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Comment by Pet_Ant | Hacker News Reader

The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation. People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house on a golf course accepting that it could be turned it into an asbestos refinery the next day. Pay them for the economic loss of value, and then for emotional damages. They can either be happy with the money, or move on. I mean, I think more people would be willing to accept a meth clinic in their neighborhood if they didn't pay property taxes from now on and could afford private security now to give them piece of mind.

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>You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house on a golf course accepting that it could be turned it into an asbestos refinery the next day.

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.

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.

It's like gambling. You buy property knowing you can't control it's surroundings.

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.

But markets change, and sometimes people lose when that happens, and you're not due any compensation when that happens. If you invest in tech stocks you'll make a killing most of the time. Sometimes you'll lose half your investment.

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.

Given that, I don't fault homeowners for trying to reduce this risk as much as possible. For many people, a home is the most expensive thing they ever buy, and it makes logical sense for people to try to protect the value of it. Not everyone wants every transaction they do to boil down to bet at a casino. If I could engage in local politics to reduce risk, I am going to do that.

I think the asbestos plant is a good analogy. Nobody moves into their home expecting a nuisance to be built next door.

It's a ridiculous analogy because nobody is buying residential property, or property anywhere close to residences, to build industrial processing plants.

That's simply not true. It may not be happening to your friends & family, but it happens frequently. One high profile flash point is oil drilling & facilities, which in Colorado can be built as close to your house as 500 feet.

It's an analogy, not an example. Nobody wants industrial processing plants built next door, just like nobody wants a 5 story apartment building built next door. They're both nuisances, at least in rural or sparse suburban neighborhoods.

you think additional housing for other people and asbestos refinery plants are equivalent?

No, but I have an equal desire to have either of them right next door to me.

I think the objection that many people would indeed weight the asbestos factory as a more severe nuisance than the apartments. Equal weighting seems like odd affectation here.

> industrial processing plants built next door, just like nobody wants a 5 story apartment building

English-speaking peoples have such crazy issues with apartment they compare them to carcinogenic pollution.

I'm not sure someone's native language has anything to do with it.

> That's literally the whole point of markets

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.

Furthermore, a home and a community are a place that you build and take part in, which can take a significant fraction of your life. My mom has spent the last decade working on her garden, amending the soil, and growing a bunch of fruit trees. There's only enough time to do that maybe 5 times in one's life.

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.

> 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

Currently we make it illegal for the current owner-resident to choose to bulldoze their single family house and build a quadplex and live in one unit. If you don't want to redevelop your lot that's perfectly fine, but why restrict your neighbor's property rights? The current system just rewards those lucky enough to see their neighborhood appreciate in value. Once it does newcomers are priced out and we have an equilibrium of urban sprawl, housing inflation outstripping inflation, and ever longer commutes.

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.

> Currently we make it illegal for the current owner-resident to choose to bulldoze their single family house and build a quadplex and live in one unit.

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).

> and then the golf course sells out to a developer who wants to build higher-density housing, and then the people who live in houses nearby complain that they are somehow injured by other property property owners building on their own land

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.

Your continued breathing objectively decreases the amount of oxygen in my environment.

At some point you gotta draw some lines, and ownership (combined with reasonable zoning rules) is a pretty good line.

> 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)

> But "urbanists" started de-regulating all the reasonable zoning rules…

Citation needed

> …that made that system work

Citation very much needed

We used to have 40 acres and a mule. Things change.

Fun fact. 40 acres and a mule lasted less than a year. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...

It always seemed like 40 acres is too much work for one mule

> combined with reasonable zoning rules

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.

That doesn't mean that zoning can never change, or that someone is suddenly due a 6-figure check because land they don't own has been rezoned to allow people to live on what was once a patch of grass.

"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.

Nothing in life is certain. When they buy, the law says you can't build more densely in that area. Obviously the law can change, but that's about as close to "always" as you can get. Similarly, society could decide to do away with land ownership altogether without compensation, so they take a risk paying for ownership. Naturally, they'll be against changing the law in ways that harm them.

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.

When you buy property you accept that the community might change zoning rules. That's the de-facto social contract. There's no rugpull; if you didn't understand this when you made the purchase, you made a mistake.

Any society can change the rules at any time. We could go back to don't-ask-don't-tell with a future government, screwing over all of the openly gay service members. Or a future government could repeal the fifth amendment (or expand "civil forfeiture" i.e. theft). Society changing the rules is pulling the rug. It's not like there's somewhere you can go where the rules can't be changed to avoid that risk. The best you can do is... try to minimize how much society is around you so you can be more selective about who you do live around and hope they'll share your values. i.e. avoid density. And stay out of California since they'll make statewide changes to solve city problems.

When the land appreciates enough there is no economic harm. If the land reaches $1 million per acre, a developer might want to build a triplex, townhouses, quadplex, etc. and buy you out bagging the owner a nice profit. However local zoning usually forbids upzoning making this productive activity that can ease the housing shortage literally illegal.

> dumps lots of new vehicles and new traffic into the neighborhood ... - adds new retail on the ground floor, with more noise

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?

I really wish what ever cohort you are would stop giong on about 'higher density housing'. Thats not what people want, no one wants this. Do you think poor people want to be packed into even smaller denser boxes?

We need more houses, not high density apartment flats.

That is just not true. I want to (and do) live in high density housing and I would not be considered poor.

then go live in it. there is plenty of it. stop making everyone else have to live that way.

R1 single family zoning is making everyone have to build housing a certain way.

> no one wants this

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.

All sorts of biologically toxic materials are spewed into the air during demolition and industrial level building. Concrete dust alone is insanely bad to inhale. So, no, I wouldn't be happy for a placid field next to my life home to suddenly become a major development site overnight.

> entirely intangible such as "the character of the neighborhood" or "the environment"

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.

…which is why none of that value should really accrue to the homeowner. It’s a collective product, not their own.

I'm trying to interpret how this comment relates to the thread above but not clear to me.

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.

replace asbestos refinery with prisons, hospitals (yes some people don't want to hear ambulances launch every 20 minutes, insane asylum (I lived next to one, screaming all day long).

If you didn't buy it then why should I compensate you?

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.

> didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase

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.

Zoning needs to be logical. Not allowing any residential in commercial is ridiculous for instance. We had homes above businesses for longer than we haven't and dropping them was a mistake.

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".

> Why is it up to a group of people who are all dead how tall a house I can build?

Same reason you don’t drive on the left side of the road: your beliefs are no match for the reality of the law.

The point is those rules weren't made to match the current set of conditions.

Driving on the right does.

If you build a spite fence next to my property in order to enrage me, we will have largely the same problem that your grandfather and my grandfather would have had: you will chortle with glee and I will grind my teeth.

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.

I didn't say spite fences were okay did I?

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".

Yes, that is the objective. We have these rules today for the same reason we had them yesterday: to protect proprietary interests.

The problem is the incentives are completely wrong.

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.

You've just restyled "eminent domain"... turns out, people can get pretty finicky about it and often look at it as a form of immoral coercion. Noncooperation and even violence or vandalism are common. For as necessary as it might be sometimes, it's been shown to be a pretty messy and conflict-engendering approach.

IMO, if your community has decided to build mass transit with state/federal dollars, you've also forgone any reasonable expectation that densification won't happen.

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.

The example you give is a case where this makes sense, but most of the time NIMBYism is more like cartel behavior where existing home-owners work to restrict supply of housing in an entire area to boost their own property values.

"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.

Eminent domain is pretty expensive because it takes so many legal appeals, and some people won’t accept compensation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)

Worse because while is it expensive legally, it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner. Kind of like class action lawsuits, the only ones that come out better off are the lawyers. Also, I've heard stories about some extended family that lost their farm by eminent domain for an airport. They never recovered.

it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner

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.

I have no idea but it's got a pretty rough history of abuse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/10/more-citi...

Take a look at the disputes that have arisen over CAHSR's use of eminent domain to see how thorny these issues can get. https://cchsra.org/cahsr-eminent-domain/

Anecdotally, a portion of my parents land (and my childhood home) was taken by eminent domain to widen the county road. My parents had to fight a legal battle with the county, who wanted to pay only for the value of the bare land they were taking, disregarding the fact that the house was on that portion of the property. My parents were eventually able to get fair compensation but it took time and effort to get the county to pony up.

I like this idea. I know properties can sell off their "air rights" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-...). Are there other examples of rights (air quality? noise? etc.) that can be sold off?

"Easement" is a term that means this [1]. You can give someone an easement allowing them to use your property somehow, and you can make the offer contingent on something in return, such as payment. It's a type of contract and not uncommon to see for things like utilities or nature preserves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement.

Depends.

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.

I would argue for mixed use of hazardous industries and residential/commercial properties. There is a long history of forcing the pollution generate through your daily life onto lower income communities. If you take a poop, the sewage treatment plant should be in your neighborhood. Drink water, the water treatment plant should be in your neighborhood, use electricity, electricity generation in your neighborhood.

In other words, don't force your crap on to somebody else.

Ok if it applies to the rich as well, which it won't.

You are quite right. It wouldn't even though it should. The refusal of the rich to clean up their own shit is behind environmental injustices.

Yup, this lack of basic empathy is a big part of the tension. It's the same situation played out over and over in different contexts. Each side of every issue judges the other side by their worst constituents, imagined or otherwise. Now that whole side of the issue is just "villains". There are unreasonably NIMBY people, but virtually human being exhibits a minimum reasonable amount of NIMBYism. You can't bring harm to people's home and communities (concrete harm, societal harm, or statistical harm) and then call them names and declare their opinions and emotions invalid. I mean, you can - sometimes politics works that way. You shouldn't, morally.

So property owners should profit from appreciation when new infrastructure is built around them, and this is pretty much the only reason that their land ever increases in value, but be compensated when the opposite happens? Sounds grant.

Housing, not unlike other assets classes have expectations baked into the price at purchase. However those expectations are not entitlements to future outcomes, unless you also purchased the rights to the variables at hand. (Ex: the only way to make sure someone doesn't move in next door is to buy the house nextdoor)

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.

People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them,…

If someone buys real estate with some expectation of ROI, then why should they be shielded from risk?

Land Value Tax should help reflect the opportunity cost for the community as well as the benefit to cashing out of a property.

LVT takes no consideration of the improvements done to the property, of course. Great for aligning taxation to the opportunity cost of the property, but I would think it would dramatically underestimate the value of cashing out of the property.

You imply it's the only tax, rather than one of the total taxes.

> The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation

Does it work the other way - ifgovernment improves an area, for example builds mass transit, and property values go up, do homeowners pay?

> I think more people would be willing to accept a meth clinic in their neighborhood if they didn't pay property taxes from now on and could afford private security

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.

> 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?

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.

Doesn’t that sort of ignore the need for shifts and guards to have holidays, sick leave and so on. For whatever minimum staffing you think you need you need to multiply it by 3-4x. Not to mention the logistics involved in terms of vehicles, work space and so on.

And the sheer dystopian vibes to this calculus is crazy.

It's not some dystopian future - this is the YIMBY movement. It's not about housing. You think some rich person struggling to find land for his next prison that doubles his wealth cares about your kids playing in the street? No he's going to donate to YIMBY to double his wealth.

Yeah that glosses over the entire point - you prefer having an armed gaurd and a meth clinic across the street where your kids play than just paying property taxes?

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