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It's as if you rely on the younger generation to fulfill your quaint small town vibe at the coffee shops, farmers markets etc but you don't give them a place to live.

* Housing that workers can afford

* Close to amenities

* Detached homes with yards

Communities can pick two.

Yeah, like I said, these people all failed Econ 101. It's really bizarre, they never accept that they can't have things both ways. So we've ended up with a town that's shockingly beautiful and unique, but it's becoming more dysfunctional by the day because of the development ethos, and instead of doing something everyone just complains. It's great if you've got tons of money, and then it just gets harder and harder for those who don't. I mean, that's the most ironic part, is that the same hyper liberal people who are so against development have directly caused such wild living disparities across income brackets.

> is that the same hyper liberal people who are so against development

A bit of a nit pick here, but this issue does not fall cleanly across partisan lines. Some of the most vocal advocates for zoning reform are on the left. And at least in my town, a fair number of folks in the anti-development camp are traditionally right leaning well off suburbanites. If I could pick one issue that most scrambles the traditional partisan alignments, this would probably be it.

That's because there's three factions now. "woke"-left, center classical liberal, and "alt"-right. Both the "woke"-left and "alt"-right are generally NIMBY anti-development, for different mistaken reasons.

Why is the alt-right NIMBY? Homeowners are NIMBY because their home is their retirement fund, and housing scarcity boosts the value of their home. Anti-development is literally in homeowners' immediate self-interest.

While some part of the issue is some homeowner's financial interest, I believe that it is mostly lifestyle/neighborhood preservation. They moved there because they like it exactly as it was when they moved there (or otherwise they would've moved to a more developed place), and over years and years things change because our world is dynamic and increasing population-wise.

I characterize it as "alt"-right because the right has largely been taken over by Trumpian issues. And the right is generally anti-density and all that it comes with like, rural and suburban areas, cars, and keeping the undesirables away. Trump even had that bill that was about preventing zoning fixes that would "invade the suburbs."[0]

[0]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/23/trumplow-income-hou...

it is zero sum thinking. the overall pie can increase if you let development in and economy growth, so that everyone is better off.

it is sad that NIMBYs dont get it

I belong to a woke left group that fiercely advocates for development.

That's awesome, in general it hasn't been my experience with those on the most left (lefter than say Pelosi/Biden in US politics). I hope you're able to advocate for how development helps the people the left most advocates for, like the poor and working class. There are many that are shooting themselves in the foot by opposing development on the grounds of "gentrification", "colonization", or other scary strawmen.

> is that the same hyper liberal people who are so against development

Kind of a weird statement. Having grown up in a small town, there's wasn't a "hyper liberal" person in sight.

The elitist, anti-growth, outsiders-are-destroying-this-place attitude is pervasive everywhere. It's absolutely not a party thing. It just so happens that California has a lot of outsiders wanting to move there, and is left-leaning. That's it. You see the same exact attitudes in towns in Wyoming, Texas, and Florida too.

Perhaps injecting partisan into it was dumb of me, however, in my experience it was the very liberal people who were the ones who spearheaded some of our largest long-term planning blunders. But you're right, the pervasive attitude in most smaller communities is generally "Everything was great until a shortly after I moved here" which really drives me crazy. I suppose it's just more acute in a town of 3,000.

If everything truly was great until shortly after you moved there, especially if it happens at several theres, that means that you were what made the places fall from greatness.

All those staunch conservatives in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.

...Arizona, Texas, Nevada

It's a very longstanding cliche to complain about people from California moving into the nearby states. Lots of that when I went to school in AZ in the 90s.

Yes, as we all know, homeowners bias towards American liberalism. What political clarity coming from Sr_developer.

> Interestingly, homeownership has a split effect on political party affiliation. Those who use private mortgages “polarize,” according to the authors, with some becoming Republican and others becoming Democrats. But homeowners who get mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration, so-called FHA loans, are much more likely to become Democrats.

> By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. In fact, the authors point out, even those who were previously Republicans “shift markedly” toward the Democratic party once they receive an FHA loan. It could be that those who receive FHA-backed loans recognize the value of government in helping them obtain a low-interest mortgage or perhaps it is because FHA loans are only available for more modest loans, and are more likely to be taken by working- or middle-class people. At the same time, Republicans who do not use FHA loans become even more Republican.

> It’s not just that becoming homeowners makes people more NIMBYish, or that homeownership locks people into place, but buying a home changes people’s political behavior writ large. Once someone buys a home, they act politically to protect its value. As the authors point out: “Overall, the results suggest that individual economic circumstances importantly influence political beliefs and behavior, and suggest that homeowners have special influence in American politics in part because their ownership motivates them to pay attention and to participate.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-28/how-homeo...

Oh look, another HN commenter with 0 idea of what he is talking about, but all the bravado to support his dumb position.

Why would you go through so much effort only to not demonstrate your point of view?

Are homeowners more likely to have what political leaning?

Do you understand that that was the intention of my original post right? Please tell me that you do.Because if not, Jesus!

> It's really bizarre, they never accept that they can't have things both ways

It’s not really that bizarre when you accept that it’s part of the human condition. Then you start seeing the pattern all over the place, especially in politics.

I have two degrees where the concept is pretty much taught in the first hour of 101 classes: economics (cost of opportunity) and software engineering (design trade-offs). And while I see through the pattern quite well, I wish I could say my behavior is always perfectly consistent with what I know.

More like can pick one these days

You either have enough money to afford all of them, or none of them.

> Detached homes with yards

Can we get rid of this please? Your little piece of green is better served as an undisturbed park that can support wildlife.

I’d love to see small towns replaced with a single highrise. More room for trees and deer and migratory birds. This is a real thing: https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/4893153001

The anti-growth crowd is often those who already own homes, so they're gaining from the cost of housing exploding.

The people who live in an area, it seems, should rightfully decide the rules of that area. It's in their interest to stop competition with their existing property so they will vote against it. At the same time, everyone lives somewhere, and if everyone votes for anti-development policies there will not be enough houses to go around. I guess the policy hurts the up-and-coming to help the established. Still, people should have a right to determine the future of their own communities. I would be interested to hear if any philosophers have untangled this one, because I can clearly see the conflict of two good principles.

It is a mess in a lot of places. I have lived in Florida for 49 years. Retirees basically work against the interests of people who need to work and raise children. I don’t see any solution other than limiting the voting franchise to those with skin in the game.

Or move elsewhere. Retirees will struggle when there's nobody to wipe their ass because they can't afford to live there.

They won’t move again. They have the political power. There will be an ever growing service economy with an ever decreasing standard of living. The system is working as designed.

If the service workers vote with their feet and leave Florida, retirees'll be stuffed.

thats why you have holes in the southern border, to keep bringing fresh meat willing to work for peanuts and without entitlements to the social safety net

There is a related problem in that the businesses profiting from illegal labor are rarely punished when there is a round of deportations. It is not an accident that those who complain loudly about illegal immigrants are often not checking the I-9s.

We know that won’t happen. This is my point. It is not a healthy, free market for labor. The retirees have the political power. Enough people poor enough to pick up the slack will always be available.

>I would be interested to hear if any philosophers have untangled this one

Georgism?

But what is the community that people have the right to determine the future of? The town? The county? The state? The U.S.?

People who are lucky enough to get the Oranges early in the game have an unfair advantage

I don't think you need to be a philosopher to realize the trade-offs.

The issue is that if every community does this (as they pretty much have) then anyone whose family didn't have property 50 years ago will be stuck with bad housing and anyone whose family had housing 50 years ago will be able to fund their housing.

Its a coordination problem. Clearly a small town may be sacrificing something by decreasing their own values with building - but if every town in the same country individually makes the optimal choice for themselves then the result for the country overall is not great for anyone.

> The people who live in an area, it seems, should rightfully decide the rules of that area

This sounds nice, until you consider that "people who live in an area" is merely a proxy for community members, and a poor proxy at that. The people who work in an area are part of the community too, and should not be excluded from the decision making process. If towns can tax non-residents who work there, they can give them representation.

this is medieval England thinking, where only landlord had a vote and could decide the future of the country/community

It's founding father thinking.

Madison for example said

"Allow the right [to vote] exclusively to property [owners], and the rights of persons may be oppressed... . Extend it equally to all, and the rights of property [owners] ...may be overruled by a majority without property.... "

Back in 1776, you could vote in the US. If you were

1) White

2) Male

3) Owned property

4) Were not Catholic, Jewish or Quaker

When Washington was elected in 1789, only 6% of the population could vote.

Even as late as 1850, some states (North Carolina for example) still denied the vote to white men (let alone anyone else) who didn't own property, and it was 1964 when the idea of paying to vote was finally outlawed with the 24th amendment.

Right. People seem to think that if the cost of hotdogs goes up, that home owners who's $1M house appreciated an extra 10% are getting screwed. They're not. Unless they're spending an absurd amount of money on local services.

The people who made $100k on paper will end up without it if they hold on to their house until the market gives up on moving people in to their housing-constrained locale. They'd have to sell it during the rush to benefit, otherwise they pay the higher living costs for a while only to see their equity return to its original valuation.

Housing prices are much stickier up than you give them credit for

No they are not. I've lost a ton of money on houses in the past. However it is clearly a matter of how much housing is built, when you are not allowed to build as much housing as the market wants prices go up and prices remain sticky. So long as the market is allowed to build, the cost of materials/labor is the factor. (Land is less a factor than you think because someone will get the idea of building up if allowed thus amortizing over less area)

In what part of the US are you that houses cost $1M, AND you're allowed to build houses?

There are few places in the country where houses are expensive, AND you can actually build housing.

That isn't housing prices being sticky, that is house prices following supply and demand.

Where you can build more $1M houses? Not many, if any. Where houses can cost $1M and there's plenty of room to build more housing? NYC metro for one, and I'd guess other major metro's as well. Though I've noticed plenty of anti-apartment and other anti-development signs here in my NYC-area suburb. We're not the SF bay area yet, but seem to be aiming for that.

No, they aren't gaining - not yet. They only gain when they sell. In the meantime, their property taxes probably go up, and their cost of services goes up because businesses have higher costs.

For anybody who earns more than their expenses- additional cash flow and increases in net worth are interchangeable.

Meaning that if you gave me 10k in cash I'd just invest it in an asset that appreciates, so if you give me 10k in home equity, which is an asset that appreciates, it's almost just as good.

If housing hadn't exploded in the US over the last 30 years the US would have needed to confront the fact that wages would never allow anyone to retire or build any wealth.

Wait, so the Boomers collectively cashed a 'one-time lotto ticket' to benefit themselves without fixing any problems for future generations?

Weird, so unlike them.

There seem to be four 'big' models for quitting-work-when-you're-old: kids; socialized safety nets; pensions; and, home-wealth. One of these things is not like the others.

If housing hadn't exploded over the last 30 years I don't think stagnant wage growth would have been an issue.

I've always felt like housing is the biggest indicator of inflation.

And housing is not included in official inflation statistics... :facepalm:

Housing prices will find whatever level is necessary to price out the excess housing seekers relative to available homes. Higher wages simply mean a bigger number.

At any given snapshot of time this is true. In the long-term there is a lot of policy controlling the supply of housing to benefit existing home owners as well as a steady lowering of interest rates which improves the nominal home price a buyer is able to procure. Given that humans have finite lives the increase in home prices benefits owners who are near retirement the most.

When you combine these effects you have an intergenerational wealth transfer machine that rewards existing home owners. The only reasons for home prices to rise as they have in the US are due to policy decisions, if these policy decisions never occurred the baby boomer generation would be unable to retire without changes to entitlements or improvements to working wages.

Available homes is not a constant. New structures can be built, inefficiently utilized land can be rezoned, and transportation infrastructure can be improved to increase the effective size of an area. You might seriously run out of living space in an area like Manhattan, but in 99.9% of cases increased demand should lead to increased supply in a functioning market.

And home owners tend to vote in elections, especially local ones.

THIS dynamic is the most frustrating part of 'nobody wants to work anymore!'

That seems like a policy the newcomers coming in setting up winter homes would do and not the locals who are slowly driven out through rent/price increases brought by market restrictions.

Affluent people coming into the town later and buying up homes for vacation properties and/or AirBNB style rentals will suck up any remaining capacity in the housing supply, as well as further driving prices up.

But it was residents and locals who set the stage, by being against development, voting for restrictive zoning, and so on.

I would like to “flunk Econ 101” if the end result is a 40% return on my home price over the past 2 years.

Is this even a problem? It's a problem for the no-dev people, but they brought it on themselves. As long as they're the only people who "get hurt", seems like the problem will take care of itself?

Unless they start allowing shanty-towns, which seems like where this is going.

  > Is this even a problem? It's a problem

It's not a problem. People like that don't really care for the town either, only their bottom line. If small businesses go bust, tax revenue craters, and municipal services are gutted, they're still making money on their investment.

I grew up in a town like this and left. The only thing I miss is being close to my parents.

Amazingly we can say a similar thing about small, advanced, usually university towns in Germany like Freiburg, Heidelberg or Tübingen (among many others).

It‘s like a new version of town vs gown. Cost of living of course skyrockets…