Rising demand is great. It means people want to enjoy your neighborhood. You can either meet that demand by increasing supply, or you can restrict the demand, and let certain people be outpriced by the market.
Locals aren't victims of gentrification. They're victims of zoning laws and nimbyism.
How does this work in your head? When the new homes are being built, where do the people who were living on the land they're being built on go?
Notice how these responses do absolutely nothing to address the issue. They exist only to express dissatisfaction with realistic options.
Again, you can either build to meet demand or expect higher prices. Those are the options.
Or enact preferential laws, or use vandalism in order to drive demand down, or make newcomers feel unsafe or unwelcome.
Those alternatives are not entirely rational, nor necessarily effective- but they are human nature, and not that rare.
A 500k house never gets torn down to become 3 400k condos. It becomes 3 600-800+k condos.
We should build more, because we need it. But "build more" can't be the only tool to lower prices, because simple observation shows us that it doesn't work.
http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...
...which explains a lot about why residents dislike this
Quite the contrary. A pretty simple reductio proof demonstrates that more housing lowers prices. All you need is to imagine a market in which there is one more apartment available than there are people to rent it.
I'm also surprised that you would still think the math does not apply. A 100 unit building taking up the space of 12 SFH $1.5mm homes will sell many more $800k 2 bedroom apartments comparing what houses and apartments sell for Build about 1000 of the buildings close to bart and muni tunnel stations and you would get 100'000 units for the price of 3000 SFH / in law units and a larger city budget to fund the new required transit system capacity.
Cities have been able to grow for centuries. The only thing stopping them from growing are zoning and restrictions prohibiting additional homes being built.
Even if a city government has liberal attitudes toward development, it still takes years to create new supply. In the mean time the process is displacing people.
Ok, let's say we double supply.
All the houses are now either twice as high, or half as big, or maybe the trees were cut down and the bushes ripped out to make room. There's twice as many people & everything therein. Is it still the same nice neighborhood?
Things change, especially in the US.
"The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins": http://cityobservatory.org/the-immaculate-conception-theory-...
And: if prices are going up that much, and you really want out, you can sell and move, to, say, Lakeview, Oregon.
Among many issues, the fundamental attractiveness of a particular neighborhood may be tied to low population density.
In which case ripping down the neighborhood and rebuilding makes neither resident Person A nor prospective buyer Person B happy.
Sooner or later, the US must confront the fact that not everyone can live in a single story ranch house with a big yard in an extremely desirable part of the country, without causing massive sprawl (LA).
But we should be wholly unsympathetic to that view. It's a reasonable thing to wish for, but it's not a reasonable demand to give in to.
This is a brilliant sentiment, and a brilliant quote. It applies in so many conversations...
I just wanted to express my appreciation (and my intention of stealing this quote many times in the future!).
As long as there is high demand, you can either build more or expect higher prices and more sprawl. I get that people don't like those choices, but that's what's on the table.
So you're kicking the marginal (in the economic sense) people out into marginal places where they have less access to what made the original area such a great place to have a job.
Rent control could do that for rent, but has its own problems. As for owners, how do you tell someone they aren't allowed to sell their house for what someone else is willing to pay them?
Sounds like it would work, until you realize most of the buildings are owned by landlords who want to cash in and get as much money as they can with the property they've invested in. They don't particularly care who is living in the property, just that somebody is there and that they're getting paid.