Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Short & medium term effects on real estate prices is only part of the issue. Ultimately, NIMBYism exists for a bunch of reasons... and the reasons don't matter much.

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.

View on HN

I think the best approach is just to spread the risk. If I own a house and someone builds a fracking station behind it, I'll lose most of what I have worked my whole life to build. I shouldn't be able to buy a house and have jurisdiction over the entire surrounding area, but I also shouldn't be at risk of losing 50% of my property overnight.

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.

The core problem here is that so much value is tied up in houses. People view houses as an investment. If houses depreciated like cars then people aren't so concerned about the value of there house b/c it won't make or break retirement. Any long term housing solution needs to find a way of preventing houses from becoming investments.

Houses do depreciate like cars. Houses are money pits. It’s land that is the investment. The earth may have a huge amount of land but the amount of desirable land is tiny by comparison.

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.

> Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild.

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.

That people put money into their house every month doesn’t change the fact that a great deal of that money doesn’t contribute to wealth building. Interest on mortgage payments, maintenance and repair, renovations, utility bills; these are all sunk costs associated with home ownership.

Ok but that doesn't change GP's point. Just substitute land for house in their post.

It changes the point profoundly. Why would we expect land to depreciate? Unless the world’s population goes into decline (always a possibility), land will only continue to become more scarce. As other sources of wealth grow (and not just population), land will go up in price, not down.

They're treated like investments partially because they have special tax advantages that other investments wouldn't have. So part of the long term solution may be to actually treat them like investments.

So that even less people will have a chance to have roof over their head? Fuck that

Just encourage earthquakes and building on unstable ground. it works in Japan.

Don't give the insurance companies any ideas...

I'd love to have fracking or another well put in behind my backyard or, even better, in my backyard. That's a huge win. My cut from the mineral rights would be a welcome addition to the retirement plan.

Assuming you verified you own the mineral rights since deed of property does not necessarily convey deed of mineral rights, which is a costly process in its own right.

Highly agree. It seems like the only recourse these days is simply overriding NIMBYs at the state level (I think CA is close to this point) when the housing crisis becomes so acute that it becomes politically viable to simply go against the many NIMBYs' wishes at the higher levels.

NIMBY is only one face of the coin that makes it difficult for building. Local governments are also extremely satisfied placing a high bureaucratic burden (red tape) on new development. Think of setback laws, environment impact studies, zoning, facade ordinances.

To my knowledge that's often because local governments are inherently NIMBYs since they only represent locals by definition. Local governments don't listen to potential locals or outsiders. So I don't really agree that local governments and NIMBYs are different sides of a coin. There is a great amount of overlap and personally I suspect any rules that slow development to be NIMBY motivated.

Those things are never, arguably.

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.

Another recourse would be not to build stuff in other people's backyards.

There's plenty of space in the US.

Ah yes. Rural Montana. The best place for California to fix their housing issues.

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.

Well, rural Montana is not the only place in the US.

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?

> 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.

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?

> It's far cheaper to live in places with low demand

Not if you live in heavily subsidized housing.

Because remote work isn't low-income work, and companies aren't setting up in small towns.

In this case it probably would be better to put more effort into attracting businesses to the US in general and to the smaller towns in particular.

The NIMBYs could move to those places and not have to worry anymore

Yes, with some effort you can make NIMBY people move out.

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.

The idea of low income housing is itself ridiculous. Why are there no low income Porsches? There's plenty of places that don't need affordable housing because housing is affordable without the government tearing the fabric of the free market. Lots of places that didn't have affordable housing didn't overinvest in houses like Texas where the houses remained stable compared to the heavily populated areas with high density.

Why is it ridiculous to you that people want and need both shelter and access to a way of sustaining themselves? The comparison between a Porsche (essentially a status symbol that you buy so that people around you see that you have money - given traffic regulations it isn't really a way of making your daily commute shorter) and housing (which is a necessity) shows that you don't have a good grip on reality. And you don't want all bus drivers, garbage men, supermarket cashiers etc. to move to Texas and bring your garbage to the landfill by yourself.

> And you don't want all bus drivers, garbage men, supermarket cashiers etc. to move to Texas and bring your garbage to the landfill by yourself.

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.

They’ll never have the bargaining power to do that. No unions, no unique skills, no money. They have either to commute for 5 hours a day, share a room with 20 people or live in an RV.

Housing is essential but a loft downtown isn't

> Why are there no low income Porsches?

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.

But that's not a Porsche then. It's a cheaper car from the same manufacturer you have to buy, not subsidized by the gov or other car buyers.

I do find it hilarious that the Porsche cayanne is the same as the Volkswagen version but worst interior.

I don't see how this would become real in practice. The YIMBYs don't want to drive out NIMBYs they just want denser housing. If you replace a single family home with a 4 story apartment building you get 4 times the density. Most of the people who want to move in aren't actually low income people. They are migrants who are about to double their salary but can't find a place without displacing low income people. There are lots of cities in California that want to stay "small" which also means that they throw away growth opportunities. The low income people that are being displaced are actually the californians.

> simply overriding NIMBYs at the state level

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.

> simply overriding NIMBYs at the state level

> 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.

What do you mean by systems thinking? I looked it up but I'm not sure which definition you had in mind.

> how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it.

i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard".

I wonder how it meshes with the idea of property rights.

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 mechanism of NIMBYism is noise in media and promises to vote against politicians approving of the construction.

The main method of NIMBYism, and the secret to its success, is to put restrictive zoning laws and building codes in place.

Which is why Japan has zoning laws on the national levels -- and the zones are very different. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

> i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard".

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.

If the government believes that it's in the public interest to have low income housing, then the government should pay for it. It's not exactly the same as the homeowners paying themselves, either. Structuring it this way ensures that the cost is allocated fairly across all of society. If we believe that it is in societies interest to have low income housing, then society as a whole should pay for it. The cost shouldn't just fall on a few unlucky homeowners. Making the cost widely and evenly shared makes it equitable.

Who's gonna pay for it? The government? How do they get money? Taxes? So we pay the government (they of course pay the federal employees and some pork barreling) to pay for affordable housing? In the end who will really pay for it aside from the people who will live in affordable housing?

My whole comment was an answer to that exact question. The government pays, because the government paying smooths out the hit. The cost is more equitably distributed over the whole population, as opposed to being concentrated in a few unlucky neighborhoods.

My point is the government never really pays, we pay the government after all, but I understand your point too.

The people who pay for affordable housing are those who caused the housing market to be unaffordable. That's only fair.

If candy bars are too expensive it's the buyers fault? That's fair?

Sorry I misread your comment!

The property developer who built the new construction.

Where does the property developer get that money? From the low-income people?

No, they get it from the rich, land owning NIMBYs through taxes.

So then what's the point of the taxes instead of just letting their housing prices come down?

If they wanted to ensure the buildings around then would not change, they should have bought them too; the idea that your house value is supposed to be protected by the state is ridiculous. Just like stock market choices, no one should be bailing out house owners who treat the house as an investment. If you're just living in it, value don't matter.

but if, as the OP article suggests, there is no lost value, then there is no incremental value to pay existing NIMBYs. Otherwise you're just paying people off based on some subjective measure, which does not seem eminently sustainable.

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.

The problem then is you can avoid paying NIMBYs by manufacturing studies claiming they didn't lose any value... Which may be the motivation here. It's very easy to fudge a study, even direct analyses like this. I'm skeptical.

Only if you believe 1996-2006 is impartial information 14 years later and not cherry picked

There wouldn't be lost money at all, lots that can be turned from SFH to 8 unit condos are worth way more.

> I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them

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.

The article was useless. They could have showed asylums, prisons and liquor stores built during 1996-2006, you know, the year that housing prices peaked and said it had no effect on housing prices.

The article is comparing < 2000 feet away to < 4000 feet away home prices. So, any broader market trend is accounted for.

Doesn't really matter when they use booming housing prices from over a decade ago to justify their cooked statistics.

Yes, it does. By comparing them to teach other, the broader trend in the housing market is held constant. They may be making other errors, but this isn't one of them.

I'm sure they have other decades they could use, but they choose the time right when the housing boomed and right before it burst. I doubt the prices had anything to do with affordable housing, and more with other factors that could have easily negated it.

NIMBYism exists because so much personal savings is tied up in real estate. This is mostly due to maybe tax incentives and government policy favoring landowners.

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 think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. ... YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally."

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com