Is letting them run hog wild through our cities replacing neighborhoods with luxury high rises for foreign investors any different?
Obviously we could always use more updated housing in urban areas, but you are either stupid or acting like it when you pretend the argument is not about who should be building that housing and whether anyone should profit from owning it.
Uh... existing homeowners are the ones making bank hand over fist thanks to the housing shortage:
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2021/03/16/who-benefits-f...
We bought our first house about seven years ago and are about to sell it. The house appreciated almost 75% over that span of time. We bought a new house in the same price range. I'm just transferring the appreciation of the the first house to the second house. But since it's a higher real dollar amount, I was able to put a much higher percentage down on the new house and get a better total cost of the loan as a result. I still have all of the gains I made, even if they're locked in equity in the house, and was able to leverage them for additional value in reduced interest paid. Because I had more equity from the first house, it also made it easier for me to outbid other bidders, because I didn't have the same debt-to-income constraints they did.
Even if the gains aren't liquid, homeowners gain at the expense of non-homeowners.
Need to pay for your child’s tuition? Start a business? Unexpected major expenses? You have a relatively cheap line of credit compared to every other option on the market.
That’s still wealth no matter how you slice it. And, not even that long ago, that was wealth people could access for almost nothing, who knows what the interest rate environment will be in 5 years.
Everyone knows that luxury means “new”, or at best, “shiny stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops”. The fact that it is new, and so has to comply with the most updated standards, is probably the most luxury aspect of all since materials and connections and whatnot have improved.
This designation of new and old is more important in the apartment market than house markets because apartments tend to get neglected by landlords, whereas houses either get updated or can be updated by the owner.
Also, in the case of houses, where a lot more money and due diligence is required, simply using luxury to describe them is insufficient, and not very useful to sell new housing developments.
It's a rhetorical device that carries no substance, whether it happens to be NIMBYs using it as a political weapon to demonize, or developers using it to sell a product.
However, I am going to focus criticism on NIMBYs when they are doing it, since they are the ones being dishonest and hypocritical when they only apply such labels to apartments. At least if a developer/agent was to try to sell a house, they'd try to find similar flowery language in order to market it, instead of only singling out apartments for that treatment in order to push their damaging political agenda.