Why America doesn't build
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
How often is that true? In my very limited exposure to the process (2 friends over 25 years, both in VA) the result was fair. Obviously there are cases that make the news, but I assume these are the outliers.
What? Property taxes are maybe $5000 per year for a typical property, maybe more maybe less shrug.
How do you hire a full-time (24/7) armed guard for your house for $5000 per year?
Even if you allocated that $5000 toward some group in your community paying for an armed guard... ask as many people as you know today the following question:
What scenario do you prefer:
1) Pay $5000 per year and not have a meth clinic near your house.
2) Pay $5000 per year and have a meth clinic and someone with an AK47 guarding your neighborhood.
Other than that, I agree with the general idea - however I would reject the government paying for that - because ultimately that means a new tax. It would have to be the "entity" that wants to fuck up the area.
You hire it for the neighborhood jointly. I mean 12 neighbors cover a single guard. That means a neighborhood can have several of them patrolling. And you don’t need 1/12. So you pocket the savings. So you get maybe $4,000 cash per year and one guard per street.
Obviously not personal security detail.
And the sheer dystopian vibes to this calculus is crazy.
yes, owning a single family home near a major transit corridor is nice, but let's be realistic: that transit corridor is for everyone to enjoy.
"My home value will go up forever" can't be a built-in guaranteed expectation when purchasing a home. Property appreciation is not an entitlement.
If we want entitled money we should just implement basic income.
Sdf shelters and win turbines?
Sure.
Facilities emitting unhealthy fumes or dumping pollution in the water?
That would set a dangerous precedent where society would validate the behavior as long as there is money in the mix.
It already does mind you. But at least is considered wrong at the moment.
What would have happened to the asbestos scandal is instead of cleaning the stuff, we just paid compensations? Carnage.
In other words, don't force your crap on to somebody else.
Why should my previous houses height be your concern? Did you pay me for that?
If you had a view before for free why is it my problem that you don't now? You could have bought the land to guarantee it, why didn't you?
Some of these are HoA restrictions which were shared covenants agreed upon in the past but we really need to reconsider the efficacy of allowing those to be enforceable.
Why is it up to a group of people who are all dead how tall a house I can build?
Very infrequently are people making housing decisions based on such covenants and pricing ignores them.
However when NIMBY comes up suddenly people want to be compensated for what they didn't pay for, didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase, and weren't party to the original agreement.
because those are just too difficult to all list. The solution to that is a mutually shared list of conditions which is then called "zoning", which HN loves to rail about. I'm offering a fair value compensation in lieu of zoning.
If you really don't think you should have anything to say about your neighbors' houses, I will happily buy all of them and build tall fences that ensure your house only ever sees light at noon, and then maybe still at 12:01.
Complaining about people's "I've got mine, so screw you buddy" with "I want mine, so screw you" is unbecoming.
can't just be market rate though, because there is legitimate pain and suffering to disrupting the community and breaking it apart etc, so that needs to be comped too.
Industrial restrictions are fine. Commercial restrictions could be okay if we allowed anything within walking distance of most homes.
It isn't that zoning laws are bad it is that the current set don't match what we should be planning for.
Making up examples where you could piss someone off on purpose is pointless and avoids actually engaging on my point.
Why does something you could gain but never actually valued something you should be paid for.
In many cases people simply block because "there will be more traffic" as if they have a right to a certain amount of traffic.
You can gain benefits for free but stop pretending society needs to pay you to remove those benefits.
On the topic of culture: gentrification has been ignored so I don't care fundamentally.
Mostly "culture" is just a new form of redlining "I don't want to be near poor people they are gross".
Same reason you don’t drive on the left side of the road: your beliefs are no match for the reality of the law.
Driving on the right does.
The solution (zoning, nuisance torts, private law) remains largely the same today as it did in the past.
It seems like the suggestion in this thread is that if I don’t like it, I should have moved or prevented you from building. This seems like a somewhat Neolithic solution to me, and I’m glad we have solved these problems.
Why does blocking legitimate building have to be the same as spite fences?
The reality is what purpose you are doing something for matters.
Remember NIMBY blocks and any all building not just cherry picked "I won't get enough sunlight so we can't add a hundred new apartments".
Not in my backyard doesn't work because we need to do it somewhere.
Pretending someone else will deal with the problem is short sighted.
But that's not how it works. People buy a house adjacent to a golf course and then the golf course sells out to a developer who wants to build higher-density housing (your "asbestos refinery" example is ridiculous and hyperbolic, nobody's trying to put dangerous industrial facilities in a residential zone) and then the people who live in houses adjacent to the old golf course complain that they are somehow injured by other property property owners building on their own land, often citing damages to "the view" or something entirely intangible such as "the character of the neighborhood" or "the environment".
If they wanted to save the golf course they should have put in a bid when it was up for sale. There's no reason why anybody should have a stake in land they don't own.
Except that defies market value in practice. Evaluated in a bubble, every quarter acre of dirt is generally no more or less valuable than any other quarter acre of dirt. Yet we all know that's not how real estate works.
A plot of land downtown in a cute walkable neighborhood full of midcentury modern houses is valuable, and people want to live there, in large part because of those things.
We haven't really figured out how to reconcile this with absolutist views on private property rights.
I see HOA's as a crude attempt to tackle this, whereby residents all agree the neighborhood is better if everyone cleans up their yard, and legally commit to do so.
Edit: Unless you're a local politician or well-connected individual. Then you can change laws to preserve your property value like in the article.
That's literally the whole point of markets - there's no guarantee, and you don't have damages (in the legal, someone-now-owes-you-something sense) when it goes wrong.
You have the right to buy whatever property you want and can afford, but you don't have the right - for the most part - to impose restrictions and covenants on other people's property just to prop your values up, especially without their consent.
I think the asbestos plant is a good analogy. Nobody moves into their home expecting a nuisance to be built next door.
English-speaking peoples have such crazy issues with apartment they compare them to carcinogenic pollution.
A home is not a share of stock. The purpose of a home is not to be an equity to trade in the markets. The purpose is to live in it, enjoy the neighborhood, raise kids, etc.
So trying to think of it as just a trade in a market misses the point why people care about their homes.
The thing georgists ignore when they say it's good to kick people out so land can be used more "productively" is that stability is what enables society. There's no point in making your surroundings better or contributing to society if you're going to be forced out in the name of "productivity" once things are nice, and it makes sense to become anti-social if that's the deal.
i think we already seen people react like this in some areas to gentrification and inequality. The damage to society us considerable
Imagine if groceries were sold on a 30 year contract. If you chose the right grocery district you'd eventually get a sweeter and sweeter deal as your right appreciated. In the most competitive grocery districts, newcomers would have to bid $1 million to for the right to access groceries in that area. Or rent it at $3000/mo. Faced with a too high cost to buy into a centrally located grocery district, many would have to commute an hour each way to stock their pantry.
Not sure who "we" is there, but as an absolute statement that's not true.
I see quite a few lots around here that used to be a house that have been converted into 4/6/8-plexes (depending on lot depth).
They are though. They objectively are impacted. Your new high-rise often does any/all of the following:
- change the elevation or the permeability of the ground (in the midwest, this means often dumping higher water levels into nearby properties, causing basements to flood that didn't before). In my home state, often 25 to 40% of a home's finished livable SQFT is in those basements)
- dumps lots of new vehicles and new traffic into the neighborhood (that the high-density housing isn't going to build parking for, in their obvious-lie greenwashing attempt to be 'eco-friendly')
- adds new retail on the ground floor, with more noise and more traffic (so that the business becomes viable)
- increase the costs of all insurance (automobile insurance, homeowners insurance, flood insurance, etc)
And of course, the big one:
- Dramatically increases the value of the property, immediately driving cost of living up for existing residents, in addition to increasing the housing costs for all residents (yes, even for pre-existing owner-occupants).
-----
You can argue that existing residents should just eat all of that, as like, "the cost of living in a society" or somesuch. Because your right, regular people didn't buy up that land too, to prevent the development ahead-of-time. And I get, new housing has to go somewhere, no one is against all new housing.
But you can't pretend these effects are "entirely intangible". New development, especially anything that "increases density" has lots of direct short-term real-world observable impacts, and very real costs, passed directly onto each other nearby resident. They aren't crazy to complain about all that, even if they aren't articulate enough to accurately name each effect individually, and instead label the whole thing "the character of the neighborhood" or similar.
At some point you gotta draw some lines, and ownership (combined with reasonable zoning rules) is a pretty good line.
Well, that's what we used to have, to make it all work. You used to trust that if you bought in a neighborhood zoned "R-1", it would mostly stay "R-1" for at least a little while. (same for "PUD-3", and so on)
But "urbanists" started de-regulating all the reasonable zoning rules that made that system work, so now no one can trust that the rules would be enforced anymore, which is how you get random citizens reflexively fighting things (and the prevalence of HOAs, as an extra block against it, and so on)
Citation needed
> …that made that system work
Citation very much needed
That's the point though isn't it? People who buy into areas that are zoned SFH do that because they want to live somewhere with that level of density. Rezoning and increasing density is a rugpull with both intangible and direct economic harms.
"Rugpull" implies that they were told or under the impression it would always be SFH and they'd have the ability to deny its change unilaterally, which is not and has never been the case.
If you live in a SFH in a subdivision on a quiet road, next to a large piece of undeveloped land, that's desirable property. But the fact that it's desirable now doesn't guarantee it will be desirable at any point in the future, and you don't have any say in what happens to that undeveloped land unless you own it.
That six figure check might not be so exciting when it means they have to pay transaction costs (~10%) and transfer taxes. Hopefully they don't also have capital gains too (the nominal gain isn't much comfort when they need to find a similarly priced new home; capital gains on housing is mostly a tax on avoiding inflation). Hopefully they aren't also seeing an increase in mortgage rates if they need one. Then they need to find somewhere new to live, probably in an entirely new city (or state) to find somewhere with the zoning they wanted still in place. This destroys social connections and probably requires finding new work, on top of the move itself and the difficulty picking out somewhere to live in an unfamiliar area. If they try to instead stick it out, increased property taxes might bleed them out until they're at a net loss and are forced to move.
So yeah of course people who don't want high development near them and picked somewhere to live with regulations against it will vote to preserve those regulations. Conversely, speculators and developers know when they buy property that is is zoned not to allow what they want, but they take a gamble on their ability to change zoning.
This just sounds like conplaining abour presence of other people and services.
If so, why is the most valuable real estate not in remote locarions? Why doea everyone value living near other people and services?
We need more houses, not high density apartment flats.
Except the people that do, which is actually quite a lot of people.
I prefer living in a house, but I know many people that prefer living in middle-density or even high-density areas.
There is nothing intangible about the character of the neighborhood (or the environment).
Have you ever chosen a place to live? Nearly all the research effort in that decision is about the character of the neighborhood, not the house itself.
The house structure in isolation has very little value. That's why you can buy a perfectly functional house for like $10K, when it is located in a place that nobody wants to live in. Nearly all the value comes from the neighborhood it's in and its character. That's what people buy into, much more than the drywalls and roof.
I was stating that the "character of a neighborhood" is a very tangible thing that has value to people (I don't mean value in dollars, but value in that they enjoy it and want to live there). That character attracted them to move there. So it is value that can be destroyed by greatly changing the character. There's no value accruing here, it's value being destroyed.
For example I know of a few people who moved to a quiet street, very walkable and had nearly zero traffic so it was great for kids & pets and strolling around.
A couple decades later that quiet no-traffic street had turned into a six lane avenue, with their front lawns right on the edge of that. The character of the neighborhood sure was changed and its value was destroyed to everyone who had chosen to live there precisely because it was quiet and had no traffic.
Essentially the benefit of private parties not developing on their property is an externality of their decision. Of course government interventions often address externalities as many a Nimby have figured out.
If someone buys real estate with some expectation of ROI, then why should they be shielded from risk?
Does it work the other way - ifgovernment improves an area, for example builds mass transit, and property values go up, do homeowners pay?
And because of that, homeowners in the US will fight tooth and nail to stop anything that depreciates their houses.
it also does not bebefit the average homeowner - your house is worth more, but you cant sell ut or youll have nowhere to live
It's become very frequent in the US. Houses are appreciating assets, investment opportunities and retirement planes - not homes.
https://www.ft.com/content/9aa0fcc0-31fb-44be-b5a0-57ceb7fb7...
In Britain, you can get planning permission and sit on it for 3 years, doing land banking. In France, it expires after 3 years.
In Britain anyone can object to anything - solar panels get noise complains from people that live 2 miles away. In France, there are penalties for bogus complaints and you must be materially and demonstrably affected.
Apartment owners are treated like medieval serfs in UK - after buying one for a million dollars, you must beg landowner for a licence to have a cat, and renew it annually for a fee.
https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f...
The wealthy people have all the money and for them, it doesn't look like that improving infrastructure and "building" will make them more money, so why should they want to do that?
A lot of countries got bombed during WW2 and got a fresh start. I don’t want to be bombed.
You really lock in your decisions when you start a project.
From everything I've read, building (and rebuilding) in Japan is much more straightforward than in the states, or other Western countries.
We've invented many processes and regulations that were well-intended, meant to reduce abuse or exploitation (e.g. pollution, destroying local environment, etc) but also made it hard to build even things that are good, that we broadly want, like new infrastructure or more housing as housing prices rise.
In the US we don’t have much in the way of old/storied buildings, especially in the western half of the country. Maybe that’s responsible for disproportionate attachment to modern buildings.
And even these tend to get rebuilt periodically, and are regarded as the 'same' building.
Their buildings are meant for 30 years of use after which they hold no value and need to be rebuilt based on government recommendation. [1] The government may revise this number but it stands as of recently.
They have temples that have been built and rebuilt many times due to weather and nature. [2]
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/03/31/how-tos/ja...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shri...
I thought that the whole point of homo sapiens is to use intelligence and draw conclusions quickly. Maybe I was wrong.
*Edit, fixed wording.
They ran out of undeveloped land long ago and were forced to increase density.
At least in California, cities are like 50-150 years old at best. Lots of cities are only running out of land now. In 300 years, I'm sure somewhere like LA will be dense.
I don't think that's quite it. Why would we hate change qua change? Change is neither good nor bad as such.
There's plenty we all wish was different (and plenty that should be preserved). Almost everyone wishes Madison Square Garden were demolished and old Penn Station were rebuilt. But it's difficult because buildings, and urban layouts, are enmeshed in a thicker reality than just stone laid upon stone. Look at the urban plans of European cities, especially ancient or medieval ones. You may find a few weird quirks in the way streets are laid out. For example, you might find streets that are circular, only to find out that this is because there used to be a Roman amphitheater there. Even some of the stones from the original structure are still present in the very foundations of the new buildings. Living, breathing cities are a network of dependencies, and it is not a simple matter to change how a street runs. It is very expensive, people live there, businesses operate there, property lines are what they are. Unless the justification is severe enough, there isn't enough reason to even think about doing it. That's why it is essential for us to get urban planning right in the beginning according to durable principles.
A random example fresh on my mind: I'm happy with my city renovating streets and improving infrastructure. But just now, the city started renovating three major streets at the same time, grinding all traffic in the city to a halt. Think taking 2 hours instead of 20 minutes to leave it, or a city bus that was, literally, exactly 199 minutes late. This suddenly disturbed our weekend plans, and at this very moment, I'm NOT happy with the renovations. It's not about the works and the changes - it's about the unexpected hassle this caused to me personally.
(Not that I would vote against the works. Maybe just towards not doing them all at once, and giving more warning.)
An middle class family with kids in school, saving for retirement and college, owns their home already, and decides to maintain an older home rather than build a new one.
I.e. If you already own the home, the best course of action for you in this particular year, with the money you have on hand, meets the constraints of your particular life circumstances. Global efficiency doesn't actually matter to you.
Ye doing maintenance is probably almost always worth it. Doing something before it is too late is like one or two orders of magnitude cheaper. Like painting the outer walls before the wood rots, etc. Fixing the roof before it leaks through both layers of protection.
The point I am trying to make, is that buyers seem to underestimate the cost of fixing stuff when it is "too late". I have a theory that there is more competition for houses the cheaper they are. So poorer people are forced to buy homes that are not worth what they cost. I.e. the poorer buyer would be better off buying a more expensive home that is cheaper to maintain in the long run, have to buy the cheaper home that need expensive repairs. If the market was only "rich" people, the bad homes would have a lower price to offset their repair costs. Or something ...
I wouldn't be surprised if other online creators do the same.
Before: https://archive.ph/cZNYh
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09032023/inside-clean-ene...
With some controversy over the impacts to grid stability:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/07/25/wh...
They are also embarking on massive CO2 sequestration projects.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/20/texas-carbon-capture...
There's an awful lot of schadenfreude that happens within the renewable energy and power production communities during serious power system events in ERCOT because they willingly suffer problems other power systems don't have to.
I strongly identify with this position. I don't need the government stopping gas sales. That doesn't mean I don't recognize that renewable energy is cheaper and pollutes less.
What I've noticed on the left is that unless you believe that gasoline and natural gas should be made illegal, you are considered a hypocrite if you also use renewables.
I'm just chasing the rationally superior energy source. The environmental argument doesn't really sway me on this one. And I don't like government coercion for a very useful and life saving substance (fossil fuels).
Nevertheless to directly address your claims. Abbot has been pretty vocal in his support for renewables..his campaign puts out materials extolling his success in bringing them to Texas.
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/business/RenewableEnergy...
In another speech, abbot makes this clear by saying he favors a both and approach: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Gov-...
He again touts the benefits of renewables.
I think what's happened here is that progressives have once again moralized on this issue.
It's not enough to be in favor of and actively take steps to encourage renewables. If you don't do it to the same degree or you don't simultaneously criticize and ban the alternatives, you're presumed guilty of some great transgression.
The article:
> Texas has produced more gigawatt-hours of electricity from renewable sources than any other state for several years running
That's an absolute number, and this is just another version of all heatmaps are just population maps[1].
If we look at percentage of energy from renewables … Texas lags the national average, and is way down the list. The top is Vermont.[2]
(They're not first in terms of per-capita, either, but I do wish that column was in the table. I don't exactly know where they are in the ranking, other than not first.)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...