If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.
Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.
It has nothing to do with the inhabitants.
It's about the ugliness of these kind of buildings and everything that goes with increased density (traffic, street parking etc.)
You don't like the 'look' of 'ugly' building? I guess you better save up for the neighboring lots.
You don't like it when some of those houses are replaced by an apartment complex.
What is there not to understand?
He didn't tell anyone what to do. What are you so upset about?
No, they don't. All homeowners don't have the same utility function. Not living near people of different socio-economic strata is a very important factor in some people's utility function.
> When the only people who can afford to live within 40 miles are senior software engineers, surgeons, hedge fund quants, corporate executives, and large landowners, the whole community becomes a fake and lifeless place.
The features you see as “fake and lifeless” are what many people actively desire and seek out. Aesthetics are highly subjective.
No, it frequently does have to do with the inhabitants. That's why you saw Forest Hill homeowners kill an affordable housing development because "the new development would house 'severely mentally ill' and 'severely drug addicted' people" [1].
[1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/city-pulls-funding-150-unit-forest...
But I can have the desire for the conditions to stay the same.
See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.
You can think of it as an interesting experiment in collective land ownership.
I'm using "own" meaning "control" here.
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
But I suppose that's par for the course for the US, where individual expression and selfishness is valued over collective good.
And if we recognized "physically being present before others" as a natural right, I imagine the Native Americans would have a much better situation than they do. Thinking that's a right for some but not for others is the height of hypocrisy, but that seems to be what a lot of incumbent property owners here seem to believe.
That being said, I'm hard pressed to call desired housing density a natural right.
That's definitely an original kind of argument.
At least that's what I'd be referring to if I were to make the parent's argument.
Increasing housing supply by 50% will increase homelessness because you have 50% more people willing to financially support it.
Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them.
The homelessness rate in Tokyo is astonishingly low and decreasing: just 1600 people in a metropolis of 13.6 million. Almost everybody can afford to live somewhere, because there is enough housing for everybody to live somewhere.
You may think I'm saying that your neighborhood has to look like the Ginza area, and I'm not saying that at all. Tokyo contains some calm, beautiful, residential-focused cities such as Setagaya. (If this is confusing: a metropolis can contain a city.)
Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.
That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.
That's reasonable.
But what is not reasonable is if you try to enforce that preference on next door. Your house is your house. Your neighbours house isn't.
Speak for yourself. Not all homeowners want less density. I wouldn't have become a homeowner if the only houses available had yards with picket fences.
The first may benefit current land owners a lot, but the second is absolutely essential for lower incomes to succeed at all.
This is not a zero-sum move, and is fact hugely beneficial to everyone. When there's fixed housing supply, that's when things are closer to a zero-sum economic game.
http://marketurbanism.com/2018/02/05/density-working-poor-ou...
The reality is that the apartment building goes up and you house is worth nothing unless the government allows an eminent domain for your property or a developer with the bucks to buy out the neighborhood shows up.
Until that happens, your house lost a third of its value because there's an apartment next door. If you're unlucky, rates go up and you're stuck.
Is it really controversial to say that a regular single family house in a single family house neighborhood will go down in value when somebody decides to plant an apartment complex right next to do?
Sure, once this happens enough times, and supply starts to meet demand, you're absolutely right in that a single-family home's value will drop when it's adjacent to an apartment complex.
(Then again, it could also be quite valuable to someone who wants a single-family home when the norm becomes larger complexes.)
Also note that the current value of your home is driven almost entirely by artificial scarcity. There's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it worth so much.
Making a real estate purchase is a risk. Making a huge one is a huge risk. Right now, the Bay Area is prioritizing rewarding the obscenely wealthy and rewarding massive risk-taking by the moderately wealthy.
If those risks don’t pan out, but people can afford to live here, I’m not that upset.
People who are disrupted by this can build character by living in a van or move to any of the hundreds of metro areas that are more affordable -- it's not my problem. If you work for some tech company, you should appreciate that controlling a resource like a technology or real property has benefits.
FWIW, I chose the latter option and live in a mid sized urban core. I make about half of what I'd make in the Bay Area, but my costs are probably about 80% less, even factoring in private school. So if you make a choice to live in a van as a rational actor, that's your choice. Own it.
I totally get that, but it's a) unfortunate that when one buys a home, their financial self-interest becomes immediately opposed to the needs of the overwhelming majority in this city who rent, and b) ridiculous that city politics safeguards the value of these risky bets by homeowners at the expense of literally everyone else.
Mainly because homeowners are more engaged in the city politics? If renters or would-be homeowners were more engaged, this would have been a totally different situation.
But see, now you have introduced an "us vs them" mentality to this discussion with homeowners on one side and non-homeowners on the other. If I, a homeowner with 800K mortgage, is going to face people like you who want to act in a way that will reduce the price of my home below 800K thus wiping out my equity in my home and saddling me with an underwater mortgage, then I am going to fight tooth and nail against any new housing.
Figuring out how to add new housing without affecting the value of existing homes would go a long way towards getting buy-in from existing homeowners.
You took a large gamble with a massive sum of money—what is literally a lifetime of earnings for most families in the US—and are now arguing that the city should continue to prioritize the positive outcome of your gamble over the needs of the hundreds of thousands in this city who are struggling to get by.
This leveraged gamble has been growing at a rate of 8–9%, and with typical mortgages here it’s reasonable to guess you’re seeing over a 12% return on that gamble annually as a result, after mortgage interest and property taxes. Pardon my complete lack of empathy for the hardship you might endure should your gamble only return 5%, were we to consider the needs of the rest of this city over your own.
The problem from my perspective is that the "crisis" of housing is really a boomtown phenomenon. The problem exists because companies can afford to pay people enough, which won't last forever.
You're saying that if you have the only single family house in a high density area that house will actually be worth less?
I think it's very unlikely either of those things would be true.
a) Correct.
b) Beneficial to most participants in the market, well off (mainly due to luck in timing) NIMBY's being the exception.
If people really want to address the housing issues, they need to start actually listening to people who object to more housing instead of just calling them names. There are legitimate downsides to more housing and higher population that will need to be addressed.