'Dear NIMBYs' – An Open Letter from a Homeless Woman in LA | Hacker News Reader

'Dear NIMBYs' – An Open Letter from a Homeless Woman in LA

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40 pointsclairity44 comments

It appears to me that once a society becomes large enough a majority of the problems left to solve are collection action problems, I think the housing crisis in West Coast cities in particular is an example of a collection action problem.

I keep up with the NIMBY/YIMBY divide both in my home: Portland, OR and in the Bay Area. And I've noticed a few trends: You can't build high in certain areas because it blocks the view for wealth homeowners, you can't build moderate density buildings because it "changes the character of the neighborhood", you can't extend rail into certain areas because rail bring minori-- eh, crime. And you can't build near existing rail because it should be up to each individual community to decide what gets built in their location.

Where are you supposed to build? Something has to give, and it looks like as always its poor folk who are suffering. Being pushed out further and further with a lack of adequate transportation support to get to urban job centers.

>Where are you supposed to build?

Austin. That's why the US has a federal structure, so that if one polity degenerates into a self-interested but somehow still self-destructive gridlock situation, everyone can just leave.

Poor people can’t just leave. They lack the resources to get started in a new community.

When only poor people live in SF, the property prices will decline from the stratosphere.

This is why the Dust Bowl westward migration... didn't happen?

And Houston.

In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaser talks a lot about the effect of regulation in housing markets on pricing and new construction. He uses Houston as the prime example.

Of course, deregulation in the housing market is far from a panacea and comes with a number of trade-offs

Austin just gave up on CodeNext, a revamped zoning proposal to allow for greater density. It's not safe from NIMBYs.

https://www.statesman.com/news/20180802/codenext-to-code-nix...

CodeNext had plenty of non-NIMBY issues. This November we voted in a city council that is majority urbanist/pro-density and voted down the NIMBY Prop J. There is hope.

I see all the issues out on the west coast. But then why are real estate prices in places like Buffalo, Cleveland or Pittsburgh also rising significantly faster than inflation? Why are places where the population is declining seeing an increase in real estate values?

It seems like everywhere I go everyone blames real estate prices on some variety of local issues without noticing that this isn't even a national issue, but global.

Maybe we need to address these macro issues first?

Speculation and low interest rates are nationwide issues. Locally, price increases are almost always caused the population growing faster than new homes are built.

But if Cleveland cannot keep real estate prices stable, with a rapidly declinig population, how in the world could anyone realistically expect a place like Portland, Seattle or the Bay Area to?

Local policy does not appear to be able to even fix this with a declining population. So please answer me. What is Cleveland doing wrong that is causing their real estate prices to climb higher than inflation? What can Cleveland do?

My speculation and low interest rate points still apply.

Maybe Cleveland was undervalued before? Maybe the population declines are mostly non-homeowners?

So before naming something specific they are doing wrong, what should a house cost? Cleveland is still so much cheaper than many other cities, they might not be doing anything wrong.

Why are places where the population is declining seeing an increase in real estate values?

Perhaps increased real estate values drive out people?

maybe the real estate companies & money lenders want housing priced so high that you will always need to take out a loan no matter what. only the wealthy have the money to pay for a home with 'cash' or at least a good chunk for a low/short term mortgage.

as an american, i can see that 'we' have lost our compassion for those truly in need.

peace.

Meanwhile Paris is more dense than NYC. Beautiful dense cities are a solved problem since like 1700s.

As is Barcelona and Athens. But it would ruin the neighborhood's character /s

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

I agree with this but am always skeptical of the YIMBY side of things. At least as I understand it, YIMBYism is advocating for deregulated real estate development markets? So maybe my understanding of it is skewed, but I can't really see real estate developers making cheap housing a priority in an expensive neighborhood when they could profit from building more expensive housing. Especially now that housing can be bought as an investment and held but not used. I just think "market based solutions" aren't going to fix homelessness. Good ole fashioned public housing might though, real public housing, not projects owned by private corporations and subsidized by tax dollars.

This letter isn't really talking about YIMBYism so I'm probably just assuming any anti-NIMBY writing is pro-YIMBY which is probably inaccurate. I do see a lot of YIMBYism on HN so perhaps someone can set me straight on it.

If rich people (i.e., amost anyone reading this) cannot buy fancy new houses they will have no issue raising the values of existing stock.

There was an article (I believe on Noahpinion?) a while ago about how they don’t need to build cheap housing, if they built enough expensive housing to soak up all the tech workers, the price of everything else would drop enough that poor people would have plenty of places to live.

I don’t know if that would work, but it’s a theory...

That sounds like a housing development version of trickle down economics.

It really isn’t. It comes down to the fact that if you’re a high-paid tech worker you can outbid basically anyone else for your rent. If an area doesn’t build housing for tech workers and other such high-paid young people, you force them into the existing apartments, forcing out anyone who was living there previously.

It’s less “trickle down economics” and more “build housing for me or I will outbid you for your own apartment”.

As patio11 put it "If you stop building housing, you’re deciding someone doesn’t get to live there; market just tells you their names."

Trickle down is a theory about tax rates, wages, jobs. “Supply and demand determine housing prices” is not that.

Been witnessing this a lot in my city. Developers talking a big game about deregulation and additional supply being the only way to drive prices down, then building only "luxury" condos that are snapped up by speculators and prices everyone else out.

Shifting the supply curve is the only way to drive the price down if the demand curve cannot be shifted. If prices are not falling, that simply means the supply curve hasn't shifted far enough yet, hence more supply is needed.

Edit: At the heart of the issue is whether or not society believes if the place someone lives should be distributed via supply and demand. Historically, the overarching theme has been might makes right, either via brute force or some proxy such as money, with a few localized instances of seniority or luck dictating the right, such as with rent controls and housing lotteries.

another way to look at this is that the number of people who need housing is higher than (far to the right of) the current market clearing price point (where the supply and demand curves currently cross).

building more at the high end shifts the whole supply curve down, not just the portion at the high end (this is because markets are defined by the interchangeability of the goods therein--i.e., fungibility). however, the rate of building is far too low to even meet the rising demand, much less to supply housing to everyone, so prices continue to rise.

the demand curve, which moves independent of the supply curve, has shifted up with the flood of high-salary developers into the market, so the new equilibrium price is still high and far to the left of the number of people needing housing.

all of those people between the market clearing price point and total needing housing are homeless (not all are on the streets however).

to get to the point where we can house everyone, we can shift the demand curve up with higher wages (for the bottom 80%). the supply curve shifts up (prices are higher) with high rents (e.g., land prices), zoning/other regulations, and nimbyism. we need to improve all of these things to supply enough housing for everyone.

I believe in the theory that building "luxury" housing for high income workers frees up rental space for those with lower incomes.

This is anecdotal but personally I know a lot of millennials who place a lot of weight on living downtown (I'm one of them). A few years ago -- prior to the completion of a variety of luxury apartments, these folks were renting out rooms in homes, or staying in more moderately priced apartments.

Once more rooms opened up that a had a gym, a nice rooftop area, close access to Whole Foods, and other amenities, they moved. I even know of a very wealthy couple that lived in a relatively poor neighborhood while they waited for their condo complex to finish completion so that they could move in. This couple could easily pay the monthly rent with half of one persons paycheck.

I think Boston showed that building luxury housing didn't lead to gentrification growth but instead concentrated it to the new housing. Granted it is one data point essentially but it makes some sense - that would take up higher end demand although some gentrification resulted from "all they could afford" and then growing successful.

City planning requires proportions, but cities keep building more office space without building the residential space for those workers to live in. For example, San Francisco has added over 170,000 new jobs since 2010 and has a stretch goal to build 5000 homes each year. It just doesn't add up.

So what am I to do? I'm the white tech worker living in a building with predominantly lower income families. If developers were allowed to build more condos I'd probably be living in one of them.

Also, consider what "luxury" means in this context. They're expensive because they're expensive to build and superficially nicer than older things. Once there's enough of them and some newer ones down the street they won't be "luxury" any more.

> advocating for deregulated real estate development markets

Not blindly deregulating, though. The YIMBY coalition near me includes a lot of socialists. It's entirely possible to build the needed housing without displacing vulnerable communities.

You might want to look into how things have played out in Seattle, where there was a recent housing construction boom. The tl;dr is that prices have come down significantly.

the actual amount renters paid dropped 1.4 percent in the past quarter, or $24 a month.

They have come down, but I wouldn't call 1-2% 'significantly' [1].

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...

They also never went as high as San Francisco where construction was more restricted. How the amount of residential construction compares to the amount of office construction also matters.

I grew up in Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill. Your tl;dr omits an important point: the city sold development rights to gentrify the area. Poor residents were relocated to outlying areas such as Skyway, which is significantly underdeveloped in term of infrastructure and social services. The housing projects were replaced by "mixed-income" neighborhoods; where a small portion of the homes were reserved for low-income residents and the remainder were sold at market value. The area, once diverse and full of immigrant/refugee communities, is now whiter, richer, and the NIMBY attitude is growing. Prices have come down a little recently, but enough to counter this displacement.

In San Francisco public housing projects are funded from fees on new development. In 2016, voters approved Prop C which increased the affordable housing requirements to 30% of the total units for a new project. A combination of factors -- rising construction costs, high land value, big fees (such as Prop C), onerous approval process, etc has led to the number of new construction permits being applied for dropping significantly.

That decrease has led to the city only getting funding for about 240 units of affordable housing in 2018 - 2019, whereas from 2014 - 2016 the city produced 500 units of public housing per year. [https://www.spur.org/news/2018-11-08/how-has-san-francisco-r...]

This is a long way of saying that the market affects everything. Even if we decide to build public housing that housing is not immune from market effects like expensive land and big construction costs. If it's more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to build market rate housing then it's more difficult and more expensive to build public housing.

For example, in the Mission no new affordable housing has been built in, according to Supervisor Ronen, close to 10 years. There are 7 projects in the pipeline, but none have broken ground [https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/24/17276152/affordable-housing-...]. Long approval processes and constantly increasing construction costs are partly to blame.

Price is determined by both the characteristics of the unit and the characteristics of the market. This is why units that are not at all luxurious by national standards can rent for $3500 in San Francisco, and why luxury high-rise apartments can rent for $1800 in Chicago.

It’s true that developers target the top of the market. The point is that, when they do it at scale, supply/demand balance brings the top of the market a lot lower. Possibly even lower than the bottom of the market in SF today. And they will do it at scale, unlike public housing.

The market has successfully provided nearly every home that exists in every affordable market today.

You’re probably right that it won’t solve homelessness, because many homeless people would not be able to hold a job and pay rent at any price level.

Profit is a function of materials, land, labor, margin, and very much regulatory cost.

When town laws limit the height you can build, that means you have fewer units to distribute total costs across. Building 10 stories might be 70% the cost of 20 stories… so if you have double the units to spread things across, price per unit WILL be lower.

Now extrapolate for things like

1. Minimum square footage

2. Parking requirements

3. "low income housing" units or other terms the local housing authority might put on top of any deal

4. Getting approval for the design (and the cycle of going back and forth to the drawing board)

5. Buying out surrounding rights holders like that old church you have to move across the street, or in SF's case the derelict gas station that is now a landmark if it means "preserving the character of the neighborhood"

6…etc

Building is anything but easy or cheap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

All this adds up. Public housing is important in the interim given its usually easier to get around existing regulations, but the government is one of the shittiest landlords around. The goal should be 100% private housing supply.

Market based solutions will absolutely build homes for the homeless as long as the cost to build them do not exceed the value that whatever entity like the government or charity can pay. Markets deliver $8 Waffle House steak, and $60 Ruth's Chris steak. Cities/regulations only allow Ruth's Chris.

You get luxury housing b/c it's too expensive to build anything else. Fortunately even new luxury stock is good, as it frees up formerly luxury housing stock and stabilizes pricing for less-nice housing elsewhere.

It's pretty basic Econ 101.

I think there is no real solution that people will like. In order for the price of a condo to fall to match the price of a condo in a rural area, there would need to be a huge amount of construction (I think more than most people realize) to increase supply sufficiently to satisfy demand. Doing this would drastically change the lifestyles of the people living there.

I am just speculating, but think of a city New York now, it is already known to have horrible traffic and overcrowded transit. It is also known to have some of the most expensive real estate in the world. In order to become "affordable" you could build tons of high density housing however how much would it cost to take a taxi or eat at a restaurant if you did this? I'm sure many well of people would leave because their quality of life would decrease due to these changes. So you would basically be trying to find a new equilibrium of real estate prices.

I don't think anyone is claiming that housing density is the only dimension of city planning. It's just the most controversial one. Transportation, schools, and grocery stores are also required in the right proportions. It's also a big deal how all these things are placed. If homes, offices, and retail are nearby then people need to travel shorter distances and transportation gets easier.

I learn the opposite from NYC: if the city is successful enough to draw a lot of real estate development, the result will be even higher prices.

This more closely matches the actual trajectory of cities like NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.

Why does it have to be LA though? Is there any place in the US where her skills could translate to being able to pay for a housing/shelter?

I know real third world poverty and people that barely earn US hourly minimum wage in a day, and yet in the US, the richest country in the world, it’s OK to live off of others and demand “rights”

I think there needs to be more van life friendly facilities. I am perfectly happy to live in a van and go to work every day as a software developer. And I think there's a lot of people who also feel the same way. If there is a place that would let you park your van for four hundred bucks a month or something like that where you were safe and allowed to park. I think that would be a huge moneymaker.

i think you presented an earnest and unconventional perspective and am dismayed at the lack of engagement here (even if i myself wouldn't want to live in a van).

Why thank you for the positive assessment! Yep agree van life isn't for everyone. But as inequality grows it will be a tolerable decision for many I think in the future.

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