Lahaina residents worry a rebuilt Maui could slip to the hands of rich outsiders
ctvnews.ca
ctvnews.ca
I suspect that climate change and the resulting rash of natural disasters (though, technically they are man made it is hard to identify what would have happened normally and what not) will make whole swaths of the planet unfit for human habitation. The refugee crisis that could cause is one that will upset all kinds of apple carts. None of that diminishes this tragedy, and it also doesn't reduce my loathing of the people that would try to profit from a thing like this.
In New York we built like 100k new units in the 2010s but we grew by 500k people and still, the default position of people who theoretically advocate for cheaper housing is to block new development.
In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.
There is also an abundance of habitable land with nobody living there or using it, as a road trip around North America will attest.
Naturally it might not make economic sense to develop there at this time, but that could change with regulatory/legal changes or by virtue of improved technology or increased population.
The population density of the United States is 33.6/km^2.
The population density of Canada is 4.2/km^2.
The population density of the United Kingdom is 270.7/km^2.
The population density of Germany is 232/km^2
There's no shortage of space in North America, your road-tripping experience to the contrary.
I've thought a lot about this topic (in the sense of creating car-free cities in america), and it is technically feasible, but only if some benevolent billionaire were basically able to find some viable place, and build an entire city in place, and then create a deal with major employers to move their offices there, somehow fund the relocation of people who have already built a life for themselves elsewhere, and are already high up in these companies with homes and counter-incentives from moving elsewhere, and then somehow getting other people without any economic incentive to also move there.
At the end of the day it's a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Unless you're trying to court people who already have too much money to worry about housing prices (think Celebration, FL), then there is far, far too much cost and risk involved to do it. There is also a graveyard of failed attempts (see: California City, CA).
The reason why this crisis happened is exactly that we have stopped allowing organic city growth from happening. Fixed-zoning is the problem, and does not allow for incremental growth. That the crisis didn't happen in the 60's is only because the proliferation of the automobile allowed cities to expand outward, but that outward expansion has a limit (when highway capacity is breached in such a way where commuting from exurban distances is completely unfeasible), and we hit that limit around the late 90's, when we saw the first housing crisis.
Even in Tokyo, a city mostly touted as one with minimal zoning, housing is still pricey (by Japanese standards) with standards at the low end many Americans wouldn’t accept (although I think we need more low end housing like this in the USA). And most of Japan’s young people want to live in Tokyo, it’s obvious not all of those who want to live there can.
It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly.
In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.
The worst thing a city can do for housing affordability is simply having a bunch of high paying jobs that attract people to move in. In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
>In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
This is objectively false.
A nation wide housing crisis in a few select cities where people want to live? Or a "nation wide" crisis that you can't solve even by moving to Detroit or Bakersville? Because I"m pretty sure I started this with:
> Why isn’t “go live somewhere else” a part of the answer though?
Meaning, we all can't live in Seattle, LA, Portland, or San Francisco, so why make that a right that can't be satisfied? All of these are already dense cities by American standards, and its clear, looking at plenty of examples from around the world, that popular city densities can increase a long time before there is any real impact in the housing market (I don't think any popular city has tried building itself out of its own local housing crisis before...they just give up to the market eventually, or call for a fixed set of winners via rent control or national subsidized Singaporean flats).
You are just refusing to see the obvious. Having lived in Beijing for 9 years and Lausanne for 2 years, I see absolutely nothing special about California’s housing market that exempts it from supply and demand economics that the rest of the world is forced to follow.
> You speculate a lot in this post, but have zero citations to back it up.
If you live in a glass house, it isn’t very wise to throw stones (i.e. you didn't provide any citations either).
You want to ignore the underlying political problem with “go live somewhere else” and it is the only reason it’s being discussed in the first place.
One of the few things both sides should be able to agree on is that it's awful when wealthy outsiders start buying property.
People who block housing in cities because they don't want the cities to be "overcrowded" are ridiculous because:
1. Cities are by definition dense areas
2. If you don't want to live somewhere dense, move where fewer people want to live
3. Your right to your own property doesn't extend past it
4. You are destroying productivity and allowing landlords to extract excess productivity from the whole population, so the effect is almost definitely not the one that you think it is.
For smaller communities in ecologically fragile areas, there are more nuanced arguments, but even then those people should prefer managed density because:
1. Density keeps sprawl at bay and is better for the environment
2. Residents won't be able to afford to live on their little patch unless they own the land
3. Even then their area will become a museum around them and they certainly won't be able to preserve the idyll they wish to.
In any case, most of the supply problems can be solved without major changes to what people often refer to as "neighborhood character". Everything from ADUs to just allowing a few extra stories does quite a bit to increase the capacity of an urban area.
>There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded
Yes. Obviously.
>That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination.
This is already a bipartisan issue. You can see folks like Darrell Owens arguing for it on the far-left, Ezra Klein from a moderate-left position, and Chuck Marohn arguing for changes on the right.
It's only disastrous if your goal is to preserve the status quo of low density (sub)urban housing in the face of massive inequality in this housing costs. This is a classic scenario of a political minority (non-homeowners) facing a ton of pain that is trivially politically solvable, but not being able to do anything about it unless they become they eventually become the political majority... and now they are. And, more importantly, this scenario is does not lead to mean-reversion. We are in the middle of a political cascade. As the millennials become the dominant voting demographic, we should expect the pendulum to accelerate rapidly in the other direction... and that's exactly what we are seeing.
For those homeowners who are suddenly feeling uncomfortable about the political winds on this topic... buckle up. If this is really a cascade (and I think it's obvious that it is), we should expect these changes to accelerate for the foreseeable future. I believe it would be prudent start planning for the changes instead of fighting them.
Is that bad? Should you have a right to live where you were born in perpetuity? What about everyone else that wants to live in Amsterdam? If housing is limited and we need to ration it, why should it go towards people who were born there? Doesn't that create a class of landed gentry that have the "right" to live in amsterdam and everyone else who doesn't?
What about them?
>If housing is limited and we need to ration it, why should it go towards people who were born there? Doesn't that create a class of landed gentry that have the "right" to live in amsterdam and everyone else who doesn't?
Yes. A home is not an economic asset like any other. It is the biggest link to one's community and people. Healthy communities cannot form from transient populations.
That sounds more like you're more against airbnb and other short term rentals rather than "Rich outsiders are buying up desirable property all over the world" or thinking that "I know that were born there could live there today" is some sort of wrong in and of itself.
Srsly, free market autism fully go and all that, but maybe a trace of survival instinct? Like not every place on the planet is SF. And not every place on the planet wants to be shanghai and Dhubai, were the rich do as they please? And money as a protective shield can rapidly devalue in a crisis?
>Srsly, free market autism fully go and all that, but maybe a trace of survival instinct? [...]
So you're basically saying that that economic or moral justifications don't matter, and all that matters is how others feel? I guess that's true to some extent. If there was a bolshevik resolution tomorrow I'm certainly not going to advocate for free markets, but this line of reasoning is utterly toxic for rational discussion. It doesn't matter what's right or wrong, just whether you will get lynched for it or not.
An absolute right? No, of course not. But no one is arguing for that.
Various places say you have the right to live in your rented home for an indefinite period. Your landlord can't decide to kick you out directly, nor simple jack up the price as a way to force you out.
But you still need to pay rent, not use it to run a criminal activity, not allow vermin to infest the home, and so on.
> What about everyone else that wants to live in Amsterdam?
What about them?
> why should it go towards people who were born there?
Because for most people forced relocation is very stressful. It means breaking friendships, emotional ties to a place, and possibly finding a new job. Not considering human emotions sounds inhumane.
> Doesn't that create a class of landed gentry
What an odd analogy. Landed gentry make most or all of their money from rental income.
No. Nor does it make them serfs tied to the land.
It makes them residents.
> An absolute right? No, of course not. But no one is arguing for that.
Laws like California's Prop 13 are actually arguing that you should have that right. The quintessential argument for Prop 13 is that your grandmother won't be able to afford property taxes if they match appreciation of housing prices, so a property that was several hundred grand when she bought it, with property taxes that are representative of that price, she can afford. Property taxes representative of the multi million dollar valuation that house now would go for on the open market, she could not afford. So she pays the lower amount. So she's able to live there in perpetuity, theoretically.
(In reality, rising other costs mean that she can't, not on a fixed income.
If you cannot pay the taxes, you cannot live there. If you cannot pay the water/power/maintenance you cannot live there.
Just like if you can't pay the rent, even in country like Sweden with strong renter protections, you can be evicted.
Limited allodial title is rare. True allodial title is very rare. In the US the federal government can always assert eminent domain.
When you wrote "that you should have that right", were you referring to the absolute right? Or the limited right that I said already exist in places?
I thought you referring to the former, as that's the part you quoted. However, you gave an example of a more limited right, so isn't actually a counter-example.
What I was thinking about was how various countries have "attempt to let people live where they've settled and put down roots" as a matter of national policy.
Take Norway, https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/the-tenancy-act/id2... "Termination by the landlord of a tenancy agreement valid for an unspecified period" shows the small number of reasons a landlord can kick someone out. Otherwise you have the indefinite right to live there.
Speaking of death, it even lists succession rights on the death of a tenant "If the tenant of a dwelling dies, the following persons are entitled to succeed to the tenancy".
The US also has places with similar laws, like rent controlled apartments in New York City which, I read at https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/... , also includes the right to inherit.
I personally think these leaseholder examples, which unlike CA Prop 13 run counter to the interests of the landowner, make them a clearer example of supporting the "right to live where you were born in perpetuity".
Filtering more so for those who could afford to remotely lose a future home there when it's not their primary residence, and they have nothing invested in the community other than money.
Not very much different than the well-heeled investing in second homes, displacing the traditional working population in the most hurricane-vulnerable South Florida locations over the decades when the transition from small quaint resort towns accelerated into more widely popular destinations.
After a different culture eventually takes over the government, then the previous culture can be further economically influenced to their disadvantage and regulated into obscurity.
>that in turn should worry the residents as well.
And there's the problem. There's no slack in the existing housing system so there's nowhere for people to be temporarily "displaced" even for people who did everything right and had insurance and savings. So people will absolutely take the quick-money offer made by people who have bought themselves that flexibility elsewhere (e.g. a buyer who lives on the mainland and who can live in their existing house while helping to turn Hawaii into a second-house state).
Because we are so wound up in what housing means to our finances and culture, there's no political will to fix this even as climate change worsens. So, like always, people with lesser means--even people with lesser means who did everything correctly--still get screwed.
Of course, people like that will organize to block these big bad developers making housing even more expensive and the only people who will be able to afford to live there will be the rich.
What America should do at large is block all non resident investment in non commercial real estate, period. Would do a hell of a lot more for housing than all the nonsense about building more.
In other words, by refusing to develop, the residents of Hawaii are displacing their own natives, unless they happen to own land. This alternative system where the only folks allowed to own property are those who are born there is something I hear a lot of anti-housing people advocate and it's disturbingly similar to the hukou[1] system, which we probably don't want to emulate.
In a world where this part of Hawaii exists within the US system of property rights, you're arguing that we should grant the current landowners (whoever they may be) perpetual rights to the extract land rents. Of course, given how expensive housing becomes when it is restricted in a high-demand location the implication is that the only folks who will be able to live there are the rich.
Hawaii is a highly limited resource. Simple as that. So you have a choice:
- Develop it more to keep prices a bit down. In exchange you are actively sacrificing what makes it desirable in the first place (beautiful nature).
- Don't develop it further, and accept high prices.
Neither is ideal. I wish we could have 100 Hawaii's and everyone could live in Hawaii.
But out of the two options we have, keeping Hawaii expensive and beautiful is the only one that makes sense. Developing it sacrifices what people like about it anyway.
I also think in general you should listen to what local people want and not advocate for things against their interests. Just as a rule of thumb. The alternative is basically colonization (pushing an agenda against the interests of the people who live somewhere).
Amazing how the carrying capacity of every location just happens to be exactly the number of people who live there at this moment in time.
> I also think in general you should listen to what local people want and not advocate for things against their interests. Just as a rule of thumb. The alternative is basically colonization (pushing an agenda against the interests of the people who live somewhere).
The local people quoted in the article want to be able to live somewhere. Building enough housing for them to live in gives them that, even if they don't understand it because their heads are full of xenophobic nonsense.
The guy who I quoted above is a renter, he will eventually be priced out. The guy who owns the house he was renting will build a new house or sell to someone else and they will rent it at a much higher rate.
For example to me the places I’ve lived -
San Francisco is at a good density. I don’t want more high rises, the Victorians are charming and the sunlight while walking on the streets is already being eroded by ugly 4-story developments.
San Diego - also pretty good as is. Again why ruin the sunlight and nature by going up? Maybe downtown and fill in a bit more but not outside.
Hawaii - Waikiki is crowded and mostly ugly, so I have all the proof I need it’s not desirable to have that spread any further. Congestion traffic is super high due to tourism many times of the year. The charm of Hawaii is directly linked to its lack of development, you can’t convince me (or like 99% of people) otherwise. Just ask around who wants more high rises there, will be an easy poll to run.
Not so surprising at all if you've studied game theory and equilibrium pricing.
Markets find prices, yes, but that's not applicable to what we're discussing. Maybe in some Georgist utopia we might have housing prices being priced purely at their utility.
But that's not the NIMBY complaint. The NIMBY complaint is that wherever they live is at the perfect balance where any more development would only make things worse. Game theory and equilibrium pricing have nothing to do with that because in our current regulatory system, land owners can extract rents by blocking new development.
Every time I post in this Dunning-Kruger tar pit I'm reminded of why I usually abstain.
Yes, you can change the rules to get more people into a place, but you are just looking at a different equilibrium number to be reached. And then people like you will complain it is still too low, and nothing really changes.
In many cities you can own land if you don't have hukou, or even Chinese citizenship. It was only in 2012 or so that Beijing instituted a residency requirement (but not a hukou requirement) for buying a house in the city (other cities have similar but still slightly different rules, so you have to do your research). Wenzhou housewives were the scourge of non-Wenzhou Chinese real estate markets before they started investing in real estate abroad.
Said no one ever.
By the way, the more you develop it, the less tropical it is.
You may not want to, but you don't speak for everyone. In particular, the 5-over-1 means that there's a business, maybe a cute cafe, or a little market you can access without having to drive a car. Hell, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124015 is on the front page right now arguing how bad driving is for your mental health.
Some people can't drive, for various reasons (eg the elderly with poor eyesight), and would have a lower quality of life living in a single family home. So please appreciate that while you may never say that, it's entirely your perogative, but yes, said plenty of people.
I agree wholeheartedly with the second paragraph.
Of course, arguably the alternative to this is probably that many areas take much longer to rebuild, or never get rebuilt at all. But that doesn’t take the sting away from becoming renters to foreign capital on your own soil.
I visited Maui recently and was surprised to see the number of resorts over there, and the large single-family homes.
TBH, after visiting and enjoying the beaches, I was thinking that it would be nice to have a vacation home there. The wife didn't like the idea, so I dropped it.
But now I agree with the concerns being expressed by the displaced residents.
I think it would be better to rebuild with more dense housing, and more affordable housing. Use this opportunity to put down 5-6 story high buildings with 2-3BR apartments that are affordable. Use eminent domain if you must to get the land. And tax vacation homes heavily: if you don't live in your house at least 240 days a year (roughly, 8 months), then your property taxes will be 10% of the house's appraised value. Use that money for the upkeep of the affordable housing and to build more affordable housing.
So you essentially want to transform a place that is attractive into another slum so that crime can go up and attractiveness sinks, while trampling the rights of homeowners that may have lived there for generations?
Sounds like a great idea.
I think in this case, I am not erecting and burning a straw man, I am pointing out the most likely consequence of a policy which I do believe OP suggested in good faith, but did not think through the consequences.
This has been tried. The problem is, the people who can afford to drop $2M+ on house and land for a home they barely visit are not going to be phased by a 10% value tax.
Get creative: Maybe the tax rate should be proportional to the number of days per year the property is unoccupied. If they live in it year-round, their property tax is the minimum. For every day of the year the property is vacant, tax rate goes up by 0.1% or something.
Or, maybe their tax rate should be proportional to the number of properties they own. Own one property, and they get the minimum rate. Double the tax rate for every additional property they own and let exponents do their job.
For some reason, discussions about solving these problems often boil down to "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
So, why is that a problem? That's a lot of extra tax money for the city to work with to solve the overall problem from the other end. If that is the only issue, they should do this yesterday.
House burned down? Be a shame if we stole your land to put up shitty little apartments that cost more than your mortgage and charge you to live there in perpetuity.
Anyway, it uses GPS combined with recorded narratives to guide you on the trip. It was pretty cool. Gets into the history of Hawaii and everything.
Apparently there is a significant feeling among natives about their island being taken over. If a disaster like this leads to more of it, it's only going to get worse. There's already tons of speculation about the cause and area of this one.
[1] The Hawaiian people, government, insurance, etc.
[1] Except in a vague sense of "the forest fires were caused by climate change, and they contributed 0.00001% to climate change like every other american", but it's unclear why they should attract more blame than you or me.
Do you also get upset that construction workers profit after a disaster, because all the demand that it creates?
>when those people there are probably not in a position to refuse even an unfair offer.
You know what's worse than having your house burnt down, not having enough money to fix it, so you have to accept an "unfair offer" and move to Oklahoma or whatever? Having your house burnt down, not having enough money to fix it, and going homeless because you can neither fix your house nor sell it to buy one somewhere else.
The problem seems to be that you think the two options are:
1) Rich people are offering to buy the house, and the homeowner is forced to sell and move out :(
2) The homeowner isn't forced to sell and lives happily ever after :D
When in reality the second option doesn't exist and is a fabricated option[1]. The homeowner's house is burnt down. He doesn't have the money to fix it. He's already homeless. Not having the "unfair offer" isn't going to magically fix his house or give him money. The only way for him to live happily ever after is if he gets an infusion of cash somehow (eg. government aid or private donations), which has nothing to do with the "unfair offer". As long as the people making offers to buy the house also aren't simultaneously lobbying against government aid or whatever, they're not making the situation any worse. On the contrary, they're making the situation better by giving the homeowner more options.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-...
This is not how you deal with a natural disaster. But to get that you'd first have to understand the principle of solidarity. Hint: you can't buy it on the free market.
>This is not how you deal with a natural disaster. But to get that you'd first have to understand the principle of solidarity.
Going back to the original question, how should we deal with it? It'll be great if the government or some private benefactor decided to make those people whole. I'm not against that. However, if that's not an option, rich people putting in "unfair offer" is less bad than the alternative.
You could donate to help build it all up, that would be helping, this is just profiting from others' misery.
If you think the great lake region is too cold or wintery, well I got some bad and/or good news about what global warming is doing... it's not going to be frigid winters there for much longer.