The Left-NIMBY Canon
noahpinion.substack.com
noahpinion.substack.com
I have lived in market rate neighborhoods and have known the angst of lease renewal, each year wondering whether I was going to be able to afford to stay. And I was effectively kicked out a couple of times, forced to pack up and move for economical reasons.
I have also lived in rent controlled areas where, even as a renter, these worries go away. Unsurprisingly to me, the character of the neighborhood changes quite a bit when everyone is not constantly worried about being kicked out. People can build for the long term, engage with their neighborhood organizations, form a stable community. You frequently see people staying in the same apartments for decades.
The nature of the changes induced by market rate housing vs rent controlled housing is much more long-term than what is considered there. Long-term turnover needs to be understood, not just rent rates.
Market rate neighborhoods with ever-increasing rent bring dynamism and are often an entry point into a city for professionals. They're liquid, and enable people to upsize or downsize their living situations with relative ease. Businesses and people come and go and there's an irrepressable energy to it.
(There's a strong argument that the kind of risk, stress, and precariousness you rightly and richly describe are an effect of a NIMBY-induced housing crisis. The "market rate" and "rent control" dichotomy suggests that something is seriously hinky in the housing market at hand.)
Rent controlled areas are calmer, slower, more stable. They are better for people who are able to find a place exactly to their liking and whose lives are improved by their ability to hold the world at bay. Which obviously never lasts forever. Things always change.
As you say, both have long-term consequences. It's perhaps worth considering that perhaps neither set is inherently better than the other. And, above all, it's possible that the divide between the two could be underappreciated long-term consequences of policy.
People tend to stay in the same homes for very long periods of time, and are invested in their local communities, but you can get short term housing or move frequently if you wish (short term leases exist but to be expected, cost to value ratio isn’t great; generally 1 year minimums without penalty for long term leases with 1 month rent fee if you leave earlier, and with high fees (3-5 months rent!) when you move in, so it’s not economically encouraged to hop a lot; I personally find these high costs unreasonable, but seems to be well accepted here).
Housing is generally reasonably priced; you can live within 30 mins of central Tokyo by train for less than $400/mo as a single person in an apartment (SF seems to completely lack cheap, small options for single people); but for a significantly larger premium, you can get a standalone house as well if you’d like. For me, despite living in a significantly more expensive apartment, I generally spend significantly more on going out to restaurants and stuff than my rent.
I personally think that if cities really invested in transit and relaxed zoning and permitting significantly, densifying neighborhoods, that market rate can produce the best of both worlds; but that would threaten the view that housing is an investment as the cornerstone of ones financial life, so it’s unlikely to happen in a place like the US.
Exactly! Build more housing!
Homes should be made for living. Not for investments or speculation.
Why is the American public and the politicians so clueless about this?
Well, because they are the landlords that benefits from all the price increases. They are the foxes guarding the hen house.
> housing is generally a depreciating asset
Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. In America, policymakers tend to prioritize real estate value over the ability of housing to actually house people. Homebuyers expect and demand that the values of their properties, including the rents that they generate, be constantly increasing. Supply and demand doesn't push prices down, because housing is inelastic: when you hike prices outside of people's means, they don't stop buying, they find more means, either by taking on more roommates, more jobs, or by making big cuts elsewhere in their budgets.
Before the housing market was commodified and public housing looted by private interests in the 70s and 80s, spending 20% of your income on housing was considered absurdly high. Now 50% is the norm, because landlords and speculators keep raising prices and you can't not live in a house.
Don't forget debt. I think there's a comparison to be drawn with healthcare costs here.
We're not clueless, but supply and demand is mostly meaningless in housing in the US. (I get that much of Hacker News is San Francisco based, and the Bay Area is an outlier in that it has an actual shortage of units). But except for a few very-specific cities (like SF), in most US cities the price of housing has absolutely nothing to do with supply nor demand. US housing prices are set by federal monetary policy, used as investment vehicles for banking and private equity, with some money laundering and scams thrown in, to create good-looking artificial economic indicators.
Most housing can not depreciate in the US. This is intentional, explicit, federal policy. (Guaranteed and backed up by the full faith of the federal government). Macro-level depreciation at the urban level simply isn't allowed for any reason. (Seriously, this is not an exaggeration. We poisioned an entire cities drinking water and despite demand being practically zero, that city still hasn't lost meaningful values on it's housing). You can't build faster than the feds can raise prices, and even if you could, most cities are not short on houses. (Half of the top 40 major US cities literally already have more empty/abandoned homes than they have homeless people)
If we pulled all that political monetary policy out of housing, then sure, our housing could be based on actual supply and demand (Japan-style). But politically, that will never happen in the US.
Most Americans can't articulate all of the above clearly. But any American that has ever bought a house knows damn well that the price they paid is entirely political and has no basis in reality, and most Americans know that the primary way housing prices go up is through new construction, so most Americans aren't going to be swayed by an argument to "just build even more"
> Homes should be made for living. Not for investments or speculation.
I agree, but generally speaking, America does not. All housing is investment here. Unless your wealthy enough to DIY it yourself, houses literally don't get built here unless it's a "profitable investment". (Banks often won't even finance things that lower average housing costs)
This is also why YIMBYism doesnt work here. The problem is too much investment in housing already. But new construction is assessed high, and all housing everywhere is assessed based on the closest comparable, so it becomes an infinite feedback loop until the bubble pops. You can't solve that with even more investment, the investment is causing the prices to rise in the first place!
My own anecdatum comes from about twenty-five years ago. I was living with my family in Tokyo in a rental condominium owned by a large corporation. The corporation tried to get us to move out so that they could sell the unit. Our children were small and I worked at home, and it would have been a major hassle to move then. I looked into the law and learned that the landlord needs a “proper reason” (正当事由 seitō jiyū, [3]) to evict a tenant and that wanting to sell the property does not count as such. I told the company’s representative that we knew our rights, and they stopped bothering us.
[0] https://www.generalunion.org/laws-and-rights/1700-so-you-re-...
[1] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2017/11/landlords-ending-a-...
[2] In Japanese: https://www.homes.co.jp/cont/rent/rent_00378/
[3] In Japanese: https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001017685.pdf
Source: https://www.urbandisplacement.org/policy-tools/bay-area
+1
> There's a strong argument that the kind of risk, stress, and precariousness you rightly and richly describe are an effect of a NIMBY-induced housing crisis.
Perhaps, but in my personal case, I think it was the opposite. I experienced this in an environment that is highly favorable to private, market-rate high-rise housing development.
Both San Francisco and NYC have housing shortage problems but I'm more likely to believe San Francisco's problem is inflicted by NIMBYism than New York's...
A great many people would characterize SF as highly favorable to private, market-rate high-rise housing development. I think this would be inaccurate, but they would say it with sincerity.
I cannot find good maps on this particular subject, but I would venture to guess that much of NYC is not built of high-rises. It's likely mostly low-rises with a smattering of four to six story buildings built up to or exceeding current zoning. I would venture to guess that trying to get a parcel or an area up-zoned is a politically fraught and potentially quite expensive proposition.
They also have a lot of left-NIMBY people making wrong arguments based on things they imagine are happening; in this case it's that all new housing is luxury towers that are being bought by "investors" and kept empty, for some reason related to taxes, instead of being rented out.
Without the knowledge of whether these trends continue into the long-term, these (small-percentage) dips in rent could be caused by any number of factors ranging from the decrease of rent caused by the recent construction of the buildings to the more abstract uncertainty of what changes in neighborhood composition an influx of people lured by a high-rise might cause.
Like I said, maybe that sort of thing is addressed in the papers, but as presented it isn't addressed outside of that comment about arson.
This is very selfish thinking. What if the whole city was rent controlled? Economy and population would stagnate. You want to have the benefit of living in a small privileged rent controlled pocket, while the rest of the city stays alive and vibrant due to free market economy.
Because ceteris is never paribus. The comparison is with the counterfactual world in which SF wasn't rent-controlled. Now, we can never know what would have happened, but I think there's a very strong case to be made that such an SF would be even more of a roaring powerhouse than it is now.
I guess the case in the negative is my experience, where every largest metro area I have been in has implemented rent control, often after large rent shocks.
So populations that had a lower home ownership base and less access to high income jobs, such as African Americans, have seen their populations completely destroyed in SF, starting exactly when SF decided to downzone.
Rent control is just fine for newcomers, as long as tenants don't ally with homeowners to keep our newcomers. The tenants lose in that battle when it comes time for the next generation to find housing.
Imagine what would happen if the whole country was rent-controlled! You would apparently end up like Switzerland.
There's some more information here: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Switzerland/Landl...
One important distinction: The amount of the initial rent can be freely agreed upon between landlord and tenant based on market rates. And most claims with the "conciliation" authority are unsuccessful. Because rents in Switzerland closely track the mortgage rate, it's derived from the market value of the purchased property, and rent increases are rarely blocked by the Federal government.
Research that establishes negative effects on housing markets caused by rent control usually analyze the Bay Area variety of rent control, not this quasi-mortgage-driven-market-based-rent-control-that's-rarely-enforced-meaningfully.
Not enforced meaningfully would mean to me that "it's abused and no-one cares". As opposed to "the rules are mostly followed, so there's not much abuse to enforce against". And as there's a country-wide renter's association (ASLOCA) I don't think significant abuses would be discussed... And checking their web site, I see https://www.asloca.ch/blog/le-conseil-des-etats-freine-le-lo... (in French) rejoicing that the parliament just rejected some landlord-lobby requests.
In rent-controlled markets, in my experience it's not unusual for long-term renters to enjoy significantly lower housing costs than if they were to buy an equivalent condo. I know that when I looked it was definitely the case for me unless I had bought with > 50% down. Property taxes alone would've represented half of my rent, HOA another bit, so I would've had to have a very low mortgage.
Noah Smith has other articles about how to do government-built but occupant owned housing like Singapore. It's far better than rent-control, which tends to privilege existing tenants at the expense of people who need jobs but weren't lucky enough to have been born in a rent-controlled apartment.
I know many folks who live in or grew up in such developments[0].
And such housing provides decent amenities and is safe, comfortable and generally well run.
There is no reason why we can't do this more, or why government should have no involvement. It works, and we know it works, because we're already doing it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Lama_Housing_Program
I'm not sure how rent control works in your city/country. But in my experience, you buy in at a market rate and then the amount of increase is capped by the government. I've not heard of people renting an apartment below market rate (for the first month) unless its classified as "affordable housing" which carries statutory requirements for the landlord and the tenet.
You hopefully are convinced by the article that short-term, building housing drops prices.
You are correct that for the people who live in a place, rent control affects their lives.
But the result of rent control is that when places open up, there is a massive excess of demand. Which results in high prices in the long term. The housing market in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area reflects this. And preserving the quality of life of people who are privileged enough to start in the neighborhood is what is causing the long-term problem of too little housing and rents that are massively too high. With commutes that are beyond insane.
Given political realities, the only hope that I have for a long-term change is that thanks to COVID, more companies have realized that they can let everyone telecommute. And after enough people move far away for cheaper housing in prettier places (prices are rising rapidly in rural counties!) the reduced demand will fix prices.
But it will take a few years after the pandemic is over before we know if that is a long-term trend or a blip.
I would challenge the notion that the problems of housing demand exceeding supply are all tied back to rent control. Zoning plays a big role. Incentives play a big role. Government leadership plays a big role. Some rent-controlled areas are economically dynamic and others aren't. I just don't think there's a clear correlation.
But in both theory and attempts to measure real-world data, rent control is a big factor.
There are rent controlled cities with low homeless populations. The fix is public housing.
I think much of new tech is mercenary. They aren’t from the area. They came to make money. They don’t care about the neighborhood. When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. In fact, with COVID-19, many have and are.
Even if you build a bunch of tech fish tanks, the surrounding area will still become very expensive. Yes, building more tech fish tanks can make it less worse, but it is still be untenable for existing residents. An artisanal coffee shop replacing a donut shop just made coffee unaffordable for the less wealthy.
I think that a much better connected transit system is actually the answer. It will allow new communities to form farther off but still connected to the whole. It gives everyone a place at the table and increases the cultural richness. NYC feels much more culturally rich than SF and I think that is why. Instead, in the Bay Area, you had the black community moving to Sacramento.
Also, those fishtanks were folly. It would have been much better for the city to have more mixed housing in those neighborhoods. By mixed, I mean having some larger units that allow families to stay. In a way, in the SOMA, you replaced the original SROs with tech SROs. The irony.
I think the transit villages were also terribly designed. Most are aligned around the track. That makes no sense from a noise pollution standpoint. It makes far more sense to build either perpendicular to the track or at least a block away.
Stepping back even further, government had and has an issue with attracting talent. It was hopelessly inadequate at addressing the challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities.
That’s literally the history of SF and why the city even began existing. The ‘attitude’ isn’t anything new, SF is built on gold mining and get rich opportunities.
Why is your local government putting so much effort into making it a tech fish trap? Yeah they will leave but only when your ability to trap them is gone. That's on you and your city. Stop blaming victims of your trap.
The suburb I live in has few tech jobs. In fact it has relatively few jobs at all. Most revenue comes from property taxes. Furthermore, it has shown no interest in attracting tech jobs. It doesn’t even have many fish traps. I think it has two such fish traps for perhaps 50-100 people out of a total population approaching 27000.
It seems to be attracting people due to geography, quality of life, and relatively good schools. The number of children has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. It was also rated a top 10 small town/city in the US.
Because the US is a big suburb with a few downtowns for skyscrapers for Fortune 500 cover photos?
...
Transit, mixed-use, etc. would all help. But there are probably 50+ years of emergent (and not so emergent, like Bob Moses and the car lobby putting a highway up everyone's ass) problems that need addressing.
Facebook’s HQ is Menlo Park (suburb). Google’s is in Mountain View (suburb). Apple’s is in Cupertino (suburb). Netflix’s is in Los Gatos (suburb).
The only big city downtown is actually SF. I would characterize San Jose as a giant suburb. All the other so called cities are really suburbs. Oakland has a small downtown but is across the Bay and has virtually no tech scene.
Particular kinds of tech tend to cluster together typically due to a founding company. South Bay is where hardware companies cluster. Enterprise software tends to cluster around Oracle in the mid Peninsula area. New software companies now cluster mostly around SF. I think the people who found new companies want access to the existing labor pool so they found the companies close to similar existing companies.
If you work for FB in Menlo Park, you probably don’t want to commute down from SF. You would waste a lot of your time doing so. You also probably prefer to live in a nicer place than a fish tank. So if you can find a nicer place than a fish tank and that is still close to work, then you would jump at it. Even if you prefer fish tank style, most of the fish tanks aren’t actually that nice: 600 sq ft and a view of your neighbor’s balcony. 600 sq ft is kind of small once you get married. Also, $3400 sounds better going to a mortgage than an apartment if housing prices appreciate. You can always sell.
The US economy is subsidizing a "one car, one parking place, one hour commute policy", every new company, new job, new office in the suburbs. (And shuttle buses for Google, etc.) Instead of building better cities.
Ideally we want to set policy so the situation doesn't get so bad that rent control is necessary. Even without rent control, you shouldn't need to worry every year, because the housing market should be sane and there'd be no reason to expect more than a token increase in your rent.
Obviously the ideal is far from reality in many places. But rent control is not a solution; it's just a useful mitigation that papers over problems (and unfortunately often creates new ones).
I think it's absurd to say that rent control doesn't work. Badly implemented rent control is just a useful mitigation. Correctly implemented rent control, with a healthy dose of public housing and private supply increase, actually is a solution - but the rent control and public housing part is a lot more important than the private supply increase and is also the part that YIMBYs such as the author never get implemented in practice.
Currently there's a system of privatized/contracted affordable housing development, which is effective and produces housing that looks just like market-rate housing, so people don't believe it exists because it doesn't look cheap enough.
The author does want public housing but also wants Singapore's HDB system.
If your issue is that public housing is run by racist people, the solution is to have it run by non-racist people. This tends to be easier when people that live in public housing are more diverse and have a larger electoral impact.
The way that we handle the downsides of rent control is by allowing landlords to break the rent-control cycle by doing major renovations, and by making rental contracts basically all end at the same date which allows for a much lower friction in moving.
While the author may very well want it, unless they make it their #1 priority, they won't actually implement it as there is much more resistance against public housing than to anything else. The end result will be that the "compromise" will be no new public housing and simply zoning relaxations at most, with continued increase in rents.
Besides that, the left-NIMBY alliance means there's noone to directly oppose public housing. The left supports it because they actually want it, and the NIMBYs pretend to be leftists and like using "this should be public housing" as their excuse for why nothing else should ever happen - presumably they don't expect public housing to actually appear, but they run low on excuses if it does.
Not much new construction of it happens in SF though, because construction costs in are very high, and there's not much land zoned to allow apartments because they don't want new housing of any kind, public or not.
> The end result will be that the "compromise" will be no new public housing and simply zoning relaxations at most, with continued increase in rents.
SF's main problem is most of it is zoned for single-family houses despite being a city, so that would be great actually.
Now of course, relaxing zoning is important and necessary, you can't have a city with single family housing. It's just not a sustainable solution.
Much of SF's voters see this as the greatest of heresies. The honest and earnest expectation is that SF can, should, and shall remain mostly detached single family homes forever. They vote accordingly, and often make common cause with the left-NIMBYs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not produced a sustainable state of affairs.
Strategically, the current situation is preferable to deregulation of housing, which will not only not fix the rent problem, but also reduce quality of life and displace existing communities.
The solution here is to make an alliance with the progressive left for an actually effective solution that implies increasing density, while building public housing and having well-tuned rent control systems in place.
The entire point of the left-NIMBY alliance is that the NIMBYs want everything to look like the 50s farmland it was when they were born, and they get this by pretending to be leftist and calling it "not affordable housing".
That's the kind of behavior pattern that leads to people being regarded as left-NIMBYs. They're not opposed to density! They're just opposed to every proposal that comes before them and insist on perfection. Whether or not that perfect solution, the mix of public housing for all and perfectly tuned rent control and running evil for-profit developers out of town, is reasonably achievable seems irrelevant. Until that wonderful day, the status quo is just fine.
So perhaps this is why they're called left-NIMBYs. They find the status quo acceptable and are willing to fight for it.
I didn't say it didn't work.
(That said ther are many possible problems that need/would-benefit-from regulatory intervention. Eg. high vacancy rate because speculation and long-term investors. The residents of a city probably don't want to live in a playground for perpetual construction due to "irrational demand" and arbitrageurs supplying it. For example when folks in oppressive regimes try to put their money in foreign real estate, they don't real care about doing that efficiently, hence the high vacancy, nor do they care about ROI or anything, just to have better odds than putting it locally, ie. in China/SaudiArabia/etc.)
You cannot increase supply forever. Rent still continues going up.
The solution is to increase supply and have rent control.
"Rent control" is useful to smooth out the bumps, but it should be called "eviction moratorium" and "negative income tax".
Obviously a community prioritizing protecting their members is not surprising, but since members change, it can eventually lead to a stagnant community.
Sure, smoothing out supply and demand imbalances is useful, but this means rent control must not be (cannot be) a long term solution.
It leads to megacorps settling in neighboring suburbs, puts a lot of tension into the tenant-landlord relationship (which is already usually a delicate one, see the usual neglect of units to extract maximal profits in a non-competitive market), detaches housing prices from prices of other goods and services (and thus the price of those increase due to the available disposable income, which is not particularly bad, but yet another imbalance).
And the usual big problem is that it decreases the incentive to increase supply. Which means, unless the regulator steps in it just leads to even longer duration of imbalance. (Eg. city population growth capped.)
You of course still have to address supply issues. But addressing supply alone is not sufficient to bring rent under control. You need both.
The FDA has papers about how above 5-7 suppliers for a given drug the price radically drops (eg. the market becomes efficient due to competition), the same thing works for ISPs and other providers, why would it be different for housing?
Also, if the things you mention don't happen, that means there's no need for the rent control, since supply and demand are in balance and prices are stable (or they follow some larger trend, like inflation).
The reality is that the demand for housing is inelastic. We as a society don't want people to move out from city to city constantly, so we strongly inelastic demand.
Empirically, rent increases 6-7% every year on average. According to the statistics in the article, to counteract this, supply would have to increase 60%/year on top of the current rate, every year. This is impossible. Thus, market solutions are not enough.
This bears out in the real world, where all big cities that are affordable have a combination of sane zoning, rent control, and public housing, whereas simply increasing supply does not work, with HK as an example.
Hong Kong tightly controls land - only something like 25% is developed. As for rent always increasing, we’ve seen rents fall in major cities during the last year as demand plummeted relative to supply. We need to build more housing - rent control, as in a hard price ceiling, tends to disincentivize doing that, while also tending to decrease the quality of existing housing if rents are set too low.
HK has high rents because ... wait for it ... they are not building enough new housing. Why? Because most of the land is government owned, more than half of the population lives in public housing, and the HK version of "US employers pay healthcare insurance" is basically HK employers pay housing subsidy.
Note, I'm not saying HK should just abolish rent control in the next five minutes and things will be fine. No, HK has many grave problems. (Of course starting with them being oppressed by the CCP.) Nor am I saying they should pave over the bay and start building. I'm simply saying that the HK market is in a pathological state. (Constrained supply, public stock is constant over the last ~2 decade, etc.)
Current residents have a vote in local elections. Current residents can organize lobbying groups that oppose new homes. Aspiring future residents don't have comparable political power.
People who move to cities are young and poor. Then they make a career, benefit from the strong economy, become old, wealthy and experienced. Then they want to deny from the next generation the same benefits they enjoyed when they were young. Old rich people have both experience and financial means to influence politics, young and poor people don't.
Only to be replaced by you staying in a place that's inappropriate for you life circumstances for too long with the looming prospect of an Ellis Act eviction. But yes, it makes for a nice 5-year time horizon.
The reason why market rate housing alone is insufficient is because how slow it is. Highest bidders get filled first. Cities have a lot of bidders, but not an infinite amount and those who are hit the hardest are at the bottom of the list. Public housing is about meeting demand at the bottom first. So in a deeply mismanaged housing market you need both at the same time. The other factor is that if the government is unable to build because of existing policies it can just change those self defeating policies (things like zoning).
Why not work to a place where you could OWN and not RENT if long term is your goal. Build more housing, allow people to buy property to live in and watch them organically grow communities.
Furthermore, buying houses can be a risky proposition, particularly since we're speaking about the context of fluctuating housing prices.
I sometimes joke that the right is "NIMBY" but the left is "NIYBY" (not in your backyard).
> They demand the preservation of architecture at all costs.
I assume this is a reference to the Wellington Spatial Plan and efforts by Wellington land owners to prevent old homes being converted into apartments or larger dwellings.
I agree this is a very harmful position for them to take. It's people acting in concert to drive up their land value. Whether this somehow ties into the Left-NIMBY Canon argued above though, I'm not sure. Are the land owners progressive lefties? Do they even live there?
> They demand the preservation of a single decades-old tree over housing.
This is a reference to the Macrocarpa tree in Avondale. What you fail to add is that this listed tree (i.e. with legal protections) on public land is blocking the development of 1 out of 6 large adjacent apartment buildings. Are people blocking the development of the other 5? No. Could the developer have planned their development to accommodate the listed tree, but choose not to? Yes. And this is an urban area with some of the lowest greenspace covereage in the city, with a long history of under-investment.
Meanwhile, the right leaning inner suburbs effectively implemented a town belt through leveraging power during the development of the Auckland unitary plan. If densification is being objected to in left-leaning areas, it's partly because right-leaning areas already ensured that they wouldn't have to at all! Case in point: Kelmarna Ave in Herne bay is getting a small supermarket because the community, via applying soft influence, made the planned development of apartments at the location politically infeasible.
Oh, and did I mention successive right-wing city councillors of the 80s and 90s running infrastructure into the ground so that good urban development was just that much harder for everyone?
> They demand more deference be given to traditional tribespeople over and above the progression of cities and housing the homeless.
Well, the extremely very obvious context here is contention over stolen land in sensitive areas. If you're talking about Ihuamatoa - "deference" was only granted after a long occupation of the land by extremely dedicated group of individuals. Of course, we wouldn't need to develop culturally significant land in remote parts of our city if we could intensify the places where prodominantly white, wealthy residents lived, without outcries from the politically powerful!
But on your last point, I am much more inclined to agree. Indigenous people are not a mere tree, and dealing with the whole imperialism/colonialism(/genocide?) thing is an entirely different level of ethical consideration.
I'm way more hesitant about anything impacting actual people or reinforcing past stealing of indigenous land than I am about nostalgia about some tree or building.
In context these are the people the original article is talking about.
I think in this article, Noah is referring specifically to this far left. For much of the article, he references Current Affairs, for example, which is a far left magazine. In the replies to his tweets about this, folks also mentioned Sunrise, which is a far left environmental org.
Regarding your original point, re: the progressive left in Seattle, I think the far left is more in coalition with YIMBYs, while the business-oriented politicians are in coalition with the NIMBYs. This isn't to say there aren't NIMBY leftists, just that they don't really have a lot of power at the moment, because they have to work with the YIMBYs.
As far as actual conservatives in Seattle politics, there are very few (maybe none?) remaining.
I recall a specific article complaining about "leftist opposition" from residents of a gated community in a Republican-run city.
People look at the world and see their preconceptions.
Yeah, it was definitely the "progressive left" that spent years and cost the Christchurch council millions to fix the broken cathedral. Not right-leaning old people at all.
> They demand more deference be given to traditional tribespeople over and above the progression of cities.
I think you mean "they think that Maori shouldn't be fucked over by the government more than they already have been".
> No one stands in the way of housing more than the left in this country.
Frankly, housing in NZ is not a political issue, it's an economic one. Regardless of your politics, no one in the middle class is willing to fix the housing crisis, because it will mean a lot of economic pain.
Also, as much as I would like to see housing sorted in NZ, I also don't want it to ruin what's good about this country. If you want an example of how to ruin an area with building, look at Queenstown.
Trying to fit attitudes towards zoning and development into a broader political philosophy seems unproductive. "NIMBY" itself has become an insult, rather than any sort of productive and well defined word. Is historical preservation of a building that prevents further development related to political philosophy? Is zoning and capacity planning indicating a lack of infrastructure for a certain number of new people in a given area a political philosophy? Is a rich person deciding they don't want their scenic view disrupted by a new large building or wind farm related to a political philosophy? Ecologists objecting to a new suburban development because it disrupts wildlife? Do they even have consistent motivations? Are they all NIMBYism?
My point is that NIMBYism is a word that makes people stupider immediately. It is a nam shub to stop critical thinking on a varied, unrelated issues and creates a binary divide where one does not really exist.
“ Allowing private developers to build market-rate housing results in the construction of “luxury” housing instead of “affordable” housing.”
“In addition to lining the pockets of developers, this “luxury” housing raises rents in an area, leading to gentrification and displacement.”
From the article. And the title of the article says canon, because these are taken as axiomatic.
If someone wants a particular wetland or beautiful historical building preserved, that’s one thing.
But there are people who truly believe that building housing raises rents! It’s crazy and widespread. The article is describing that.
Except that is not an accurate description of their position.
If a developer is given free reign as to what they can build, they will naturally build the most profitable thing they can on the land they have available. I doubt anyone would dispute that?
The idea here is that the most profitable thing tends to be more upmarket than the locals can typically afford. The area gets gentrified and rents go up.
I am nowhere near an economist, but that doesn't immediately seem wrong to me. There are plenty of real world examples where this has happened.
A socialist would say that if the market fails to provide solutions for core needs of people (health, housing, etc) it is up to the government to provide those. Some things are simply either unprofitable or not suited for a profit driven approach (e.g. private prisons where the companies running them are actively incentivised to see repeat offenders).
You can argue that having the government build low cost housing is not the correct solution, but I think the propostion that some housing raises rents is actually not that crazy.
If a city creates a million new jobs, they need a proportional amount of new housing to avoid a housing shortage.
But what happens is the NIMBYs clamp the amount of new housing to a fraction of what's needed. Obviously developers, if limited to building a fraction of what's needed, will go for the more profitable segment first. But that's not the underlying problem! The problem is that the total new units are too restricted. If we build a tiny, restricted amount of subsidized housing, there will still be hundreds of thousands of workers lacking housing, because the overall amount is too small.
What we need to do is first focus on the overall shortage and commit to building a huge amount of housing. Then it won't matter as much whether or not it's subsidized, because with an excess of housing, some will end up priced for every segment.
An alternative is that jobs could go elsewhere, for example in Arkansas or Mississippi.
What's not fine is encouraging jobs while discouraging housing, which is common in California because Proposition 13 makes residents a net expense - cities have to get most of their revenue from businesses.
Pretty obvious how that leads to a never-ending housing shortage.
Obviously, a direct prohibition on city budget increases would have worked better.
With residents not feeling the sting of increased costs, they will of course vote for local politicians who spend money without hesitation.
On top of that, it's not even obvious that this is true.
If you build a multi-story building with 30,000 square feet of housing, you can either make it ten 3000 square foot units or thirty 1000 square foot units. Which is more profitable? It depends on the local market but it's not inherently the smaller number of larger units.
30 small apartments that cost $200k (to build) or 15 big apartments that cost $400k both can end up paying the same amount of property tax. Replacing property tax with land value tax would push the profit calculation 100% in favor of lots of smaller units because you would only pay a fixed tax for the land. If the LVT is $360k/y the landlord would pay $1k tax per month in the small apartments. In the larger apartments he would pay $2k. The tax is a pure loss for the landlord so he wants to pay as little as possible by building more units.
There is no such thing as luxury housing[1], and developers in the US are given nothing like free reign, so this doesn't happen - they don't build special gold-plated apartments for rich people. The most profitable building for the landowner would typically have more units, because that means more people will buy/rent units from them.
And of course, the developer is not necessarily the landowner, and so they might be paid a flat rate anyway.
[1] What actually happens is developers call their buildings "luxury" because it sounds good, but they're lying.
Housing doesn't have to be "luxury" to be unaffordable.
Unaffordability happens when zoning makes them build single-family housing, or when the land is so expensive anything would be unaffordable while it's new.
But luxury exists. googled definition of luxury includes 'extravagant living.' To me that includes
Doorman, butler services, room service and daily housekeeping (e.g. condos at the Ritz), valet, huge amounts of in building amenities. Super high end custom finishings, fixtures, decor which doesn't serve a purpose in terms of extra comfort or use, just aesthetic/signaling.
And the epitome of the logo whore luxury condos celebrity architect firm placing giant $10mm Koons or Kaws lobby sculptures (which funny enough there's an ever more high brow snobby art joke that once you're in the lobby you're done lol).
Nobody disputes this, it's obvious. However, you're missing the benefits of this approach though. For a lot of industries you have very high upfront costs. You want to pay those off as soon as possible. Once they are paid for you can often drop your price substantially. The company has to pay for the training of the construction workers, lease machines and pay for the currently very expensive housing because that is where the construction workers live.
>The idea here is that the most profitable thing tends to be more upmarket than the locals can typically afford. The area gets gentrified and rents go up.
Well, this is where things go wrong. You are mixing up cause and effect. Demand (gentrification) leads supply (house construction). If you fail to construct new housing you get displacement. That demand is driven by people getting a well paying job and they have to live somewhere. If you don't build housing for them they will have to displace locals because that's the only place where they can live. From this perspective the new comers don't want to take your home. You can keep it. They just want a place for themselves.
>A socialist would say that if the market fails to provide solutions for core needs of people (health, housing, etc) it is up to the government to provide those. Some things are simply either unprofitable or not suited for a profit driven approach (e.g. private prisons where the companies running them are actively incentivised to see repeat offenders).
That's not a failure of the market but a failure of policy. The primary reason why public housing works is because it forces the government to acknowledge bad policies and replace them. The bigger failure of for profit housing is that it is slow. A housing shortage that took a decade to create also takes a decade to solve. The government has the benefit of being excellent in the short term but in the long term it is only "good enough", which is why you need both.
Except, that phenomenon is well-supported by research. Perhaps the situation you describe isn't so impossible as you suppose?
More than that, the places where it happens with roads tend to be the places with constraints on housing construction. (Because then people have to live farther away and clog up the roads.)
It depends on the development. A lot of the times you're not simply talking about the same neighborhood with more housing, but rather efforts to transform the neighborhood completely and increase the desirability. In areas that have seen a lot of development and gentrification, it's not uncommon to see demand increases exceed that of the increased supply and see the rents go up accordingly.
More housing generally does entail a transformation, because you need denser housing to build more units. Cities don’t have mass vacant lots ready for units of the exact same type extant.
> 1) For example, Xiaodi Li has a 2016 paper that looks at what happens to rents when a new market-rate housing project is completed. She uses the random timing of project completion to make sure that she’s measuring causation instead of mere correlation. She finds:
>For every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease 1% and sales prices also decrease within 500 feet. In addition, I show that new high-rises attract new restaurants, which is consistent with the hypothesis about amenity effects. However, I find that the supply effect is larger, causing net reductions in the rents and sales prices of nearby residential properties.
>That’s a very localized effect! If induced demand were a big deal, you’d expect the opening of a new “luxury” building to at least raise rents on its particular block! But yet, she finds the opposite.
There were more studies discussed in the article.
That study doesn't deal with long-term neighborhood revitalizations. It's dealing with new developments in New York generally, though if you read the study it still mentions that the amenity effect does occur and could increase rents. It says that this is offset by increased supply, but that's looking at things in aggregate. The increased demand from a few new restaurants in a already developed area isn't going to come close to the transformation of a burned out crime ridden area into a prosperous one. Anytime spent in gentrifying neighborhoods (or time spent looking at how cities have been trying to develop these) will show you that, unsurprisingly, the impact is much higher there.
I’m not American so I forget how stark things are there. We have gentrification in Canada and it happens even without neighbourhood revitalization. People will move into an area and raise prices as long as it’s near a transport line. Generally every place is safe enough to do so or becomes safer over time.
I’m assuming this does happen somewhat in america even without redevelopment. Are there places that with no construction in popular urban areas where prices truly don’t rise?
As the other comment suggested, there are pretty run down areas that tend to not increase as much or even decrease (in extreme cases). Revitalized areas are going to tend to be more expensive than non-revitalized areas. You'll see a lot of this if you live in a city and follow redevelopment efforts and which neighborhoods change over time (IE, neighborhood A, B, and C are poor, C gets a big development push, C becomes more expensive than A and B).
Also worth noting that amenities don't simply increase or decrease, but they shift. Supermarkets from the same chain in the same city can have cheaper, lower quality food in poorer areas and more expensive, higher quality food in wealthier neighborhoods.
> Though at that point what’s the policy: suppress housing supply and keep areas burnt out and crime ridden to deter outsiders? Not so great for quality of life or the tax base
It depends on your goals. I'm generally in favor of development, but others have goals that are different from my own. There are long time residents that feel that the disruptions these changes bring outweigh the good. Even things that get overlooked like there being fewer local cheap eateries because of increasing commercial rent, or more police attention driving away crime (a good thing) but also street vendors, or the percentage of the people you know and are able to talk to greatly decreasing (not uncommon in ethnic enclaves).
You've already transformed the neighborhood by putting almost no barriers on commercial real estate. The demand you are so scared of is already there. That commercial real estate produces a massive surplus of jobs because there is not enough housing. That's where all the demand is coming from. If you really, really wanted to solve this problem on the demand side you would have prevented commercial real estate development. Nobody is proposing that. Local people are proposing that residential construction should be prevented and then they hate on the people they built offices for, because they had the audacity to work there.
If someone complains that we cannot build housing because there is not enough infrastructure and someone else complains that we cannot build additional infrastructure because the current residents do not need it, they may both have coherent belief systems, but some trouble is afoot that need not be.
NIMBY has always been a pejorative.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, because the article itself goes into the various things that NIMBYs stand for and the things they care about.
Why does this situation invite pejorative terms and scorn from people who have no skin in the game?
When my neighbors resist change in a way that forces change elsewhere or affects our entire city, those effects are real. These outcomes affect other people's real lives in real ways. It's very much their skin in the game.
Or maybe the people downwind of a coal-burning plant have no skin in the game.
This is true, but that doesn't strictly imply that you have no participation in how it changes. The way a neighborhood changes is the sum of all of the people exerting forces upon it. This is an iterative system that you are embedded in as well.
My point is merely that change in a neighborhood is a natural and normal thing. A great many of the forces involved will be external, as it is rare that a neighborhood is in fact completely isolated from the world in every way.
I am attempting to set this up in opposition to the idea that we were presented with: that people have a right to hold their neighborhoods static against all things and we are obligated to honor that. In my opinion, neither is true.
"Outside forces want to change the way the neighbourhood is", no, its most frequently the children who grew up in the neighborhood want to stay, but they can't because there isn't enough housing being built so they are displaced.
"People in the neighbourhood resist the change" The people who resist the change tend to be retired property owners who's children have long left the house and they experience no negative effects from NIMBYism. There are a ton of disempowered neighbors who don't have the time or the wherewithall to politically organize the way NIMBYs do.
"Why does this situation invite pejorative terms and scorn from people who have no skin in the game?" Because the large balance of data we have shows that pretty much everywhere NIMBYs are a minority of the population, and this is once again an example of the minority rule issues that the US is struggling with. Also, pretty strange to throw in the "skin in the game" comment there. Who has more skin in the game, a renter who is paying 1800/month for their housing or someone who inherited a house and does not pay a monthly fee to have a place to live?
Not only do they not have “skin in the game” they barely contribute any property tax.
I think this article is a good example of what makes fixing housing so hard. If you have dumb NIMBY arguments on the left and the right, it's impossible to build a coalition of people large enough to argue for increasing supply. You end up trapped in the worst outcome.
For people that may not believe there are those on the left making the NIMBY arguments described here, see: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1351373540298170368?s=... (specifically all the comments from @buildbackbettercities)
https://teachingmalinche.com/2018/08/26/the-summer-that-elvi...
People get to pass on their privileged tax status onto their heirs
They then are also condescending dicks about it.
At least recognize that you’re screwing new people. It’s ridiculous for them to do all of this and then act as if they’re the victims.
If it’s “most frequently” that, how have/are their parents acting? Do they oppose or support the desires of their children?
Cities have been growing for hundreds of years. People want to move to cities for better economic opportunities. They very much have a skin in the game. Blocking the growth of the economically most important cities hurts the economy of the whole state/country, so in this way every citizen who wants economic growth has a skin in the game. Cities are not independent city states, but they should serve what's best for the whole country. In case of globally important economic hubs, even foreigners want to move to those cities for better opportunities, so even people outside of the country have a skin in the game.
Also, in a growing city, majority of people are first or second generation immigrants to the city themselves. They or their parents had the opportunity to move to the city, but now they want to prevent others having the same opportunity they themselves have enjoyed.
Neighborhoods change whether the buildings change or not, because of the natural cycle of life. Why should we place a premium on preserving buildings over preserving the quality of human life? Neighborhoods must change to fit the needs of the people, and not just the wealthiest or the ones who have been there the longest.
> no skin in the game
What does this mean? It seems rather pejorative towards those who haven't been born into massive wealth or have massive incomes that allow them to purchase property.
People have the freedom to move to a smaller city or a "second tier" city. They have opportunity to thrive in those locations as well, and can help turn those cities into equally desirable places. Likewise, people don't have to live and work in the same neighborhood. They can commute, or they can decide the commute is not worth it, and get a different job elsewhere. People also don't have a right to attend whichever school they want. If they can't make it work, there are other options in life.
Sure people may not have the exact job they want, or environment they want, or lifestyle they want, or whatever. But life is not perfect and you don't get to have everything you want. You have to trade off between these different things.
> That's selfish as fuck and worthy of scorn.
Everyone is selfish. You're just arbitrary placing one person's desires above others. People living in a city owe nothing to newcomers who want to come there and change they very things that made the location desirable in the first place.
Right on! Nobody here is owed anything. New residents are not owed the right to reshape things arbitrarily. Neither are incumbent residents owed an enduring hammerlock on the future of a place.
I do think it's perhaps possible that in some cases people participating in local governance might advance and adopt policies that have outcomes that benefit them financially or have disparate impacts on people of different races. Though I confess I found few references to or even accusations of racism in the article. Perhaps you can help me?
> We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods.
People who are against increased density are almost never holding that position to keep minorities out of their neighborhoods. To me that comes off as a convenient demonization, using charged rhetoric to attack the author's adversaries.
While I agree that existing home owners have too much power in cities and we need more flexible zoning to encourage higher density as a temporary solution, the ultimate solution to the problem is to build up other cities to shift demand away from SF, Boston, NYC, Austin, Seattle et al. Not only does this provide more opportunity in general, but it spreads power and wealth over more of the country.
I try to avoid pejoratives. It usually isn't helpful in any political dispute.
But we all have skin in the game. Look at satellite images. Compare how much space the US takes up for houses and lawns to the pattern in Japan or Germany. Everyone laments living surrounded by concrete. But it's our own determination to each get our personal patch of grass that leads to the unending expanse of roads and driveways and parking lots.
Kant said that an action is immoral if it when realized contradicts the rational ideal ("an action is derived from a rule...") that motivates it in the first place. If our desire for minimum lot sizes and detached single-family houses is a result of our revulsion at the jungle of artificial infrastructure we find ourselves lost in, and our desire to reduce its impact on our health and comfort, shouldn't that qualify?
The US is large enough to give each individual (person, not household!) 7.4 acres all to themselves. There is plenty of space here.
The problem is that the collapse of manufacturing and automation of agriculture in the US has eliminated many of the jobs that were prevalent in small and mid-sized cities.
We have all the space we need. What we lack is a uniform distribution of work that lets people use it effectively.
We do have work available - the BLS data shows 6.5 million openings (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm). Many of the cities and towns across America that are often ignored in our societal discourse and in discussions like this one have both available, affordable housing and economic opportunity. It is simply not the opportunity that this generation wants. And instead, they complain that they don't have the type of job, the pricing conditions, and the type of pay that enables them to live in some of the most desirable cities on the planet, like San Francisco.
I find it hard to see this as anything but entitlement and envy.
But we don't live in 7-acre communities. We live in quarter-acre communities. Transportation, power lines, etc necessitate a certain level of density. And "small" metros with a million people already begin to sprawl in many places. The arrangement of that density is the hard part and ultimately if you want most people to be closer to green space it means you need to densify in some places.
Plus complaining about the distribution of work is not really useful; you might as well protest the weather! We can't change that in huge ways quickly and have to work with the economy (and, for that matter, often, the infrastructure) that we have.
> Plus complaining about the distribution of work is not really useful; you might as well protest the weather! We can't change that in huge ways quickly and have to work with the economy (and, for that matter, often, the infrastructure) that we have.
We certainly can! Look at how opening or closing a single large factory can radically change the surrounding cityscape. Look at how the Space Race created an entire hi tech industry out of the swamps of eastern Florida which continues to this day. Look at what the Public Works Administration in the New Deal did.
The standard objection, I think, is to refer to the economic history of Argentina, but that's neither here nor there.
Here's a satellite image of an area near Chincoteague. This is a small town in coastal Virginia with a healthy but not skyrocketing tourist economy. In other words, it's the kind of economy most of our small cities "should have". It also happens to be next to a major government Space Race-era facility.
https://i.postimg.cc/QtsGMbrL/chincoteague-trails-end.png
In the green circle is the original town of Chincoteague. It is built and designed like a town and like many towns in beautiful areas it has generally resisted transformation into something more like a city. Again, pretty standard Americana. It has a simple road layout, a mixture of development patterns, and is not too hard to navigate on foot.
In the red circle is Trail's End, a parody of a caricature of the epitome of a suburban cobweb. It is full of mobile homes and cheap plaster houses crammed as close together as county zoning rules allow. It exists because local municipalities and their constituencies did not want to accommodate housing demand within their usual town fabric. This pressure builds up and, eventually, some land development agency gets hold of a big parcel and chops it up in to what you see here.
The ongoing "carcinogenesis" of such developments ossifies municipalities. The layout and design of streets within and leading to the red circle is actively hostile not only to walkability and the adoption of transit, but also to the development of a connected regional culture, due to the access-limited (access both to and within) design:
https://i.postimg.cc/qR8KspYh/trails-end-closer.png
This is by no means unique to northeastern Accomac County! It repeats in nearly every metro area in the United States that hasn't either banned it or surrounded itself with swamps (NOLA, Miami). It creates neighborhoods that everyone can survive in but nobody wants to live in. It creates an exclusion zone separating the city from the countryside, and the farmers from the city. Worst of all: it is practically impossible to reverse.
We will live with the Trail's Ends of the 20th century for decades if not centuries, and they will still be inaccessible, unwalkable, petrified replicas of Stepford, CT, with more mobile homes and fewer gardens. Why? Because we didn't want our Chincoteagues to change.
We all have skin in the game. We only have one country -- don't mess it up.
If you don't want density, move to the country or to the suburbs of a medium-sized city that does not have a housing shortage (thus far less pressure to increase density). In the post-COVID telecommuting age this is easier than ever before, at least for people in the industries that are popular on this site.
If you decide to move to a top-tier city or a rapidly growing boom-town, you do not get to complain about density.
If you don't like the existing density of a city, then move somewhere else. You don't have a right to live wherever you want at whatever price point you want, just like I don't have a right to demand a beachfront villa in Hawaii.
> If you decide to move to a top-tier city or a rapidly growing boom-town, you do not get to complain about density
If you choose to move to a city that incumbent residents have built up and love, you do not get to complain that they don't want to increase their density to accommodate you. You can move to some other city instead of taking away from others who have built something you now covet and find desirable.
I live in California where almost by definition everyone came here from somewhere else. In a very nice neighborhood I lived a former strip mall was getting developed. Keep in mind, it wasn't that nice when it was created in the '40 and '50s --hence strip malls-- but now it is nose bleed expensive. What did these neighbors want? Not housing, god forbid they build multiple unit housing! But a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's would be nice. Yes the traffic was getting worse and density was increasing. Things were changing. But did these people want there houses to be worth 1/5th of what they were worth twenty years ago? Did they want to get paid what they got paid in those days? No, they just didn't want new neighbors.
Life changes things through natural forces. It's not all "evil outsiders".
> no skin in the game
Because progress is hindered by those who's "skin in the game" is holding back progress at any cost.
Essentially, local planning meetings are like that. Anyone can talk but people who own are given priority over renters and people who own are obviously going to be more aggressive in protecting their position than we could expect renters to organize.
On the surface it doesn't matter but the net effect is pretty clear (lots of single family houses, little apartments, expensive land and expensive housing)
"Outside forces" want to tell the owner of a parcel what he can't do with his own land. And they should! Decisions about land use at the parcel level affect the neighbors. Correspondingly, decisions about land use at the city level affect the region.
The thing is, the locals actually banked on this. If they want the value of their home to go up they need the economic growth to justify it. You can bank on it again by making sure they have to buy your house.
Basically, by buying their house these people started an informal business and the easiest way to make sure you stay in business is to make sure there is no competition.
>Why does this situation invite pejorative terms and scorn from people who have no skin in the game?
It's incredibly selfish. External factors like globalization make a lot of communities redundant and cause economic decline which drives far more economic displacement than gentrification does. The thing is, you can trivially fight against these external factors by restructuring the economy, mostly through college education. You will have to leave your hometown and go somewhere with more opportunities. Every city with a housing shortage is dangling a golden carrot in front of you and then punches you in the stomach.
That software developer making $150k or more didn't start off at that salary in his hometown. He probably would have gotten $60k at most in the place his parents live in. $150k is enough to displace some stubborn local so he probably doesn't care about your stupid ideas.
However, what about a teacher in the middle of nowhere who lost their job because of economic decline? Well, they could probably work in city X for $70k. Better than no job but how are they going to afford rent? They don't. They are stuck in poverty limbo. Can't leave the old place, can't join the new place.
The linked studies are interesting, but they seem to be looking at just short-term impacts, which I don't think would reveal anything of a potential "high demand -> new housing -> new commercial/business development to serve and take advantage of higher density -> even higher demand -> higher prices" cycle.
In developed countries, prices seem to be highest in the most developed, densest cities, which is why I suspect this loop exists.
(The counter-argument, which you could make based on SF, would probably be something like "a business cycle of growth like that can happen even without new residential construction, and then you just have even higher prices and more displacement as a result than if you'd built residential to match the business growth." But I wonder if this is ideal for the long-term health of the city or state/country at large, in cases of a bubble or compared to some of that business growth being spread out in more regions.)
The YIMBY response is "of course, that's the point" but for many left-NIMBYs the point was to reduce pressure on the budgets of existing households; accommodating these new buyers is not helpful (and might be harmful).
Also, defending the in-group is good, actually, when the in-group is 99% of people of lower income.
The problem with Trumpism is the defense of a xenophobic/racist ingroup and economic malthusianism in the production of commodities. There is no issue in and of itself in having a ingroup, especially one that is rabidly inclusive, and no issue recognizing that you cannot endlessly produce more housing on finite land area cities.
You also start having issues with traffic, obviously, and air quality, which can easily get so bad that no improvement is possible any more, especially when you cannot force people to use very high performance public transit
The third issue is that as you are already at taller structures, it gets more and more expensive to make things taller still - not only are the existing structures already incredibly expensive to build and thus really expensive to replace, but the structures you replace them with are also more and more expensive.
Which leads to the result that simply increasing density is not a solution to the problem but instead a temporary fix, as you rapidly brush up against the density limits of your economics and infrastructure, such that even the very densest places such as Hong Kong have hugely unaffordable housing. And as you arrive to your limit, the 6-7% rent increase clock keeps ticking and ticking, sometimes even faster than you can reduce it via increased supply while you're doing a massive building, let alone when you're not anymore.
So yes, there is simply no way to fix skyrocketing rent by simply scaling cities vertically. The truth is that in the end there is a hard limit to how cheap you can make housing in a free market. And you're just stuck there. The root cause is that you can't build more land. So the only solutions that work long-term require at least partial decomodification.
Decommodification is not magic. Scarcity is still there. Unless you're going to expropriate from current owners, it mainly means the government buys housing on someone's behalf. The government suffers exactly the same problems as market-rate buyers there. Relieve scarcity, lower prices as much as you can, and tax revenue to those programs can do more good.
The solution is the decommodification of land, very high speed modes of renewable transpiration, and spreading around in more than two or three cities, as well as a massive increase in supply as public housing.
That way, we can achieve our goals. We can have big cities, that allow for low carbon transportation, we can keep lower income communities alive, we can avoid incredibly high amounts of wealth being wasted in non-productive housing, and we can have vibrant cities, for anyone, not just for the fortunate.
Yes, you could build more, and have 30% more people in your city, but with rent so high that half of the city lives in economic precarity or has to move out, destroying their entire social circle and access to the aforementioned benefits.
In the end, it we abandon the obsession on free market solutions and partially decomodify land, we can provide the big city lifestyle to everyone that wants it with the economic, environmental and cultural benefits it brings, without merely postponing the elephant in the room of unsustainable rent prices.
And by the way, according to the authors arguments, even if we tripled density we'd just roll back rent increases for a mere decade at best.
The government has two main advantages here. Firstly, it doesn't need to pay unsustainable market rates if it implements rent control before starting big public housing housing investments. This is a synergistic policy, because while at the same driving down real estate prices with rent controls, you counterbalance the issues of rent control which are decreased supply with your own increased supply. The end result is that now you have much more housing, for cheaper.
The other huge advantage is that while real estate investors expect a 6-7% YoY profit rate, the government is fine with 0% or even less if the increased economic activity can pay for it back in taxes. The real estate market is ultimately unproductive, so going from 6-7% of exponential growth to 0% in value extracted without productive returns is a huge economic gain in and of itself.
You do of course need to keep the government accountable to keep this housing of proper quality, but competition with homeownership or private landlords can help here.
The thing is, this actually works. Rent control tweaked to reduce supply issues combined with public housing to finish providing the necessary supply works to reduce rent and keep it under control while also allowing newcomers to enjoy life there too.
Market solutions on the other hand don't work on the long term. Eventually, rent just continues increasing. Look at Hong Kong for an example. The density went way up as the zoning rules relaxed , but so did rent too. Compare it to even the very bad Chinese Hukou system, where rent in Shenzhen or Guangdong or Beijing is much, much lower. You don't get to own land because it is decommodified, but you get to rent private or public housing at very low prices, and if you have the Hukou you also get to own guarantees on the land. Even the worst such systems in high density cities provide better results than free market solutions.
New buyers are absolutely not immigrants. Most immigrants are new renters, and cost sensitive ones at that.
Pretty much every market of interest for this debate is supply limited, so more people CAN'T buy housing if all that changes is price. It just becomes more of a lottery.
That's not what I nor the linked article are talking about - more an idea that continual growth may not necessarily ever lead to long-term downward price movement.
Unless we have a fully "post-growth" economy, we need more Urban core.
(Those other cities, though, do have room to grow outward still, and so far keep going out; it will be interesting to see how long they can sustain that.)
Tracy, CA is an abomination, but so is the Sunset in SF.
Broadway Junction in Brooklyn should be a second midtown.
Building up Austin proper or building those up is equally good in my mind.
How much gentrification happens only because NIMBYism in other areas pushes new residents into previously poorer areas that are less politically able to keep newcomers out?
YIMBYism-but-only-for-the-poor-neighborhoods does sound like a distinctly inequal policy, so I can understand people's concerns there. Upzone Beverly Hills!
In the SF bay area, that leads to repeated, expensive right-NIMBY projects that either further sabotage mass transit:
- instead of building parallel, incompatible tracks, why can’t we synchronize all 6 train systems so it is possible to transfer between them at rush hour?
- Why do we have bike lanes on most bridges, but only half of the bay bridge between SF and Oakland?
- no bart to marin, no closed loop bart
or left-NIMBY projects to sabotage the road network:
- removing surface street lanes on trunk roads
- switching normal lanes to toll lanes
- kicking cars with two-people in them out of the HOV lane
- setting light cycles to two minutes during rush hour
- discouraging left lane fast, right lane slow.
And so on.
The general unspoken idea I've heard for that one is simple racism: the Bay Bridge terminates in West Oakland. Same reason BART doesn't go to Marin (the folks in Marin don't want SFians invading.) The limit is reached in the town of Bolinas, who infamously removed their highway signs so not even the rest of the Marin folk (let alone lesser Californians) could find them.
It's considered a Left/Liberal idea, isn't this conventional opinion?
It would never occur to me people consider it predominantly the other way.
It's incredibly easy to find anti-development movements and policies across the country. Look at public transit in red states, for instance.
In somewhere like Georgia, denser housing, public transit, and walkable neighborhoods are the domain of the interior parts of Atlanta, inside the freeway loop. That area is FAR more liberal than the rest of the state. Texas (Austin, Dallas, etc), too.
Zoning Laws typically match the textbook definition of conservative (literally trying to conserve and maintain an old system and prevent anyone from changing it with new developments). This aspect of conservatism is shared by both right wing and left wing interests.
No one wants to build a house next to what could become an aluminum smelting operation or a pig farm. Zoning supports functioning real estate markets.
The problem fundamentally seems to be that both support high immigration for different reasons, but don't want the new migrants to be able to live in their suburb. Both can get elected because they're responsibilities for different levels of government.
As a worldwide flagship of the damage NIMBYs can do, San Francisco definitely associates NIMBYism to the political left/progressives.
I usually think of two kinds of "NIMBY".
One is extremely concerned with their property value, and making sure nothing can ever damage it. Stereotypically this is a conservative, but most liberals act the exact same way when you want to build in their neighborhood.
Then there's a more left leaning contingent that has nothing but disdain for markets, thinks the government should build and administer housing in highly desirable areas, and somehow decide who should live there (it always seems to be them, interestingly).
"programmers trying to save thousands in rent" are a small subset of the population.
Vandals care more about keeping their name up than what’s under it.
My neighborhood in Chicago had a controversial affordable housing complex get built. It was a mix of affordable and market-rate units, with a priority for veterans, seniors, and those with disabilities to take the affordable units. This was not section-8 housing, or government housing.
The prospect of its construction ended up fracturing an unofficially YIMBY neighborhood group, splitting it in two: Those who wanted 100% market-rate units and felt the affordable apartments would "end up like the next Cabrini green". It culminated in several individuals, one YIMBY-aligned individual launching unsuccessful lawsuits, and ultimately culminated in the alderman who approved the project losing in a massive landslide to a neighborhood that had reelected him twice.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
Using data going back to 1948 (!) we find:
> Overall, [rents] went up 6.6% every year. Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
Fischer concludes:
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
This seems weird to me. So if an area has nothing but single story homes, and we raze every single one and replace it with two story homes that have twice the occupancy, it would only reduce rents by 10%?
I'm also somewhat annoyed that NIMBYs everywhere, regardless of political preference, seem to ignore the elephant in the room of giant employee/education campuses. High home values need demand to support them, and that comes from lotsa people. Controlling campus size to me seems like the most straightforward way to control home prices, but then you lose out on that juicy, juicy revenue/spending.
I think most cities see the revenue and think they'll sort everything out later, which may not be successful.
Your example of mass-redevelopment would likely have the opposite effect - it would be an inducement of demand - raising the value of the entire location to outside interests and raising rents.
The important thing here is that people leaving a city due to unavailability of housing thus stopping the growth in the price of housing is something that we only just see happen, it's a lot less delocalized and it's a long term process, so I really don't see how the real world effect of zero from increased supply is supposed to counteract this second order effect.
The second issue is that while in theory neoliberal YIMBYs are often for public housing, when their plans are put into practice this part is completely ignored. If you see a crucial aspect of your plan being ignored, which is also by far the hardest to implement, and yet don't put it front and center to stop this, it's clear that you're okay for trading that off. Which means that the real world effect is for rent to just keep on increasing.
Whereas cities with progressive solutions (which also include increasing supply, but fittingly with the weakness of the effect don't make it completely central, often seen much more than 0-2% temporary decreases.
Imagine what the effect size would be if we had enough market rate housing built to increase supply by 100% within 500m. I imagine it's more than 1-2%.
Assuming more or less linear increases, instead of 1-2% you get 10-20%. Let's also ignore the large temporary decrease in supply and price stickiness of rent.
You "paused" rent increases by 1.5-3.5 years. For something that will likely take more than ten years to accomplish. And then there's not much more that can be done.
If instead you increased supply by 30% in affordable housing (which is much more reasonable, and of course you could do more or add some market rate housing on the top), build very strong public transit systems and allowed construction of high density private housing away from the city centre, and implement rent control, you will do much, much more than stopping 1.5-3 years of rent increases and then not being able to do much. You will actually have a durable solution.
False equivalence. The other option in most cases isn't no decrease in rent (i.e., 0%), it is an increase in rent (> 0%). So if with no increase in supply the rent increase would have been 10% (like it has been on my rent for the past several years in San Diego), than it suddenly seems like a pretty good deal.
Beyond that, if it actually was a 1% total decrease (which it isn't), you can bet your ass the author would have written that as 7.6% relative decrease cause by construction, instead of 0-2%.
Which means far left NIMBYs have always been strange to me. The far left already rejects landlords and rent. The problem goes away if you remove rent from the equation, because the owner/tenants of a building get to decide whether to sell it for redevelopment, and get to capture the sale value if they do. So if there's already a solution embedded in your ideology, why go out of your way to blame the concept of development itself?
I've become fond of using this quote to illustrate the hypocrisy: "Texas is more liberal than California because in Texas a working class person can afford a place to live."
It's really hypocritical to claim to be "woke" while supporting policies that create massive divides between rich and poor and lock vast numbers of people out of housing.
I'm really hung up on the quotes here. Isn't this because the market rate is currently distorted by the preexisting lack of supply though? So a developer isn't actually building 'reasonable' apartments with a level of furnish that is 'affordable', they've got granite (sorry quartz, granite is out!) countertops and heated tile floors because they can capture more rent than the cost that way?
I'm curious to what extent this is due to market distortion via governmental policies, or just developers/capitalism 'spying' a neighborhood near the end of it's natural lifecycle.
Banning such would be like banning new cars to keep the price of cars down
Also, there is so much land in the USA that if people want to live in solitude outside the cities, they should be free to do so, there is no reason to stigmatize these individuals. Not everybody wants to or needs to be surrounded by others to be happy or a contributing member of society.
I met plenty of left-wing homeowners who supported building in an abstract sense. But, they would take any housing that was actually proposed near them, and present a pile of reasonable concerns, effectively lobbying to block it.
> We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans tend to value low-density communities while Democrats tend to value denser, more walkable places.
The link offered to support this is based on personal choices of conservatives vs. liberals on where to live, NOT conservatives using government policy to block development.
If you look at data in areas where building codes are most restrictive and home prices are increasing the most, it is almost all exclusively in progressive deep blue cities, states, and areas. Most "deep red" large cities (like Houston, TX - famous for having almost no zoning laws) are still very affordable with lots more construction happening everywhere. This would lead me to believe that NIMBY behavior is most often associated with progressives, not conservatives.
I also don’t understand that “if the government says something is designated as being affordable housing then it will be affordable” is suggested to be a possibly unreliable assumption. I’ve lived in affordable housing and market rate housing. Affordable Housing was uh, much more affordable.
Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding this post but the general tone comes off as “anything associated with ‘the left’ is actually diametrically opposed to truth”
This is an attempt to prove the principle of supply and demand (that NIMBYs often reject) from first principles.
Of course, the counter-argument from induced demand is “after those 1000 yuppies move in, then 2000 more hear about how good the fish tanks are in Portland and come along and bid up the rest of the housing stock even further”.
The degree of induced demand is an empirical question that the author provides some citations around.
“Affordable housing” can be a relative term, for example see https://www.housingwire.com/articles/43818-san-franciscos-de.... It might not be affordable by the current residents.
At the end of the article the author points out that YIMBYs are mostly leftists so I don’t think they are making an anti-leftist point.
Pretty much every person in my friends group experienced something similar in all four quadrants of the city (proper), Beaverton, Garden Home, Multnomah Village, Tigard, etc. If the Portland fishtanks are driving down the price of rent, I haven’t heard about it myself.
I am not, however, an expert on this.
One confounding factor here is that it's quite hard to draw anecdotal conclusions, because it is impossible to test the counterfactual; the YIMBY would make the case that rents would have gone up even more in Portland if the fishtanks were not built.
And the effect is quite hard to measure; that paper I linked says "I find that monthly rents fall by $22.77 - $43.18 relative to trend, or roughly 1.2 - 2.3%, for people living within 500m of a new project" -- this is probably not noticeable by you or me with anecdotal observations, but if the study is correct, and we committed to lots of new buildings, then it could make a noticeable difference in aggregate after lots of new projects were completed.
In my experience in Portland over a decade, I’ve not experienced this tiny nearly unnoticeable decline that the paper suggests. I’ve in reality seen a significant increase in rent year over year for myself and pretty much my entire friend group that spans from “couch surfing” to “can comfortably rent a multiple bedroom house”
Aside from the empirical studies, have you personally experienced (or know someone that has experienced) a reduction in rent as a direct result of adding non-“affordable” (eg. luxury or market rate) housing to their neighborhood? I’d love to hear another perspective.
I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was trying to position myself as an expert. I try to make my language clear about my experience but sometimes I might not mail it in such a way as to not be misinterpreted.
Like, some people who would scoff at trickle-down-economics in the context of tax policy seem totally on board with the trickle-down story of housing, where you build more high end condos, and everyone moves to a slightly nicer place, and so there are eventually more affordable older units at the lower price range. Surely housing is the slowest context in which you could hope that that long chain of events finally leads to the desired outcome.
If we actually care about housing being plentiful and affordable ... shouldn't we start building at the low end of the market where the need is the most critical?
Leftists should think about it in terms of deliberately producing an oversupply to crash the market. Aggressively relax zoning in areas that have already gentrified where that battle is simply lost and never coming back. Massively expand the supply of $1M+ homes until the supply outstrips the demand and developers are stuck with inventory of housing that they can't move without slashing asking prices and taking losses. Watch as property values fall.
The problem is that both liberals and conservatives are against that, because they don't want to see their property values fall, and that background of NIMBY'ing is where we are. Without really opening up zoning to generate a glut what you are generally talking about is relaxed zoing in a few areas which will be too little to affect the trajectory of housing markets, but will enrich a lot of rich people.
Leftists kinda instinctively know that this economic fantasy of creating a supply glut is just a fantasy, so it does make sense to support things like rent control.
But you know keep punching left like they're the biggest problem, and not the people who understand the limitations of the system.
(This comment's tone totally changed from the start, but I'll leave it as it is instead of cleaning it up so you can take the journey with me...)
It is odd how the only people I can have conversations of merit about Nuclear power with, are generally rightist Statists, Even most economists now decry Nuclear power, unless untenably evil neocons. (who I avoid)
But there is a small cohort of statist, vaguely right wing people I otherwise disagree with almost all the time, but we can talk about nukes.
Not people on the left (of which btw, I am one)
Standard anti nuclear arguments from the left:
- diverting resources from wind and solar is folly
- corrupt energy corporations will always run unsafe plants
- nuclear proliferation
- US regulations make the technology fundamentally unprofitable (despite many counter-examples in other countries)
Anti nuclear arguments from the right:
- Coal = jobs
- Scientists can’t be trusted to make nuclear work.
- government regulations ruined it, and are unchangable
Data driven arguments:
- meltdowns are bad, but infrequent. Even if safety never improves, coal plants dump more radiation per kwh.
- waiting the last 30-40 years to decarbonize electricity generation was much more harmful to the environment than nuclear plants would have been (even with multiple meltdowns, and it wouldn’t have cost much to avoid that).
- france and china have successful nuclear industries, and france did it with now-obsolete technology.
I haven’t seen much correlation between being on the left or right and being pro- or anti-nuclear.
I have noticed that pro-nuclear people tend to have a more balanced take on covid (by “balanced”, I mean somewhere between “masks are a hoax” and “full-on panic”)
overall, i do tend to agree with the economists soft-left who point out with the cost of capital close to 0, we can do all the economically less "efficient" stuff in wind, solar, batteries, because we can afford to, and actually need to, under the new MMT/Keynesian pump-priming. The same investment in nuclear wouldn't be net beneficial in the same way because less immediacy in the spend, and so less effective economic levers for the right-now economic problem: out the other side, we'd have an amazing modern supply network built out of a mixture of sources, and maybe thats ok?
I see huge correlations being leftist in general, and anti nuclear. There is a small c conservative movement who believe in the integrity of the land and oppose nuclear because its just not how fox-hunting people of tory bent, envisage the land being run. But, they are a tiny minority. Most of the active anti nuclear people are either declared centre-left or lefterward of center-left (IMHO)
I can't speak to the covid question. I haven't explored it.
The article opens with a broad caricature of "Right-NIMBYs", which is completely farcical and made in bad faith:
> We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods.
People have reasons to block housing development that don't have anything to do with poor people or minorities. To ascribe this intention as the primary motivation is ridiculous, and completely self-serving. In reality, the main reason for most people to block development is simply that they enjoy their present neighborhood character, lifestyle, sense of space/openness, access to amenities that are not over-subscribed, etc.
What is often happening here is that low income progressives in old rent controlled housing are literally being faced with being evicted and displaced for new developments that they cannot afford.
It should be no wonder why someone would oppose being thrown out of their home, or why a project kitty corner to them would bring fears that "they're next."
The underlying problem is that the neighbourhoods that developers are seeking to build in are ones with cheap land, which not coincidentally is where the most working class, poor and most vulnerable people live.
If we saw developers going to rich low density mansion districts to redevelop into apartments you certainly wouldn't see "Left-NIMBYs" complaining! Of course this never happens.
So you have the Left YIMBYs that can afford these new market priced condos upset and wondering why low income progressives won't roll over and let themselves evicted. Maybe wealthy left YIMBYs should focus their activism on redeveloping other areas of cities that wouldn't harm the working class and poor?
State or federal prohibitions on certain zoning restrictions might be a way to go around that, as the people who can't afford to live in certain cities would still be able to outvote those who can. I keep hearing California proposing to force city governments' hands on density; but it keeps getting stymied for stupid reasons. Having a "no reducing affordable housing units" rule should still be allowed, but a "no dense housing" rule should be banned as a clear attempt at fixing prices within a neighborhood.
Sadly with so much wealth and power putting their thumb on the scale it's an incredible challenge. We've seen that this past year with the way wealth has been able to influence Prop 22 and the Democratic Primaries.
Aside from the concerns of the working class that may be pushed to nimby to protect what little they have, there remains the established rich which nimby for a whole other set of reasons.
I don’t have any sympathy for neighborhood groups that are anti-transit, anti-road, anti-development, pro-rent control, and pro-prop 13. All of those things helped turn bay area housing into a giant pyramid scheme.
Now that housing is expensive and scarce, the people that voted in those changes are worried they might have to move, forcing them to pay the bill like the rest of the marks.
The reality is that demographics are shifting towards people that did not grow up here, and that are tired of paying out the nose for housing.
Eventually, newcomers will manage to vote in a massive redistribution of wealth. The longer it takes, the more painful it will be.
Doesn't matter if they vote democrat. They're not left and it's not the left nimby that I or this article is talking about.
I’ve met many people on the left (homeowners or not) that think we should have fewer roads and more rent control.
Don't know about the rest, but this one seems to have some truth to it. No developer wants their brand spanking new condo to be occupied by paupers. It gives the place a bad image and brings the value down. Plus because you cannot simply kick out tenants in most places, you are stuck getting a low income for a very long time. So they prefer to market them as studios for expats and young professionals and keep half of them empty accumulating dust. There's certainly something to fix there although I cannot tell you how.
Often luxury is also a misnomer. At least here in Seattle most of what gets labeled as “luxury” is merely new. There’s nothing that special about the complexes or units aside from newness. The materials etc, aren’t luxury grade.
As you say, though, it's generally a misnomer. Often it seems like a thin euphemism for "New and not for you".