Low-income housing has no impact on nearby home values (2016)
trulia.com
trulia.com
Once you have actual organized NIMBYism, you are selling to existing property owners and residents. They have no real reason to "buy" this story. Either low cost housing doesn't affect anything, or it is against their interests. In no scenario does benefit them, so why shouldn't they object... just to be safe? At the least, construction is noisy and unsightly.
I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them. That's how organised NIMBYs see it. That's how it plays out in practice. YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally.
NIMBYism exists. The relevant questions are about how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it.
The problem is that once they exist, they serve whatever purposes whoever controls them wants. If they want NIMBY stuff, they can be used for this purpose.
I think addressing NIMBY at this level is a fools errand. You can always replace one tool with another.
There's plenty of space in the US.
As a result, jobs and money also tend to move out. Somehow the low-income people, who now have all the space and jobs to themselves happen to be uncapable of running the place.
There were - the Volkswagen Beetle. You could even bolt a Porsche engine directly onto the bug's transaxle. The same fellow (Ferdinand Porsche) designed both cars.
Many car lines have high and low ends, where the manufacturer tries to appeal to high and low spenders.
I do find it hilarious that the Porsche cayanne is the same as the Volkswagen version but worst interior.
Correct.
I want a supermarket to pay cashier a decent salary, so that he could afford a shelter at market price. Otherwise it looks like I'm subsidizing the aforementioned business from my taxes.
Anywhere that truly, desperately requires more low-income housing isn't a place where it's not in someone's back yard. And if you move low-income housing projects so far away from the population center that no one will have their backyard disturbed you're making the housing non-viable before the first mound of dirt has been moved.
But yes. I believe the plan should be not to squeeze more people into already overpopulated areas, but how to attract people to other places.
> you're making the housing non-viable before the first mound of dirt has been moved.
Why's that?
It's far cheaper to live in places with low demand, so why do low income people not live there?
Conversely if it's so much more expensive for a low income person to live and work in SF, why is there so much supply that wages can be low?
Not if you live in heavily subsidized housing.
Yes, because we love democracy, don't we folks.
> when the housing crisis becomes so acute
And why is there a housing crisis, exactly? You're presumably a technical person — apply some systems thinking.
> Yes, because we love democracy, don't we folks.
Home ownership is about 50/50 in the Bay. If CA acts against NIMBY short-term interests that isn't in and of itself anti-democratic.
It could make sense to question whether that's a power that should reside with the state, one might attack some of the common anti-NIMBY arguments (e.g., that people without homes are disproportionately unable to participate in local politics), and any individual state-level solution could be undesirable on its own merits, but going straight for the jugular and asserting the state is being undemocratic by not protecting NIMBYs seems overly inflammatory.
i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard".
Obviously, there are plenty of potential issues, such as sampling bias that may confound the article's conclusions, but it's not something to outright ignore, either.
Suppose the difference is actually large. Their currently million dollar house will be worth half a million dollars.
Who is paying this money? Low income people who need housing? They haven't got it, that was the original problem. Local taxpayers? That's just the original homeowners paying themselves.
The title that a NIMBY has is for their lot and their house. It's not on anything next to it, it's not on the view from their windows, not on the social strata living nearby, etc.
I don't see any right to limit the nearby construction from those who already live there, except when the new construction would be dangerous to their health or safety (so no oil refinery next to a housing block).
The mechanism of NIMBYism is noise in media and promises to vote against politicians approving of the construction. I wonder if that can be overcome by counter-noise ("we want to live somewhere!") and promises for vote for the politician form those who benefit from the new development. If the new development is higher density, simple arithmetic of voting would make it politically more profitable to build more units, given that the people who are going to live in them would vote based on that.
The main method of NIMBYism, and the secret to its success, is to put restrictive zoning laws and building codes in place.
To be honest, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of insurance policy that covers this kind of thing. You'd pay a premium to be protected from large value reductions, and the risk is distributed across a large number of homeowners.
Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. To them, the house essentially had negative value. The land was all they wanted.
At this stage, you're not talking about regular people who are holding their house as their nest egg.
Many, many people hold their house as a location they can put money every month that won't disappear and someday might make more money.
The kind of people that are buying houses for the land and the kind of people that are buying existing houses to live in are two entirely different income brackets.
Lots and lots of people are in the poorer income bracket.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Allowing further construction and development raises the value of land, it doesn't decrease it: a square foot in a dense city is worth a lot more than in a sparse one.
Its possible NIMBYism exists on the wrong belief that it's in their economic interest to prevent new housing though I'm skeptical.
The core problem of NIMBYism is not the pulling-rope game of wanting and not wanting housing: its a crisis of tax design and political design.
If California, and a city like san francisco, eliminated sales taxes and income taxes and would gather those revenues with property taxes and land taxes, they would be so high that property wouldn't be worth a damn. (SF city alone spends something like 1000U$S per household per month) This distortive tax does benefit old landlords, and in a state with such a transient population it should be politically popular to change that. But it doesn't because of a political design issue: renters and immigrants either can't or tend not to vote. SF population is like 25% immigrants, almost all of them renters and with no capacity to politically fight back anything.
It is my belief that these things will change when they have to be changed and not a minute sooner.
We need land value taxes to encourage the efficient use of land, discourage this ridiculous house-as-a-nest-egg system, and encourage housing development to match demand, but it won't happen until renters start voting more than landowners. (Landowners are technically outnumbered 2-to-1 in the bay.)
I fully agree with your realpolitik analysis and conclusions. Your strategy is far more healthy than my own. Thank you.
I was very involved in local politics. Long time member of one of the few remaining orgs regularly doing endorsement interviews. My own large (largest?) precinct is in the most progressive legislative district, in the most progressive congressional district, in a very blue state. For a rough sense, IIRC, our 2016 caucus had ~140 Bernie supporters and ~10 HRC supporters.
That liberal bubble you hear about? I was deep in it. Our executive board regularly has some very divisive arguments. But I now know these were the narcissism of small differences. Collectively, we were very far to the left of our broader community.
I have a rueful laugh whenever told how left-wing my area is. People just don't know. That liberalism hard stops when the topics are housing, homelessness, and adjacent issues. The policy positions blithely voiced by electeds, candidates, other org leaders, activists, neighbors, etc. have made many of us board members blanche.
I've had some very rough conversations with friends, family, and associates about zoning, development, social services. The kinds of convos where I just have to stop for fear of damaging the relationship. It's not a good feeling.
Any way. Thank you for your clear-eyed take. I wish I had your views a decade ago.
Talk about cherry picked years. Why don't they analyse from 1998 to 2008 and say the same thing? Did it really take until 2020 to post this?
>Of the 20 markets examined, Denver was the only metro area where homes located near low-income housing projects registered a positive effect in terms of price per square foot after a project was completed.
And the absence of serious, critical thought. Has trulia never heard of correlation vs causation?
They probably don’t teach that in data science boot camps
As others have said I don't think looking at home values in major cities like Boston or Seattle is that interesting. Cities are used to having very rich areas next to poor ones. I grew up in a town of about 20,000 that had close to no housing that wasn't zoned as single family. As a result, the median income was very high, property taxes stayed extremely low as a percentage (since everyone was contributing a lot), and the schools were considered great despite people not having to pay a lot in taxes. The neighboring town had higher taxes (because the median property value was significantly lower) and the schools were known to be bad. I wish there was more state level funding at the time - but there wasn't and don't think there is now.
It obviously isn't but the history of progressive politics demonstrates that ideological purity is a great way of never getting anything real done.
E.g. planned Parenthood's murky beginnings, food stamps (buyer of last resort for leftover agricultural produce), schools (training kids to be obedient factory workers).
I doubt there are any progressive institutions which aren't partly borne out of an uneasy alliance with some powerful but unethical group whose interests either align or are at least aren't all that badly affected.
- why did the authors pick 2,000 feet and 4,000 feet as thresholds? They refer to another article, but that article doesn't shed much light onto the problem as well
- why does the research cover the range of 1996-2006?
- the article looks at the low-income housing project built in 1996-2006. What's about the projects built before that?
- what was located on the site before the project was built?
To go from a "good neighbourhood" to a "bad neighbourhood" takes longer time than just 10 years since more and more houses are build graudually and people move in over longer periods of time until the majority of the population there is low-income.
Given low inventory and high prices in these tight markets, we set out to uncover how much homeowners really have to fear.
It should increase because the amount of land of normal price decreases.
Also, I always joke that you can help lower housing price in the area by causing non-offense nuisance. Walking shirtless and talking gibberish to yourself loudly. It will probably help a little.
So you could lower housing prices a lot more effectively by convincing kids in the area to goof off more and not take school seriously.
but it's not a causal effect - or at least, it's a lot more complicated than a simple causal effect.
School performance is affected by budget, which is paid via taxation, as well as resources available from the parents' contributions. Poorer neighbourhoods will obviously have parents contribute less, even if the taxation is the same (which, is highly unlikely as well).
The cumulative effect is that poorer people receive a poorer education, which compounds over generations, and causing a negative feedback loop.
It is a causal effect since parents with more resources (higher paying jobs, higher levels of education, more connections/resources) will be living in higher value housing.
It's really simple. Kids tend to be like their parents. Parents who raise kids well have a strong preference to be among their own kind. The parent who sits down at night to check homework is nothing like the parent who interrupts homework in favor of entertainment. The parent who enforces discipline is nothing like the parent who lets kids run in gangs.
Families are in a bidding war to be with other families that prioritize education. Families without those values will bid lower, and thus be excluded.
Thats probably 10% of it. The socioecomic status and drive of the parents is probably 75% of it. If you bring in low SES people / low drive people into a successful school district its common sense the school will be worse off handling their children. So as a home owner you have lost some piece (albeit potentially small) of the good school district you paid for when you bought your house, and your indirectly having them to subsidize other peoples children, but as in articles like this, misrepresenting the data and hoping that they dont realize their having the value of their assets chipped away at in the name of social welfare.
>The cumulative effect is that poorer people receive a poorer education, which compounds over generations, and causing a negative feedback loop.
I agree and it would actually make some sense for the well off with good school districts to carry out such programs to lift other people out of poverty. but when you see articles like this that are so thoroughly dishonest about true cost, it makes sense you would outright reject it because they aren't going to acknowledge you are even giving something up. and if thats their perspective, then they can go as far as they want with it, so your are better off not giving an inch.
It has everything to do with parents. High property price is the price of admission of having your kids with other people willing and Able to pay.
See charter schools as a good example. They do not select by ability and they don’t spend that much.. but you DO have to bother to show up(enter the lottery) this is too much to ask for A LOT of parent though. No amount of spending on schools will fix that.
In principle, by supply and demand. If there is more housing then people don't have to outbid each other for the existing housing and the prices decrease.
Obviously this only applies if there is enough new housing to move the needle, which for housing projects like this there often isn't, but that's also the exact reason why programs like this are so ineffective. You have a city of a million households, a quarter of a million can't afford housing (or are having to scrimp in order to afford it), then you build a thousand units and imagine that will do something. What about the other 249,000?
Anything actually effective at making housing more affordable would reduce housing prices, because that's literally what "more affordable" means.
People want to live near other people/businesses, but that's what cities are already, which is why there is already more demand there. There is a limit to the amount of housing you can add before you end up on the other side of the curve and prices start going back down again.
There is also a matter of general policy. If hypothetically one city (and no others) added a lot of new housing so that the cost of housing there was lower there than in other cities then many people might move there, because they'd get to live in a city for less than it costs anywhere else, which would drive prices back up to near equilibrium. But if every city added housing then you wouldn't have that sort of migration because people could get into new housing without moving to another city, and then prices would decline everywhere.
One possible reason is because more housing requires more infrastructure expenses.
These expenses will be paid from taxes. Since you cannot tax low-income people, either current residents will see their bill going up, or the infrastructure will be now underfunded.
It takes some time for the infrastructure to fall apart though, so the effect may be not immediate.