What a joke. A system is what it does. Andreesen is a hypocrite.
You know what would be fucking incredible? If he had taken the opposite stance and put his money where his mouth is. Instead, he plays the coward, unwilling to embrace his own advice.
>They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values
I get that mansions, like SFHs, are seen as investments. And I suppose this is just how they want to bring locals/voters/officials (who might not be as uber-rich?) on board while muffling the quiet part ("quality of life", i.e. mixing classes). But if it's even a remotely honest sentiment, how damn much is enough? He's a (multi-?)billionaire and still gives two shits about his house's appraisal? So shallow, but I guess in character for someone who just bought a $177M palace ("priciest home sale ever in CA") with the money of retail bagholders.
what goes down is the immediate price to rent out if new units become available in the vicinity.
what all these NIMBYs want is a reservation for themselves, where time (and gas prices and everything else) is frozen.
That is one thing I really enjoyed about George Lucas v Marin County.
Lucas bought Grady Ranch to build an extension of the nearby Lucas film studio. Following the backlash he decided to develop the property (zoned as residential) as low-income housing, paying for it out of pocket (after 3 years getting the runaround from housing grants and regulatory boards).
Sadly a decade later the project is still blocked by Marin NIMBY.
the article advocates for bringing housing planning under state jurisdiction:
>The hypocrisy itself is galling, if informative. Andreessen might well support legislation upzoning neighborhoods across California. This macro-micro disconnect should push policy makers to grasp that they cannot reason with NIMBYs on a project-by-project basis. They have to eliminate NIMBYism’s veto power by moving decision-making to the state level.
Why the words of rich people are important is beyond me. It's like you guys put these wealthy assholes on a pedestal and then act all shocked when they're looking to enrich themselves even more. Take money out of politics. It's that simple.
I totally agree with this goal, but the core problem is deeper and won't be solved by banning political contributions and so on. Homeowners will still have a financial incentive to vote in NIMBYs, even though that's not directly "money in politics" (albeit it is so indirectly). We need to somehow take negative sum self-interest out of politics through systemic change. I have no idea how one would achieve that, though.
Currently lower supply means higher prices, which benefits existing owners, so they vote for that. Under a LVT, lower supply means higher taxes instead of higher prices.
You can resolve this issue through a 100% LVT. A 100% LVT would set land prices to zero. You would still need to pay for the building on top of the land.
A good way to transition to this system is by giving everyone land tax credits equal to the value of their land. This is beneficial for everyone right now because the Fed is raising rates, that will yield lower land prices, and thus by zeroing out the risk of lower housing prices as we move into this recession through a one-time credit, everyone is better off.
If you want to preserve those bubble prices, you want to quickly vote in a LVT.
As a culture we value money more than many other things thus financial success is often considered a proxy for virtue, intelligence, or both.
I agree that the post was right, but it discredits the author when they act so diametrically opposed to the words they write and, specifically, the action they call for.
Did he not mean those words in earnest? Is there some other play he is angling for? It begs everything to be questioned.
But he's not like the overwhelming majority of suburban homeowners; he owns mansions.
You'd actually think that a multibillionaire who owns a mansion would be less sensitive to fluctuations in home values, since their wealth is usually contained in other assets (unlike the average American homeowner, for whom their home is likely where the majority of their net worth is). If Andreessen were to accidentally light $200M of his own cash on fire, he'd come through it, lifestyle unscathed.
Where I live, property is expensive, and I live in a neighbourhood that seems to be dominated by investment property; many empty properties or short-let properties. There are no kids here, even though the neighbourhood would be fine for kids.
Anyway, that's apparently not the way the cookie crumbles; owning property so you can live in it seems to have become unfashionable. I hope the fashion changes, because I have no plans to sell.