The only thing I wish on NIMBYs is for them to spend a decade in a Soviet queue for apartments.
This shortage is man-made.
This shortage is man-made.
Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
Now imagine you spent a lot of money for your house. A housing company proposes changes to the neighborhood that will reduce the value of your house by 20%. In other words, you will be working and paying for years on a portion of your house that no longer has value. Are you happy? Well, maybe you can handle it because you're rich.
So these are the kinds of things that go through the minds of NIMBYs.
It certainly seems that many people want to be the last person to move into their neighborhood/area.
I'm happy, because for me housing is consumption, not an investment.
Or it means I'm not planning to sell for a very very long time and thus appreciate the tax break a lower appraisal gives me. The same logic applies if I am a landlord--as long as the rent and thus cash flow stays the same, I don't particularly care about what some appraiser says the property is worth.
Anyways, it seems to me that restrictions on construction are a lazy owner's way to maintain property values. After all, there is no better way to add value to and capture the revenue from my house than to add another 2 stories to it and rent it out. I do own the land underneath it, after all.
Know what I'd do with $8 million dollars in real estate profit? Retire immediately.
Being able to tell Larry Ellison to &#%@ off? Some things are priceless.
Jesus what a self-important thing to say while not outright denying it.
I have trees now!? Flowers? Luxury! My current apartment doesn't get enough sun to grow plants that need sun. And we pay $2200/month for a two-bedroom apartment here.
Therefore any land use changes that might negatively impact home values threaten peoples' savings, and alternately any land use changes that positive impact home values can be profitable to existing homeowners.
It's a very simple, deeply perverse incentive structure. It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
My personal issue and why we've fought against some developments in the past, is because city noise/animal/traffic/blah blah rules are just not being enforced. At all. So if I ever want to be able to sleep (not sleep in. Just sleep at all...like at 4 in the morning or whatever), I had to buy a place that was totally overpriced, and in a totally sub-optimal location, just so I'd have tolerable neighbors.
Then someone decided to build a rental-only land-locked high rise where the only possible access point is through my development's parking lot. And said high rise, even though it is in my backyard, is technically in a different city, so when there's neighbor issues, it gets really complicated.
If it was in my Canadian hometown, it honestly wouldn't matter: some asshole decides to throw a party at 3 in the morning or play hockey in my yard, I call the cops on them, 10 minutes later problem is over. Here? They'll just laugh at me and tell me to grow a thicker skin.
So the only thing I -can- do is prevent it from happening in the first place. If it was like in other countries I lived? Knock yourself out, build away!
This is only true in the absence of periodic appraisals to recalculate property taxes. In states where that is the norm, homeowners are incentivized to allow other homeowners to prevent their properties from appreciating, so long as they're not planning to sell in the immediate future. This has its own drawbacks (mostly longtime, fixed-income homeowners who are forced out due to onerous property taxes), but it's a much healthier dynamic than what states like California, where property taxes are capped, have.
If well designed, one can't take more than 100%.
You can also use some proceeds to pay for infrastructure development (of any kind). If done well, then the additional infrastructure will raise land values enough to pay for itself in higher taxes.
I wonder if I can help someone else hedge against the market going down.
I know old people who `paid' for their shares by working on building sites for these very houses in the 50s and 60s.
See http://www.wohnungsbaugenossenschaften.de/genossenschaften/h... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany
I do like it, too. However, my policy recommendation differs from the author: use a land tax to cut down land valuations.
One goal is of course to allow substituting capital for land (ie higher houses) to make housing cheaper. There's a reinforcing cycle: less NIMBYs, leads less restriction on that substitution, leads to less NIMBYs as per the paper.
If zoning laws could be priced somehow so that when they become a cost they had to change or reduce it might help.
Zoning laws in places without expensive real estate like, say, much of the US midwest probably makes things better for people. In SF or in this example in MA and other really popular places they make things worse.
Perhaps some economist has tried to calculate the price of NIMBY, zoning law externalities. Anyone know of someone who has tried?
One way we could price zoning laws is through their impact on buildable space. As long as we raise taxes on the beneficiaries, everything'll come out in the wash, right?
If you do drive, though, you are not going to appreciate new development which makes it impossible to park when you get home from work.
Not everyone hates living in places where people drive.
I don't have a problem with people who live in a place determining what the public space there should be dedicated to.
While the apartments aren't huge by comparison to most houses in the US, they are pretty comfortable, though the quality will vary depending on the particular building and region you live in. Most of the buildings appear to be the same that were built during the USSR, it's just the internals were remodeled with more modern amenities.
It can take a little getting used to, living in somewhat cramped quarters, but for me anyways, I've always had fairly small places to live growing up, whether it was living in a 3 bedroom with 6 people in college, my cheapo first apartment, I guess it's more just something you get used to. Even now, my partner and I live with her mom/aunt in a 3 bedroom apartment in SPB and, aside from occasionally stumbling across each other in the kitchen and funny battles for the bathroom, we get by just fine.
funny battles for the bathroom
From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
Christianity and some other religions also promise some utopia in the future.
Once Upon a Time, we Westerners looked at Communism and laughed. We justified our system (democracy for the state, capitalism for the economy) by pointing out all the obvious material benefits we reaped from it:
* High economic growth
* Cheap, varied, available, high-quality consumer goods
* High and climbing wages
* A class structure that looked more like a Gaussian curve than an exponential distribution, with greater actually-existing, de-facto equality than the Communist countries
* Workers' rights and the free formation of unions
* Public infrastructure, parks, and transit
* Cheap, acceptable housing for families, leading to widespread owner-occupancy becoming the norm, something rarely seen in civilized human history
* Ever-climbing life expectancies at birth, thanks to rigorous public health, sanitation, and disease control measures
In contrast, the Eastern Bloc promised that Real Soon Now, actually-existing socialism would be transformed into Full Communism, and people could have nice things. All they had to do was make a few sacrifices today to defeat the fascist capitalists and experience great rewards tomorrow!
They promised "jam tomorrow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_tomorrow), but we had jam today.
Whereas nowadays, the spectrum of jam-promises has shifted. Nowadays, the capitalist West promises its people, "Jam tomorrow, for the deserving", while most of the Second and Third World have switched to promising, "Jam never, it was always a lie meant to lead you away from God and Putin."
We can still kinda say we've got the cheap, widespread consumer goods, but not so much the rest of it.
Communism seemed to have higher growth rates for a while.