Sim NIMBY, the Game Where You Can’t Build Anything

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-18/looking-t...

We made it illegal to build housing, so we don't have enough housing. We could fix our housing crisis by re-legalizing housing _without_ fixing all of the (very real) problems you describe. You are simply engaging in whataboutism which will _not_ solve our housing crisis.

Yes, it's the lack of houses, or more specifically, lack of land, where you're allowed to build houses. We also have thousands and thousands of cars and trucks driving through small villages, because a road cannot be built, because someone from a different part of country saw a butterfly there once. We have areas with lots of unemployment where they couldn't even start a brewery, because people complained.

Watching places like san francisco, with even worse housing problems, and then seeing rows of single family houses instead of huge apartment buildings is an indicator of that... more people, denser housing... if NIMBYers don't allow it, you get a housing problem.

The result is that when someone proposes raising taxes on the uber-wealthy, people making $40,000/year go into a panic thinking it'll ever affect them.

Rich people gets to use the most valuable land, but they will also likely pay more, and also likely to use it more efficiently, unlike today where you have landowners who sat on lands worth million of dollars and oppose development. This is land hoarding and it's not good.

Really? If you're playing as the YIMBY against NIMBYs, isn't one of your main goals to build housing without parking?

There's truth to that as the new stock would only go to those that could afford them, and the vast majority would be swept up by investors, unless they were actual public housing - the kind of housing that NIMBYs are most upset about. Either way having more stock ought to have a deflationary effect on housing costs. Though maybe perverse incentives/legislation could cause the opposite.

Presumably most people start their lives as not homeless, and at some point that changes, because housing prices exceed their income. More housing would lead to lower housing prices and less homelessness.

In a 2016 Census, only about 12% of the homeless population aged 15 and up were actually unable to work due to various maladies[0]. According to the same census report a whopping 62% of homeless males were currently employed.

The issue is not to just remember the 3 or 4 homeless people you've seen clearly dazed and likely unable to work, it's the thousands of people living in their car because rent is unaffordable for their income. That's the first point, abundance of housing lowers rents to the point of being affordable to Minimum-Wage workers.

Secondly, one of the first issues homeless shelters noticed is that employers require and address to even apply. So if one of those people living in their cars or under a bridge and still heading to work god forbid loses their job, they literally cannot apply to another one without a fixed address, another way affordable/abundant housing explicitly affects homeless employment.

The 12% that cannot work should probably not be on the street and should be cared for in shelters, but many shelters are filled with people who's employers underpay or pay an unlivable income and so also require shelters. Abundant housing thus allows people in the work-force to not be priced out of a roof, opening up shelters for those that cannot care for themselves.

More housing is a win-win-win. Except maybe it means aunt Karen notices more busses, which she doesn't like the sound of, hence no more developments to appease those with the ability to make their points to local government, at the cost of those that many people even avoid eye contact with.

[0] https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp5hpi/cp...

Programs show time and time again that housing homeless people massively helps and reduces the problem of homelessness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First#Evidence_and_out...

I was homeless while studying CS. I only had enough to rent an appartment for one year when i started, and since the school wasn't recognized by the state yet, i didn't qualified for most state aid for students. I slept at school, or at my friend and family 's apartment for almost two years. I wasn't the only one living like this btw, i think this was quite common in Paris. I also didn't own a car, and i think most homeless do sleep in their cars, it's easier.

Lower rent prices (1/3rd of what it was at the time) would definitely have helped me.

If lots of people want to live in Brooklyn, then they should obviously be allowed to do that. And developers should obviously be allowed to respond to that demand by building housing.

Brooklyn has plenty of housing. San Francisco has plenty of housing. What they lack is cheap housing. Housing is a human right. Cheap housing that displaces and disenfranchises the locals because you see them all like the Old Man in Up? Not a human right.