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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn’t you? It’s a land arb. You get cheaper land then use political power to raise its desirability. Common trick.

You can do it a few ways. Get a place near a nightclub then force the club to shut down. Almost certainly they have some regulation they’re not following.

Same with schools etc. Or sometimes the city will be planning an affordable housing thing on a lot. No one likes that so you’ll get the homes next door for cheaper. Then you can lobby for the place to become a park. Boom! Your home is now more valuable than it would be.

It’s just political arbitrage.

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This shouldn't be down voted, this type of arbitrage is common and the parties engaging in it know the baked in risks. It is no different from the common gambit of buying land outside of cities zoned as industrial or agricultural and then waging politics to have it rezoned as residential to dramatically increase its value.

The cool solution I've seen to this problem is to have some process for identifying the class of people who are affected by [locally burdensome thing] and then allowing the proponents (a business, the government, etc.) to negotiate some settlement with that affected class directly, with a majority vote used to accept the settlement.

For example, everyone near the airport could get some property tax relief or share of an annual payment that would go away if the airport went away.

This way a small minority of vocal opponents cannot effectively oppose something that would be good for everyone, but if something is irredeemably terrible and unfair locally affected people can block it.

This is absolutely how it should work. Negative externalities should be paid for by the source of them. It can be difficult of course to find where that price lies, but this is what all those lawsuits were about. It’s a shame they didn’t just bake that cost in from the beginning, instead of failing to take responsibility and then having to be forced to do so.

This is Coase's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

Yes and no. If someone buy land at scale, and tries waging zoning politics...yeah, okay, arbitrage.

Vs. if John Doe buys a house near a substantial airport, then claims he didn't know? No, sorry, nothing's gonna change in his favor. Maybe he imagined it would, and planned...but that's just the difference between ignoramus and fool.

That’s just a matter of ability. A few guys can easily stall things. It didn’t take many to force Sonoma to change. All these attempts have risks. You can always try. Sometimes you’re powerful enough to get change in your favour. Other times you’re not and it was a good bet. Other times you’re not and it was a bad bet.

Besides, this is quite refined now. I just put nana in the house. People can’t resist old people. She’ll have medical issues that need quiet etc etc.

My landlord did something like that with a few buildings for the big London sewer project. London actually paid him for new windows and things like that.

You just apply the force. Most taxpayers don’t notice this stuff so you can get hundreds of thousands out of it.

Many government projects are slow, too, so you can do this for ones where they’re announced but no work has been done. Bam, free upgrades, earthquake retrofit, etc.

I would say it is short sighted land arb. Density and land prices go hand-in-hand [1]. The causality is less clear. Higher land prices necessitates more units and being able to build more units increases land prices. Cities build airports because the expected economic impacts and increased tax revenue growth justifies the large expense. That's the long view. Your same reasoning should mean some entity is willing to lobby to open up construction and reduce height limits so they can build more. The reason this does not happen is because it is easier to block things than it is to change things. I'd say this is some type of societal second law of thermodynamics.

[1] - https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/Bertaud_-_Th...

This is not "arbitrage" though. It's not risk free, etc.

Rent-seeking is a better term for what the OP is describing.

This is so so how the world works in reality.

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