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.
Or, to say it another way, as long as we tolerate politics that are basically just performance art nothing changes.
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.
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.
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).
What evidence is there that it is due to racism, classism and fear rather than rational self-interest?
Racist and classist concerns also influence property value. Blockbusting was a real estate practice that worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
If you just add apartment house to existing residential street, you achieve neither. Especially when zoning does not allows small shops to appear.
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'.
This.
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 $100k++ after you've bought the flat to fix the flammability that was a result of their shoddy construction.
And if you do die, it's not their problem.
This is the culmination of decades of the UK mindlessly nodding along to the 1%'s "market knows best" propaganda.
There's a reason the supposedly "free market" Singaporean government builds 90% of the housing stock in the country like they're fervent Stalinists. Coz that's the economically efficient way to house people.
Well yeah, they’re generally amazing deals for decent quality new built apartments.
Yeah sure, the staircase looks just average and not like a luxury hotel and there’s no gym or infinity pool!
Doesn’t really seem like such a disaster when you get to live in a nice heavily discounted apartment on some of the most desirable square feet of earth in the world.
It's more profitable for them to sell appartements at 700$/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.
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.
I'm sure that politicians are incompetent and corrupt. That being said, we can agree that there is a market failure here.
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.
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.
While I visit large cities, they often seem more dystopian then somewhere I'd actually want to live. Liberals can have them.
This is currently a massive problem in the Intermountain West in places like Boise.