I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but I genuinely don't see a solution where you allow people to move to areas of high opportunity without building more high rises (or just denser housing in general).
On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax increase). They may not have good credit, not qualify for a loan, or even have any savings. They may already be stretched to the limit in terms of transportation to a job, or rely on their neighbors for child care. If they were a homeowner, it may have been the last vestige of generational wealth in their family, and they may simply have no money for rent or a new home. If they can rent, it'll certainly be much more than they were paying before, which may have just been their property tax. And if they are one of the millions of Americans whose parents brought them to this country in search of migrant work, they might not even have a birth certificate or social security number, or perhaps have difficulty speaking English.
For many disadvantaged Americans, being forced out of your home due to gentrification can leave you homeless, jobless, and broke, with no lifeline. No extended family to give you money or support, no savings to cushion rebooting your whole life. This has been a reality for decades, and I'm still surprised when people don't realize how much of a risk to human life there is here.
So.... if the question is "When will you let people build high rises and gentrify out poor people?", my answer would be: "When those same people who want to build high rises are forced to reconcile with the people whose lives they might destroy." If you want to gentrify a neighborhood, it should be a requirement that every single person who will be negatively affected by that move should be supported such that their lives won't end up in shambles just so a developer can get rich and some hipsters can have an expensive loft.
It's a choice between giving rich people a cozy pad, or letting poor people continue to have a livelihood and home. I just don't see that being much of a choice.
You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.
Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.
Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.
So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.
Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.
This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.
The land became valuable because they are there and have done a good job maintaining their community. It's collective action of the community that has made it a good place to be.
Maintaining the community is what ensures that value remains. The rea question is why all these other people aren't willing to go build a valuable community
If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses.
It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one
Then, you're turned into a renter against your will, and also, everyone else needs to find new housing at the same time, so even before the new luxury units go up, the rent skyrockets.
Poor people with expensive homes can't defend their ownership. That takes paying expensive lawyers
If they leave immediately, rather than struggling to pay their massively increased property taxes, then mortgaging their house to keep up...
> by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY
...which apparently is a good outcome?
The GDP isn't a magical number that rises by making people suffer. It rises because NIMBYs are unable to force others to struggle by keeping them out of their economically advantageous land.
Similar land is all over the place
Eminent domain is another.
Why not worry about renters though? Are they not people?
Here in the U.K. taxes etc don’t increase with property value, and eminent domain isn’t frequently used. So I lack the context to understand why increasing property values mean people are forced to leave, especially when I look around London and see thousands of people who bought their council homes 50 years ago, and are now living in properties that are worth many orders of magnitude more than what they bought them for. Notably, none of them have been forced out.
As for renters, well the mechanism is obvious, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.
That is too far away. That may or may not happen
In the short term, the supply just increases significantly. Probably also the traffic and other infrastructure use.
Not that I disagree or agree with nimby. Just pointing it out because you only point out one side.
On the infrastructure side, its a much better deal for you as well, the combined value of all the property taxes from the apartment buildings will be way more than if that lot had remained a house. Since the road, water, sewer and electric lines are already in place nothing new has to be built. You benefit from all those property taxes coming in from the apartment building while the liabilities to the government have barely increased. The local government can use this new surplus of taxes to build new amenities for you.
For traffic, sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere. Once you have enough people in a place you could open small shops so they can hang out around the building rather than drive everywhere.
We can of course choose to say we want quality of life over economic comforts modern economy offers, until our holiday shopping is stuck in the ports because of viewshed(!) regulations.
The cold truth is if only very rich do that it won't affect much, if however everyone also starts, the economy will suffer and eventually as a result of that quality of life will also drop, everything becomes expensive and industry/jobs go to places that don't restrict as much.
Look at Healthcare in U.S. for stark example, insurance(tied to employment!) or proper care is a luxury is out of reach of for many people, that on average citizens here actually may be getting poorer care than many other countries with poorer per capita GDP . The best in world research or care is possible in the U.S. what is the use if people cannot afford it ?
> someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium.
This is still a far future.
> If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed
It's still better for you that only demand exists, but not supply.
To be honest, I doubt nimbyists are even interested to move. They just want their neighborhood to stay relatively the same (quiet, fewer people, safe, less crowded).
Either way we look at it, this kind of points are likely cons, not pros.
> sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere.
I laughed a little, assuming this is a US city.
Again, I don't own a house, so it's not that I agree or disagree with nimby. But I can understand why nimby hates new buildings next to their houses. It's just a lot more cons than pros.
Extraordinarily wealthy people are going to be willing to pay a premium for a nice house in Manhattan, and extremely wealthy people are exponentially wealthier than moderately wealthy people, so you cant get that back in volume.
or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.
As for structural safety, no one is arguing to reduce building codes or safety regulations so that's just a straw man argument. If an apartment building is built unsafe then the government should have done a better job inspecting and enforcing/expanding their regulations, it's not really an argument to not build.