, Indiana? Or St. Louis? Show me one urban core area that has more than, say, a 20% African American population that is popular as a target for tech gentrification. I'll wait.
The fact is, there just aren't that many cities that fit this bill, and those that do experience rapidly rising real estate prices. As with many issues, race is a taboo factor operating behind the scenes in determining which neighborhoods are targets of gentrification and which are not. When you create a lot of low income housing, people viewed as more undesirable move in and the high income earners go elsewhere. Then you rinse and repeat. But of course the problem is not that there's a shortage of housing or even a shortage of affordable housing. Median value of owner occupied units is $245K, which is 3.5x the median household income[1]. That's perfectly affordable. But the median home value in a major urban city with less than a 10% African American population is a different story. So there's a shortage of housing in our diverse society that has the "right" kind of demographics. As we become more diverse, the number of locations that are predominantly white or asian will get more and more scarce -- and more and more expensive.
You see a similar situation in Sweden, which accepted a large number of migrants and put them on the outskirts of major cities, and of course the house prices of units in the urban cores that were free of migrants skyrocketed. People are paying to not live in areas with large migrant populations. So all of a sudden housing is becoming 'unaffordable' in Sweden. But the unspoken part is that housing with few migrants is become unaffordable, not all housing. Again, this is a social problem, it's not a problem of a shortage of lumber or space.
So building more low income housing doesn't have the effects you believe, in terms of increasing the amount of housing in highly desirable areas. It will have the opposite effect, by removing one area that has the desired demographics, it makes the remaining islands even more desirable and thus even more expensive. At least this is my reading of history. It was very clear, after the race riots of 2020, how home prices in predominantly white/asian enclaves began to rapidly increase, at which point those who wanted to live in these enclaves began complaining about a "housing crisis" because they could not bring themselves to complain about a racial crisis.
But hey, I could be wrong -- housing in St. Louis or Detroit is still affordable. I'll wait to see tech workers scramble to move there, rather than, say Salt Lake City.
There is gentrification in some of the southern Chicago neighborhoods. If you're asking why there isn't much in Englewood or Grand Crossing, it's because Chicago is geographically huge, and decades of redlining tore a giant gash in the west and south sides of the city that will take many, many more decades to heal. There simply isn't enough demand, across the entire city, to make high-end development in Grand Crossing viable. Gentrification is pushing harder against the west than the south side right now, is my impression.
I don't know what all is happening in Sweden, but what happened in Chicago wasn't an organic process; it was deliberately engineered.
> There is gentrification in some of the southern Chicago neighborhoods
Fun Fact: The Obama Administration was instrumental in tearing down a number of low income housing projects in Chicago and exporting them to nearby cities in Illinois, in an attempt to "unlock value" in downtown Chicago housing by removing poor black families. This has had limited success, although South Chicago is still overall a no go zone for gentrification. This explains the slight gentrification you are referring to. There were multiple lawsuits over this, as the nearby suburbs did not want to receive these housing projects, and were basically forced into it by the Obama administration. This was portrayed not as an effort to enrich administration-connected housing developers in downtown Chicago, but rather as an effort "integrate wealthy suburbs" so that they do "their fair share".
Bottom line, you have to be aware of race and what is really going on when you complain about "lack of affordable housing". There is, of course, plenty of affordable housing. But not where you want to live.
There is plenty of affordable housing all over Chicago, which is why it's going to be awhile before Grand Crossing has a Sweetgreen. Housing on the west and south sides of the city are, by CA/NY/WA standards, beyond "affordable". The median home price in Portage Park is somewhere around $350k --- freestanding houses, yards, low crime, Chicago property taxes, Blue Line connectivity. The median home price in Grand Crossing? $120k.
Public housing projects as implemented by cities like Chicago were a failed experiment. The people that used to live in those places get Section 8 vouchers now, and live in houses on blocks like mine. They're better off, and the city is better off.
Recently a study evaluated one Canadian city's strong efforts to build housing. It was found that prices didn't go down because the builders colluded to build far less housing in the surrounding area, keeping overall supply down, and prices up. That's in their interest. The napkin solution is correct ... unless Marx is right about how elites behave.
California is a great state? I guess the mass exodus over the last several years is just simply people leaving in excitement.
California is not great. It hasnt been great for a long time. It's hostile to anyone who is not the elite while also mascarading as a progressive paradise. The problem with people leaving is they export the same politics that got California to it's position as a working class hostile state. In the most common states, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas Californians are looked at with great disdain. It tells you something, at least, when even a left-leaning state like Oregon doesn't want you.
Dude, as someone who left, California is a great state and I never would have left if I could afford to live there. Only a small portion of Oregon is left leaning, and people who feel they are being squeezed out by Californians of course are going to feel antagonistic and try to justify that antagonism in their heads as more than just fear.
I live in one of those states. I have watched my state go from an alright place with affordable housing, good liberal laws, etc to a complete shit show in the last decade. Where I am is beginning to feel more like California every single day. Dramatically more taxes, far more expensive houses, far worse roads, increasing stretched police forces, less personal rights, etc. It's a nightmare. People like me aren't antagonistic because people moved here. We're antagonistic because the same shit that brought you the absurd taxes, expensive houses, poor roads, terrible policing, overbearing politics, etc is being exported en masse by these very same people. The average person living here cannot afford to live here because, according to my realtor friend, majority of home purchases come from Californians and they don't just buy one. Ignoring all else the income asymmetry is causing strife to people who cannot afford to live when the chickens come home to roost.
I live where I live and travel to California so often I more or less live there for several days a week. The only thing great about California is the weather.
It's simple, assimilate or stay over there. You left California for a reason - why bring the garbage to every other state? Your voting is the reason California is a dumpster fire in almost every major metro. Walking down Santa Monica, or almost anywhere in San Francisco smells like human waste. You cannot tell me California is "nice". At least the Californians coming here aren't exporting the smell.
It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right.
Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I will simply receive vitriol and anger for sharing my views. But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Edit: and this why I don't engage. I'm out. Merry Christmas everyone.
Yes, if we made it illegal to manufacture new lawnmowers or sofas or iPhones, then the value of the existing lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones would skyrocket, which would be (at least in the naive accounting [0]) very good for the current owners of lawnmowers, sofas, and iPhones -- but hopefully you can see how ridiculous that is as policy.
[0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy a new lawnmower, sofa, or iPhone or if you hope your kids will someday be able to. And it's not so great for your city in the long run if making ordinary products illegal results in drastically lower levels of productivity, etc, etc.
Of course allowing more housing impacts people. And people on their iPhones impact me -- when they're behind the wheel, when they're talking loudly in a restaurant, when I can't get their attention in a shop. The towers impact me (they're ugly and ubiquitous and use valuable spectrum). And lawnmowers? Those impact me, too! They're loud and stir up dust. I'm struggling to think of anything objectionable about sofas, but that just means 2/3 of my totally-arbitrary examples have significant impacts on others. And, because those examples were totally arbitrary, we could easily substitute three far more objectionable products.
You live in a society. Of course the things other people do impact you. That's a low bar, easily met, and not interesting enough to justify a ban on new housing. The impacts have to be overwhelmingly harmful to justify prohibition. Apartment buildings clearly do not meet that standard. You might not like apartments, but I love them, and banal preferences shouldn't drive policy in a free society.
Sure, that's the beauty of democracy though. Everyone gets an equal say. Seems like not enough of the voting population agrees with you and as such no new houses are built. America is a huge country though, plenty of very affordable housing elsewhere. Everyone doesn't get to just have what they want where they want it though, that's capitalism for you.
In the United States we have a Constitution that enumerates a set of Rights about which nobody gets to vote. It doesn't matter if you (or even 99% of all people) think it should be illegal for me to express this opinion, for example; you don't get to vote on that.
Private property rights in my view quite clearly fall under this rubric and it's only because of a few laughably bad SCOTUS decisions that this is even a live debate at all. For most of our history this was well understood.
If given the chance, most people will vote to ban new construction in their neighborhoods. I presume that if given the chance significant percentages of the population would also vote to ban certain kinds of speech. In neither case do I believe those positions are made legitimate by virtue of having majority support.
> In the United States we have a Constitution that enumerates a set of Rights about which nobody gets to vote
No, it doesn't, since people actually do campaign on changing the Constitution. I mean, unless you specifically and exclusively mean “the right to equal representation of your State in the Senate”, and even that is debatable, since you could vote for someone who proposes removing that limitation on amendments from the Constitution.
I agree for the most part but government is always going to have the power to regulate what property in city limits can be used for. This prevents things like me opening a shooting range or a night club in a single family home neighborhood. Laws are put in place to prevent a worsening of living conditions for people that already live somewhere. 100% with you on free speech though. Government has no right to control what we say. I would go even further and ban companies being able to fire people for expressing unpopular or even racist opinions away from work. I'm a jew and if a dude is a Nazi on his free time but professional in the office he should remain unfired. Applies to speech only, if he's breaking the law via assault, arson, etc. then sure, fire him.
In any -ism.you could build an apartment on your own land[1]. It's capitalism that turns it into capital which allows you to rent it out or sell it as property.
1. to the extent that land can be owned under a given mode of production.
Tenants existed before capitalism. Marx discusses this in Capital when he discusses the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The ownership class changed (from the Lord to the landlord) but the relationship continues to exist. The idea of using an asset to generate returns on the asset is indeed a capitalist concept but housing is but one aspect of that.
It's in important distinction because even post-capitalist dialectics need an answer for the need of housing.
If I did not want more people to live near me, I would simply not live in the most economically productive region in the country. People who hate other people are free to sell their homes and move to the country.
Why introduce "hate other people" into the discussion? Would you maybe allow that what some people actually "hate," are jammed highways and thoroughfares, not enough parking, and everything crowded? To the extent that people have a say (a vote) in zoning regulations, people are entitled to voice their opinion about the population density of the area where they live.
You get anger and vitriol because your views are part of the problem. NIMBY’s pull up the ladder and try to turn a nice semi-affordable car into a Porsche then tell everyone “sorry, it’s just expensive to be here. Not my fault!”
It's not a problem to me, that's the point. By saying I am a part of the problem, what you really mean is that my views are an obstacle to you getting what you want.
> Most of us aren't even asking you to do anything or pay higher taxes - just stop screwing it up for everyone whose income isn't as big as yours
It's true people don't have to "do" anything, but they are still affected by QOL decline: increase in traffic, not enough parking, schools get crowded, everything gets crowded, etc. So it's not a no-op.
But by buying a house they're not buying the whole city and the right to prevent others from living there.
If these are REALLY the objections, we could find ways to mitigate these issues.
A reasonable discussion could be had about how fast neighborhoods should change, or what reasonable expectations buyers should have about the neighborhood changing over what period of time around them.
However, if more people move in, their single family home in the period of 10-20 years will probably double in value and they'd probably be able to sell it and move to the outskirts of the now-expanded city with a similar character to what they had before, which has become the center of the growing city.
What if people simply don't want refugee camps in their back yard? You are assuming that an improvement for you is logically an improvement for others. It's not. Your opinion is worth as much as everyone else's; 1 vote
> There are an awful lot of suburbs in the Bay Area that would be massively improved in character by replacing a handful of mansions with refugee camps.
Not even refugees would want to live near refugee camps
Once again, you don't get to decide for me what 'the problem is'. You're just framing what you want as objectively what should be. But you're incorrect to frame it that way. You want what you want. I want what i want.
It's more than just framing. It's one set of people telling another set of people what they can and cannot do with the land they own. That seems to be a bit of a tie breaker. The parent you replied to wasn't telling other people what to do with land they owned, he was objecting to people telling him what he could do on land he owned (within reason, like a duplex/triplex, or an accessory dwelling unit).
There's no principal like safety behind how restrictive many of these rules are, unless you count fear of people in different economic demographics to be a reasonable justification. It's a difference of opinion.
People who want more flexible zoning are growing in number, these are people who can't find an affordable place to live or are otherwise not happy with the changes made to zoning in the last 75-100 years, and they are driving changes in more and more localities.
The basics of economics are that housing prices is a function of amount of housing and number of people who want housing. NIMBYism is about keeping the amount of housing low, thus pushing prices up.
On a side note, how can you be mad at people who have a home, are raising their kids and don't want an apartment building smacked down next to them and their kid's schools flooded with hundreds of extra students?
Thing is, people aren't asking you (and people like you) to do anything, but simply to stop actively blocking things (like building new homes). You're getting the vitriol because you're simply sharing your views. You're getting it because based on your views, it seems like you support measures that actively blocks progress for others.
For the most part everyone arguing in favor of ideas championed by the left are unable to engage in rational argument they always engage by attempting to personally insult and label the other as bad or selfish. As someone that has always voted Dem prior to this past midterm, this style of argument actually drove me further right. Got to the point where I decided that if an idea can't be championed on it's merits it's probably not something I'm interested in
Sad but true that progressive "people deserve to live decently in my city" ideas are at odds with the "I'm fine so stop talking about how there's a problem".
I'm working on an entire comedy set about how many of my peers care more about dissecting the wording of shit rather than actually furthering a cause. Those idiots aren't going to affect my ideology, though I am sometimes cancelled for the hilarious reasons (i.e. mentioning Joe Rogan).
Lastly, I got ran out of a bar for saying I think people deserve health care. Labeled a communist with no job and that I'm not welcome there. Lol!
I find it problematic that so many people reject your opinion, in particular because I suspect they are probably downplaying the degree to which it parallels the way most Americans think about where they live, to one degree or another.
Your logic isn’t unsound, but it will increasingly come across as unreasonable because not everyone in the workforce has the option of finding employment and accommodation elsewhere.
Make it unaffordable in a city for service workers to live, and there will be no one to host your night out on the town. No one to serve your dinner, or to tear your venue ticket, or to play live music.
I know what you mean but I still disagree. Is it _illogical_ to care for the disabled, elderly, widows and orphans in their affliction? I walk past people in need all the time but I don't justify it. Logical is subjective according to the person's wants and needs.
Given that I know the local authorities will drag their feet and it'll take 5+ years for anything to actually be lived in and most stuff will be expensive to live in - yes. But that's already happening.
So if people keep leaving then the property values go down. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay.
Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and the problems with the silicon belt.
You're missing why people want to live here in the first place. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world, with one of the best year-round climates in the world. If prices start going down, people will move here. For those reasons.
You’ve described most of the country outside of job centers. There’s very little rural housing available and people crowd into job centers and drive up costs. Unless you own property or make a high salary, housing is unaffordable in all 50 states.
TLDR: I'm fine so what's the problem? I'm the victim! I can't speak my hilarious beliefs because people will "engage" aka challenge my poorly thought out and constructed opinions.
As a San Francisco area homeowner and a BMW owner, I believe every human deserves a roof over their head.
Edit: Please don't discuss the things I've said. My BMW is the victim! Merry Christmas.
> It's not a problem to everyone. For example, it's not a problem to many homeowners that the value of their homes keep going up and to the right
"Increasing price of cars during pandemic not an issue for people who already have cars."
Yes, people are upset that the government pushes policies that hurt people, and that make no sense generationally (intentionally targeting rising property values is just a generational ponzi scheme).
If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
> If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
There was absolutely nothing in the comment to imply he derived "pleasure from seeing suffering." You are making that leap in bad faith.
I think the build-or-not argument might be more productive if the "YIMBY" side would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
> But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Maybe pleasure was the wrong word, but they certainly seem to enjoy the terrible situation. It's not very far off, and saying that you're okay with and even love the current setup that helps you at the expense of others isn't a great look.
> would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
Obviously it does, just like increasing the supply of anything has an impact relative to the option of constrained supply.
Realistically, the real solution is radical upzoning at the state or even federal level. Upzoning individual neighborhoods and cities exacerbates the negative side effects of upzoning by concentrating them in small areas. If the population increase is broadly spread out, it'll be much less of an issue.
The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.