Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs
citylab.com
citylab.com
The reason why CEQA can't be amended or repealed is because it effectively gives the environmental lobby a veto over projects, and that lobby is a pillar of the governing coalition in California. Setting aside the wisdom of granting such leverage to non-state institutions, any amendments that cut down on NIMBY abuse would almost necessarily reduce the environmental lobby's de facto veto powers.
California can keep putting the screws to city councils, but unless they amend CEQA you'll see very little change in number of units built, except for large projects or well-heeled (i.e. well-lawyered) developers. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could step in. A possible silver lining of adding another conservative vote to SCOTUS would be that it might strike down CEQA as commonly applied. Likewise, they would hopefully crack down on the "community input" process that makes it difficult for developers to clear zoning hurdles. In particular, in cities like San Francisco zoning laws are so loosely defined and applied that it's impossible to submit a plan with any degree of confidence that it meets zoning and other regulatory requirements. In reality you're basically bargaining with the city like you would bargain with a corrupt city political machine in the 19th century, except it has the imprimatur of the courts.
It's a failure of Due Process, the most basic guarantee of Western constitutional law. Government is supposed to apply clearly defined laws. In particular, zoning boards and other instruments of government (courts in CEQA lawsuits) aren't supposed to be venues for democratic feedback. NIMBYs are free to lobby to change zoning and regulatory law to shape the character of their neighborhood; they shouldn't have a backdoor to change those rules on-the-fly as part of development plan approvals.
Environmental concerns under CEQA aren't "black-boxed" or generic, they have to be categorized, detailed, and public. Mitigation measures are sometimes expensive, yes.
Rubber-stamping construction permits in my island is how we ended up with rows of hotels destroying the coast illegally. Once the buildings are there, the harm is done, and no one has the money to demolish them. "Going after them after the fact" can work for arbitrary zoning requirements, but it doesn't work for environmental ones.
For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good.
To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.
The hostility is built up of years of expecting each new increase to be the last, and yet continuing to receive urgent demands for more, all with the plaintive "for our schools and our children" exhortations that try to suggest only an absolute monster would dare to say "enough".
One of many ways in which local government here is fucked up.
Taxpayers have a real blind spot to the whole 'money is fungible' concept.
> A fund is hereby established in the State Treasury, to be known as the 2016 State School Facilities Fund
> no disbursement shall be made from any funds required by law to be transferred to the General Fund.
> Bonds in the total amount of nine billion dollars ($9,000,000,000) […] may be issued and sold for the purposes set forth…
(This proposition was approved by the voters.)
Thus the schools are receiving the $y, just as promised. Only they aren't any better off, and the general fund has an extra $y in it now.
The political promise is usually "Hey, we'll implement a lottery and earmark 100% of the taxes towards education -- that'll be $20 million a year!" to which everybody thinks that $20 million will be added to the $30 million already being spent. But what happens is the $20 million lottery gets added, then the $20 million non-earmarked funds get pulled to pay for <insert other thing here>, such that the schools don't end up with any more or less than they had.
Past that, "earmarked for schools" is also a way to reframe over political opponents against the lottery as "voting against education".
I am sure some fake-libertarian HNer who wants the shrink government to the size of a bathtub drain will tell me I am wrong.
If this system were used in USA, our shameless politicians would regularly just completely fail to fund schools. The fact that some money goes directly to schools means that most of them can at least keep the lights on.
Property values (and therefore property tax receipts) vary relatively modestly with the economic cycle, but income tax receipts are fully exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. What this leads to is school funding that is somewhat directly tied to the financial markets :( So if you're in school during a recession, it sucks
I'm sure there's a ton of good-sounding legal reasons for it, but seriously?!
The legislation discussed in the article is largely about making Sunnyvale (and the rest of the job-heavy housing-light peninsula cities) build more housing.
[1] http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-acc...
In San Francisco, the situation is entirely different. We have a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area, which is 99% developed. Californians have a long history of anti-growth "pull up bridges" politics. It is not so simple as putting some enlightened developers in charge.
Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco.
Just because there's already, say, a parking lot or a Burger King with a drive-through on a block in the city doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to build apartments there instead.
Geography and existing land use do not prevent building more housing in SF. Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted.
Also, I wonder if you would make the same argument for places that are also generally though of as real-estate constrained. Like Manhattan, or Tokyo. Or the part of Brooklyn where I live.
It's not like a random housing developer can come and kick you out just because they want to build condos.
The zoning here is pretty different than in the US though. The government created a national, unified zoning standard consisting of 12 zones.
Local governments can split their land into more-or-less arbitrary regions, and choose which zone type they want each region to have. They also have some control over how large the resulting buildings can be in each region by mandating the maximum ratio of floor space to land area for each region.
The main difference between Japanese and American zoning rules is that in the US, the zones are exclusive where-as in Japan they are (mostly) inclusive.
There's a fascinating writeup about it here: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.jp/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
I also miss the freedom Japanese architects seemed to have, where a building shaped like a treehouse would be just one of several interesting buildings.
Lots of NIMBYism is inspired by some level of home value protectionism. It's possible that if you don't expect to resell your home, you don't have to worry so much about protecting its value.
IIRC a large percentage of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today in terms of design/zoning.
"Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted."
Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across the city.
You're arguing about underutilized land, which is a subject that cannot be addressed with simple assertions. In most cases, that "parking lot or burger king" is a contrived example that doesn't really exist: either the lot really is being developed (and you just don't know about it), or the owner of the land doesn't want to redevelop it (i.e. they're making more money with the current use than they would otherwise), or the land is in a place where a developer can't make a building work (pollution, neighborhood, etc.), or any number of other practical reasons.
I used to believe, like you, that "regulations" were the reason that SF has a housing problem. Then I started looking into it. Regulations make a difference on the margins, but the root cause of SF's housing crisis is simple economics: too much money chasing too little land. No matter what you do, it's going to be expensive.
Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit.
If your artificially reduce the number of units that can be built on a plot of land, you're forcing to spread the price of land among fewer units and you increase their cost.
I'm not sure that's correct. I think the reason that you see a lot at that height is because building codes change quite a bit as you go past a certain height and the costs go up as well.
3-4 is also where you need to start thinking about adding an elevator. That adds to the cost and reduces the area available for units.
http://www.structuremag.org/?p=10934
The main height limit is local politics around density, not building codes.
And so? Is it affordable live in Paris? No, it is not. I just looked up rents there, and a 500sf studio will run you around $1300-$1500USD a month. Given average salaries in the area, this does not compare favorably to SF. (As a matter of fact, the city of Paris has just enacted strict rent-control laws, because rents were seen as unaffordable.)
Also, be more specific: what part of SF are you talking about? If you're talking about the 1/3rd of SF that could be characterized as "city", the density is already quite high. Increasing the density of already dense areas won't meaningfully impact rents. But meanwhile, average density numbers completely ignore that the western 2/3 of SF looks like suburbs:
https://www.google.co.jp/maps/@37.7501516,-122.4626812,3a,75...
That's in the city of San Francisco. I dropped a pin randomly in the west side of the city. You can see Sutro Tower!
When we talk about density in SF, these are the areas that matter. But even if you could build higher density in these areas, you'd still have to buy the land (which would suddenly be much more expensive), build transit, infrastructure, and so on. There is no inexpensive solution to this problem.
Yeah, lots of discussion treats SF as if it was the "downtown" urban core of the Bay Area, but in fact only a part of SF is that way, and a lot of SF, if still urban, not the kind of core that it is often compared to.
I'm actually not opposed to higher density or building up. I'm just pointing out that it isn't a panacea, and certainly won't work if you focus on the wrong places.
I don't know the English terms here, but that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them, is just wrong. That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away.
So, just zone more apartments in that area and put big enough property tax on underdeveloped land area. That way the economic incentive of the property owner aligns with the interest of the whole city.
Doesn't sound like that's the property owner's problem. They didn't ask for the city to be built around them.
That is so wrongheaded I don't know where to start. Increasing property taxes is the exact reason you have older folks be forced out of their homes after having lived there most of their life.
No one should have a continuously growing tax burden over time.
The old person will make a good amount of money selling their home, and they can use that windfall to buy a nice new home somewhere warm and cheap, so it isn't like they're being trampled on.
It deconstructs communities.
This land is too valuable to allow you people to squat on it. We'll compensate you, so it's all fine and fair, now get out.
It's not hard to understand why people don't like being treated that way.
Subsidize? I think your concept of private property rights is under developed.
This is the gigantic pitfall of overly-individualistic property rights - that socially beneficial infrastructure development doesn't happen, because nobody has the power to siphon off enough of the value created to make it worth doing.
Property taxes (specifically on the unimproved value of the land) offers a way out of this dilemma. If you can do more valuable economic activity with a piece of land, you can and should pay more for it, so it'll be worth more. So if you spend $10MM/yr in financing for building a bridge, and it increases land value in the catchment area by $100MM, and you have a 12% land-value tax, the state responsible makes more money.
Like so what? Your property value, whether house or some artistic drawing, can go up or down based on other peoples actions. There is nothing wrong with that, that is how ownership of anything works.
When people loose business or work because those around them abandoned area or supermarket appears, they get no reimbursement. It is market force in practice. Therefore, when the same people earn on others coming in, they should not be punished either.
Prop 13 prevents this, and in fact makes it so that only redevelopment or change of ownership allows increases in property value to be taxed, which is one reason owners might prefer not to redevelop.
Full value assessment (even retaining the Prop 13 limit on tax rates) would encourage redevelopment because underdeveloped properties would still be paying taxes based on value increases from potential uses.
These kinds of stories are apocryphal.
A random residential street in SF: https://goo.gl/maps/GtKscWh1ko52
A random residential street in Tokyo: https://goo.gl/maps/QqtERUnBzXD2
According to my google maps eyeballing, the SF street is about 6 times wider building-to-building.
You have to prove this before you can retitle a car.
These homes aren't rented because there are too many tenant rights and it's more trouble than it's worth to the owner.
We have a bunch of parks (which add enormously to our quality of life) surrounding massive suburban sprawl. Within the city, there is space for hundreds of residential towers without demolishing anything but parking lots and decrepit buildings. Outside the city, in most places you could easily double the density of single family units, they are so spread out.
I don't think anyone really has suggestions that enable anyone to by a family home in Palo Alto. But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers.
Who has what rights (who deserves what) is not an abstract truth we discover. It’s decisions we make.
It's true that anyone is legally allowed to live here.
It's also true I've excluded, by legal fiat, almost all Americans. I've declared my lifestyle superior to all others and no one else can live here except those who enjoy the same.
Palo Alto is not as extreme.
But it still limits the number of houses, tells everyone what lifestyles are legally permissible (don't forget to include parking or yards!), and excludes vast swaths of Americans.
This isn't good governance. It's not healthy for the region, and it's not healthy on a national basis.
This is why many nations take away zoning power from localities and move it to regional or even national levels.
It's also why we don't have the power to vote for who lives next to us, at least explicitly. That would be local governance, but quite cruel and prone to abuse.
Why do we give localities this right to implicitly vote out people?
I would argue it is just as cruel and misguided as voting to ban your neighbor
This simply cannot work. The most desirable areas in the world are going to have high prices that exclude "normal people" period.
> Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy.
This actually happens all the time. Every time a new subdivision is built in the suburbs this is exactly what happens. Hell, even new condos being built in my small city in the downtown area do this. So unless you're going to mandate that every single development that will house human beings stratifies the cost such that each income level can afford the exact same setup and you don't allow people over that income level to purchase housing, then you will never solve this "problem".
Does it suck and is it not fair that you're not mega rich and can afford to live in Manhattan or in the hippest part of SF? No. That's just a market economy. I also can't buy a Ferrari and have to drive a Honda around. Can I afford a 1.5mm shack in SF? Sure. Why would I do that when I can afford a 1.5mm giganto-mansion on the Great Lakes?
City ordinances, national ordinances, any of those are fundamentally the same thing. You're just arguing about what's most prolific because that's in your field of vision. Why can't I buy an affordable house in Switzerland? Why are they keeping average Americans out?
Why can't I afford a 2br/3b flat in Paris next to the Louvre? Why don't they just fill that place up with skyscrapers?
etc. etc.
Maybe people want to keep their neighborhoods how they are? Maybe the charm that makes a place what it is has value, and should be protected? Why should they lose tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because other people want to move next to them?
I've lived all over the world. Moving sucks. But life is what it is. If I wasn't making the money I am now where I live and it was too expensive then I would just leave. You don't have to work for Google or Facebook or whatever. You can go have a huge impact at a smaller company that really needs the talent somewhere else in the country. If Google can't find good people because rent is too high and they aren't raising wages, don't be an idiot and move there and just get paid shit and then complain about it. Move to Michigan and work in automotive, or move to Nashville and work doing something there. Don't act like you don't have choices. You do.
Also, when does someone become 'local'? All the time on Nextdoor I see, "we need to stop the building", "traffic is bad", "there are too many people". Yet, the loudest complainers are people who literally just moved to my town in the last year. The building, etc... is what allowed them to move here in the first place so don't complain about it now.
SF is not the only city experiencing these issues, although they are amplified. Nearly every nice weather coastal city in the US is growing out of control right now as people flee much of the center of the country.
A decent article detailing the mismatch between people coming vs. housing starts: http://www.paragon-re.com/Supply_Demand_Money_and_Demographi...
Other metro areas have balanced these competing needs much better.
A lot of the laws proposed still require any proposals to follow the existing zoning (a law championed by the governor last year is one example), etc. but just prevent a few motivated individuals from blocking growth.
I'm not aware of any country or city (besides London) that does this to young people. It's insane to be making over $100,000 anywhere in the world and be expected to pay $5000/month for a studio just because building some high-density housing would diminish some entrenched gentry's view of the ocean.
The NIMBY's can all go and shoot themselves in the face, as far as I'm concerned.
You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes.
Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.
Regulation isn't so much the problem as regulation which is slow to the point where it effectively kills development. There is a balance.
That would likely lead to a solution that's actually worse than the problem. Court cases to resolve these violations will take years to adjudicate and will in most situations lead to a settlement that still fucks over those who were victimized.
A better approach would be to reform our legal system so that it isn't and/or hire more court employees, judges, etc. If our court systems are perpetually overburdened, it makes sense to clear the bottlenecks to give them the resources and reforms so that they can meet their obligations.
It's a travesty that in all the places I have lived in the US, going to court for some minor infraction or permitting issue will take me at least 3 hours or more, necessitating me taking a vacation or sick day if I didn't work remotely. When my number is called, the actual process takes usually no more than 5 minutes. Perhaps a relatively small investment in our legal system could lead to a large return
Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way.
But the wealthy don't wait anyway. They just hire lawyers.
My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper) way.
Here's what would happen in the scenario you're describing: Developers would build whatever the heck they like. Then, they'd be told "You built something that doesn't meet code". The developer would say "Well, my mistake, but it's built now and do you really want to tear down this new housing development that people paid for 3 years ago?". Now you have a political situation where the people who want to move in are being told that the building has to be torn down. Politicians would get involved, and the building (not meeting code) would be allowed to stay.
This would repeat over and over again.
I completely agree that we need a straightforward set of clear, consistent rules. But the idea of pre-approval without checking what the developer plans to build, how they plan to deal with waste-water, storm-water, parking, and a long list of other requirements, that's asking for trouble.
It would incentivize his sort of behavior too.
Are there regulatory ways around this? Of course, but they are complex, restrict the market in other ways, and lead to different distortions.
Bonds, however, create their own host of incentive problems.
This is why a balanced regulatory approach is needed - one that is more proactive than reactive. By the time we're reacting way too much damage has been done.
If its not built to code, the contractor didnt finish the job and will not be paid until the building is up to code.
If its a private investor building the building, thats on them, they shouldve hired better contractors or been more thorough in their management of their contractors
Flooding is a big issue right now in Toronto because we've had a few 'incidents'. You can build a building such that every drop of rain is gone from the property within minutes of it landing, straight into the storm sewers. But you can't have everyone do that, or every rainfall will mean a major flood in the lower-lying areas. And anyone in Toronto back in 2013 remembers exactly what that is like (last week too, nearly).
Instead, regulations now say that new buildings have to retain their water for as long as possible. You can release it, just not all at once, and hopefully not all of it. Green roofs are great to absorb the water. Car washes in the underground parking garage. Options like this exist, but they cost money.
This is only one example (storm water management). There are others. The goal of the city regulating certain engineering aspects of the buildings isn't just to protect those directly living in the building, it's to protect the city as a whole.
Fuck NIMBYism straight to hell, but don't tell me that the developer flooding my property isn't my problem.
If I were a developer, I'd be hesitant to build anything with that hanging over my head. It probably also means I'll have more difficulty getting financing. Less up-front bureaucracy, more risk and cost.
The nine counties are currently permitting about 20,000 units of housing per year [1]. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments are expecting 27,000 new households (not people, households) and 43,000 new jobs per year in the thirty years to 2040 [2]. Thus, we're about 25% short of the units we need to preserve today's unaffordable status quo. To make any sort of dent in cost of living, the nine counties need to shoot far, far higher than what we're producing today.
[1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Bay-Are...
[2] http://2040.planbayarea.org/sites/default/files/2017-03/PBA_...
Yes it was a pain having a lot of cars on the street but I didn't feel it was a hardship that I couldn't park in front of my house but occasionally (horrors) across the street.
As my passive aggressive neighbor put it, "well they can just buy a downtown permit. It's just a tax." So again, the minimum wage earners get the shaft. The discount permit for low earners is $100.
PS: my kid wants to buy up the extra parking permit allotment and offer them to folks parking the next street over.
I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.
Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots.
Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners.
In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area, where land owners are inherently millionaires), this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the public to the wealthiest few.
Where it snows, homeowners are on the hook to shovel the portion of the public sidewalk along their property.
It's not exactly unprecedented for municipal governments to treat the properties nearest infrastructure as more responsible for it than the rest of the city. It's not unreasonable that they then have preferential access to it.
An RPP program is a formalization of, "look, it'd be a waste for us all to build off-street parking when there's perfectly good street frontage here, let's agree to be reasonable and share the street frontage equally."
Of course it makes sense that would be the case. Inconsiderate people are likely not to care about encroaching on others' driveways when they or their guests leave their vehicles. They're also not likely to heed city leash laws, leaving their dogs deposit excrement randomly which neighbors tend to object to.
In some neighborhoods in town parking is a nightmare because there are not enough spaces on the street for visitors and residents. Institution of metered parking and permits was a price of success of urban redevelopment. Around here the residential permits aren't cheap, but most residents cough up the fee anyway. Even then there's no guarantee they will be able to find parking close to home, though the odds are improved and local dwellers say that's better than nothing.
Under the conditions operating here, I don't think there's a substantial "transfer of value" from public to private hands. It may be a different story in Palo Alto.
When presented with the true cost of driving, most people choose other modes. Driving and car ownership are ridiculously expensive once you realize how much you're paying for "free" parking (higher rent), "free" roads (higher taxes), and of course tens of thousands of dead people per year in the US alone. What we do now is largely force people to pay whether they drive or not, which of course encourages car ownership.
I mean, a helicopter would be a fun way to get to work but that doesn't mean we expect free helipads everywhere.
Easy. It becomes an endless source of parking ticket revenue for the city.
"Beautiful street you've got there. It'd be a shame if someone were to start parking on it. Every. Day."
I once observed that a few of my college-aged friends were subsisting on canned tomatoes and beans, and struggling to make ends meet. I suggested that they use my Costco membership to buy a months worth of supplies at once for roughly half to two-thirds or what they were spending. They patiently explained to me that part of why they lived this way was because they were already barely living within their means, which made acquiring two weeks worth of dining funds impossible (even if it meant "free" food for the rest of the month).
These fees are the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that keep people in poverty.
If you never have much surplus money, you can rarely if ever do the things that save money in the long term. You can't invest in good clothes or household goods that might cost twice as much, but last more than five times as long as what you can afford, for example. You can't buy a freezer and stock up on food when it's on sale, or cook large cheap meals and freeze them to free up time later. Often, things like good benefits from banks and credit card companies are simply not available to you. Et cetera.
Obviously things like being unable to afford preventative health care and sort of health maintenance stuff like checkups and new glasses and so on can lead to much more expensive problems down the road. "Noncritical" health services like dental and vision are big things there. It's not like you can get a root canal or new glasses at the ER.
And it's very difficult to fight back against mistakes other people make that screw you over when you have few resources on hand. Problems with your bank? In my experience, if you have money a bank is a lot more likely to help you than if you're poor. I was treated a lot better when I had thousands of dollars in the bank than I am now, when I'm scraping by. And that's if you can even open a bank account at a reputable establishment at all. That is not a given.
Then there's renting vs owning property. Owning property isn't for everyone perhaps, but if you're handy and don't need to pay a professional to do everything the house needs, it's a lot cheaper to own than rent. Plus there's the general freedom you have on your own property vs rented property which opens all kinds of doors for saving money or just better quality of life in general.
Having money means you have the freedom to live very frugally by making smart choices and thinking long term. Not having money in the bank, free to spend on the right investments and opportunities, makes that enormously more difficult. And it's only getting worse with time.
It's not only restrictions though. Of the people I know who own property, many, if not the majority, own more than one property, some of them empty. I also know many remote Chinese that own a property in L.A. It's super frustrating.
Can you afford rent, though?
Isn't a bit extreme to expect to be able to own property -- like some sort of medieval lord -- in a major city?
I don't have any hard numbers, but I suspect LA simply having become more urban and desirable is a big part of it. It's certainly still possible to buy houses in suburban flyover country very cheaply.
I think owning property would be much more expensive than renting in the case where the value is based on future appreciation, vs actual value that it provides as a living area. I admit I'm not an expert on real estate, so please explain to me whether this makes sense or not.
Point being, its not unreasonable at all to expect to be able to afford a home.
I own a condo that I rent and live renting in other part of my city. The rents cancel each other. It works very nice for me.
I definitely wish more people own their homes. I also love highrises.
For one thing, houses are cash sinks. It doesn't make sense for highly paid professionals to spend enormous amounts of time or money reshingling roofs, painting, mowing lawns, treating weeds, trimming hedges, repairing plumbing, etc. The deep specialisation and constant attention that the professional economy asks are orthogonal to all those things. It's prudent to upload those demands to the cloud (aka your landlord, at scale) so to speak.
I know far more urban professionals that were hindered by the ballast of owning real estate than those empowered by this "most basic form of security". Here in the sprawling metro Atlanta area, taking another job will very likely take you to a wholly different part of this vast agglomeration and doom you to a punishing commute unless you sell your house and relocate. The uncertainty, transaction costs and other friction kept a number of people I know in dead-end jobs until they were finally laid off.
As a personal anecdote, I bought a condo in May 2007. I was drinking the very same Kool-Aid about basic form of security and whatnot. I finally let my home go to foreclosure in summer 2015. I financed at $160K, and in summer 2015 it appraised at $85K. I still owed $140K. One of the lenders sued me for a $29K deficiency and got a judgment, and I'll be paying them $250/mo for the next six years. Some security. I grant that my effort at partaking of the most basic form of security a human needs was exceptionally disastrous, but I think the housing crash educated a lot of people about just how much security it really offers. A senseless push to ownership for ownership's sake threatens to discard those valuable lessons.
The real argument for owning vs. renting is the mortgage interest deduction, and that's an artifice of government tax policy that hugely distorts the market and the incentives.
The cost of maintaining a house in the smallish 50 stories highrises in Shanghai per unit is a lot lower than for one level detached house.
Density gives ability for a lot of savings in everything.
So we pay HOA fees for high-rise condos.
Rents in SF grew $2000 over 5 years. I would be ecstatic if my worst-case housing market outcome were a measly $250/mo. My standard of living is going to fall every year at lease renewal time until I can't take it anymore, and then I'll go live out my days in a soul-crushing Midwestern cost center IT department, if any haven't been outsourced or automated by then.
Housing costs that can't increase are looking really good right about now.
Median rent in Midtown Atlanta, where I last lived, is pushing north of $2000, which for Atlanta is a _princely_ sum considering it's ... well, it's Atlanta. It's not Brooklyn or Chicago. If I'm going to pay that much, I want Brooklyn or Chicago.
I would agree that condos tend to be more volatile than single family homes. More of them can be built quickly and when real estate prices start to drop it often starts with the condos.
I agree that owning a house is not right for everyone, but if you're planning on staying in a location for awhile it can make a lot of sense (although ATL is its own special hell). If I had not bought a house in 2011, I actually could not afford to live in the area I currently live in. Sure, taxes, insurance, and maintenance will always be ongoing cost, but for the most part my housing costs are fixed way below what rent would be now.
I also do not know what's wrong with professionals doing things like cutting the grass and trimming hedges. Every hour of my day does not need to be spent in some highly productive fashion. An hour/week in the summer, outside doing the yard while listening to music is a great way to relax and unwind.
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, the same property squeeze is happening here on a similarly massive scale, also driven by foreign "investment". In my experience, advocating for strong countermeasures is a great way to get one's self labeled as a Trump-er or anti-immigrant.
Uh, I'm not sure why Democrats would be against this, especially considering Prop 13 was passed by Reagan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1...
Hey, they're not all remote. Some of them are outgoing, a few even garrulous!
'During the recession, many market-rate projects that had been OK’d were abandoned by cash-strapped developers and converted into affordable housing projects because the government was the only entity doing any building. The community’s reception of a market-rate project compared with the same project when it became an affordable housing project was noticeably different, says Gloria, who was a San Diego city council member at the time.
“Whatever reason that might be, it could just be a pure no-growth approach or it could be a true fear of what affordable housing is perceived to be—and it’s never what it really is—maybe this [bill] is a way to address that,” he says.'
Amazing how they described this odd reaction without once uttering the words "black people".
While you have the general idea right, it really could be more accurately described as "poor people of a variety of backgrounds". I mean, there's plenty of poor latino (especially in San Diego), black, and white folks who need housing.
It's particularly galling when it happens in a charming neighborhood that used to be run-down and redlined but now that people are discovering trees and walkability are a nice thing has mostly $750k+ houses and residents who oppose any new construction of any sort. I mean, reading the nextdoor feed these are people who wanted to fight a discount grocer opening on an empty lot because it wasn't classy enough for them. They also oppose bike lanes and street calming, which is one of the reasons I left. (I refer of course to Golden Hill)
There needs to be an incentive in place for this not to happen. Perhaps we need to force the municipalities to split their employment tax with the city where the employee actually lives?
Admittedly I have no idea what legal mechanism would make that possible, but something like this would give cities an incentive to build more housing along with increasing their employment/tax base.
Forget home ownership, forget starting a family. This current situation just isn't sustainable.
In this case supply is said to be bounded by government. But imagine an alternate reality where SF was Tokoyo-fied to the max. The city has every last housing unit that could possibly be squeezed in. The peninsula is slowly sinking into the ocean. And there is still more demand for housing. What then? Supply isn't going to rise then, either.
So all I see is a whine that the government should prioritize one interest group's desires for lower prices over all the other desires and interest groups that coalesced to constrain housing in the first place.
Want to talk about the market not functioning like a market is "supposed to"? Look no further than consumers overpaying to pack into a city for salaries that do not offset the higher cost of living.
Lets say the economy is big enough to consume X new graduates of major Y. The problem we have as a nation and an economy is we've been producing between 2X and 100X degrees of major Y for many years. The majority of OPs fellow grads from that graduation year are working as bartenders or waiters or salespeople or software devs, so being stuck in horrible living conditions yet in his academic field means OP graduated at a very high percentile of class (maybe more than 99th if he's english lit, or at least 90th for a "normal" field). If OP bails there are at least 10 to 100 grads who currently have worse jobs probably not even in the field, with the same degree as OP, chomping at the bit to take his awful job.
Restriction of supply is the only way out. That means eliminating socialized student loans, and that would result in crying and squealing like the world has never seen before, so that's not politically possible. A massive world war and draft? Close the borders? We know the demand side of the economy will never grow big enough to provide enough jobs for the people already qualified and living here, so don't count on the demand side to fix things, its gotta be a supply side solution.
In the long run, a large fraction of the population has to immigrate elsewhere or die or tune in turn on drop out NEET style or do hippie commune UBI or have a (hopefully nonviolent) revolution ... I'm unaware of any viable alternative to the list. Kicking the can down the road BAU style means the inevitable crash will be much bigger.
I'd love to live in San Diego. If I could afford it and live like I do now I'd be there in a heartbeat. Not the case with San Fransisco which I'd have to be paid a whole lot more than could reasonably be expected to go near.
I'm not sure if you're talking about building a new home that replaces an existing one, or building a new home where no home has ever been built. I assume the latter, but if so, there is certainly a lot involved.
How hard would this be in CA?
Those of us who are or feel priced out of those areas, however, have no voting rights, but are stuck with the outcomes.
For example, the Mountain View San Antonio Shopping Center development has become an uninspired eyesore. I don't live there but it's unattractive.
Additionally, building downwards is extremely impractical where downwards is below the water table, which is the case in many parts of most major cities (since cities tend to have historically developed along rivers or shoreline for access to drinking water and transportation).
One of the long term side effects of this enormous housing shortage and the presence of prop 13, is that 50+ aged people are making up a larger and larger % of the population, as many of the younger people get pushed out (the next generation has nowhere to live). Already just in the last 10 years, % of 65 years olds and up has increased from from 13% to 18%. I'm guessing this trend will continue for the next 10-20 years, until the housing starts to correct.
Having said that, I don't believe any amount of legislation will solve the housing problem in California. The appeal for living in California extends beyond US borders and there is a large population abroad willing to move to CA.
I suppose the implication here is that teachers and firefighters make a middle-income salary. The author is gonna freak when they find out how much housing a teacher or firefighter salary will buy you in a major US metro city real estate market.
It is insane that so many teams in such dense areas have these butt-in-chair policies that require employees to live in expensive areas and commute great distances.
Frankly, there are tons of jobs that can be done just fine from anywhere. Managers have to get over this idea that they can't keep track of people wherever they are.
There are towns doing this, but it takes time.
That is an excellent question that you could ask about many of our modern social dilemmas. The beginning to an answer might be found in Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
NIMBY:
Acronym soup can be maddening. Sure, one can look up every acronym but this can reach the point of jarring the reader out of a story. It is often a better idea to help the reader retain the desired mental state by taking a second to clarify acronyms.
Anyone who's read legal documents know just how easy it is to do this. The first time you use the acronym you define it, just like this (JLT). Any time after that the reader knows what it means without having to run a separate search and change mental states, JLT.
Wouldn't it be better to try to grow tech outside of California in places like the Dakotas and Idaho where there is plenty of land and people in need of work?
The American heartland could be a place rich in opportunity if we invest there as a nation. Considering urban/rural income differentials it would ease inequality also.
Instead, those homeowners now have a 60-90 minute to SF or Sunnyvale, where all the jobs are.
How about hiking in a wilderness area? Skiing?
Now, true, if you want high-quality Chinese food, Boise may not be your cup of tea (pun intended). But I bet there are enough tech people who like the outdoors more than the big city to make a small-ish tech hub in someplace like Boise.
The climate doesn't support skiing or trout fishing, but outdoor activities are very big here. It's a significant part of why many people stay here rather than going to NYC or Boston.
Determination, patience, and wealth are what create destinations, even if you don't have California's climate. (And Idaho's climate is pretty nice, from what I've heard of it, certainly better than the South's and the interior Midwest's.) And in the meantime, there's a great deal of unspoiled nature to enjoy -- as a sibling comment points out.
Also I think you've forgotten we live in a free market. Tech has decided to base its industry in the Bay Area. And unfortunately the new participants in this industry have a higher purchasing power than the existing community. You can not tell people where they can and can not live or work. So if your strategy is to limit the supply of housing the only outcome possible is higher property prices with the existing residents pushed out.
Next, the homeless situation has truly grown to epic proportions. Take a peak into any of the inbetween areas, and you'll find a small encampment. How many of these exist, I can't say, but once I began to understand where the homeless go, I started to venture and take small peaks - they're everywhere.
Next, the homeless started showing up, en masse, in large public places. The most obvious is the parks near San Pedro square in San Jose. Yes, this area has always had an "element" to it, but that element used to live in the nearby housing. Now, the element is in the park.
I was talking with a friend who lives in a very expensive and beautiful home near this park, and this friend was really annoyed at how the homeless population around this house has really exploded. At the same time, this friend had not identified any link to the homeless population and crazy median home prices, now approaching $1 million for San Jose. I asked this friend to please consider the statistic of a $1 million median home price in a city with a population of 1 million, and what does that really mean for its residents?
My feeling is that, in time, this is going to be incredibly bad. The first problem is an increase in property crime. When people are forced out of their shelter, they will become desperate. Some percentage of any population is going to be pre-disposed to considering crime, so increasing the number of people who are desperate will increase the absolute number of people who will turn to crime.
Police forces do not exist to protect - they are really just for cleanup, and currently there is a new trend that will eventually get reported of how the nature of burglaries, especially in the San Jose area, have changed. It used to be that perps would case and then burglarize when owners were out for a weekend or vacation. Now, the owners are out for only a few hours and return home to find they have been burgled. Obviously they are using some more sophisticated surveillance or network tech of some sort. In at least one precinct, the police have yet to catch anyone performing burglaries in this manner.
With this new trend, a group of, say, five clever people can do 10s of millions in property damage annually. As these small groups are increased, the dollars in damage become very real, plus the emotional impact of feeling insecure in your own property will often push people over the edge to sell their homes or at least move away, converting their residence into a rental unit.
The second trend that I fear will begin to occur is the less clever criminals who simply mug, loot, and smash-and-grab.
Finally, there will simply be violence against the property owners. People are not dumb, as we can see by this article that even the politicians and bureaucrats are beginning to get concerned for their jobs. In San Francisco, there was the violent demonstrations against the Google buses. I don't know in exactly which way the violence comes out or is directed, but when you force enough people in to desperate circumstances, you will eventually have enough of those who are pre-disposed to violent "solutions" that they will find a target.
In all of this, people will begin selling and moving out. The property values will drop, not because of increased supply of housing, but because of an exodus of existing buyers coupled with a sharp reduction in new buyers. Eventually, companies start moving jobs or entire companies to other areas (owners, executives, and managers don't want to live in all of that), and demand for residential housing falls yet further.
As the prices drop, people will consider selling to get equity, so the prices drop further (selling encourages selling). Getting things to go up from here will be a serious problem. All of the governments are maxed out, credit-wise, and their revenues will tank.
At this moment, today, it seems like increasing housing is a bad idea for cities and property owners because they will lose at least some of the current equity in their homes, but depending on the property owner's time-horizon, they may well lose all of their equity.
Yes, you can downvote me but consider formulating a counter-argument.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you, but I will elaborate: there's very little you can do to stop people from moving to California, short of forcefully putting them on buses and sending them away (which is what some cities actually do[1][2]). What you can do is figure out a plan before they show up to provide them decent housing for a fair price, or else they'll figure something out, something likely to be illegal/extremely uncomfortable/look a lot like homelessness.
Some anecdotes: one friend of mine lived in a house-boat in Berkeley for 2 years while going to college. Another lived out of his van in Los Angeles. These are regular young people, both born in California, trying to make things work.
It has been extremely hard to build new buildings in hotspots throughout the state for quite a long time. You could argue that preventing growth to meet demand is, in a sense, what it means to "stop growing" (short of turning folks away at the state line). This is what I meant by my comment.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html
2: https://thinkprogress.org/nevada-gets-sued-for-dumping-homel...
Now that's an oversimplification. There is a lot to be said for mixed income communities and whatnot, but just saying "oh I can't afford to live here this sucks" is not good enough.
People are moving to California to get better jobs, and most of them can comfortably afford to live in California. The people who are ending up in buses have lived in California since housing was cheap enough that they didn't have a problem, or since they were children.
People who can't afford to live in California anymore also can't afford the cost of moving. So they end up on the street and unable to find work or leave the state.
Most of the people I know who complain about the housing cost in California are young people who make considerably less money than their parents do but expect to be able to maintain the lifestyle they had growing up. That's incredibly unrealistic and I doubt that's ever been attainable unless you're exceedingly wealthy.
When my parents moved to the area I grew up in, it was not even close to the desirability that it is when I eventually moved out. I've done what they did. I bought a house further away in a less expensive neighborhood because I can't afford to live there.
The amount of young people who think they have a right to move in the opposite direction and maintain their lifestyle is strange to me. Tons of people I know moved to bigger, expensive cities out of college/high school but they had to live with 3 roommates to do so. Eventually, when you want your privacy back, you have to move away.
For most young people, you can't have your cake and eat it too when it comes to where you choose to live.
It's not "supply and demand" until the supply caps come off. It's just policy set by the entrenched.
It's their community they set the rules. Why have communities or governments, or even countries for that matter? Fundamentally they do the same things.
Why should I not be able to just come live in your house or just build a house in your backyard? Oh you have a great view? Let me just build a huge nonsense wall here and live in a small shack or something. Why not?
There's not much precedent around protecting the scarcity of assets as a job for government. Maybe taxi medallions?
>Why should I not be able to just come live in your house or just build a house in your backyard?
Because I own my backyard. On the adjacent lots, if you can buy them, knock yourself out. No one owns their view, unless they actually own a view easement. The government has no business enforcing property rights that don't exist.
>Oh you have a great view?
Are you seriously suggesting that someone else should be prevented from living the life they want, the job they want, affordable rent, enough space to raise children, etc. to protect someone else's view? That's an unbelievably fucked up level of dystopian.
But hey fuck you right?
>Are you seriously suggesting that someone else should be prevented from living the life they want, the job they want, affordable rent, enough space to raise children, etc. to protect someone else's view? That's an unbelievably fucked up level of dystopian.
Me me me me me.
I want an affordable house, with enough space to raise children, affordable rent, the job that I want and I want to live right next to Breckenridge so I can ski all the time! Oh and I want a short commute, freshly paved roads, bike lanes, HUGE parks, the best schools, and free community events. That's the life I want. So I guess I get to move in and start demanding those things?
Sorry. Life doesn't work that way. Whether it's somebody's view, or the neighborhood they moved in to, you aren't entitled to things like that. Housing will be expensive in desirable areas. You don't get to just move in and complain it's expensive. Move somewhere else or deal with it.
Ridiculous.
But yes neighborhoods do get to control things like that and they should. Ever wonder why there are no skyscrapers in DC? Ever wonder why there are home owners associations that can dictate what colors and upkeep you do on your property? My example was extreme, but rules and controls exist for a reason. If you don't like it, then don't live there.
No you're not. You believe in private property in views.
The fact that I'm critiquing a poor argument has nothing to do with my philosophical views. Just as I could argue a fascist policy would be poor to implement or is inconsistent (or the opposite), I can do the same with liberal democratic property rights.
While a view may not be property (and this depends on what laws are written etc...) communities in this system of government regularly create laws and regulations for said communities. It's just a normal thing that happens in democratic societies. Being upset about that doesn't change that fact, nor does it make those communities immoral or unethical or anything like that.
Let's try changing this up. "It's my community, so I set the rules. We're seizing the means of production, and any bourgeois scum who don't want to give them up can be put against the wall and shot."
Chances are you suddenly developed an objection. Maybe "we'll set the rules we want in our town" tends to get overridden from above for a valid reason? I dunno.
And towns do set rules all the time. People get together, vote in legislators, and set rules. For example, building height restriction. I don't understand what your problem is here.
Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
Who said anything about Ayn Rand? Are you unfamiliar with political philosophy? Have you read Robert Nozick for example? I find it curious that you're using Ayn Rand here.
But with that aside, I am in fact arguing morals that have grounding in the real world. If you're unable to understand how force is abstracted then I can explain it for you, but you have to be willing to be educated on the subject.
The analogy presented was incredibly poor, one is seizing property, the other is a normal function of a liberal democracy.
It's a pretty common thing in the United States. There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
The area has housing problems, no doubt about it, I'm not arguing that they don't, but there is clear legal, and social precedent for establishing rules for communities throughout the United States.
Indeed. Communities can collaborate to keep things the way they'd like them by leveraging local networks. One particular and exciting example of this sort of policy is Redlining[1]. Agreements such as height limits aren't as bad (and are less explicitly racist), but it's a similar sort of idea. I understand the reasons why someone would want this for their neighborhood (and in most neighborhoods throughout the USA it's not a big deal), I just think in these examples where there's extreme tension between external demand and the desires of current residents, something has to give.
> There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
I'm not against historic neighborhoods in general. I live in NYC and am aware of multiple, but I feel that some, such as parts of the West Village, have been harmful to the city as a whole. The point of a historic neighborhood should be to preserve exceptional period architecture: for example, the Upper East Side historic district in the low/mid 60s preserves a particular style of late 1800s row houses[2]. Many parts of the West Village that are historic are preserving a bunch of shitty 1 or 2 story buildings constructed when the area was a slum in the teens and 20s, after half the neighborhood was torn down to build the IRT 7th Ave Line (i.e. the 1/2/3 train) that would be covered as 7th Ave South[3].
To use a historic neighborhood as a chance to "preserve community" is, I think, an extreme distortion of intent (although the ultimate result for many well-positioned historic areas is preserving a particular sort of extremely wealthy community).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
2: https://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/east61s...
3: https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/201... (note the 1 story structures and general architectural hodgepodge)
You can't stop us from moving in. Controls on internal migration in the United States are unconstitutional. The best you can do is allocate new units in proportion to new residents so that we don't wreck the existing market.
Because how the fuck can your view, the uncrowdedness of your street, be worth more than everyone else's pursuit of happiness?
You're ruining their pursuit of happiness. They want to live in an uncrowded neighborhood that was how it was when they bought their home. If you don't like the home prices then don't live there. It's quite simple. I choose not to live there when I could because I believe the prices are too high. Instead of cramming my family into a crowded area I just live in a nice little home with a good income and space. You're free to make your own choice.
Great! I pay ~$1500/mo extra to protect the uncrowdedness of Berkeley. You'll pay $1500/mo to restore the Rust Belt to economic greatness?
We'd need an enormous amount of building just to accommodate the people who are already here.
You want to stop growth, put controls on migration or job creation. Controls on housing aren't working.
I'm frankly surprised that there isn't more effort to bring tech business into Denver, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta... They all have some, but there's plenty of room for growth and the income to cost of living ratio for tech work is pretty nice... No you don't have the relatively great year round weather, but you do get more options.
But that happening isn't particularly good for California or the Bay Area.
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.jp/2016/06/how-to-raise-gdp-10...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14304869 and marked it off-topic.
The main thing capitalism is meant to do is prioritize where resources should be focused. And they get focused where they get the most value.
But, thinking of counterarguments, it appears there is a network effect going on here, i. e. the value (an attractiveness) of a tech hub is proportional to something larger than the sum of its components.
The majority of non-environmental water is used to grow cash crops in the central valley, like almonds, which take 1 gal/almond.
Overall, urban residents have far less impact on climate than exurban residents who drive around in SUVs. It is in the best interests of everyone on planet Earth to make our cities denser and more inviting [1, 2].
[0] - http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108
[1] - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/23/city-dwe...
1. Unregulated water use that allows for production of export cash crops will continue
This could easily be fixed by regulating water use properly, such that farmers have economic incentive to grow crops that are less water intensive given that CA is not water rich.
2. Market prices of current export and current import crops will hold constant regardless of growth
That's not how markets work.
If there was a sudden surge in lettuce demand, farmers in Salinas would respond to increasing prices by switching some fields currently used for export crops to lettuce, which would be consumed locally.
This is aided by point (1) above, where we could push this shift with water regulations.
On the whole -- your concerns seem best addressed by sensible regulation of water in CA, which is a long term political problem. Opposing the farm lobby is well known third rail in the CA Leg.
Nativist population control programs are not the solution to a market failure of water distribution, however they might be implemented. Opposing housing construction is even a really poor way to implement a nativist population control program.
Moreover, current irrigation methods in the valley are not ideal for water conservation. Many farmers have water rights dating to the 19th century allowing nearly unfettered access to whatever water they can find, providing no economic incentive to invest in conservation infrastructure.
There is no Californian Malthusian crisis, just a story of poor resource management.
Do the almond growers receive subsidized water? I don't know how else the economics of this works out. (Unless the water used to grow almonds isn't up to the purity standards of drinking water, and they're counting on the tree to filter it...)
A gallon of tap water isn't, and a gallon of agricultural well water is even cheaper.
This [0] is a pretty good analysis of how California spends its water. One interesting point: instead of carefully installing low-flow fixtures and rationing showers and letting your lawn die, you could pay the california alfalfa industry about $2 to grow $2 less alfalfa for a year.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...
Access to ground water is so unrestricted that the entire Central Valley is sinking! https://www.revealnews.org/article/california-is-sinking-and...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/food-water-footprin...
some highlights:
1 gallon of coffee - 1056 gallons of water
1 pound of chicken - 518 gallons
1 pound of beef - 1847 gallons
1 gallon of wine - 872 gallons
1 gallon of lentils - 704 gallons
Want to prevent the central valley sinking [1]? Maybe we should have less cows and pigs and selling a lot of the meat abroad.
[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drough...
Now we're being told we're greedy, and our neighborhoods should be replaced with 3 story townhouses on 1200 sq ft lots. No room for Fido.
Makes me wonder what we're working insane hours for -- to settle for permanent apartment style living. At least we don't have cage houses yet.
Nobody in a city deserves their own yard. Public parks where everyone can BBQ make far more sense. Want a dog? Move to Montana, or get a housecat instead.
You seem to want sprawl; cities need density.
The YIMBY movement is strong throughout the Penninsula, between SF to San Jose -- areas previously considered suburbs.
Clearly a 5000 sq ft lot is unacceptable in SF, but where _is_ it acceptable? San Bruno? Menlo Park? Mountain View? Sunnyvale? Pleasanton? Oakland? And for how long?
The article is talking about State laws. Presumably they would apply to all cities, not just SF.
If you're neighbors want to sell for $10MM each to a developer who wants to build an apartment, they should be allowed to. If your other neighbor wants to tear down their house and build a duplex and rent the other out, they should be allowed to. If you want to keep your dog and bbq, you should be allowed to.
The general idea is to allow people the ability to extract the wealth from their property. It's possible that they are "drinking your milkshake" by extracting wealth from surrounding properties too. But everyone was given the same opportunity.