The Villains in the Gentrification Story Are Wealthy NIMBYs
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Something's gotta give. It's time for land value taxes. It's time for the abolition of large swaths of zoning restrictions. The NIMBYs and landlords are gonna bitch and moan about it, and to them I say "tough shit". I've subsidized them enough with my tax dollars and with the opportunity costs they've thrust upon me.
The solution is to relax zoning restrictions and give local communities less say in how the land around them is used.
Yes it is, and I'm tired of pretending it ain't.
> Blaming high prices on greed does not make sense because Landlords were just as greedy 30 years ago when the prices were low.
That reasoning does not make sense because there's this thing called "supply and demand" to which landlords are constrained. Demand for land comes from economic activity, and that has grown considerably over the last 30 years - and landlords have been at the ready, greedily capturing that growth in rents.
Landlords are parasites - literally-rentseeking middlemen between honest people and housing. They serve no purpose that their tenants could not do themselves; they exist solely to hold land hostage, and I have no sympathy for them. They are long overdue to pay their rent to the society in which they exist - that rent being a land value tax.
Landlords serve an important role in the economy: they pay housing developers to build housing. Most renters don't have the ability to cover the cost of building housing or the credit-worthiness to borrow it.
By providing the liquidity necessary to pay housing developers to build, landlords increase the total number of housing units created. When we are facing housing shortages, this is an extremely important role.
And I would love to see us transition to land value taxes, they are the form of taxes that minimize deadweight loss. If we did, landlords would pay high taxes and would still exist because they play an important role in the housing ecosystem.
And that upfront investment is finite. At some point the developer/landlord will have broken even, and will cease serving any real purpose other than being a parasitic rentseeking middleman between a property and its residents. "But muh maintenance!" - tenants can pool money for maintenance just fine - obviously, because they're already paying more than that as rent.
And this assumes that the landlord did indeed pay for development. There are plenty of simplexes/duplexes/quadruplexes/condos out there as rental properties, and in those cases that premise is patently false.
> Most renters don't have the ability to cover the cost of building housing or the credit-worthiness to borrow it.
Obviously not; if they did, then landlords wouldn't be able to prey upon them and force them to pay far more than they would if they actually owned the housing outright. The solution there is to encourage them to pool resources as a housing cooperative or some similar resident-owned entity, not to pretend that landlords' inflated senses of self-worth are in any way legitimate.
> When we are facing housing shortages, this is an extremely important role.
What's needed are more housing cooperatives, not more landlords.
> landlords would pay high taxes and would still exist because they play an important role in the housing ecosystem.
Landlords would cease to exist because it would no longer be profitable. They would be replaced rather thoroughly with housing cooperatives, and the world would be much better for it.
Banks pay a lot of attention to where you buy a house when they give you a mortgage. And if the location does not have solid supply constraints (to make the price go only one way, which is up), they don't give you the same advantageous terms.
Which means, NIMBYs constrain both the supply in their own neighborhood, and the demand in the non-NIMBY neighborhoods. So, prices go up everywhere.
The article is about how we need to build more housing immediately, which would make everyone's CoL lower, everyone's lives better, and would also go a longgg way to resolving the exact tensions you describe.
The point about NIMBYs is that the key factor preventing us from building more housing is local opposition from people who are primarily concerned about protecting the value of their house so they can resell it later.
I've been a "gentrifier" in several places and never had any issues; its as simple as being thoughtful about your role in the community and respecting your new neighbors