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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.

It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well.

So let's be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.

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> But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling

These people are property owners in Berkeley, California. While I'm sure yarns can be spun about the difference between asset value and cash liquidity, this is just not an impoverished class, sorry. They've seen their property values go through the roof, then the trees, now through the first cloud layer into the open sky with eyes toward low orbit. Arguing that they don't have an "alternative" is a little spun.

To wit: cry me a river. Build those homes.

Not everyone who owns a home has purchased it decades ago...

Per Zillow, the very house in the linked article is up 14.6% just in the last 12 months. Decades what now?

If somebody bought it recently, chances are they own no more that 20-30% of it. Which means if the value goes up 14%, they are in good place (though not seeing a cent of that money until they move), but if the value goes down 20%, they are in trouble. And if they have to move, they are in real trouble.

I had the impression (from the last financial crisis) that if prices go down, home owners just mail the keys to the bank and walk away.

Assuming they have little equity to start with, of course.

I get the feeling this was written about more often than it happened. A lot of journalists were trying to justify their salary with ad views while the economy was in free fall.

Do you have data or any sources to go with this feeling?

It would be nice if the article provided some data.

Fine, but those people are not going to be getting another loan any time soon.

They are, actually. The market is hot again, and banks aren't idiots: they know that people pay their mortgages before other debt, even if they have a foreclosure in their past. Walking away from an underwater loan (which is a rational decision that connotes good decisions in the future) doesn't actually hurt your credit in the same way that getting behind on your credit cards does (which is evidence for poor money management skills).

It's not that simple. Bankruptcy or foreclosure ruins your credit and you have still to live somewhere.

Wait, highly levered investments are risky -- who knew?

That's unfortunate, but I'm not sure where it's written that investments must always go up.

No, and nowhere is it written that you get to decide when existing rules should be changed.

Our democratically elected legislators make and change the rules. It's not clear to me why they should preserve the value of an asset for a few people just because the asset might go down. Especially if there's a high cost to people who don't own similar assets.

Can you help me understand why that's a good idea?

Democratically elected legislators can also choose not to make new or change existing rules. If you want to leave it to democracy, that's why we have what we do now.

Yeah, I feel you. But I also feel for people who have worked their whole lives to build towards a comfortable retirement, put their lives' worth of sweat and tears into that, and then had it pulled out from under them.

There's a hyperbole to express on both sides, but I can understand why people who are worth $1-5 million and are past their 50s might feel threatened by this sort of development.

They aren't in a particularly marginalized position, but they are probably frightened about the rapid change and possibly out hundreds of thousands of dollars plus time they don't have.

I agree, build those homes and reduce the power of small groups to put up large barriers, but I also understand where the residents are coming from to some degree.

> There's a hyperbole to express on both sides, but I can understand why people who are worth $1-5 million and are past their 50s might feel threatened by this sort of development.

They can sell their house and live a life of luxury virtually anywhere else in the world.

I have a hard time sympathizing with such people. They're not out anything—they're amongst the most privileged people in the country.

Sure, I understand where they're coming from. That doesn't mean they have my sympathy. I understand why billionaires advocate for lowering their own taxes—that doesn't mean I give them an ounce of sympathy.

I'm sorry, but I really can't shed a tear for the economic worries of people who are worth $1-5 million, when even in first World countries there are hundreds of millions of people who are scraping by with negative worths...

if you have $5 million, you could pay yourself $50k a year for 100 years.

There are taxes, but people who have 100 times the median household income in the bank might be able to figure something out.

It makes sense that they're fighting for their money. And people deserve basic empathy, no matter what the situation. There could be solutions out there that make the most people happy.

The cynical view is that this is their greed, and they are taking money from people with less means with their demands.

Less cynically... we can try to find solutions to assure them their house value won't plummet, but encouraging a view where more prices at least stabilize won't put _that_ much strain on them, compared to the help it would give to other families with less means.

If you have $5 million reasonably invested, you could pay yourself approximately $200k per year until you die (the average long-term expected return from the stock market is > 4% above inflation) and likely leave some cash to your kids.

Perhaps a solution would be to allow people to sell a percentage of the equity in their homes - let them pull some money out of their investment, while still not having to move.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mortgage

That's usually marketed to older people.

It's not pulled out. They can sell to developers. The value of the land below their feet will increase with broad upzoning. It's just they won't have their neighbors grow zucchinis.

Nobody is forcing them to build this housing on their property. They own it, and it's theirs to do with as they like. They DON'T own the neighborhood and when others want to move onto another property they have no ownership interest in and that happens to be on their block, they don't have a property right to prevent that.

Sure, but these people aren't seeing their wealth erased. If anything, there'll be a discount of say 10-30%, probably realised over a period of 20 years, and there's a good chance the only effect it will have is that prices stop rising faster than income, but will rather stay stable. i.e., making it more affordable, without them losing any money.

If that's the price that has to be paid, I think there's no moral argument to be made on this discussion, what remains is a legal-political challenge.

Finally, I do believe this is all part of investing into the housing market. If you want a risk-free investment, choose government bonds. If you want to play the housing game, this is part of the story. You can't expect to invest a few million into an overpriced industry with a scarcity-controversy, and expect to reap risk-free rewards. Everyone who buys a house in these areas knows that your money pouring in and your legal defences are inadvertently screwing with housing affordability. If you're okay with that and want to make a risky investment, so be it. But then don't treat it like some kind of safe retirement plan you worked your entire life towards, it's not.

>To wit: cry me a river. Build those homes.

Why not just build a massive cluster of skyscrapers and put all the people who want cheap rent there? It would cause much less impact on the existing homeowners at large. To me that is a much more equitable solution for both parties.

Personally, I would say if you can't afford to live there, don't. There are plenty of places to live and many people do.

> Why not just build a massive cluster of skyscrapers and put all the people who want cheap rent there?

1: where? and 2: these homeowners will oppose it, because it still drives down the value of their investment because it drives down demand.

There is no way to drive down demand but keep prices high. That's not how economics works.

1. Pick a few contiguous blocks, it doesn't really matter where.

2. The logic being, if you have to screw people out of their equity (retirement) might as well make the smallest footprint.

Screwing people out of retirement? When you buy a house there is no contract with the city to keep the city from expending and improving. Such an agreement would be against capitalism. And... What about the teachers, janitors, and other necessary individuals that make a community work? Most of them have to drive hours just to get to work in the Bay Area since all the housing is going to engineers making at least 100k a year.

For a single earner making at least $100k a year, I'm looking at moving away from the Bay Area for any notion of not blowing $50k on rent every year.

I can't even touch the housing market in an area inconvenient to my work without literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity. That is cash that I simply do not have, nor do I have wealthy relatives that can front me the money. Please don't assume that just because an engineer has, what looks like a high income on paper, that they can even afford houses that cost millions of dollars in a high cost of living region as the Bay Area.

My coworkers that have set down roots here have to drive hours, and they're also making "at least 100k a year". What about the engineers that need jobs and homes, and the people that move just for their job? City's full, go away.

There was no assumption. You just completely missed my point.

You are looking to moving out of the Bay Area for cheaper rent. There are people who make a lot less than you who can’t afford to live here. They drive from Tracy and Stockton to get paid a fraction of what you get. Stop crying.

I'm moving for more than cheaper rent, but thanks for playing. There are people that make six figure salaries that can barely afford to make ends meet due to the cost of living, and that is a fact. Try swallowing $4000 a month in rent for the suburbs, after CA taxes, before utilities/food/gas/car upkeep. Even people with six figure salaries are having to face a reality that they are being pushed out in favor of people with even more money. If I want to buy a house, guess what? I'm commuting from Manteca or farther. Affording Tracy would be a luxury. It's a numbers game and more people than you're willing to admit are hurting.

You can get a nice two bedroom 20 minutes from downtown Austin for ~$600k. You can get in on the ground floor and be part of the NIMBY block in 15 years when nobody can afford to live here anymore! :)

Loved Austin when I lived there. I went back earlier this year and it just wasn't the same. The hypergrowth over the past few years has turned moderately annoying traffic into a driving nightmare, which compounds everything because Texas is very car-centric.

Btw you realize this all started because you didn’t understand my comment and decide to be a troll about it.

> I can't even touch the housing market in an area inconvenient to my work without literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity.

You and the parent agree. guywaffle's comment talks about people who make much less than you and are in the exact same situation. Absolutely true that a high income doesn't make spending 50% of it on housing any better. And someone who makes a smaller amount doesn't even have that option. You're both screwed, just in different degrees.

How large of a place are you looking for? $4,000 rents a three bedroom in much of the bay area.

Of course there's no contract like that. What there is instead is a democratic process for the residents of the city to guide and shape how their city evolves and improves.

You're watching it play out, but some seem to not like that the residents of the city have a greater say than the "not residents" of the city. I find that perfectly natural, normal, and desirable.

No, what you’re seeing is a bunch of greed. Residents in cities like Berkeley and Palo Alto love the economic boom the tech companies are causing, but they aren’t willing to shoulder the responsibility that the boom brings. So they are screwing over their neighboring cities forcing the burden on them.

Or the greed of people who want the big salaries of SV but don't want to pay the big rents that go along with it. See, that word is loaded and works both ways.

“Screwing people out of their equity” is not nearly what is happening here.

To sell the 3 units in the new lot, they will have to be relatively high end and there will probably be no clear net plus/minus in property values attributable to them. Instead of fighting the change tooth and claw, the neighborhood should be ensuring that the development as-built is high quality. For one, the lot setbacks look like to be as much as 20 feet, which is quite good.

Or you could just find a cheaper place to live.

Or if an area is zoned for this type of construction, which it is, then maybe the neighbors should stop whining and those homes should be built.

Where? How about Antioch or Richmond ?

That's what they said about the Mission several years ago.

Cheap rent doesn't mix with skyscrapers; the article notes this. Per unit cost gets high when you build tall.

Uh, earthquakes?

Uh, Tokyo?

Vast majority of Tokyo is small buildings. Skyscrapers are fucking expensive and exist in posh districts only.

Yes? http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15024911 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1155413... And more close to the point, here's an example of the kind of work that goes into building really tall buildings in California, which makes them expensive to live in and not at all likely to become cheap housing: http://www.cnn.com/style/article/quakeproof-skyscraper-new-w...

1. Units in skyscrapers are fundamentally expensive, whereas small apartment buildings or townhomes or quadplexes can be relatively cheap per-unit.

2. Having moderately higher density has a lot of useful knock-on effects, like better walkability and transit support.

3. The objections are rooted in selfishness and classism/elitism. It's like someone objecting to a homeless shelter in their neighborhood because eww, homeless people. This common attitude doesn't mean we should never build homeless shelters.

China has been able to migrate hundreds of millions of its citizens from rural farms to urban skyscrapers, and it hasn't been fundamentally expensive. Obviously costs in the US are much higher, but that's the problem that should be attacked. Replacing single family homes with two story apartments doesn't deal with the problem long term, and invites political battles that may be unwinnable.

It absolutely deals with the problem long-term, because population isn't going to increase forever. We need more density in the US, but we don't need skyscrapers everywhere, that's ridiculous.

The US doesn't have 500 million out-of-work children of peasant farmers to resettle in cities in the next 2 generations.

My guess is that if we re-zoned the Bay Area and replaced 1/4 of the current single family homes with 3-to-6-story apartment buildings we could cover several decades of regional housing demand and push housing prices down by 50%.

6 storey apartment buildings are too tiny, they need to be 35+ floors tall

I live in a 7-story 28-unit Manhattan building. It sits on a plot roughly the size of my parents’ home in Cupertino, which houses 2 (6 around Thanksgiving). I don’t think the Bay Area has a 30x housing shortage.

You need to build with some reserve in mind

I don't think many middle income and lower folks are in skyscrapers. A lot of buildings in China cap out at six stories, which is cheaper (no elevators needed!)

Also, earthquake protection makes SF based buildings more expensive to build, especially as they grow tall.

This is absolutely true. I have spent about a year in China and when you are in those older neighborhoods it is mostly 4-5 story walk-ups. Some of these small units are worth more than a single family home is parts of the US especially if they are next to good schools.

China has a massive housing imbalance. The skyscrapers are being purchased as investments by the newly rich and are out of reach to low/middle income folks. Also, not all those skyscrapers are good quality. In our condo on the 37th floor, we had to have the bathroom flooring completely redone because there were leaks all over the place. This building was built like 5 year ago! In addition, when you walk around the construction sites of those new skyscraper projects, you see those countryside workers crowded into hastily constructed dorms, 4 or 5 people in one tiny room. You can see them sitting around eating their small portion of rice and veggies. It is definitely a sight that would make most “living wage” Americans cringe...

My wife grew up in China and she loathes skyscrapers. We bought a single family home here in the USA with a nice size backyard and she has the happiest wife in the world. She often goes in our backyard just to sit and watch the squirrels. She also has a piano which she can play any time of the day. In China, neighbors complain when start playing your piano in those crowded skyscrapers....

I have an unproven hypothesis that most people on the planet would love their own single family home like we have here in the US. They aren't living in those dense urban areas because it is hip and cool. They are living there because they have no choice.

Um, isn't the average cost of a house in any major Chinese city MORE expensive than in the US?

A typical two bedroom in Shanghai is $870k [1]. Homes in Chongqing China are more expensive than in Columbus Ohio [2] -- yet wages are about 1/5th ($9k/yr in Chongqing vs $46k/yr in Columbus) [3]

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/07/18/china-beijing-property-housing...

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/278350/average-annual-sa...

They're going to have a lot of issues with that policy long term. The US started doing that in the 50s and 60s only to find it raised crime rates and decreased economic productivity (these became what we know now as "the projects"). Not until Jane Jacobs came along did we begin reversing that trend, and we are still dealing with poor urban planning in the form of suburbs and luxury apartments.

In my town people object to homeless shelters near residential areas and schools because of all the used needles that mysteriously show up around the existing shelter.

We already tried housing projects, it didn't turn out well.

Somebody's investment doing well isn't a reason to penalize them. Lots of things have had way higher returns than single family homes.

Haha yes! Perspective.

Consider your logic in a different manner:

I assume you work in some form of technology. Technology and related jobs have seen their wages increase astronomically compared to textiles or fast food. Sorry, you're not impoverished. You, and everyone else in your town, are now subject to 100% tax above a certain threshold, at 110% of full time minimum wage. This is so we can give that money to people who chose to not enter technology.

Ridiculous. Moderate taxation on a progressive marginal increase is fine. The extreme is absurd. Property rights are what make trade work without having to hire armed thugs.

I absolutely reject the notion that a home owner's personal reserve price to walk away from their property should be coercable.

That being said, my neighbor should have little say over what happens on my property outside of mutually agreed covenants.

If your argument is “these people should feel differently”, then you have already lost. Their votes and community involvement are, in the end, the only things that matter. Your principles mean nothing; they need to be convinced.

This is the biggest failing of modern debate. It seems like we've thrown compassion and putting ourselves in other people's shoes and now just say "your view is stupid, change it". Imagine someone presenting that to you? Is your immediate thought "hm, you're right! convincing point!" or "Go fuck yourself"?

It seems that reluctance to consider other views is closely related to the level of education, and place of upbringing.

This IS not a failing in modern debate, but a much bigger issue.

I have seen less educated people show zero empathy for the opposing side many more times than the reverse.

Also you cannot have debates with some people, e.g. right wing authoritarians.

Some people are just born that way.

Educated left wingers seem to be most ignorant tbh.

Right, it's not about education as much as it is knowing people who don't share the same views as you. If everyone you know thinks the same way you do (which is as common among left wingers as right), then it's much easier to believe that people who don't share your views must be insane/less than human/your enemy.

From the article, it turns out that their opinions eventually did not matter. It would be nice to change their opinion at least so they aren't bitter about it.

Also considering it's Berkeley, I'd wager many of those same people sanctimoniously decried urban sprawl, favored high density, walkable, sustainable development... but when it was going to happen next door they were as NIMBY as anyone else.

Some people want to live in a place that looks like this:

http://www.unitedcountry.com/CountryHomes/img/Country_Homes_...

and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:

https://www.cmgsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Presidio-...

and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Hong_Kon...

The problem is that someone who moves to the first type of place doesn't want to have to move again when it turns into the second type of place, and someone who moves to the second type of place doesn't want to move again when it turns into the third type of place. It's not entirely unreasonable.

Not entirely unreasonable, definitely. But it seems somewhat expect-able over the course of a lifetime. A lifetime ago the world was a rather different place, and I imagine the same was true of the lifetime before that.

Seems like you either stay and fight (which history implies does not work) or keep moving to new similar-to-before places. Always. Expecting otherwise is not entirely reasonable either.

Well I guess we just need to figure out how to geographically distribute the world's human population once and for all and never do anything that will ever require that to change, then.

Or you could let the people who live in a given place have a vote as to whether they are OK with new housing.

And if the local residents don't want a new housing development because it negatively impacts their home value, then maybe someone will find a way to make it worth their while (i.e. real-estate developer grants current residents a stake in the returns of the new development if they stay for 5 years after the new housing is constructed).

> Or you could let the people who live in a given place have a vote as to whether they are OK with new housing.

This is the local equivalent of Trump-style “close the borders and build a wall” anti-immigration rhetoric.

It's not entirely unreasonable.

You're right. It's not at all -- like not even a little bit -- unreasonable to desire that your neighborhood stay the way it was on the day you bought into it. That's why you bought there in the first place, presumably; you liked it the way it was!

But it is 100% unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to help you achieve that goal. Times change. Places change. Building more density in the Bay Area is good for the most people and should be supported on those grounds.

I desire a lot of things. They aren't unreasonable desires. But that doesn't make them good policy goals for society as a whole.

I don't think it's controversial that NIMBYism is bad for society. It is controversial that society, rather than local or hyper-local (block-level) residents, should write zoning policy.

There should not be zoning policy. It exists out of racist midcentury policy to keep "those sorts of people" out of the neighborhood

Or to keep an oil refinery out of the neighborhood.

There are plenty of industrial uses that it's perfectly sane to segregate from residential neighborhoods.

I might agree that zoning should be all-or-nothing with respect to residential uses, and that there should not be such a thing as a "luxury residential only" (i.e. single family home only) zone.

Interestingly, this is what NIMBY used to mean (i.e. we all agree there should be industry/prisons/landfills/etc, just please not near me).

But this is something totally different.

This is just urban incumbents opposing further urban developments in their neighborhoods on the grounds that they’ve got theirs and there’s no upside to making it any easier for other people to move there, too.

This isn’t about keeping the oil refinery out. This is about keeping other people out.

That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.

>That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.

"Fuck you, I (literally) got mine"?

You are talking about covenants, which is concerned with what types of people live in an area. Zoning has to do with the types of buildings.

I’d suggest “The Color of Law” for a better rebuttal to your argument than I can provide here. Zoning absolutely has been an important tool in establishing and maintaining segregationist housing aims where more explicit policies like restrictive covenants were rejected by the courts.

There's no obviously correct geographical unit for zoning. Placing a major industrial plant is county-level (or even above), a mall probably affects people in about a 2-3 mile radius, an 6 story apartment building maybe a few hundred yards, while fence regulations should be decideable on a block level. Perhaps the solution is to flip the problem around, define (tightly) the geographical boundary of residents that will be non-trivially affected by a change, and require a vote (perhaps even of a super-majority) in that area for the planning permission to be approved. Developers who want to build an apartment block will have to convince or compensate a few dozen residents in a certain radius (or buy their properties outright) to get their assent, but residents across town don't get a say. If you want to build an airport near a city, you'll be smooching a lot more people.

While a single project might only materially affect its immediate neighbors, the pattern of land-use decisions in aggregate harms the region as a whole (housing shortage, astronomical rents, displacement) much more than an apartment building could harm its single-family neighbors. This is why something like regional housing needs allocation is a good idea: let local communities control the how and where, but don’t let them screw over the rest of society on the “whether or not.”

The entire planet is nontrivially affected by creating and preserving car-dependent settlements; this sort of thing needs to be handled at the level of international climate treaties.

The entire country is nontrivially affected by the inaccessibility of moving to where there are jobs. Shadows on your garden don’t come close to being stuck in a place with no opportunity.

Imagine if other law was made at such a hyper-local level. Should residents of the 1200 block get to write themselves a murder statue that says residents of the 1100 block are fair game?

Good government is an antidote to the patchwork of small-scale actors making decisions in their own interests but dumping the downside of those decisions on society.

"I don't think it's controversial that NIMBYism is bad for society."

I disagree. I think that NIMBY has its place. Maybe not in Berkeley or 101-corridor Marin or in (insert miles and miles of shitty two story residential in SF) ... but I can quickly think of examples where NIMBY created tremendously valuable outcomes that were worth fighting for.

Here are a few, from places I live or have lived:

- West Marin County, with the accompanying Pt. Reyes National Seashore, is an incredible, awe-inspiring example not just of nature, but of the foresight and the hard work that a small community of people had to keep out development and large roadways.

- Boulder, CO, with all of its flaws and idiosyncrasies, is a quite impressive achievement that has grown up over many decades - starting with the original open space ring circling the city and continuing with height and density restrictions, etc.

Those are very expensive places to live with a fairly high bar for entry (and certainly for home ownership) ... and that is OK. It's OK that not everyone can live in Aspen. It's OK that we can't afford a home in Gstaad. It's OK that ranches in West Marin are expensive.

The world does not owe you these things.

Sure, yes, fine, but it’s not OK that most Americans have been priced out of the nation’s largest, most productive urban centers. It’s not OK that even the “middle class” is spending an unsustainable portion of its income hanging out to these areas with what are basically speculative and ill-advised real estate investment schemes. And it’s not OK that we’re still letting the automobile dominate regions where fixed public transit is the obviously better choice.

The world doesn’t owe anybody anything. You’re right about that. The few white families lucky enough to buy cheap subsidized housing at just the right time in history as new highways ripped through existing (many times conveniently black) neighborhoods didn’t deserve to get rich off that decision.

But here we are.

It’s almost as if deserve’s got nothin to do with it.

TLDR version: "Fuck you, I got mine" is not good for anybody.

Parks and recreational areas aren’t really NIMBYist, more like “this should be everyone’s backyard.” Regardless, I should be more specific, NIMBYism is bad for society when it effectively locks people away from economic opportunity. If you want an exclusive resort town in the wilderness, knock yourself out. (As long as your staff have somewhere to live).

I rent my apartment. I know that I might have to move. The people that own the building might want to do something else with it and since they own it that's their choice.

Single family homeowners own their own homes. It can't get sold out from underneath them. But they don't own the plots next store or across the street. If their happiness with their living situation is dependent on those plots having the same buildings on them then they need to buy those plots too. Then they get to decide what happens to them.

A homeowner NIMBYite is exactly the same as a renter that agitates for imposing rent control.

Sorta.

When we lived in the city I had to file a permit to fix my 3' high fence. Pay something like $100 just to have "permission" to start working on something that was rotting and falling over. I don't really consider that "owning".

Ditto zoning and a bunch of other things. When we had the chance we moved out to the country so we could use our land how we wanted without having to live in the covenants of what the city lays down(for instance one of the local towns doesn't allow beekeeping, regardless of plot size).

I totally understand that there's a place for high density living and that some people enjoy that life. However when you see rapid change in these tech centers understand that are some people didn't sign up for that when it came around.

[edit]

I should add that I really wish more companies would support remote work. It both solves the housing issue and lets people live in the areas that fit their lifestyle better.

On a side note: Can we talk about fence height restrictions? Ain't that some bullshit?

eh, a shitty neighbor can make for an easy case on fence restrictions. Its one thing if you have a legitimate reason to put a high fence up, but removing all restrictions would make it really easy for a neighbor to fuck someone over. Say your neighbor is on your south side and puts up a fence that blocks a lot of sunlight to your land, now your garden is useless or you have to spend more money on lighting. Another example, though not for height, would be putting a fence up along your shared driveway up to the street, now theyve made it more dangerous for you to just get out of your house onto the road

But...Freedom!

My dad solved that by buying the land in front of his house so that someone couldn't build and block his view.

I get that people want it all but for example. Friend bought 26th floor corner apartment in a 32 story buiding with amazing view. 2 years later someone built another 32 story building next door blocking 30% of his view. Did he have some kind of right to prevent that? Another friend bought a lot and had a house built on it in a downtown-ish area. All houses in the area have no yard, at most they have a backyard porch big enough for a couple of chairs. His house now blocks most of the sunlight into at least one of the houses around his lot. His neighbor complains. If she wanted not to be blocked she really needed to by the land.

I don't see any other reasonable solution to these types of problems. The fence seems like yet another where the owner of the land should be able to build the tall fence. I say that as well as my mom used to sunbath topless in our backyard as a kid. She mostly took advantage of the fact she didn't expect anyone to look over the fence but the fence was only about 7ft high and houses around us all 1 story tall.

In other words permit rules are bad when they stop you from doing improvements you like (fence repair), but good when they stop your neighbor from turning a single home into a duplex.

Isn't it a reasonable expectation for city and suburb dwellers that when you affect your neighbors, you might have to get permission? And when your interest is greater than their inconvenience, that you should be granted permission? And that authority should be an expert at it and impartial?

> but good when they stop your neighbor from turning a single home into a duplex.

I wasn't talking at all about what the neighboring plot does. The parent was making the claim that when you 'own' you can do whatever you want with your land which is far from the truth.

Look, I have no beef with people who want to live in high density spaces. That's totally cool(and more power to them) however in our case we had retired neighbors all up in our business(since they had nothing better to do) and city codes dictating exactly what we can do with our land.

Unless you research extensively before you buy(see beekeeping above) it's very easy for your neighbors to make your life a living hell after you buy your house(see also HoAs).

In my town, extremely rich people or banks never seem to have problems getting the necessary permits and even exceptions.

The cops will even close a major street for the food catering trucks for the private parties they throw on public lands and in public buildings.

You could argue that a community of people collectively own a given area.

Also, is there a substantive difference between being a "NIMBYite" and simply opposing market externalities?

People opposing market externalities would say an activity should be punished or aggressively taxed to minimize the amount of it that goes on. Tax and fine polluters to protect the air. Tax and take the parking away from drivers to protect bicyclists and pedestrians. Etc.

A NIMBY says it's fine to do something, just don't do it near me. Yes, freeways are necessary, just not too close to my house. Yes, we need a waste-water treatment plant, just don't put it in my neighborhood.

Unless you are a literal cartoon villain, you probably don't want public policy to minimize having a place to live. You just want people to have their places to live somewhere else.

> You could argue that a community of people collectively own a given area.

You could argue it but it would be wrong. They could collectively own a given area -- form a corporation and buy a neighborhood. Then they would collectively own a given area and the collective entity would be entirely within its rights to decide what does or doesn't get built on a piece of land it owns (subject to the corporate governance rules).

That's essentially how co-op apartment buildings work. But these homeowner NIMBYites don't want to do that. They want to exercise the incidents of ownership without making an investment.

Given how local governments are set up they have the raw power to do what they are doing. But the rest of us don't have to pretend it is okay. This isn't stopping a gold mine from polluting a river, it's not building public schools, it's not defending the country from invasion -- it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

> They could collectively own a given area -- form a corporation and buy a neighborhood.

They do, it's called a municipal corporation, and it makes it decisions through voting.

Even better, you don't even need to be a homeowner to influence the decision of this corporation -- anyone living there is allowed to vote.

This cuts both ways -- people who 'didn't invest' also have a voice in property development, precisely through that same democratic process that you seem to consider so illegitimate.

> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise, there are plenty of places that don't practice much zoning, like Houston. Anyone who buys real estate in the Bay Area ought to research exactly what the local laws in the area are first, and if they don't that's on them.

> precisely through that same democratic process that you seem to consider so illegitimate.

In ancient Athens a plebiscite could exile any citizen. Do you consider that a legitimate exercise of democratic power?

> I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise

Is it fun to beat up strawmen? Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason and not naked special pleading is more Rawls than Rand.

> In ancient Athens a plebiscite could exile any citizen. Do you consider that a legitimate exercise of democratic power?

Absolutely, it was part of the social contract and certainly understood by any citizen that their continued membership in the body public rests at the pleasure of the the public will.

Even today, it's the right of sovereign nations to claim or revoke citizenship as they please

> Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason

I agree that public policy ought to be driven by reason, but presuming that you have reason on your side, when 'reason' just so happens to also be nakedly self-serving, doesn't seem very honest.

Either it's ok to vote and agitate for your self-interest (including yourself), or it's not. You can't say 'it's evil for homeowners to want what's good for themselves', but then not apply that same standard to yourself.

> Given how local governments are set up they have the raw power to do what they are doing. But the rest of us don't have to pretend it is okay.

What's to pretend? Local governments have a responsibility to their residents. Granted, that doesn't give them free reign to hurt non-residents, but they can't simply ignore the concerns of those who fund them and elected them into office.

I say this as someone who has been negatively impacted by the restrictive zoning in the bay area. It would benefit me personally more if they allowed more dense housing.

> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

Who's property right's are being revoked, the real estate developers? Again, what's the difference between that and the gold mine? The gold mine is a good thing. It provides jobs, adds wealth to the economy, etc. And yet, a gold mine polluting a river increases health risks, mars the natural beauty, and decreases the property value for those living downstream. We expect the gold mine to help reduce or bear the cost to those they affect.

On the other hand, real estate developers who build lots of high-density living also increase health risks (traffic, pollution), mar the natural beauty (bulldozing trees, fields) and decrease the property value of those living nearby. You may argue that it's not to the same degree, and I would agree, but I think it's still the same kind of situation.

An industrial resource extraction operation is not in anywhere near the same moral category as more neighbors.

I'm confused, are you saying that industrial resource extraction is evil? I certainly don't think so. It's a necessary part of our economy and our quality of life. Think the applications for gold in medical devices, for example.

But the benefits of resource extraction to society don't justify ignoring the interests of people living nearby. Ditto for creating new housing near highly desirable urban zones.

If anything the gold mine has an advantage in that, while people can live other places (even if at a somewhat lesser quality of life) you can't can't really build the mine somewhere else.

The people that own the building might want to do something else with it and since they own it that's their choice.

Well, that depends. One could argue that by allowing you to establish a home in their apartment building (in exchange for rent), they've taken on a responsibility towards you. Nobody can build up a decent life if they were under the constant fear to be evicted. That's why as a tenant, you are especially worth of protection from arbitrary actions would make you lose your home, no matter if the building you live in belongs to someone else. In other words, there must be a very good reason for the landlord to make you move out, such as e.g., they need it for themselves to live in.

At least that's one way of seeing it.

When you lease an apartment, you agree to a lease term that secured that apartment for a particular amount of time. That's the arrangement. 99 year leases are possible, if that's what you're looking for.

That depends on what legislation you live in. The model I described above conforms to the law in Germany.

"A homeowner NIMBYite is exactly the same as a renter that agitates for imposing rent control."

Perhaps.

But a democratic process that generates NIMBY policies is the same as a democratic process that generates rent control: neither outcome is off-limits in our Democracy and both should be respected.

I personally value democracy more than I value land-use policy in one particular place. I further find it disheartening to hear of disregarding democratic outcomes from the very same progressive left that should be championing that process.

Depends how you frame the democratic outcomes - if the 4 neighbors all vote on it then a new housing proposal will fail but I don’t see that as particularly democratic. If the entire state of California voted on it (because to a small proportional extent it affects everyone), it may pass. And that is hopefully the trajectory we are in, people are electing state representatives that are starting to pass by-right legislation, plus there will hopefully be related ballot measures in the next few years. It is democratic.

I think the conflict here is between democracy at different levels (street/neighborhood-level democracy vs. city-level vs, state-level). Not democracy vs. anarchy or authoritarianism.

The outcome of the democratic process is respected in the sense that it controls what happens. There’s no reason to respect in the larger sense of thinking the outcome is just simply because it is democratic. Majorities can act, and often do act, unjustly.

It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that the people ought to exercise thier power virtuously and it is entirely appropriate to chide them when they do not. Nothing in the “progressive left” philosophy is to the contrary as far as I’m aware.

The simplistic notion that whatever a bare majority of the people want is good went out of fashion more than 2000 years ago.

Not unreasonable to have that desire, just like it's not unreasonable for me to desire people throwing money at me in the streets. Just unreasonable for me to expect society to cave to my desires when it's in not in society's long-term interest to do so.

Ever increasing property values caused by artificially restricted zoning is basically a generational Ponzi scheme. It's stupid and wrong and it can't last forever. And like real Ponzi schemes, the only people who benefit are those who got in early.

If you want to look at it that way, all of human civilization is a giant Ponzi scheme. Exponential growth cannot be sustained indefinitely on a finite planet, or even in a finite universe.

No, because human civilization doesn't depend on that growth. A stable population works fine.

Whereas, the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.

> A stable population works fine.

That is far from clear. No human civilization has ever had a stable population.

> the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.

That's true, but that's not what I was talking about. What I was talking about is people's reasonable desire for a stable environment. Rising housing costs is just a side-effect of that plus population growth.

You might as well blame the situation on people who have babies as on people who want to limit growth in their communities.

>People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail.

You're damn right. I assume you don't give half your paycheck away either.

>Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.

Right wrong and moral? From perspective of whom? Those are such subjective constructs. Is it right, wrong or moral to actively attempt to triple the population of an already densely populated area when there are millions of underutilized acreage in the continental US?

>It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well.

It's actually a pretty decent investment, but does involve risk. Instead of paying someone rent and owning jack shit, you are paying a mortgage and keeping at least some of that money. Most houses will increase in value as well. Also, your mortgage payment won't go up every few years like rents do, particularly in densely populated areas. You also get a decent tax break on a mortgage. You can also borrow against it at much better rates than cards when you are in a pinch (or are even unemployed).

>These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible.

Which people? The people who bought houses, or the people who want to devalue someone else's home so they can get cheaper rent in a already overpopulated area that they just have to move to? That isn't entirely clear to me.

> millions of underutilized acreage in the continental US?

It's that land in Bay Area and SF which is underutilized. Because high density makes sense. Yes, I enjoy living in NYC.

> devalue someone else's home

A house is not money. It does not have a guaranteed value. It's property, like stock. If one's shares go down because of e.g. competition, people don't see it as an unjust assault.

Don’t confuse yourself - YOU don’t see it as an unjust assault, not “people.” The 64% of Americans who do own a home would say otherwise. Also, houses are not like stock, nobody lives in stock.

It seems to me that the group of people with nothing to lose (equity) and everything to gain (lower rents) never see it as unjust.

We all need shelter and anything you do to artificially suppress the markets ability to serve this need has extremely negative consequences on a majority of the bay area population. Would it be fair to artifically limit access to other essentials like education or proper nutrition?

By artificially constraining supply you are forcing externalities onto renters as well as new homebuyers, and in the same breath limiting others ability to meet this demand with the land they own. For the majority that can't afford the inflated rent you just kicked them out or made it impossible for them to even move here to seek opportunity.

I do not see how this can be just.

We all need shelter - I cannot argue with that. However, we all don’t need shelter in the Bay Area. There is a great sense of entitlement in thinking that anyone should be able to move to any city they so choose and live comfortably. Pick a different city to find opportunity if you can’t afford to move to San Francisco. Space is at a premium, it’s no secret. I’m not against development in general, but in the case where you buy a piece of property in an area on the premise that there are 5 other homes in the area, and then artificially, as you say, 3 homes replace what used to be 1 home for a total of 7 homes, I wouldn’t be happy, and neither would you.

For the character to change a large percentage of landowners need to decide to meet the demand by building new housing or increasing density. Why is it reasonable for possibly a minority of landowners to limit a large percentage of other landowners from changing the use of their land to meet demand? Especially if a voting majority desire the change in density?

It’s reasonable because that how land ownership works. It appears that perhaps you are not in favor of the principals that come along with land ownership, like zoning. Put yourself in the position of a landowner. You buy a house (the largest investment you’ll ever make) in an area zoned for single family homes. Then along comes a tech boom/bubble and your home goes way up in value. Awesome, you made a great investment. But now the city has become overpopulated and someone wants wants to build a 60 story apartment building a block away from your house in the area zoned for single family homes because people feel entitled to live in San Francisco and change the zoning laws to allow them to build more housing. Well, tough day for you, parking is a nightmare now, traffic is a mess, oh and by the way the value of your most valuable asset, your home, was just halved.

In reality if they do start building up the city extensively, the bubble will have burst by the time the housing capacity is much higher and people won’t want to live there at that time anyway, they’ll move somewhere cheaper - just my two cents.

Zoning has its uses, but the core of your argument seem to rest on a belief that cities should not rezone because it violates some agreement. I am not aware of any such agreement in law or moral codes, although I do appreciate the sentimental attachment to what was when things inevitably change.

Quite to the contrary rezoning is a normal way for cities to respond to changes in needs. You do however have a right to decide over your own land and to negotiate with other interests on changes to zoning rules, and I wholeheartedly support that.

Considering that land value has generally risen with density in western society and the economic drivers denser cities have become, I do not think your argument that higher density reduces monetary land value holds up to scrutiny.

What this article is describing is the opposite of how land ownership works.

A Berkley land owner decided they wanted to build something on their land that would satisfy the zoning requirements. Their neighbors didn't like it, so they lobbied the city government to ignore the zoning requirements and not let them build it.

>parking is a nightmare now, traffic is a mess

Good. Your sense of entitlement to drive and park everywhere all the time does not and should not outrank other people's need to live where there are jobs (or, for that matter, the long-term viability of the planet).

>by the way the value of your most valuable asset, your home, was just halved.

I couldn't think of a brighter public policy success story than redistributing the unearned income of the landed aristocracy to people who are trying to make a living. If we build enough for the newcomers, at worst you're going to see returns at parity with inflation. Am I supposed to be sympathetic that you were thwarted from profiteering on a shortage?

It sounds like you're against the idea of land ownership, so there's no logic that could change your thinking. Also, it's laughable that you think that 64% of the country can be considered "aristocracy."

I think the parent incirrectly plays into an antagonistic story between renters and landowners, which is not present in a healthy market with balanced housing supply. However, I do not see how the parent argues against land ownership. The parent quite the contrary argues for more rezoning to meet demand, which to the contrary is very pro land owner since you therefore can extract more value out of your land by building more housing units on it.

If so few people want to live in a city that there’s no contention for housing or presssure to increase density, then it isn’t healthy. Even without newcomers, a healthy city would be reproducing at least slightly above replacement, so it would still need to grow.

Granted, most American cities are this way. That’s because they are shriveled ruins of their former selves thanks to White Flight and deindustrializaton.

We disagree that prices need to temporarily go up to give developers an incentive to build to meet demand. Landlords will buy real estate from these developers and the normal return should be 3-8% on that investment.

There should be a lower return for less efficient land use, buildings that are badly maintained or outdated housing stock.

Uh, what? The idea of land ownership is that you have an exclusive right to use your own land.

You seem to have confused land ownership with its complement, ie. the right to dictate the uses of neighboring land but not your own. I don’t see any inverse deeds listed on the MLS. The closest thing I can think of would be voting shares in a corporation that come with permission to live on its land. But I’m guessing you’re not in favor of permitting more coops/TICs.

That many suburbs function this way is an emergent property of the political process, which can and should be unmade through the same process.

Owning a home in a coastal city or other job center is a question of bloodline and being in the right place at the right time; it’s not realistically available for any amount of wage labor, which is why I call it aristocracy. People whose home value corresponds to their earned income (most homeowners) aren’t in that category.

You missed his analogy -- he didn't say that people who own a home don't see unjust assault, he said that people who own stock don't see unjust assault and people who own a home should be like them.

>Right wrong and moral? From perspective of whom? Those are such subjective constructs. Is it right, wrong or moral to actively attempt to triple the population of an already densely populated area when there are millions of underutilized acreage in the continental US?

If bay area land was not underutilized you would not need zoning to artificially constrain housing supply. We would also not be supply constrained on housing.

Artificially causing a housing shortage is arguably immoral because it cause high housing costs that in effect limits access to the rare opportunities found here. It makes it almost impossible to grow up with lower middle class parents or work in a low-pay low-skilled position, and mingling with the tech crowd to work your way up.

* A snapshot of more recent U.S. Census migration numbers shows that nearly three-quarters of those who have left California for other states since 2007 earn less than $50k a year.

* San Francisco's African American population has declined from 13.4% of the population in 1970 to 6.1%

* 41 percent of San Franciscans spend 30 to 50 percent on rent, despite a lot of rent control for longer-tenure residents and a population average income being $104k as well as median $77k

It also limits the number of and kind of opportunities that can be found here.

> devalue someone else's home

Maybe devalue the actual structure, but upzoned land is worth more. The only people getting economically screwed here are condo owners.

Not really. They also own part of the land and can redevelop. It's people in maxed out land that get screwed.

Nice to see xenophobia being openly advocated on HN.

Maybe you should look up that word before you throw it around.

I'm on very solid ground calling NIMBYism xenophobic. (It is also racist given how people of color were systematically excluded from housing until very recently.)

So xenophobia is fear of people other countries.

NIMBY means "Not in my back yard." That includes everything from HUD housing, to nuclear power plants, to fracking, to prisons.

I don't see how being afraid of nuclear disasters is in any way xenophobic. I also don't see how not wanting your property devalued by building cheaper houses is either.

I think you don't have a clear understanding of what those things are, particularly in regards to the article we're discussing which happens to be in present day time.

Or maybe that's your "I want to win" tactic and you are just throwing it out there to see if it will stick. That might work in some corners of the internet, but it doesn't seem to be working here. If you have a rational argument about the discussion, I invite you to present it.

Xenophobia is fear or loathing of outsiders.

Nuclear plants are a ridiculous strawman. We're talking about places for people — living, breathing human beings, with thoughts, dreams and aspirations — to live in.

Ensuring other people have a place to live is more important than your property values and neighborhood character.

I have an extremely clear understanding of how the white upper middle class has systematically used the state's monopoly on violence to exclude anyone else from joining their ranks.

So redefining words so your argument makes sense isn't a valid tactic. From a dictionary:

xen·o·pho·bi·a ˌzenəˈfōbēə,ˌzēnəˈfōbēə/Submit noun intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.

Nimby ˈnimbē/Submit noun a person who objects to the siting of something perceived as unpleasant or potentially dangerous in their own neighborhood, such as a landfill or hazardous waste facility, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/xenophobia includes "strangers".

In common parlance in the United States, NIMBYism includes opposition to housing. That is also what we're talking about in this thread.

Maybe in your little bubble, but not generally.

If you want, replace all instances of "NIMBYism" in my text with your preferred term. Maybe "housing NIMBYism"?

You'll see that the changes don't actually make a difference to any of my arguments.

Their usage seems fine, perhaps you should look up the word before criticizing people for using the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/xenophobia

It's not far-fetched to associate NIMBYism with a fear of the strange and foreign.

Thanks. (I prefer the pronoun they.)

Does 'xenophobia' have other connotations in the US besides its established meaning?

Xenophobia is fear or loathing of outsiders.

NIMBYism prevents outsiders from moving to your neighborhood. It is xenophobic in intent and effect.

According to other comments, people don't seem to care about who moves in / from where, rather they care about their property value being diluted.

That is a distinction without a difference.

>"You also get a decent tax break on a mortgage."

Used to get a decent tax break. But Republicans made sure to stick it to Blue states with reducing the mortgage cap for deduction from $1M to $500k.

I have no idea why this is not a huge grab-your-pitchforks thing in California.

It is, but we're a Blue state without the representation warranted for our size because of how our system works.

That's only for newly purchased homes, so current jumbo mortgages can still deduct for up to $1M in principal.

It's not always clear the selfishness is strictly financial. If your land gets zoned for higher density development (or similar regulations/barriers are removed), and there is strong demand, then the value of your property can go way up.

What they generally want is to enjoy the current character of their neighborhood (big lots, green space, still close to the city, walkable, etc.), but also realize substantial gains in housing value by keeping new housing off the market. They might gain even more money if their particular land could be developed and they moved, but then they woud have to move.

Many people don't care about the potential monetary value change, it's only about the character of their neighborhood that you mention. They just enjoy the way of life in a low density, single family home neighborhood - the gardens, space, easy parking, low traffic, kids playing in the street. That's why they chose to live there.

I think their is a strong bias that people which free time tend to care more about the neighborhood. Most people may not agree, but we rarely hear from an unbiased same.

They are welcome to buy all the empty lots and tear downs and make community land trusts out of them, or otherwise legally restrict their property with covenants.

But if they don’t own the property, they need to stop trying to get Berkeley zoning to break Berkeley laws. Thank goodness for Nancy Skinner’s law that will make the city pay legal fees if the city does more crazy stuff like this.

I can’t wait to vote Jesse out of office at the next election.

Good point; but if it's only that, why not simply cash out of the urban core once it starts to expand, and buy a larger property further out? You might deal with a longer commute, but that's just down to money; if you could afford the same square footage in the city center...but alas.

This sort of answer angers me. I bought a house in town because it is convenient. I don't want to drive an hour to work each way. The idea that I will likely be taxed out of my home in ten or fifteen years is irritating and the idea that I should be happy about it because I'll make money on my house is also irritating.

Then move somewhere else with their millions in appreciated value. There are plenty of places in the country where you could buy a beautiful home with gardens, space, easy parking, low traffic, and kids playing in the street for 1/5 the cost of the Bay.

> But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling.

That's not true at all. They could sell their homes for their mindbogglingly inflated values to condo developers in exchange for multiple units in the new buildings. They wouldn't have to move at all (except temporarily, while construction is going on), and would even gain an asset that they can rent out or sell later.

What they're fighting for is the right to keep their low-density suburb, single-family home, lifestyle. Which would be fine except that their insistence on doing this is impoverishing everyone else.

Heh. Try telling the average family that their lifestyle is unsustainable and unfairly subsidized by others.

They will have a litany of troubles and problems that they go through, ready to fire off, no matter how well off they are.

I know I have one. It's not fair, so I try not to listen to it, but I do have one. A whole litany.

> Try telling the average family that their lifestyle is unsustainable and unfairly subsidized by others.

Well the fact remains that it does not happen. When I purchased my home in 2003 I received no tax credits, support from the government, bonuses, or a pat on the back. I put 20% down after saving up everything I could for a solid 5 years after landing a great job after college, which again wasn't subsidized or had grants for.

No one else does this but me and the ridiculous sense of entitlement or attitude of it being "unfair" that someone else can't afford it really stems from a deeper issue.

Prediction: you vote GOP, yet do not consider the support you get from the government in terms a mortgage interest deduction, FHA loan eligibility of people who could buy your house propping your house value up, nor in fact how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (govt supported) actions makes it possible for you to rely on a fixed 30 year rate for your mortgage. Oh no, you did it all by yourself.

(Don't tell him GOP is getting ready to cap mortgage deductions at $500k. He's probably not going to be crazy about the SALT deductions going away either. Out here in flyover country it all sounds great!)

Only for new mortgages.

If he bought a home through hard work, I’m fairly certain he’s aware that he’s paying taxes through the nose to support these programs as well. I know I am.

Get off your high horse about the government charitability towards homes, the government didn’t provide these programs out of its own back pocket, our tax dollars provide these programs.

Dude. Home ownership is one of the most tax advantaged investments in the US. Rather than telling me to get of my “high horse”, why don’t you get of your Austrian economics horse and point to a more tax advantaged investment and we can chat? Can’t? No, because it does not exist unless you’re into carried interest territory.

> No one else does this but me

Are you being sarcastic?

If you're not a Bay Area (or other unaffordable area) resident, then your viewpoint is rational. The price-to-income ratio of your new neighbor should be about the same as your price-to-income ratio when you moved in.

If you're a resident of metro San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Washington DC, or Boston, then you are expecting different behavior from your new neighbors. They will need to save for 10 or more years for that down payment of 20% due to competition from each other. The income required to live in these metro areas is much higher. The lower-middle class is pushed out. Upper-middle class folks who want to live below their means don't have the option to.

Fairness is the wrong metric; life in all societies is fundamentally unfair.

It is just nonsensical for you to expect other people who are chasing opportunity (those metros are where the best jobs are) to give up, when you chased that same opportunity when you moved where you currently live.

Because our economy is changing, this means it's harder, but don't knock people for trying.

How is that impoverishing everyone else? There's an incredible amount of empty land in the US - the UK has 12 times the population density.

I don't understand why people feel they have a right to move to a particular place and live there at a particular price.

I agree. A city can grow too much, similarly to how startups can grow too much and end up wasting a lot of resources and having to cut staff. The Bay Area growing indefinitely is not necessarily good for the Bay Area.

> I don't understand why people feel they have a right to move to a particular place and live there at a particular price.

I don't understand why people feel they should have the right to decide what their neighbors do with their property (as long as they're not opening up a waste treatment facility or something). But that's beside the point.

There are two main reasons why "just move" isn't easily actionable advice: jobs and family.

The reason expensive areas are expensive is because they have desirable jobs. (One) reason cheap areas are cheap is because they don't have as many desirable jobs. Those of us working in tech in the Bay Area accept that we earn high salaries in part because the rent is so high. So we grumble but we can make ends meet and life is mostly good.

For those who aren't so lucky to be working in hot industries with good pay, support of family and friends matters much more. Single-mom has grandma looking after the kid so she can work; if she moves to Des Moines or wherever the rent is lower, she loses that free childcare she'd been getting. Since most jobs come through referrals, she'd have to have professional and social networks in those cities before moving. Otherwise it's just a leap into the unknown to move before having an offer in hand. If you don't work in tech, I don't think having 15 recruiters emailing you before breakfast is the norm.

65% of SF residents are renters. If renters did not vote in lockstep with landlords/homeowners and against developer interests, we could change the politics to allow more housing to be build and stop some of the more egregious abuses of existing processes.

It does not make sense for renters to vote against developer interests and for homeowner/landlord interests, as a supply constrained housing market increases rent.

Even if you have rent control, wouldn't it be nice if you could move out of your moldy unit into a new one or from a one bedroom into a two bedroom without breaking the bank? Or from Berkeley to Menlo Park if that is where you find a job, without loosing out in rent?

They're building tons of new apartment buildings in Redwood City, which is right next to Menlo Park. So come on down!

Great! We need to do much more of that, and build it near public transit and extend public transit to new up zoned areas. For instance BART would enable a lot of people to avoid traffic if it extended around the whole bay and straight across from Fremont to the peninsula.

I'm not sure how I feel about apartment buildings. On one hand the density option can be good, on the other it's consolidating property and rents into the hands of even fewer..

Condo buildings can be just as dense as apartment buildings. The difference is that people without savings can live in apartment buildings.

Sure, but often you can't own the place. As a data point, I live in San Antonio. I'm very bullish on the city and would like to invest in some of areas being renovated along the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. Nearly all of the new developments along the rivers are buildings with units for RENT. You simply can't buy a condo in these spots. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a disparity between "can be" and "have been".

Fortunately there are a lot of options here still, even though I do hope density does not go up too high; oak trees here are protected and a huge part of the city's character. If you want higher density than the trees can allow, maybe go to SF. If you want higher density than they allow maybe go to Chicago, NY, Hong Kong, or London. IDK.

People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.

Yet this problem got started in the 1970s: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-..., and I don't think human nature suddenly changed then. So what did?

In addition, Tokyo doesn't have this problem: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-....

So it's probably something other than pure selfishness per se.

I don't understand why people want house prices to go up.

I own a small house (with a mortgage). I'm hoping house prices go down over the next 10 years. I'll probably want to buy a larger house, so if prices come down I don't have to come up with as much cash. OK, I'll get less for the house I'm selling, but the difference in the prices is also less than if they were to go up.

As long as I sell the current house for enough to pay off what's left of the mortgage, I think I'm winning if house prices go down.

Because many people can't budget or plan on a multi-year, multi-step horizon like you are expressing above.

For those people, if their house goes up in value, it represents an important source of financial security (if they haven't gutted it via refinancing and HELOCs for renovations returning $0.60 on the dollar, new cars or vacations)

Even for people with decent financial planning skills, the home is such a large investment and typically bought with 5-33x leverage, that a small price drop is dangerous to their position.

I get this concept but I dont think thats how it works. The correlation on the prices of a 1000 sq ft to a 3000 sq ft is not 1: if the first one increases 100% the second one might increase 50%.

In cities, it is often that bigger appts are cheaper per sq/ft because the market for them is much smaller than 1br/2br.

It’s all relative. You own a cheaper house now so if prices went down your absolute loss in selling would be less than someone who sells a house that’s worth let’s say 10x more than yours, maybe the next house you want to buy. Also, not everyone is in the market for a new house in the 10 years, so sure you want houses to be cheap because you’re going to be buying, but it would be the opposite if you were looking to downsize. Home prices going up means personal net worths going up - most people like that.

Because mortgages are one of the few leveraged investments Joe Consumer has access to. As such, it is often one of the only ways people can retire or afford property at all.

Also, because it is highly leveraged for many, especially in the Bay, to have it reduce in value can actually easily bankrupt you. But for many, they feel they need to take the risk to lock in home prices, and also to grab what they still cling to as "the american dream" of owning a small single family home. Can't say I blame people for being upset by that, especially after this tax reform theft.

Are we sure that upzoning destroys homeowner value? If the land under the house is authorized for a more productive structure, the land should be worth more. It doesn’t seem obvious whether or not this would counteract the loss of “quiet suburban neighborhood” appeal.

Houses are usually based on what houses in the area sell for. So if you own a $200K house and a builder buys your neighbor's house and demos it, then replaces it with 3 cheaper houses @ $100K, the average goes way down.

It's more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

> Houses are usually based on what houses in the area sell for.

I think it's more complicated than that - certainly $100K houses would not be the same size and features as $200K one, and when determining the price estimates, this is usually taken into account - 1bd/1br is not the same as 3bd/3br.

It is more complicated, like I said. It's not a linear valuation, meaning a 1500 sq. foot house won't be 1/2 the cost as a 3000 sq. foot house in the same neighborhood, but it will be lower and push down the average home value.

If houses in a neighborhood were sold strictly on a price / sq. foot basis, there probably wouldn't be much devaluation, in fact you would probably get an increase valuation based the costs incurred to just build a house without regards to sq footage. (meaning the first $125K is the first 1000 sq feet and the 2nd 1000 is only $75K more.

> meaning a 1500 sq. foot house won't be 1/2 the cost as a 3000 sq. foot house in the same neighborhood, but it will be lower and push down the average home value.

Average home value is largely meaningless if you are averaging substantially different houses. It only has meaning if we're talking about heterogeneous neighborhood or about something like a large area in rough comparison with another large area. Well, maybe not entirely meaningless as you still can get rough indicator of "price level", but useless in comparing the effect of this or that measure. It's like the reverse of the joke when Bill Gates walks into a pub and average income of everybody in the pub doubles. May be technically true but not a useful measure of anything.

> Bill Gates walks into a pub and average income of everybody in the pub doubles

That must be a really big pub or have started out with some very rich people in it to have only doubled.

Well he wouldn't go to just any pub...

If Bill Gates walks into a bar the average person in the bar is now a billionaire (assuming about a moderately sized bar with 50 people in it).

Sounds like your lot just went up ~100k for free?

> People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.

I disagree with the tone. Everyone is selfish. Everyone wants either their own benefit or their own benefit. Everyone is grasping. Moral, wrong or right can't correct that behavior, even if you could agree to it. Thats why the moral, wrong or right decisions dont have to be about what people want, but what you allow people to do or not do.

If we're talking about selfishness leading to homelessness, why don't we just seize the non-primary houses of the wealthy to house the poor?

Why is it that the middle class who only have their single single-family house are the selfish ones?

No, on the eve of what looks like the most disastrous tax policy in the history of this nation for working and middle class folks, I don't think it's the middle class who are being selfish by a long shot.

I’m all for confiscating the wealth of the rich. But even I have to admit that this is one problem that it won’t solve. The issue at play here is land— raw acreage— and the density thereof. While the rich may own big houses it doesn’t even come close to the total acreage of all the single-family housing in an area.

> I’m all for confiscating the wealth of the rich.

Why?

In the cities with massive housing shortages I'm aware of, everyone -- NIMBY and YIMBY alike -- would seize the non-primary houses of the rich (or at least tax the shit out of them) if they could.

The problem with this, of course, is that it involves picking an economic fight against rich people, the people who win economic fights.

Anyway. A lot of zoning policy is set by people who claim to be middle-class but own fabulously valuable property. They could become rich at any moment they choose because they are lucky enough to live in a home that has become worth about $3 million due to the housing shortage. It's in their interest, of course, to stay where they are and keep the housing shortage going until their house is worth $4 million.

If we had a land value tax, maybe people would prefer to have a sensible rate of development that kept their home price stable. But accidentally-wealthy homeowners are a huge voting demographic, on top of the fact that blatantly rich people have a lot of political influence. So the land value tax is politically infeasible.

>why don't we just seize the non-primary houses of the wealthy to house the poor?

For starters, that would violate the 5th amendment.

Well of course it would, I'm talking about philosophically.

Why should everything be balanced on the backs of the working and middle class if we're talking about architecting a more functional society.

You can believe that "densification" will be applied in-equally as well. Just as it happened to poor or working class folks who were gentrified out of the homes they had inherited, it will move up the 'class' gradient until only the wealthiest own everything.

At some point the practicality of life in a civil society has to trump insane ideologies committed only to protecting 'property rights' of a small minority.

If you own a standalone single family home in Berkeley, you’re not middle class.

If we can write the rules so that we never have to see people with less money than us, we can feel middle class.

Those hypothetical home seizures would not be on a large enough scale to make a difference. Empty houses owned by rich people are not a large-scale phenomenon.

Middle-class people, on the other hand, are not facing their single-family house being taken away; just some of its benefits being reduced and its value possibly dropping.

>Why is it that the middle class who only have their single single-family house are the selfish ones?

This thread is largely an assault on the middle class in SF who happen to have been around when it was affordable to buy there by a swarm of very well salaried (but still priced out) techies who've by and large ruined SF with their presence as it is.

Like most Americans, the target isn't the rich because the techies in question see themselves as being those people someday.

I am sensitive to the investment aspect, because it is true what you thought you were buying has changed and possibly in a way that makes it less valuable. Ultimately, it’s not what you actually bought so that’s kind of on you.

But I wonder if developers offered to buy neighboring houses at the same time they buy the first house, if that would help at all. Then the neighbors have the option of not losing any value because of the shadows that will go up or whatever. This would require by-right type laws where the developers could trust that housing is actually possible to build on these lots, otherwise buying multiple properties may be too big of a risk.

I suspect NIMBYs might like this idea even less since it could more drastically change a bigger part of the neighborhood, but it seems like it would at least partially address their stated concerns of neighbors being financially impacted.

No doubt, homeowners are in no way incentivized to fix the housing shortage. Legislate away their ability to unilaterally prevent more housing to be built, which is what California is doing.

There is NO reason we can't have the same rate of home construction as Seattle, which built homes at the fastest rate in the nation. No infrastructure? Build it. No school slots? Build more. The Bay Aarea can easily accommodate double digit population increases with almost no perceived increase in density. It just requires action rather than whining about neighborhood "character" or traffic.

I've never understood that. If people want to buy your single-family home and build a $1 billion skyscraper with 10000 units, surely it's worth more than if the law prevents that construction?

If you had a single-family home in the middle of Manhattan, it'd be worth a lot just from the land. It seems like you'd want to encourage the city around you to be as highly developed as possible if money was the main concern.

> People are selfish

Better: people are self-perserving.

Is resistance to zoning changes economically motivated? I'm not absolutely sure it necessarily is. In San Francisco, I actually think that nimbyism may not be the result of a desire to maximize the value of an asset.

Here's why - it's true that the value of a SFH in many parts of SF would drop if a large apartment were built next door, if that house could only be sold as a SFH. But what would the value of the land beneath it be if zoning restrictions were relaxed?

To be clear, I'm not sure, but I have a friend who owns a SF on one of those rare streets that is zoned R-2, and some of his neighbors have been cleared to build two flats where there was once a SFH. The two flats sell for considerably more than the SFH would have.

Now, this might still reflect scarcity, and a rare flat in an otherwise SFH neighborhood might be more desirable than an entire neighborhood of them (maybe, but not necessarily, I doubt it - nob hill and Russian hill are more expensive than the SFH parts of the sunset and excelsior, and Manhattan/(+ some other parts of New York), one of the few urban areas that is more expensive than SF, is also the only large scale urban area that is considerably more densely built.

Even if lots of people were to build 2 or 3 unit flats, vertically, that's a huge amount of additional housing. The value of the land sitting beneath the SFH would reflect this, even if the current owner chose not to undertake the project. I also believe that greater density in SF might very well stimulate additional economic activity, which could end up offsetting the additional supply, eat least enough that 3 apartments would be worth more than one house on the same plot of land (again, if density meant lower prices, Manhattan would be the cheapest place to rent in the entire US, and Nob Hill would be much cheaper than the Sunset).

When I heard what people on this street had done, I was almost jealous. They replaced their aging SFH with two apartments that were just as spacious and nicer, building vertically. The backyard is now shared, but it's still big. And they got so much $$ for the additional unit that their mortgage is paid off with a nice fat chunk of change left over.

I suspect that much of SF's famous nimbyism is actually motivated by a desire for things to stay the same. People like their SFH neighborhoods, and don't really want it to chance. They don't want to tear down their house and build a bunch of flats, even if this would be a way to wring a lot more money out of their investment - and because they don't want to, they don't stand to benefit if their neighbors do this either. Alternatively, they might not be aware of this possibility. Or, in a city of 75% renters, they may rent and not see any benefit to this new construction - at best, disruption during construction, at worst, losing their current rental.

It may indeed be selfish, but I'm not sure it's asset maximization behind all this.

  > a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision

Speaking only about the "investment" part of home ownership, I found this blog post insightful, and maybe interesting enough to share here: http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrib...

Here is a somewhat paraphrased version of the author's main points:

* Not just an initial, but a relentlessly ongoing drain on the cash reserves of the owner requiring an endless parade of repairs and maintenance without which it will crumble

* Illiquid. It takes months of time and effort to buy or sell

* Expensive to buy and sell with very high transaction costs: 5%+ commissions, buying and selling

* Undiversified. Represents a disproportionate percentage of a person’s net worth

* Complex to buy or sell

* Lots of extra fees and reports and documents you must pay for

* Generates low returns. At or below the inflation rate

* Leveraged. If the price goes up a little bit, leverage will magnify this and people will convince themselves it’s actually a good investment! Most will never consider that leverage is also very high risk and could just as easily wipe them out

* Mortgaged. You pay interest on the loans. Many people borrow money against it more than once

* Unproductive. Never pays interest, never pays dividends

* Immobile. Fixed to one geographical spot so at any given time only a tiny group (if any) of potential buyers for it will exist

* Subject to the fortunes of a single neighborhood

* Fragile. Easily damaged by weather, fire, vandalism and the like. As such it requires expensive insurance to cover these risks. Often the the bad things that are most likely to happen aren’t actually covered

* Heavily taxed.

* * If it should go up in value, we tax that gain. If it goes down in value we do not offer a balancing tax deduction on the loss like with other investments

* * Taxed annually, not just when bought or sold

* * Tax rate goes up as value increases. Does not go down when value decreases

* Subject to eminent domain

* Increases stress, leads to more divorces, but then be impossible to divide

(Note, I am biased against homeownership. Which hasn't stopped me from recently buying a house for a variety of reasons, mostly revolving around space needs for my family that could not be met with the available rental options in my current city)

> Tax rate goes up as value increases. Does not go down when value decreases

The tax rate usually doesn't change in either direction with value, except in states like California which limit assessment increases, where the effective rate decreases if value increases rapidly (because the tax basis increases less than the full increase in value).

And in most jurisdictions, value decreases are fully reflected in tax assessments, even when increases are only partially captured.

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