Or put another way: zoning isn't the only tool used by NIMBYs.

The problem is institutional, and is based in the same economics (inelastic supply of land) that makes a land-value tax so effective. If by any means possible an entity or consortium of them can restrict new development in an area, then as a whole their ability to capture consumer surplus value through economic rents increases.

This can be holding units off market, limiting density, restrictions on various utility hookups (typically sewerage and water), redlining, title insurance, homeowners' insurance, and more. I've found direct documentation of such practices dating to 1937, and long preceding that.

When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate,149 and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures.150 These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis. Lumber companies and manufacturers of other materials which are being displaced in the production of prefabricated houses, have sought to prevent their construction through building-code restrictions and by organizing boycotts by dealers and building crafts. Moral and ethical rationalizations have been used against prefabricated houses. The director of the New England division of the American Institute of Architects in May 1934 attacked prefabricated houses as tending “to substitute a life of vagrancy for responsible citizenship in the community”.151 The author of an article entitled, “Houses Cannot be Built Like Automobiles”, who speaks on behalf of architects against prefabrication, argues plaintively, “Spiritual, mental, and physical well-being is enhanced always by the exercise and development of individualism, especially when related to the home and its environment. Housing that fails to respect these human values must be considered among the ‘chats’ to be discarded”.152

Planned public housing projects such as slum clearance which afford the most efficient methods of utilizing advanced technologies in the building industry, crash against the wall of vested private-property interest. They meet the combined opposition of the owners of obsolete buildings, that nonetheless are still profitable, of landowners who demand prohibitive prices, of holders of mortgages who fear a depreciation of housing values through the increase in available homes. Achievements in building technology lie sterile in the face of the opposition of these interests. It has been calculated that at the rate of replacement between 1921 and 1933 of homes and apartments, the American house will be in use 142 years.153 Such slow replacement, based on profits derived from old houses, impedes the building of new structures, however pressing the housing needs for the mass of the population of the United States may be.

Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

Markdown: https://rentry.co/szi3g