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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Homelessness also decreases when cities simply let more housing be built, even if luxury housing. https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-building...

For some reason liberal policymakers (or their constituents) either can't seem to get that in their head, or can't act on it. And instead cling to things like rent control, which "feel good" in the short run but end up doing the opposite of what was intended.

Sometimes I think that every policy (that isn't a "duh, of course" policy) should come with an expiration date. So that the people you wanted to help are specifically identified, and given a finite time to be helped -- and people who come after know that it's a one-time intervention and the system is what it is from now on. Then when the people you thought it would serve / benefit are gone, you are required to assess whether it worked as you thought, and it doesn't just go on autopilot forever. Now, whether the policymakers would respect that, or simply keep on extending it on public opinion, who knows.

It's just too easy for well-intentioned people to put in place rules they think will work, and go away for 10 years and discover it didn't, and then still do nothing to fix it.

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It’s actually important to understand the American liberal is quite conservative when it comes to economic concerns. The problem with fixing housing is that it requires change, and the tolerance for economic change for your typical liberal voter is very limited. There’s a reason why they routinely reject their left flank in favor of economic moderates and it’s not just pragmatism or electability: they tolerate the status quo and are only open to minor tweaks and adjustments.

This. The people with influence in both parties benefit from the status quo, enjoy their privilege, and only want things to change from a distance.

I'm not sure it's even necessary to blame politicians with influence.

Over the last few decades, we made home ownership a goal for the vast majority of the US populace. Now we expect those homeowners to vote against their own self-interest (to approve additional housing units/zoning).

Agree that voting blocks with influence are a big part of it. I don't think it's rational self-interest, though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784347

Upzoning might increase land value but often decreases property value. In general supply and demand still functions, by increasing supply the price should decrease.

What evidence is there that it is due to racism, classism and fear rather than rational self-interest?

Who says the two are exclusive? You can go to any US planning meeting and find at least one person who alludes to the wrong type of person moving in resulting in loss of "neighborhood character".

Racist and classist concerns also influence property value. Blockbusting was a real estate practice that worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

> Upzoning might increase land value but often decreases property value.

Is there an example of where that happened? A developer building an apartment building can pay more than an owner occupant.

The complaints from wealthy neighborhoods start with quality of life and degrade into questioning "what kind of people" will housing/transportation/amenities attract. I base this on listening to public meetings in SF / Bay Area so lots of local bias.

Those selling the land to the developer profit but there are lots of examples in which home values around the new building decrease due to blocked views/shade/decreased privacy.

From a societal POV we should be building higher density and the drawbacks are worth it, but it is also in the rational self-interest of those building neighbors to vote against the new development.

NY has alleviated this somewhat by granting all existing landowners some air-rights that they can choose to sell to nearby highrises. Something like this might be the right way to go so that the nearby owners receive some recompense.

The same laws that prevent mid size apartment buildings often prevent an existing home from being divided into a duplex or triplex. Why restrict the number of kitchens and exterior doors? For most single family exclusive neighborhoods, I don't think air rights are relevant. They don't want people with less money moving in.

It's the same motivation as Marin County, CA and the Georgetown neighborhood of DC refusing train stops to "keep the riff raff out". The exclusion is the point.

Traffic and parking concerns are legitimate gripes that I’ve heard (and I’m inclined to feel myself).

I don’t care who lives next to me, because my interactions with them are limited to kindly waves as we pass on the sidewalk.

If I couldn’t park my car anywhere near my house because the alternative timeline neighborhood had twice as many cars because it had twice as many kitchens and exterior doors, I’d be less satisfied with my neighborhood as compared to now where the parking is generally adequate except on street cleaning days. That’s got nothing whatsoever to do with who the other car owners are, how expensive the other cars are, or how rich they are.

This is also some of where “each new residential lot needs X feet of frontage and Y parking spaces per unit” zoning laws come from. It’s not just “keep the poors out” (although that may be a secondary motivation for some).

The policies you suggest to protect parking are exactly what make traffic worse.

1. Less dense development creates suburban sprawl. This means new people live farther away from their jobs than existing residents.

2. Those new people have to drive more miles each day than existing residents. ie traffic congestion is super linear on population growth.

3. The intersections that become bottlenecks get worse every year.

Texas style sprawl spreads out the offices more so their average commute times go up every year at a slower rate (but they still go up). The only proven solution is to allow housing that's dense enough for public transit to work efficiently.

I'm not saying your motivations are based in classism, racism, and fear, but the people motivated enough to engage in the political process "protecting the suburbs" generally are. They're smart enough to educate themselves on these issues, see the consequences, and say, "yes, this is what I want".

Residential zoning creates geographic segregation between rich and poor. In America that also means the housing crisis is making racial segregation worse(https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism). With the way public services are primarily administered at local level, once people are segregated then richer, whiter areas get the best schools, better parks, better maintained infrastructure, faster emergency response times, etc

Ironically, early residential zoning had explicitly bad intentions, but the impact was limited because there was so much land available to build on. 75 years later the consequences have escalated.

I see this notion a lot, that density decreases home values. Yet home prices are at their highest in our densest cities. I just don't buy it.

Walkable neighborhoods tend to be expensive and those where jobs are.

If you just add apartment house to existing residential street, you achieve neither. Especially when zoning does not allows small shops to appear.

Assuming you're right and increasing density somehow does not decrease home value/price in the densest cities, then how can up zoning/increasing density help alleviate the housing crisis?

It's like saying 'We want to change the zoning to make housing more affordable but don't worry it won't make housing more affordable'.

Because relaxed zoning increases the price of land and decreases the price of interior space. In the most expensive cities, it's the value of land that's going up. The houses themselves are often the same structures that housed the working class in the 50s.

> This. Everything's equivalent. This.

This.

I read a good article some time ago about how as long as we gravitate towards symbolic and emotional / headline-grabbing solutions, we will feel good and think that we've solved problems, but end up having made little progress.

These problems have taken decades to mature (or even are an endemic part of how a system is), and it's a bit naive to think that some quick fix will undo them.

Rent control, affirmative action, drug policy, wealth disparity -- all of these have headline-grabbing proposed solutions (often with heated protests) but when it comes down to it (and you observe after a few months), people vote with their $ and behavior according to deeper considerations on the choices they actually want.

While people may say (or appear to) be in support of whatever cause-of-the-moment grabs the headlines, when it actually costs them (or their kids), they will not do what you hoped.

> I read a good article some time ago about how as long as we gravitate towards symbolic and emotional / headline-grabbing solutions, we will feel good and think that we've solved problems, but end up having made little progress.

Or, to say it another way, as long as we tolerate politics that are basically just performance art nothing changes.

I don’t think that I would say it that way at all.

The parent comment simply makes the point that people vote with their own interests in mind, but say otherwise as long as it doesn’t cost them. We don’t just “tolerate” performance art politics - we actively encourage and vote for it because the alternatives are expensive and unpalatable.

It’s much more comfortable to “blame profits” or “blame campaign financing” or blame Jeff Bezos or blame capitalism than to acknowledge that in a city that maximizes global utility and wellness, you might not have the right to keep poor people from living near you.

It isnt voting that kills off these things. It's campaign financing.

Profit friendly "solutions" tend to get given prominence (e.g. a new mental health clinic or two) over profit-unfriendly solutions that actually work (e.g. rent control, building competing housing that decreases the value of existing stock).

It's not really about voter preferences, though. It's about $$$.

If you genuinely believe that homelessness is primarily solved with obviously palliative solutions like mental health clinics then you're probably quite a credulous person. The people touting these ideas certainly know they dont work and if there were more money in actually building housing they'd guide you to believe that instead.

This is why I live in a small city with tons of affordable housing. Quality of life here is a lot better than you'd expect.

While I visit large cities, they often seem more dystopian then somewhere I'd actually want to live. Liberals can have them.

The problem is that because, by their nature they are small, it doesn't take that many people fleeing blue-state large cities to also overheat a small city housing market.

This is currently a massive problem in the Intermountain West in places like Boise.

There are a lot of small cities. They can't all overheat. Eventually the supply of blue-state refugees will run out.

The migration has been ongoing since the 1980s, so the value of "eventually" may be worthless to the currently living.

It’s not that different in Europe, we still get the same silly virtue-bikeshedding. In my city the government requires developers to include “affordable” flats in luxury developments and then complains when the residents of the “affordable” flats have to enter through a separate “poor door” and don’t get to enjoy the swimming pool and wine cellar.

Yet those are the apartments that sell out.

In my city (London) that happens too. The ultra luxury flats are 50% unsold and have an occupancy rate that is lower still and they are STILL building more luxury housing with swimming pools and gyms nobody uses.

The Soviet Union wasnt this bad at allocating resources.

This is a free market that needs to be taken out and shot. It's culminated in the creation of assets, much like NFTs, whose existence is not predicated on them actually being used because all it needs to do is soak up capital, and actually useful economic activity had to be mandated into existence by local government (Ordinances to mandate % affordable housing).

The worst part isnt even that. The worst part is that if developers cheap out and sell you a flammable flat they can charge you $100k++ after you've bought the flat to fix the flammability that was a result of their shoddy construction.

And if you do die, it's not their problem.

This is the culmination of decades of the UK mindlessly nodding along to the 1%'s "market knows best" propaganda.

There's a reason the supposedly "free market" Singaporean government builds 90% of the housing stock in the country like they're fervent Stalinists. Coz that's the economically efficient way to house people.

> Yet those are the apartments that sell out.

Well yeah, they’re generally amazing deals for decent quality new built apartments.

Yeah sure, the staircase looks just average and not like a luxury hotel and there’s no gym or infinity pool!

Doesn’t really seem like such a disaster when you get to live in a nice heavily discounted apartment on some of the most desirable square feet of earth in the world.

The disaster is that there is human demand for tens of thousands more of these that living, breathing people could actually live in but instead economic policy and capital distribution is geared towards building NFTs in the sky for Russian and Chinese billionaires.

It sounds like Russians and Chinese are to be blamed. I bet American billionaires had been involved decades earlier, including all American and European funds. Our tycoons lobbied our legislators and regulators way before the foreign billionaires came to riches and realized they may make money on our market as well.

But it's not heavily discounted. The markup is just lower. The way these affordable appartment laws are typically written, they are still allowed to profit on those appartements. A typical appartment costs around 250-350$ per square foot to build.

It's more profitable for them to sell appartements at 700$/sqft for only half of them to sell, costing them 350$/sqft to build, than to sell for 400$/sqft an appartment that cost 250$/sqft to build.

The disaster isn't that there is no access to the pool. The issue is that they're trying to spite the poors and shame them, because they're trying to prevent them from moving in.

If we really wanted, the government could build appartements of better quality and sell them at same price, AND make a profit on it.

As the above commenter said, it's simply a market failure. It has nothing to do with the price of the land or anything, it's that the appartements are seen as an investment asset and will be bought at an exorbitant price eventually, as long as the price of the appartment doesn't fall in that "luxury" building. It's gross resource misallocation.

> The disaster isn't that there is no access to the pool. The issue is that they're trying to spite the poors and shame them, because they're trying to prevent them from moving in.

That’s really not true though. The facilities beyond the “poor doors” aren’t any different from how most normal people live, they’re just right next to luxury accommodation for rich people. The contrast is obviously more apparent, but the developers aren’t doing anything to screw over the poors (what’d be the point?).

> If we really wanted, the government could build appartements of better quality and sell them at same price, AND make a profit on it.

Of course, but the politicians would rather virtue signal about “poor doors” than actually solve problems.

Well no, the facilities are lower, they often don't have access to the gym, sometime parking, etc...

I'm sure that politicians are incompetent and corrupt. That being said, we can agree that there is a market failure here.

> Well no, the facilities are lower, they often don't have access to the gym, sometime parking, etc...

Isn’t that just… normal? Until a few years ago I thought that apartment building gyms were something that only exist in american movies.

Parking is hardly a given for any apartment in European cities, London even has tons of luxury apartments without parking.

>The problem with fixing housing is that it requires change, and the tolerance for economic change for your typical liberal voter is very limited.

This applies to most voters, not just liberals ones. But I agree, as someone living in the SF Bay Area, the NIMBYism is hypocritical and very annoying to see.

Sometime ago I came to a conclusion that there might be another reason why american (western) left is talking more than acting on the problems from their agenda: any action has 2 inherent risks: risk of failure and risk of success. While risk of failure is quite easy to understand, risk of success is a very different beast. Risk of success is when solved problem renders the entire movement pointless and puts people in power at risk of losing control.

Your URL cites two studies, one was in the US, which states:

> I combine the address histories with a simulation model to estimate that building 100 new market-rate units leads 45-70 and 17-39 people to move out of below-median and bottom-quintile income tracts

The people represented in your vague "liberal policymakers" are almost universally in support of "market-rate units," contrary to your claims. Did you read any of the articles or studies you linked to?

The Trump Administration suspended part of a 2016 rule designed to reduce segregation and expand opportunity for low-income families with Housing Choice Vouchers. Is he a "liberal policymaker" as well?

Why would they allow more housing to be built? That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. Discard any notion that all but a very small minority of policymakers are truly motivated by ideology.

I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers.

In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart.

This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.

Completely agree. We should be aiming to elect doctors and engineers (i.e. people who understand Systems Theory) for political positions, not people who have prescriptive solutions.

There are plenty of stupid doctors and engineers.

Well, duh. There's plenty of stupid people of ANY classification. But at least most doctors and engineers have proven that they can understand systems analysis and think critically, or they wouldn't have their licenses. Software engineering is barely regulated/licensed, so I certainly wouldn't apply this to most software engineers.

What does understanding systems analysis have to do with being a good politician?

What would a doctor or engineer do differently?

Make a decision based on emotion and then retroactively use math to justify that decision.

I am so glad that this response is here.

HN in general has this disease, but it's pretty prevalent in STEM fields in general- The "I know how to solve a differential equation so that means I am a rational decision maker" disease.

It's important to acknowledge that the more education a person has the more likely they are to reverse-engineer a reason to think something that they want to think, especially when it comes to emotionally charged issues like those that politicians encounter every day.

Having technical skills does not automagically make you a good leader or policymaker. It just means you have good technical skills.

I would go so far as to say there are probably more people with good technical skills that should not be making policy than the opposite.

I think having technical people on staff is really important. That the elected leader has a STEM background? Not important. Leaders should be general purpose coordinators of groups that solve problems. Understanding the psychology of all the participants is as important as solving the specific issue.

In context, a STEM background is someone who has and can actually engineer or science. Writing some code doesn't qualify. Every human on the planet should be able to design an experiment and do basic statistics. I think the bar we have for our fellow human should be much higher than it currently is. The moniker, that person is an "Every (Hu)Man" , should be a badge of honor.

Approve construction of market rate housing, presumably.

thats more or less what china does

Minus the "we ... elect" part.

Most Chinese officials aren't engineers or doctors, they might have a degree given to them in something like Chemical engineering, but they've never practiced as an engineer and have the full life training of a politician.

Easier to win votes by selling castles in the sky.

This is my experience as well, after being heavily involved in a local issue. In my state the state employee leaders are also, on the main, very low caliber people.

> This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.

There’s a bit of both, but it’s not a conspiracy. Most cities have this problem (even outside US), because the issue is that most baby boomers have their financial health tied in real estate.

This makes those policies ideal, because they look like attacking the problem without really fixing anything.

...but if you were a smart homeowner, wouldn't you want to elect a 'useful idiot' to carry out your desired policy?

Just because the policy makers are dumb, doesn't mean that the voters behind them are too.

The risk of collateral damage by a bumbling fool who just happens to stumble upon your favored policy is way too high. She might do what you want in matter X, but might also do completely wrongheaded moves in matters Y, Z, or even in X itself from another angle. All you need for confirmation is to look at what Seattle looks like today: I doubt that there is a single voter who can look at the city and honestly say “I support policies of the city government in entirety, and the current state of affairs is to my liking”.

"According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States#...

It seems you haven't been around Seattle DT. I'm from a 3rd world country and it's really bad even by my standards.

I would say the problem is we give government the power to solve the problem, we expect the government to solve the problem, while electing idiots to government

I also suspect many believe the solution to this problem is to "stop electing idiots" when in reality the solution is to stop expecting government to solve the problem, and recognize we should remove the power from the government and allow private actors to solve it

Haha I can see that from my experience with local politicians.

It's rough that talent in these large cities generally flows to the megacorps or private companies in general.

I'd personally love to leave my tech job temporarily for city govt if the pay/environment was similar.

I've also interacted with elected officials. Econ 101 might as well be as hard as quantum chromodynamics.

For fun, could you ELI5 quantum chromodynamics?

Haha. No. I quit advanced physics at Schrodinger's equation.

Turns out I preferred studying Hamilton instead of Hamiltonians.

> I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers. > In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart.

Is that on top of all the house building that has been done and is being done still? If they are so incompetent, why are new town homes, condos, and apartment complexes popping up all over the place?

Sure, it still can't keep up with demand...a 25% growth in population over the last decade is no joke. But Seattle is nowhere near as dysfunctional as SF, at the very least.

That's like saying your government is run better than Somalia; damning with faint praise.

All the growth is concentrated on like 5% of the land and unaffordable for normal people. Open it all up for development.

You mean like…Houston? Can you come up with some better examples of a city that does this that doesn’t suck?

DT Seattle and other parts are probably the same as SF with tent villages.

The proliferation of ignorant idiots in politics is pretty universal problem. It is not any better ten timezones from Seattle...

Genuinely smart people are usually satisfied with their own line of work, or realize that politicians and their families in the age of (a)social networks are subject to constant barrage of unhinged hate messaging and threats emanating from the Internet. So they think twice before even entering the race for any public office.

We would probably be better off with sortition (basically, drawing lots and choosing random people to serve in legislatures).

> In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart.

It's not about whether they're smart people or not, it's about whether they're smarter than the problem they're trying to solve.

I, aware of the risk of Dunning-Kruger effect, nonetheless consider myself to be a pretty smart guy. I'm a well-educated a computer engineer; I score well in interviews, in exams, and also in Trivial Pursuit. But the steel, silicon, and copper that I work with and am respected for is highly predictable. Electrons and hydraulic fluid are intimidating to a layman but with a bit of education and experience can be broken down into understandable subcomponents and reliable mathematics.

Back in school, we engineers with our mathematical, physics-based hard science liked to denigrate the 'soft science' employed in educational, social, and political fields. However, after further growth, I've come to realize that physics is simple and people are really, really complicated.

The narrative that housing is blocked by rich NIMBYs protecting their land value is true BUT

The less popular narrative that’s just as true, at least in California if you pay attention to the politics, is that PHIMBYs who are mostly renters and insist on 100% affordable or nothing, play just as big a role.

If you look at who blocked SB50 or who pitched the “Mission moratorium , it was PHIMBY renters.

It’s easy to rally people up against greedy rich people. But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.

You can agree or disagree with the PHIMBY position but most people find it complex enough they just pretend that faction doesn’t exist despite the huge role it plays.

Acronym stands for Public Housing In My Backyard. (I had to look this up)

That's only true in relatively small areas. Most places resisting home construction are full of homeowners. The political impact is larger in SF/LA because they give left cover to homeowners, but even that's not a thing in most states and cities.

> PHIMBYs

Basically don't exist. AHIMBYs do, but even people who demand affordable units don't want public units anywhere close to where they live.

> But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.

In any place without open space, the only way to build new housing is redevelopement; if you target the top of the market (which is what “market rate” housing means), you cannot have any hyperlocal (and wider, on a short-term scale) effect besides more gentrification.

The intermediate term, wider area (but still somewhat local) effect may be more affordable housing as existing housing becomes more down-market through competitive forces, but that also could be offset by further increasing nonhousing costs and reduction in nonhousing services targeting the lower income segment as the gentrifiers reshape local markets.

> That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA.

does it actually work that way? a large part of land value seems to come from network effects: the more densely populated a region, the more valuable each sqft.

upzoning a plot often seems to be an immediate profit, too. SFH worth $1M, gets upzoned, suddenly a developer can pay $2M for the plot and tear down the house + build high-density units that are very valuable.

maybe values fall once you overbuild, but i have yet to see that in my lifetime.

Long term vs short term.

Long term they’ll be worth more, but short term prices will go down.

No one sees prices really go down because that could trigger another ‘08 style collapse. Banks are less leveraged, but there’s a lot of people with mortgages too big for their sake.

> does it actually work that way?

Yes, density drives up the price of land, but much of the value of a home isn't land value; poorer people in the neighborhood drives down the value per square foot of existing dwelling because people with money don't want to live near people without money by and large, both directly and indirectly. (E.g., better off people want to, and will pay a premium to, live near “good schools”, but there is pretty solid evidence that almost none of the difference in the things which people look to to assess that is due to the school itself, it is almost entirely incidental consequences of the demographics of the students attending the school: “good schools” aren't ones that make better students, they are made by better students.)

Until the potential realizable by dense redevelopment drives up the land value so much that the added land value exceeds the lost value of the existing improvements, it's a loss, and even then it's a gain that can only be realized by abandoning the home, which becomes a liability that needs to be dealt with to unlock the value.

Homeowners want the value of their home to increase, but often what they more specifically want is to continue living in the home while leveraging greater equity to enhance their lifestyle. This is not served by land value increases (even if they reach the level of net property value increases after decrease in value of existing improvements) that are only accessible by redevelopment. People who live in homes they own are not like absentee owners and tend to ascribe significant value to existing community character and significant negative value to moving, on top of theit investment interests in the property.

It increases the value of land for people who sell and build while pushing externalities onto people who hold. If your neighbor with a $1M home sells it to a developer for $2M, they make a cool extra mil. You, as a neighbor, get nothing. Meanwhile, you have to deal with additional traffic in the neighborhood; cars parked on the street; more people (quite possibly of a different socioeconomic strata) coming and going; construction noise; higher property taxes; usually uglier buildings; blocked views; more crowded schools; and more load on public infrastructure.

This is also why the most vocal NIMBYs are often senior citizens who plan to live in their home till they die. They don't benefit from the higher land values at all, because they never intend to sell the property, and will be dead before somebody reaps the financial gains. However, they have to deal with all the community externalities, and they're often at a stage in their life where they're least suited for that.

> You, as a neighbor, get nothing. Meanwhile, you have to deal with additional traffic in the neighborhood; cars parked on the street; more people (quite possibly of a different socioeconomic strata) coming and going; construction noise; higher property taxes; usually uglier buildings; blocked views; more crowded schools; and more load on public infrastructure.

there was a time in this scenario when those schools and public infrastructure didn't exist. presumably, the thing which justified their build-out was an earlier increase in density. one would therefore expect further increases in density to justify more forms of (or larger scale) public infrastructure. what scenarios would lead one to value the existing public infrastructure but not value the future public infrastructure? is it just a problem of time horizons/discounting (i.e. that the negative externalities of upscaling are immediate while the positives accrue over a longer time period)? that would seem to align with the anecdote about seniors, at least. but then i'm curious how the original community ever overcame these tradeoffs in order to achieve enough density and construct the earlier forms of public infrastructure.

Appropriate infrastructure for one scale usually isn't appropriate when the population grows 4-5x.

A cluster of 4 1000-pop villages will usually share an elementary school, with students bussed 10-20 miles to it. A 4000-pop light suburban town will have its own elementary school, usually one where parents will drive their kids 1-2 miles to it. A 4000-pop dense suburban development will place a 1-2 story elementary school and associated park & fields inside the middle of the neighborhood, where most students can walk to it via footpaths without crossing major roads. A 4000-pop urban neighborhood will build a 4-6 story schoolhouse on a major avenue where all the students are close by.

A cluster of villages or small towns will have 2-lane roads snaking between major village centers. A dense suburban neighborhood has a road hierarchy, 6-lane boulevards with commercial strip malls, fed by 2-lane residential streets. An urban neighborhood builds mass transit.

In each case, you can't really upgrade the existing infrastructure to the point where it's appropriate for the new density. You have to tear it down and build it a different way, at a cost that's usually higher and more disruptive than just building it a different way in the first place.

It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. That's how we got the infrastructure in the first place: land developers generally subdivided undeveloped farm/ranch/wilderness land, and sold it to people living in overcrowded tenements in the city. Or in the case of Europe/Japan/Russia/China, bombed the hell out of each other until all the infrastructure was destroyed and then built new infrastructure from scratch to house the survivors. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek-yet-actually-practical way of looking at this might be to treat cities as disposable, with a lifetime of a few generations, and then once the people outgrow them it's time to abandon the city and build a new one.

> It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities.

the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases.

this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).

Owners of SFHs tend to be the most stiff resistance despite the fact that upzoning increases the value of their land.

This is a culture war first and foremost. It's racism, classism, and fear of the unknown.

I honestly believe my friends aren't motivated by keeping their house price up, they just don't understand simple supply and demand. I tried explaining rent controls don't work, they even agreed but said "something must be done". Rent control is the easiest solution to justify and implement. I really wish supply and demand was taught in schools.

Rent control also has the opposite negative effect of causing a lot of people to stay still forever, causing the only AVAILABLE rentals (that all smell like cat pee, laundry detergent/freshner and next door to basketball hoops) to be $3500 a month.

If the rent wasn't controlled then the nice apartments would be available at $3500 and the pee/laundry baskebetball ones would be available at least at $700/mo for those that need housing.

Serious question. What's wrong with living next to basketball hoops? I live across the street from one in NYC and consider it a big positive to have a park nearby.

Presumably the noise. It's a pretty common source of friction between neighbors.

They can be noisy when there's a kid just shooting for half the day. If you're outside of the noise shot and you have good insulation, then it's probably fine.

My guess would be noise. A basketball hoop across the street is an amenity, but one right outside the window might be an annoyance.

Here's the weird part, policies to encourage density to go higher would almost certainly dramatically increase the value of the real estate homeowners already own. I suspect it's the desire to limit change more than really some asset value calculation.

No, it wouldn't. The land is what's valuable and the land in those extremely high-demand areas would be worth more money if the zoning allowed more uses on it.

Depends on how you measure it. Are we measuring based on days not homeless, homeless status, or number of evictions? The core problem of poverty living is having to jump from one rent situation to another. Landlords openly discriminate against women, women with children, and race continuously.

But yes, a number of liberal policies keep people on the streets. As documented multiple times in "evicted", the building inspector is sometimes responsible for more evictions than the landlord.

However there's more to it than that as we see with the homeless camps. Many of these people have little to no reason to care about anything. Often addicted to hard drugs (including alcohol) with no want to sober, no reason to. There's enough money in theft, prostitution, and odd jobs to keep homeless living sustainable. We cannot convince these people that there's more to life, and therefore we cannot convince them into free education for skilled work.

The education system on this is also broken, especially high school and universities. Therefore the problem were seeing is not simply housing, work, education, it's all symptoms of government rot. Systems that were created a long time ago of which their purpose has been lost. The solution to all this is to wipe the slate clean and start again with people that actually care and aren't sitting on a government paycheck.

This is on its face absurd, and makes it clear you've never actually spoken with an unhoused person.

I have helped multiple friends into government housing. Housing didn't suddenly cure their addictions or absolve them of mental health problems. It doesn't remove the victim mindset. Resources such as education and work can only be done if the individual is prepared to do it. But we don't have good resources, therefore the problems are cyclical.

Trusting the word of people is not representative of what they actually do. All of these people claimed to want X but make no effort towards it. People lie, especially to themselves.

I appreciate your breakdown of the situation, but it does make me wonder - are the people who become temporarily homeless consistently able to get back on their feet into into new jobs/homes with the resources governments currently provide? Making sure that the people who want help/relief from the situation seems important even if others choose to reject it

There are plenty of liberal YIMBYs out there getting c___blocked by bipartisan NIMBYs who don't want anything to happen to the monotonically increasing value of their real estate.

But also, we have plenty of land if we could do something about all that ridiculous eminent domain that keeps us from building a high speed rail system. Ironically though, even in California's heartland, a lot of that land is in the hands of disinterested speculators as part of their enormous portfolios built during the Great depression and handed down generation to generation.

I doubt we do any of these things though. Until there's some sort of phase transition in our political system, everything is gridlock all the way down with occasional spurts of disruptive innovation with calls for regulation shortly thereafter.

There is no such thing as luxury housing. If someone builds a fancy new apartment building with amenities, units in the 60 year old building next door automatically fall in value and become more affordable. We need to build housing, period.

> If someone builds a fancy new apartment building with amenities, units in the 60 year old building next door automatically fall in value and become more affordable. We need to build housing, period.

More than likely (at least here in Seattle), the 60 year old building next door has already been bought by a developer and is just waiting its turn to be redeveloped into more fancy new luxury housing.

Because >80% in single-family zoning. Let them build denser there and they will tear down single homes instead.

But those maps aren’t equally distributed. Yes, Seattle has alot of SFH zoning in…lake city, greenwood, rainier. But the place where they are building luxury town homes aren’t it, as soon as the zoning allows for it, developers buy out the old small craftsman homes built in the 1920s and replace them with multiple 3-4 story luxury townhomes.

>And instead cling to things like rent control, which "feel good" in the short run but end up doing the opposite of what was intended.

I'm not sure if there is a better term for it but people are highly susceptible for falling for a "it's your fault because you touched it last" bias. Luxury apartments are "bad" because their rents are high, even though they alleviate demand for regular housing. Evictions are "bad", even though the alternative is for landlords to factor that risk into the price or require very good credit and a stable income.

It's not just with housing either. Everyone loved student loans until they enabled colleges to raise their tuition prices. Now people are demanding the government to throw even more money at the problem with student loan forgiveness, which increases people's willingness to pay and would enable colleges to raise tuition even more.

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" is a term that someone coined for that idea.

Liberal policymakers in my town push heavily for homes to be built, thought they push for "affordable" housing specifically, which maybe is a mistake.

Homelessness also decreases when cities simply let more housing be built, even if luxury housing.

Eh?

The paper you are citing doesn't mention homelessnessness at all. You might want to believe that a decrease in homelessness will follow from the kind of value-chain effects it describes -- but if so, that's your own speculation. Not something that the paper makes any claims about. Yet you're waving it about as if it does exactly that.

Meanwhile, it's a complex subject (due to secondary effects), and other papers (easily findable) have described either negative rent-lowering effects, or extremely limited rent-lowering effects (or effects that reach the mid-range but not low-range).

And the paper you cited not only does not make any statement against the social housing policies that you vilify -- in the conclusion it tacitly supports them. And it explicitly says that adjustments to market-rate housing "are not a panacea for all housing-market problems."

I wish it was obvious to everyone that simple supply and demand means that luxary builds still drive prices down. I was surprised to find nearly everyone I know does not understand this.

The UK has an awkward cycle: housing is expensive, people who want to buy houses want to find something cheap. But once they find a house, they want no more houses be built, as they would depreciate the value of their own house.

Incidentally, home owners tend to vote Conservative, whereas renters tend to vote Labour. Labour’s housing policy tends to revolve around cheap rentals (social housing) rather than cheap houses for sale.

Last statistic could just be due to age difference.

I think a lot of negative issues regarding housing in the UK come from the government charging a stamp duty when buying a property instead of property taxes like almost every other country on Earth.

Paying 5% of an entire property price is a steep price in an already expensive market. This is even worse when compared to paying nothing when not selling, which just forces people to stay where they are (specially if the market is more expensive from the last time you moved) and further constrains supply and raises house prices.

On a 500k house, stamp duty is 2%, and that’s already an expensive house (stamp duty is progressive). So it’s not that big, certainly for a first time buyer away from London (no stamp duty at all on first 125k).

Council taxes are effectively based on property price, in a weird kind of way.

If you already bought a home then selling it and moving to a new one with the same price is extremely expensive, specially if the housing market increased its prices faster than your salary (which is true for almost all UK homes since the 2008 crisis).

Making it expensive for home owners to move constrains supply and raises house prices even more.

I think one of the most underappreciated facts in politics is that distinct groups with similar incomes don't necessarily have similar interests. In the case of housing policy the interests of people rich enough to lend money are actually much more closely aligned with those of people poor enough to have bad credit than the upper middle class who can afford to use leverage in a speculative housing market.

It takes time to build housing: from permits to financing to actual construction, multi-family infill projects can take years to build. Rent control is a good interim solution to letting the effects of liberalized housing rules take hold… But certainly it’s only a short term fix. There is no free lunch.

Can we stop the name calling, it's really not productive to the conversation. How many *IMBY's did you just throw out there?!

There's a couple really good books that delve into this complex issue [1], [2]. The TLDR is that early 20th century American cities were quick to level entire neighborhoods to bring in modern infrastructure. It was swift and brutal, wiping out 50 to 100 years of history without much thought. All replaced with boring concrete roads and bland architecture.

So in the 60s and 70s, activists changed city laws to empower local residents with the ability to delay or out-right block housing projects.

What you're seeing now is the result of 40-50 years of cities stuck going through very tedious processes to get anything moved forward.

The problem with empowering any local resident is that you see only the people who want to stop something at the hearings and all it really takes are a hand-full. The rest of the residents are impartial or just too busy to care.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America...

> It was swift and brutal, wiping out 50 to 100 years of history without much thought.

“Without much thought” is whitewashing. There was usually very careful thought about who was targeted for harm, and who for gains (race, ethnicity, and class were central focuses of this thought.)

I'm not whitewashing anything, I used that expression to dramatize the reckless way in which neighborhoods were torn down in the name of progress.

Obviously, there was a lot of very careful thought that went into every project. Public opinion has always mattered in government and it'd always get faster approval if you tackle infrastructure projects in certain areas over others. It'd also become a much more affordable effort if you did it in areas with cheaper land value and used cheaper building materials.

Still, my mistake for using that expression, as it's distracting you from my main point.

It takes time to build housing: from permits to financing to actual construction, multi-family infill projects can take years to build. Rent control is a good interim solution to liberalized housing rules… But certainly it’s only a short term fix. There is no free lunch.

When a luxury house is built and a family moves there, they have to move from their old home which is presumably worse. So will the slightly less wealthy family that buy their old home, and so fourth.

That said, preventing gentrification requires an active effort from policy makers.

I mean, also, if we know homelessness rises if rent exceeds a third of income, can't we just set laws that say rent cannot legally be more than a third of median income?

When the most luxurious homes drop to that rent price, the standard places will drop even further.

And those landowners that can't afford to maintain it anymore will be forced to sell, increasing supply, and reducing the number of real estate tycoons that squat land without living on it or using it, in turn making ownership cheaper for middle class residents, and reducing the number of people that need to rent. As ownership gets cheaper, property taxes will then crash, which is also good for even cheaper rents.

And investment in creating more homes will also drop. You will have attacked a symptom, price, in pursuit of attacking the problem: lack of supply.

Congratulations you've now created a death spiral where housing supply will decrease over the long term and your city will no longer have the cash to fullfil its obligations.

That's how you kill a city.

Property owners will always be conservative when it comes to increasing supply.

Also, most voters in a given municipality own homes in that municipality (if they just wanted to move in they couldn't vote there) and so have a financial interest in restricting supply. And when most of your net worth is in one highly leveraged asset that's at least an understandable atttude.

And if housing prices go down that might allow the wrong sort of person into their communities. Some people conceive this in racial terms but for others its that they think of poor people as lazy or impulsive and so not good neighbors.

And I've certainly heard coworkers complaining that if poor people could move into their communities they wouldn't be paying their "fair share" of the school's running cost and so spending per pupil would drop.

And, least concretely, I think, developers would profit and they align with our mental images of greedy capitalists more than landlords do. At least for non-renters who do most of the voting about these things.

Building luxury housing is emblematic of the short-term thinking of the 90's and 00's that has resulted in the long-term issues we're seeing today.

You can build single-family housing on vast swaths of land for landlord sharks to snap up and rent out. However, that results in a city of short-term inhabitants who aren't invested in taking care of the city and eventually the city is less desirable and the rentals dry up.

Or you can ban single-family housing rentals, build high-density housing for rentals, and reserve the single-family units for long-term residents who will upkeep the desirability of the city.

It has nothing to do with liberal or conservative policymakers and more to do with the sort of short-term thinking that "build more housing - there are no consequences" represents.

More housing decreases homelessness in the short term, but not in the long term. Humans breed and will always reproduce to fill all available habitat, like any animal.

Building more housing reduces homelessness like building more highways reduces traffic.

There are empty cities in China and cheap empty houses all over the Midwest.

This is wrong. In the west, and much of the developing world now, reproduction is below replacement rate.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/business/china-birth-rate...

People living in urban areas have fewer kids than rural families. Malthusianism has long since been debunked.

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