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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

So one thing I always have trouble with on this debate is that it feels totally one-sided. There's smart people on the YIMBY side making the case for building. But then NIMBYs are always portrayed as a caricature of the self-interested rich guy. So I read this article and then I click through to http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu... this article and I see lots of poor people opposed SB 827 as well. But even then there isn't really a strong op-ed or anything like that making the case against YIMBY. Where do I go to read that? If you're a YIMBY what's the toughest NIMBY article or argument you've come across?

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The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded.

It's a perfectly rational set of motivations. It's the same reason people move to nicer neighborhoods in the first place. With limited development over period of time you get the benefits of living in a more expensive neighborhood, without having paid the premium for it.

These arguments don't play well in public, especially in a socially progressive city like SF, so the rhetoric gets confusing. NIMBY groups sometimes float arguments such as: building more housing will make neighborhoods less affordable.

Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, and support NIMBY policies too, so it's not just homeowners. In the end, most people don't know what to think, and gravitate to the status-quo (ie, limited development.)

But if they want public infra to be well funded, then they have to pay their taxes. For the older houseowners, they're paying a fraction of the taxes they should be paying. They can't have their cake and eat it too!

This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values.

What they do care about are traffic, parking, noise, school overcrowding, and other quality of life issues. Some people simply don't like living in densely populated areas. If you want to win over the NIMBYs then you have to address their concerns rather than just demonizing them as greedy property owners.

It's probably not possible to win over NIMBYs. Incoming population will always create more traffic. Taller buildings always overshadow something. They have almost no interest in letting in more people.

The key is recognizing that it is an inherently selfish constituency, and you have to give voice to the people who don't yet live there or who are renters and less likely to vote or attend city council meetings. The homeownership rate in CA is already bordering just half (53.8%) and decreasing, so this is a growing constituency which just needs to be activated. That's why there's a need to remove local control on density limits, as the constituency probably exists at the state or regional level, but not so much at the individual neighborhood level.

My wife's grandmother is a CA NIMBY. Prop 13 and all.

She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc.

I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it.

At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.

LA/OC and SF are global mega-cities full of people who seem to want to live in small towns in the country, yet choose to live in global mega-cities. It's weird.

It's not weird. SF wasn't a "global mega city" until perhaps the late 90s (it's honestly pretty debatable that it is one today).

If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational.

Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.

Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree.

Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal.

I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation.

I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.

Hmm... yes I can see that perspective from long-time residents.

Thing is I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s-2000s and SF always felt like a global mega-city in my mind up there with New York and London. That's how I always pictured it mentally even though I knew it wasn't as big. I was just so influenced by the culture it had exported since the 60s counterculture all the way up through 80s-90s hacker/tech culture, etc.

Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away. I don't live there, which in a way might make my view more objective. The city no longer seems to be the beacon of culture or intellect that it once was. Maybe for the NIMBYs that was the goal, but in keeping the city the way it was physically they might have succeeded in destroying the way it was socially.

I live in SoCal now and like it down here too. I strongly support action on the housing crisis to prevent SF's real estate hyperinflation cancer from spreading down here. It already has to some extent, but San Angeles (what I call LA/OC/Riverside/SanDiego) has what may be a non-metastatic non-terminal case that could still be treated with a dose of chemo.

I don't actually oppose development (in SF, or California at large). I just hate the hypocrisy and callous, self-interested rhetoric around this subject, and don't believe construction will be effective at lowering prices on timescales meaningful to any of us. SF will have to continue building through at least a few more boom/bust cycles for that to happen.

"Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away."

I completely sympathize, but here's the thing: now that I've lived in a number of different cities, it's become obvious to me just how comically limited San Francisco actually is. If you go to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris...you see these massive, sprawling cities with incredible transit systems and infrastructure. SF is a dinky little geographical backwater. It's landlocked (i.e. "supply limited"), with terrible transit and worse traffic. It's not a place that wants to be a global mega city, nor could it be one if it wanted to be.

I firmly believe that the real solution to the acute housing crisis in SF is other half of the demand equation: eventually, the tech industry is going to come to its senses and begin relocating. It has to happen.

Only when it has to. Nobody likes change.

Apple's going to be here for a while, they can afford the salaries people are demanding to be here.

The trend is already clear and accelerating for smaller firms. No startups can afford to hire here on a 500k seed. You'd be paying 200k/head all-in, you can't even run a 4-person company 18 months on that.

The bigcos will be slow and conservative like they are with everything. But change is already very obviously underway.

commercial enterprise in SF didn't start in 2012,

GAP global HQ, Levi Strauss global HQ, PG and E HQ, Wells Fargo global HQ, Charles Schwab global HQ, Pottery Barn/Williams Sonoma...

Yes, business existed in San Francisco prior to 2012.

This latest housing crisis began in 2012.

The top five US public companies are Apple, Google, facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Three of them are HQ'd here. Netflix isn't top-5 by market cap but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there before long, maybe displacing Microsoft.

You can certainly make that argument but it's on a whole different level now. Apple is earning 60-80 billion in profit per quarter. Many of the companies you list don't even have market caps that high.

> This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values.

I have. Among other things, they like to ramble on about the importance of neighborhood character. They're also reliably very, very vague on what they actually think that means. In my experience, it's functionally impossible to address concerns that people refuse to communicate, no matter how much sympathy, empathy, compassion, and kindness you engage them with.

I often find myself thinking "neighborhood character" is code for "freeze my world in amber" and "keep people with different skin color away".

> Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, [...]

For the laws of supply and demand to be accurate they require that only quantity and price changes. The housing market in popular areas, other than being inelastic, tends to suffer from demand shifts. There is nothing in economics saying that building more housing can't result in neighborhoods being less affordable.

Can you explain the mechanism by which building more housing causes neighborhoods to become less affordable?

There's a popular meme that it makes an area more desirable, therefore increasing property prices. And there's probably some truth to that.

What this fails to consider is that, if a bunch of people are moving to an area, they have to go SOMEWHERE, so it's not a "here vs. there" question, it's "which here will it be?" Proponents like to believe they can somehow put people "elsewhere" without realizing the poor always get screwed when rents rise, and they absolutely will rise everywhere in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion, if more supply doesn't come to market.

For plenty of people, so long as the answer is "not near me" then the details are irrelevant. You can see the policy mess that results.

Typical collective action problem. Everybody wants to move here but nobody wants to house them.

At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, bye. Then see what happens when all those pension and infrastructure payments come due. Hilarity will ensue.

As I said, a shift in demand. Yes, if you increase supply and if nothing else changes there is a decrease in price. But if you increase supply and the area therefor e.g. becomes more popular among people who earn more money or there is more investment in that area, then you have a shift in demand which can lead to an area becoming less affordable. [0]

[0] https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/3-2-shif...

The same mechanism that fills the new capacity realized by increasing the number of lanes on a highway. Utilization increases to fill available capacity.

That’s the fallacy here, that more housing is going to meet or exceed the demand hyper growth-focused companies will continue to produce for employees.

I think it's the other way around. Cities become more desirable to live in (thus causing housing prices to rise). Developers see a new market and capitalize on it.

> The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded.

It's people who own houses that are YIMBYs, because removing zoning restrictions causes land value to go up. It's people who live in them who are NIMBYs, because they fear density in their neighborhoods will lower their quality of life, and that they will eventually be forced to sell due to a rise in property taxes as a result of their property values rising.

If they're old, that's a scary proposition. If they're young enough that they have kids in the public schools, they're probably young enough that they won't have a problem selling their home for a boatload of profit and moving to another exclusive neighborhood.

In California property taxes are fixed.

It depends on how supply is increased. If you allow single-unit housing stock to be converted to multi-unit, that causes existing homes to rise in price as you say. But rezoning industrial buildings to high-density residential causes existing homes to drop in price. I believe the solution in SF will mostly be the latter, such as converting warehouses in the Mission into lofts.

Also, California's weird laws mean that property taxes don't go up much even when the value of houses rise a lot.

So most NIMBY homeowners are genuinely defending against property values dropping.

I'm gonna say that anyone who throws out something like "people who don't understand supply and demand" likely doesn't understand them past the ultra-simplistic view presented in Econ 101.

The simplistic view is correct almost all time. Given a fixed demand curve, more supply leads to lower prices and less supply leads to higher prices. Exceptions can exist in special circumstances, but they are rare and usually short-term.

Not when it comes to human behavior it's not. The simplistic view tends to assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor, and that there aren't other forces at play.

Even if we accept the premise that the housing market mysteriously transcends the rules of supply and demand, the pidgeonhole principle is going to come into effect. How is San Francisco going to accommodate 5-10 thousand new residents each year when only 2-3 thousand units of housing are added each year. Even if we ignore price, there just isn't enough space unless we build more housing.

I'm saying that the rules of supply and demand are not as simple and as clear cut in reality as they are presented in Econ 101.

This exactly. Who doesn't want to live in a nice neighborhood and have their kids goto good schools? Publicly it may not be a popular stance, but you can bet your bucket that privately this is what most homeowners and aspiring homeowners desire.

And guess what? Most tech workers in the Bay Area want to own a home in a nice neighborhood if they don't own one already.

> and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people

Come on, this (specifically) is untrue. Your average NIMBY homeowner isn't trying to maliciously price poor folks out. The closest you can get to that would be wanting to prevent their property value from decreasing because of eyesores.

While that can be problematic in its own right, it's not malice directed specifically towards folks who make less than $N per year. You'd find the same aversion if somebody making 2x their salary left their home in a shambles.

Folks buy homes partially as an investment, and understandably they have aversions to things that could damage their investment.

The best I can find of the SB827 opponents is statements like this: http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

The anti-development left is, for a variety of reasons, not terribly visible. Poor people of color lack visibility in the first place, and so do the more extreme leftists. So you multiply those together, and you're not going to get a movement that commands a lot of attention.

The other issue with finding unified op-eds against YIMBYs is that these battles are literally fought building by building. If you really want a detailed look at the debates that showcases both sides, you'll have to start reading more local news. NIMBYs are generally quite happy to acknowledge that there's a statewide housing crisis, but they'll refuse to build anything in their own neighborhoods. NIMBYs don't need to be a unified force to get their way. Whereas, YIMBYs seeking to enact statewide change via bills like SB827 do.

Poor people of color don't oppose development, it's mostly upper middle class whites:

"77% of Latinos, 69% of African Americans, and 64% of Asian Americans support building more housing in their local areas, compared with 53% of whites.”

http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...

And that's why YIMBYs like me like to call the leftists who oppose building more housing "fauxgressives."

  ...oppose development, it's mostly upper middle class whites

Wait for it...

  53% of whites (*support* building more housing)

Your own quote literally belies your claim. A valid conclusion from that source is that "whites support more housing but at lower rates than (other ethnicities)", but that's not opposition.

Huh? The claim was that the people who oppose development are predominantly upper middle class whites, not that a majority of white people oppose development.

But the chosen quote doesn't support that claim.

You said it "literally belies it", not that it fails to support it.

"belie (trasitive verb)

1 a : to give a false impression of: "Her gentleness belies her strength."

b : to present an appearance not in agreement with: "His manner and appearance belie his age."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/belie

To say "it's mostly upper middle class whites" does give a false impression of what the study said.

Do you have other sources that support that statement?

Oh believe me, they are HIGHLY visible everywhere it counts: local committee meetings, elections, city hall, etc.

You just don't see them because "visible" to us here means posting on HN or Medium or Twitter.

There's just a huge gulf between the local and global people that we need to transcend.

Of course I know anti-development people are the ones most likely to show up to public meetings. I've gone to plenty in Palo Alto, and I canvassed for a pro-growth slate. I'm not the kind of apathetic techie who only reads social networking sites, and I'm annoyed that you seem to have missed the part where I suggest interested parties read more local news. But NIMBYs generally don't have a real argument against development the way anti-development leftists do, and that's what I meant by visibility. You're not going to see a NIMBY write a coherent statement, and publicize it to as wide an audience as possible, the way a DSA chapter would.

IMO,

When you account for political clout, the wealthy residents of Marin and Santa Monica have much more influence in the process than the tenants in Boyle Heights or East Oakland. The former uses the rhetoric and coopts the message of the latter to further their exclusive tendencies. When you look at the cross tab data, poorer people in California are much more likely to support more home building, and the people who skew "anti-building" are usually white home owners over 60 years old.

The big issue that we seem to have in SF is that the neighborhoods that historically the poorest and most neglected (the mission and soma) are basically the only neighborhoods that are zoned for a reasonable density of new construction, while the wealthiest neighborhoods (pac heights, west portal) have been able to get ahead of the planning process and ensure that they will be able to remain low density. We should be building new housing in wealthy exclusionary neighborhoods like the west side of LA, and much of SF instead of allowing it in a few formerly industrial areas.

That's because the "debate" is a disingenuous farce. There is no such thing as a YIMBY. There are people who want something that someone else has and people who have something and are trying to keep it for themselves. There is literally no one volunteering their own backyard—it's always someone else's.

I've yet to see the YIMBY who rallies everyone in their building or on their block together and collectively agree to be voluntarily displaced so they can demo the building(s) they are in, build one that is taller, and move back in several years later.

I've yet to see the YIMBY who comes to a planning meeting and votes to have lot directly next to them rezoned so they can deal with construction for the next two years. I've yet to see the YIMBY who just purchased a home at the height of the market with a view of the GG bridge and who then votes in favor of rezoning the lot across the street so that it's taller and higher density than their unit, which blocks their view, natural sunlight, and decrease their property value.

All I see is people who live in Oakland trying to rally people to rezone areas of San Francisco. Or people who live in The Mission trying to rally people to rezone the areas around Golden Gate Park.

We need more housing. There are areas that, from a planning perspective, should definitely be rezoned for higher density housing. But the people who already live there don't want that. And well, they live there.

One of my favorite areas in the city is the Sea Cliff area. The one mile stretch of land that faces the water contains only about 30 homes. Half of them are vacant because they are investment properties. On any given there are probably like 20 or so people on those cliffs. That same amount of land in NYC would house thousands of people. But if you want to take the YIMBY movement to the extreme why don't go ahead and try to rezone that area. Displace a few dozen extremely rich people and we can house literally a thousand families.

I live in Oakland, in an expensive neighborhood near BART full of single family homes, and very much support rezoning my neighborhood to allow for 4-6 story buildings, and would take those buildings on my own block. No, I am not willing to tear down my own house and inconvenience myself for years while building a 4 story multi unit building. But I would wholeheartedly support a neighbor doing so. I want more people in this area, I want the commercial activity that higher density brings, I want the added demand for public transit investment, more restaurants, more diversity, etc. That is in stark contrast to the typical NIMBY view. So you can call it something else if you want, but there are definitely differences between mentalities.

Right, you support it on the other side of the neighborhood. You support in the case where you get all of the benefits and bear none of the costs. I do too. But I'm not so obtuse that I'm going to pretend that I'm part of the some kind of altruistic housing movement.

You keep expressing this false dichotomy up and down the thread. Please engage with charity.

The argument being made is that the law shouldn’t forbid, or through burueacratic heel dragging prevent, my neighbor from selling to a developer to build a tall building next to me.

You said, “The NIMBY’s and YIMBY’s are the same.” In this regard, dougmccune appears to very much disagree, and you’re just dismissing his argument that he’d be happy to have developers build next to him, by claiming that because he doesn’t plan on selling his house, he’s just being a NIMBY. That is very much not where the locus of the argument is.

No one is proposing that we eminent domain the whole of Nob Hill, and force everyone to move who doesn’t have any intention of selling.

The law doesn't forbid you from selling to a developer. It's not about personal property and who you can sell to. You can sell to whoever you like.

Local planning code determines what can and can't be done, not who you can sell to. This is true everywhere.

And I actually don't think eminent domain (over time) is a terrible idea. Make the area around Golden Gate Park look like Central Park and your housing problem is solved.

The law doesn’t forbid you from selling to a developer, but the law does forbid the developer from turning a single-unit house into an apartment. Or even a duplex, a lot of the time. Just look at the zoning maps. Around Golden Gate Park, the height limit is 40 feet, and a lot of it is single-family zoning. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps

A lot of the time, it is more practical to take that single-family house and turn it into a fancy single-family house. Satisfying gentrification. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/25/17277290/glen-park-home-expe...

I literally said I support rezoning my block and support someone building a 4-6 story building next to my house.

> Right, you support it on the other side of the neighborhood.

He didn't say that at all. In fact, he said if his neighbor decided to build higher density he wouldn't oppose it.

You keep saying there is no difference, but there is a very simple and obvious difference: the YIMBY position supports upzoning everywhere, including where they live. The NIMBY position does not support that. It's about changing zoning to allow for more density, not about any particular new building in any particular location. Saying that one has to demolish their own home before they can support upzoning is nonsensical.

I live in the Mission in a three story building and would be fine with someone building a six story building next to or behind mine.

Do you own the house you live in?

Yes

Do you think the value of your house would go up or down with this zoning change? (totally fine if you think it would go up! I suspect it would up and am curious if you agree)

I honestly don't know. I can see arguments in both directions, maybe more building makes everything more affordable and my property becomes worth "less" or maybe it results in nothing but expensive condos and my fancy neighborhood just gets fancier. I'm in the incredibly lucky and privileged position to not have to care that much about my personal home's property value. I spend a lot of money to live where I live. If I was interested in choosing where I live in order to maximize my wealth I'd move to a state with no income tax. Instead I choose to live in a place I love (both the Bay Area regionally and Oakland locally) and want that place to be as great as it can be. I think more people makes this place better. I want kids for my kids to play with on our block. I want empty storefronts to be full of new restaurants. I'd like my neighborhood and the Bay Area to get more affordable so my friends don't have to move away when they have families and are hoping to upgrade from a one bedroom apartment. I'd take a sizable hit on my property value to make that happen.

I also live in Oakland.

It's interesting to think that if prop 13 was repealed, it would cause a ton of supply to come to market. So it wouldn't necessary "change anything" except all that supply might depress prices a bit. Funny how that works. Same house, same benefit, just a lot less price.

so your position is that neighbors should have defacto veto rights over their direct neighbor's property?

Also, do you count someone who is a tenant and not a land owner as "someone" in your diatribe above?

I support the position that the people who live in that locality should determine what happens there. In a sense, I support the status quo—because that's the way it is right now. But instead we call that NIMBYism. The whole YIMBY movement is trying to move things up a few levels so that people who live outside of a building/block/neighborhood/city can determine what happens within.

Again, how about the people who own the property should decide what happens with it?

The YIMBY movement is trying to move things down to the appropriate level.

It's literally not. The attempts to pass rezoning laws are moving up (e.g. SB 827) to the state level now because all local attempts are failing. Every time someone tries to build up outside of SOMA it fails and people cry about the NIMBYs. But NIMBY in almost all these cases is just another word for local resident. Just a few weeks ago a group called Mission YIMBY was advocating for rezoning the Sunset and Richmond. Like, how obtuse can you be?

I'm not talking about who sets the zoning laws, I'm talking about who makes decisions re: a particular property.

If you're into local control and people close to the ground making decisions, no one is closer and should know better than the literal property owner. If kicking zoning laws up to the state level helps empower property owners than it absolutely is giving more local control.

People who own property can't do whatever they want with it. That's true everywhere.

This is 100% about zoning laws. About what can be done with a particular piece of property and what can (and can not) be built.

The reality is when people buy a property, they buy a neighborhood too. That's true all around the US. You have the right to veto a liquor store popping up next door. You have a right to veto a lot of things. But naturally its a grey area. If you can get enough of your neighbors to agree, you can build a higher building too. The support needs to be there.

When someone is moving out of a property, they have very little attachment to what happens to it (other than profit) - unlike their neighbors. It makes sense the neighbors have some say.

No, it's not true all around the US. There are plenty of places where if somebody buys a property, it's theirs to do what they want within with rules set by the government. There are places in Texas, for example, that don't even have zoning laws. The interference by local communities is not a universal thing.

Texas still has deed restrictions that prevent corner stores in residential neighborhoods, density restrictions, buffering ordinances, historic preservation sites, lot size restrictions, and other things like work similar to zoning laws.

That would be a valid position if all the investment into local amenities were at local level. We all pay taxes to build a light rail line, or pave the streets, or maintain the parks, or even create enough demand for shops/restaurants on the main street of a central, single family zoned neighborhood that would never generate enough demand from locals only. The entity that creates the amenities (the city, or the state) should have a say about development around these amenities.

Another aspect of this is that upzoning will still allow locals to decide... it's not magic, the buildings don't just become skyscrapers when you upzone. The locals have to have a preference to sell to the developer who would build those. All you do with zoning is allow some locals dictate to others what they do with their land, based on semi-accidental status quo.

How can you try to claim the moral high ground re: "someone else's" property while supporting zoning laws literally prevent people from doing what they would like with the property they own?

I don't claim the moral high ground. I'm just saying that YIMBYism is a farce.

We need more housing. We should rezone certain areas. But we should be honest about it. This is a needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few argument, not some fake pseudo- altruistic bullshit.

> not some fake pseudo- altruistic bullshit

Ha! Welcome to SF. The city that pretends that letting homeless people shoot up and overdose in the street means that we are respecting their right to live the way they want. In any decent society we would be helping these people, and we would disrupt their destructive way of living, which is destructive not just to them but to society as a whole (public health concerns, needles and human excrements on the street, etc).

But...electric scooters are the current biggest problem for the city administration.

Edit: to the downvoters, care to explain your disagreement?

I did not downvote, but this seems like a tangent.

It appears you're saying that "A YIMBY's only valid political stance is to advocate for the destruction of the building they live in, otherwise they can be safely ignored."

I'm assuming I'm wrong, and I sincerely hope I am. "Saint or GTFO" arguments are pretty facile.

I'm saying drop the fake YIMBY nonsense and just be honest about it. Stop pretending like we are all in this together and you are going to bear the cost the same as everyone else. It's Yes-In-Your-Backyard. It always has been and there's nothing wrong with that.

I 100% support rezoning. Just not in my area.

Do you rent or own a home?

I rent.

Using a literalist expansion of YIMBY doesn't seem constructive.

Do you demand the same locality standard for people who block building housing and/or upzoning in places that aren't their domicile or directly adjacent to it?

In your view, how close does someone need to live to construction to have a preference about whether it happens or not? It sounds like your metric is "they should be made personally miserable, so that they regret asking for it in the first place.", which is begging the question a bit.

Don't call your movement YIMBY when the YIMBY position is the exact same as the NIMBY one, but you want to feel morally superior. Both support building as long as they don't have to bear the cost. NIMBYs in the Marina support building in The Mission the same way Mission YIMBY supports building in the Sunset and Richmond.

I live in Nob Hill. There's a unit going up across the street from me, but it's not that big and didn't affect me so I don't mind. I went to some of the meetings and had no comment.

I 100% support building in San Francisco. Just as long as it doesn't affect me. And the reality is that's true for everyone. So we should figure out how to actually deal with that reality.

It is absolutely not the same position.

A YIMBY person would say "Yes, I support allowing people to sell their house and build an apartment building".

A NIMBY person would say "No, I do not support allowing someone ELSE to sell THEIR house that THEY own, to build an apartment building".

It is about rules that effect other people's property, and rules that ALLOW people to sell their property.

A YIMBY person does not want the rules to exist, and a NIMBY person does want these rule to exist.

Both would say: I support apartments being built on land nowhere near my home.

I think the point being made is that YIMBYs don't have yards, and they're advocating for policies that they have been convinced could get them yards, and NIMBYs are advocating for policies that protect the yards that they have.

No, a YIMBY person would be perfectly in favor of everyone being allowed to do what they want with their own property.

A contradiction would be if a YIMBY person said "I DON'T want this person to be allowed to do what they want with their property."

No YIMBY person is arguing for restrictions. They are arguing for removing restrictions, everywhere, and yes that means for their neighbors.

I like the reframing to pretend like this is about personal property.

You can sell your property to whoever you want. But there person who buys it can't do whatever they want. That's how it works everywhere. This is about zoning, not who you can sell your property to.

It IS about property rights though.

I do not have the right to build whatever I want on my property, and I would like that to change.

I would also like other people to have the rights to build whatever they want things THEIR property.

How does arguing in favor of rights for property owners make YIMBY people hypocrits?

You are saying that YIMBY people are doing something contradictory. There is nothing contradictory of arguing in favor of everyone being allowed to do what they want with their property.

This is absolutely a moral argument, as it is about people being allowed to do what they want with property that they own. Arguments regarding rights are moral arguments.

Then don't buy property in an area where the community has decided that property rights should have certain limits.

If you want the "right to build whatever [you] want" go move out into an unincorporated area. Don't move to San Francisco and then try to force everyone around you to change so that YOU can do whatever YOU want.

Instead of doing that, I am just going to try and get the laws changed.

There are lots of people who care about affordable housing, and we are growing in political power.

The rich people who only care about protecting their property values and increasing their rent prices, are slowing being outnumbered by renters who will vote to increase supply.

We no longer live in a time where you have to be a property owner to vote. New people in an area have just as many political rights as property owners.

So no, I am not going to just shut up and do nothing. I am going to play to win. And that means voting and trying to change the law.

It will take time, but we are gaining in strength, because there are just so many people who are getting screwed by the establishment political interests. So I am confident that the supply problem will be solved eventually.

I am sorry that people participating in a democracy offends you. And a democracy means that everyone has the same political rights, regardless of whether they have just moved to a city or if they have been there for 30 years.

I'm the lead organizer of Mission YIMBY, and we support building everywhere. We have a particular focus on upzoning all of the exclusionary neighborhoods where apartments are illegal. We'd be happy if the entirety of San Francisco had the same zoning rules as the Mission, because it results in a healthy and vibrant neighborhood.

We want both subsidized Affordable and market-rate buildings built everywhere in the city, including the Mission. We don't show up at the Planning Commission to fight for the market-rate buildings in the neighborhood because they get built without our help. Neighbors still regularly fight subsidized Affordable housing, even in the Mission.

I kinda get the feeling you're misrepresenting a movement with which you have an ideological disagreement.

See, it's this kind of garbage right here. You support building everywhere, but with a focus on neighborhoods you don't live in.

The majority people in the Sunset and Richmond don't want that (as the voting shows).

You're clearly not engaging in good faith, but for everyone else: Grow The Richmond, Build the North, Progress Noe Valley, Castro for Housing, East Bay for Everyone, and all of the peninsula groups ALL advocate for building in their neighborhoods. There are some neighborhoods, like the Mission, Bayview, the Tenderloin, and Hunter's Point that have suffered under racist policies for decades. The same solution doesn't fit everywhere.

You'd know a lot about that since nothing you do is in good faith.

Exactly. In your backyard. Not on top of your home.

What is dishonest about YIMBY? I would totally be fine if the the 50+ year old 4 story apartment building I live in was replaced with a modern 8 story building.

There are plenty of places in SF without beautiful views where the density is low. People may choose to sell their four bed home to be developed into a high rise if the price is good but they are being stopped by zoning laws. Relax the zoning laws and we'll find out if you are right.

The people who live there don't want to relax the zoning laws. They like it the way it is. That's why they vote against it.

Then no one there will sell to build a high rise. What is the legislation for?

I bet no one votes to raise their own income taxes for just themselves. And yet, nearly everyone votes to raise everyone elses because it's supposedly for the common good.

Cost effective housing is for the common good to.

I support more development in my neighborhood.

Actually, in California what people did was vote to raise the property tax rates of people moving into the state without raising their own. That's Prop 13 in a nutshell.

I support more development in your neighborhood too.

So in reality its sounds more like "Yes in someone else's backyard". Which in principle is hardly any different than NIMBY

No one votes against their own self interest.

Plenty of renters vote to constrain and restrict the supply of housing, even in the face of increased demand. That is directly against their own self interest.

NIMBYs deploy a range of shifting rhetorical arguments (concern trolling, strawman etc) but in my observation the principle motivation is fear of change and the negative externalities of increasing population ... traffic, parking, what if the new people are different from me, etc.

Money is part of it but less than many assume because (1) home equity is paper wealth and many owners can't afford to move due to Prop13. and (2) the way to actually maximize land value is to upzone, so NIMBYism not exactly optimal in terms of economic self-interest.

>traffic, parking, what if the new people are different from me

those all seem perfectly reasonable

not at the cost of decent housing options for people across a broad range of lower/middle incomes and also not accommodating baseline population growth regionally.

Not really. Your right to an unchanging neighborhood absolutely does not eclipse the right of a long-term renter's ability to stay in their community, or the right of a newcomer's desire to move to a better job. Plus, climate change. Sprawl and traffic are bad for the planet. California will never be able to meet its CO2 reduction targets if it does not discourage more driving, which we can only do by shortening the distances between where people live and where they work, and compressing the areas people live in.

"Your right to an unchanging neighborhood absolutely does not eclipse the right of a long-term renter's ability to stay in their community, or the right of a newcomer's desire to move to a better job"

Aren't the tech newcomers the ones that are threatening the long-term renters more?

The connection between NIMBYs and displacement goes like this: newcomers come in and increase prices of rentals, NIMBY homeowners refuse to build more housing, long-time renters are displaced by the newcomers who can afford more. Simple supply and demand.

Tech is certainly part of the problem, but California has been underbuilding for the past 30 years. This problem goes way back, and it was made much worse by Reagan's massive cuts to HUD back in the 80s.

And all perfectly addressable. YIMBY policies typically addresses housing first, but also understands that parking/traffic issues also happen when cities grow in size. The NIMBY point that "these things are bad and will only get worse!" presumes that there's not changes made to address those as well (increased public transit, bike initiatives, parking garages).

That said, if your issue is strictly xenophobic/culture shift, sorry but you can't legislate demographics (and maintain a moral high ground). The idea that new people will have a higher rate of criminal behavior, this can again be addressed with deterrents towards criminal behavior rather than deterrents towards population growth (which isn't going to be stopped, just exploited using by those in control of the current housing supply)

>you can't legislate demographics (and maintain a moral high ground)

You can indirectly, and you don't need to have a moral high ground. I wouldn't care about that, I would only care about my wellbeing, the wellbeing of my family, and the price of my house.

The DSA LA statement linked in a sibling is good, but the simplest argument against YIMBY-ism is that re-zoning is demonstrably not a panacea. America has weird laws, many other countries do not. Popular cities are still ultra-expensive around the world, in spite of development.

If you want to actually solve housing problems, you need a much much broader approach than simply allowing private development which, in absence of other incentives, will be almost entirely luxury apartments.

True dat. Supply is necessary but not sufficient. I don't think this is too popular amongst YIMBYs, but some of us do support limited rent-control for the sake of displacement protection.

There are a lot of different ways of adding supply:

http://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-w...

> Popular cities are still ultra-expensive around the world, in spite of development.

Not nearly as expensive than popular cities in the US.

To be more precise, many non-US popular cities have a lot more supply of rental units at low cost than most US popular cities. The cheapest apartment available to let immediately in many non-US cities is far cheaper than the cheapest apartment available to let immediately in, say, Los Angeles area or SF.

For instance, there's apartments you can let in Tokyo for $500 (or even less!) (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-can-you-rent-fo...) but there's literally no equivalent in the US. Like at all (if you find a counterexample please let me know!).

That is why allowing dense and tall development (free of NIMBY interference) matters.

For one thing, those are single rooms--about $200 sq. ft. Also see Singapore and Hong Kong. (It's difficult to make these comparisons though because of different local wages and exchange rates.)

Yeah, but that's a shoebox.

It's an apartment with a kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, not a "shoebox". If you don't want to live in one, that's fine, but prohibiting this kind of housing altogether is a horrid idea.

In America, we don't even have the option to live in that sort of apartment, we instead can only 1) rent a room in someone else's house (and be at the mercy of their awful idiosyncracies and have negligible amounts of privacy) or 2) not have a place to live at all.

> but there's literally no equivalent in the US.

You’re kidding me, right? How hard did you actually look? You can find loads of $500 or less apartments (real ones, not like the shoebox you linked) in the US, and you don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a bunch in Raleigh, NC, which is part of a major tech hub (Research Triangle Park):

https://www.apartments.com/raleigh-nc/under-500/

The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

> The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

The US also has a problem with home-owner NIMBYs imposing their ideas with the force of law on what kind of housing should be allowable on other people's property.

Yes. I have come across a number of SF YIMBY types who used to live in NYC; they seem to think scoffing at SF's shorter buildings is sufficient argument. I've never understood their theory though. Is it that if we build up as high as Manhattan, we'll suddenly have Manhattan's low rents?

Their analysis often seems to me to be of the same level as the multitude that thinks the solution to traffic is building more freeways. Yes, the first-order effect is more capacity. But what are the second-order effects?

It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

The problem with Manhattan is that zoning trapped Manhattan in amber, along with most of the cities in the US, so it is no longer responsive to grow with demand.

> It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

Those are inherently subjective assessmentd, and I suspect thst people who choose to live in San Francisco instead of Manhattan often disagree with that subjective assessment.

I get that some people prefer Manhattan. I don't see that as an argument for why SF should become a clone of Manhattan.

This seems like an odd thing to say, in that I didn't say we should try to avoid Manhattan.

Seems to be a lot of caricature and rhetoric on both sides. It comes with any emotionally charged political topic. There are probably smart NIMBYs and dummy YIMBYs too. For some there is not an easy side to pick. Do I want lower housing prices in the Bay Area? Sure. Do I want dense apartments and town houses to be 90% of my options? No way. I’m not sure which side to support or whether to support a side.

The arguments I've come across fall into three buckets: neighborhood character, traffic/infrastructure, and (my personal favorite) supply and demand doesn't apply to housing. I suspect the real root is a fear of change mixed with greed.

* If you're a YIMBY what's the toughest NIMBY article or argument you've come across?

"We have 100 years of law, cultural, and financial precedent for our NIMBY actions and decisions, supported at all levels of government and the financial sector." When you're packing that kind of heat, your don't need a strong argument.

From my discussions with coworkers on the NIMBY side the real reason they were so interested in preventing new construction in their towns was to keep the children of poor people out of the schools their own kids were going to more than to raise the values of their houses. And some fears that the sort of people who would move into cheaper housing would cause higher crime rates.

The opposite of YIMBY isn't NIMBY per se. You'd need to look for BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) for the opposite view. Or don't, I think the acronym gives the game away.

In my city on the peninsula, the argument is that it will overwhelm the schools with all of the new residents' kids. There is also some concern that it will attract the "wrong crowd."

In the meanwhile, schools all over the peninsula are shutting down because of falling enrollment. It’s only about the “wrong crowd.”

Turns out you don't have to be self-interested or rich to be a NIMBY. Plenty of poor people don't really have a good grasp on supply and demand.

Or maybe they feel that a lot of the tech boom is what caused the increase in population, and they don't trust those people to have their interests in mind when trying to create new housing.

Color that under "poor understanding of supply and demand."

Why? Why would a natural distrust of a group of people who has never seemed interested in their problems or wellbeing before be a "poor understanding of supply and demand"?

Your implication is that it is reasonable for this group to believe that NIMBYism will somehow prevent rents from rising, "because we don't trust tech workers," which is counterfactual. In this case, low- and high-pay renters' interests are almost entirely aligned.

My implication had nothing to do with NIMBYism. Just that they don't trust the tech workers to have their interests at heart.

Its entirely reasonable and possible to believe that neither group will promote an outcome that will help those people.

Not really. I understand that Econ 101 gives a lot of people a mystical belief in the power of supply and demand. But real economies are not governed by one or two simple equations. If they were, building more and bigger freeways would solve traffic problems. It doesn't. [1]

As an example, look at how many Bay Area companies over the past decades have vigorously opened offices elsewhere, often moving whole slices of their companies to lower-cost areas. They are quite explicit this is due to rising costs. If costs didn't rise, or were rising more slowly, we would have even more demand for housing here. Or, put differently, reasonable increases in supply might not actually help current residents. But they could well increase pain for current residents: more traffic, more gentrification, more destruction of existing buildings and neighborhoods.

So it may be less "poor understanding of certain shallow econ dogmas" and "a strong understanding of what they stand to lose, and how often they've lost at the hands of affluent white people who are sure they know how to fix things". Consider James Baldwin, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU

[1] See, e.g.: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

I think they (correctly) feel that there is just so much demand that the middle class would quickly buy up available properties and they would be highly unlikely to hit prices affordable to the poor by market forces. This is simply because of the huge desirableness of living in CA and this weather. This would esp be true if the new units were in high enough quantity that the overall area would become safer.

And if the poor live in a rent controlled unit, they don't have any strong desire to live in a similar unit with more occupants on the same lot. They think more like an owner in that sense.

Supply & demand is a great concept but the supply will always be limited by a fixed quantity of land - whether its land in CA, land near transit, land with etc, etc. And some of them may feel the land they are on is hugely undervalued and unlikely to ever remain affordable.

I don't think your "correctly" parenthetical is apt — you are proposing that demand is infinite and therefore supply and demand does not apply. Clearly demand is not infinite because prices are finite. Also, if demand can eat up all of the supply, you are still supply-limited. That is supply and demand in action — you're imagining a scenario in which supply is still very constrained and claiming that prices will stay high. I agree! Supply needs to be less constrained than that to lower prices, which is kind of the general thrust of the YIMBYs.

Yes, rent control distorts supply and demand, leading to higher prices.

Land will eventually constrain, but at the moment SFBA has tons and tons of unused air that is kept off the market by zoning.

Your argument is not very clear to me. They may very correctly realize that when you take how large the demand is + how much land is up for sale + how much could possibly be built on it + which neighborhood they want to remain in... the chance the market will reduce those units to prices that affordable to them... the chances are very low. So its not really a surprise they become NIMBYs.

>will always be limited by a fixed quantity of land

Apartments exist in 3D space. A 2X height limit increase is as good as a 2X increase in available land.

Powerful local landowners support local YIMBYism, because it will make them far wealthier than they are already. Their financial clout allows them to dominate the media coverage, and their financing of YIMBY groups gives them an army of wealthy, educated, articulate young people to make supporting their right to build very large buildings look like a populist endeavor.

It depends on the type of housing being built. A lot of new housing being built is unaffordable two bed apartments aimed at higher earners. Along with the YIMBY campaign a percentage of the housing needs to be affordable to lower income people in a city.

Also better public transportation would help so people can live further away and easily commute to city jobs.

I think the caricature of the self-interested rich guy is really the most rational caricature. Preserve the neighborhood in amber, maintain home values; this makes sense, this is the majority of the United States. The activists supposedly fighting for low-income communities are so bizarrely wrong that they’re beyond caricature. Fight oppression by seizing control of the apparatus of oppression instead of by abolishing oppression.

A lot of the tenant orthodoxy in San Francisco is based on completely backwards economics. The idea is that building more market-rate housing will increase the demand for market-rate housing even more, so it’s futile to even attempt it. Only housing with guaranteed low prices should be allowed to be built. Completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of homes that used to be naturally affordable, but now are worth an average of over a million each. A major blog for this point of view is 48hills. https://48hills.org/2016/09/debunking-trickle-housing-fallac...

The self-interested rich people do come through, still. Dillon mentions the rally, but he doesn’t mention the wealthy white landlords standing at the head of the rally. He quotes Shanti, who was active in the SF chapter of the DSA, but now works full-time as an activist because of funding from the wealthy white-ish Dean Preston. He mentions a black tenant activist, but he doesn’t mention the bald-faced lies, nor the funding from wealthy white-ish Michael Weinstein. The San Francisco “progressive” movement, if judged by its results, well, rich landlords are successfully keeping their home values, but low-income communities are still being evicted.

The Filipina activist is interesting. I’ve clashed with her in other contexts, and the summary is that most non-English-speaking low-income people are for the ideas of SB 827, but the leadership of the organizations are against it. Some people from the Planning Department held an exercise where they asked whether we wanted more height and density along our transit corridors, and only the leaders said, “No, we are against developer giveaways.” The ordinary poor people want more affordable housing, and they recognized that affordable housing needs to be legal to be built. Loosening the height and density restrictions is how we legalize affordable housing.

In my neighborhood, I think the toughest NIMBY argument is that we are not the organized people of color. I’ve always had a YIMBY point of view, even though I grew up with poor parents, because I want to eliminate the structural causes of poverty. Several others in my neighborhood had a similar experience, and similarly promote more housing. The way the Filipina activist sees it, that makes us “privileged people of color,” so our opinions are not valid. We need to activate the still-poor people to be a constituency for housing; but her organizations have the institutional connections, to legal counsel from SFTU (which also promotes backwards economics), and to other non-housing activities such as immigration and community gardening. I don’t know how to work through this problem.

Great question. It only feels one-sided if you're getting most of your information from HN and the tech community. CA YIMBY wants you to believe that their opposition consists entirely of old, white NIMBYs opposed to development. That is a misrepresentation. In fact it is CA YIMBY that is mostly white.

The main opposition to YIMBY here is not anti-development. It just prioritizes "affordable" low-income housing development and protection of existing low income housing. Whereas YIMBY, while claiming to know what's best for low income folks, prioritizes building market-rate housing to accommodate the explosive growth of the tech industry. They disagree on the effects of building market-rate housing in lower income neighborhoods.

The best thing to read? That LA Times article is a good start. Others have noted the DSA's stance on this.[1] Here's an excerpt, where they lay out exactly what they'd like to see in a pro-development bill:

---------------

SB 827 can be improved further with the following additions:

Add measures to ensure that new development occurs in affluent single-family neighborhoods and not exclusively in low-income communities with a history of racialized divestment.

Mandate that a high percentage of the new transit-oriented development be designated affordable at extremely low-income, very low-income, and low-income levels.

Mandate that new units built from SB 827 accept housing vouchers.

Include value capture provisions such that value created by public transit development is returned to the public in taxes.

Impose a temporary rent freeze on buildings surrounding new development enabled by SB 827.

Pass legislation to raise funds from short term rentals and to mitigate the impact of short-term rental services, like AirBnB, taking units off the market.

Develop programs to ensure ownership opportunities of new housing in communities of color in order to combat the continued existence of redlining.

Target funding from the upcoming $3B November housing bond to be allocated for land acquisition and the construction of 100% subsidized, deeply affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color targeted by upzoning. Allow not-for-profit and public development proposals a first right of acquisition on upzoned parcels.

Amend the companion bill, SB 828, to study and analyze the racialized impacts of high-end development. Factor race and class impacts into regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) goals.

[1] http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

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