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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

He makes a good point. Broadly, in the US, the pendulum swung from "just go build stuff and don't worry about the opposition because they don't matter" to "we have to go through 5 years of process to build a 40-unit apartment building for people to live in". There are some good reasons for some of that process, but there's a strong argument that we went too far in saying no, slowing things down and in general not building things that are beneficial to society.

And it turns out that some of that process doesn't actually help the more vulnerable groups it was intended to help, but gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood.

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> gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood.

Everything for inducing the demand and reducing the supply. The invisible hand of extracting values at all cost.

I don’t think wealthy people are thinking too much about their property values when it comes to opposing building in their own neighborhoods. They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.

Doesn't that seem to implicitly state that property values are precisely what they're thinking about when trying to keep the poors away? If the poors are able to move in then the value of the property must be inexpensive for them to be able to.

I've lived in two areas that this has happened, and will try to word it gently but honestly.

The neighborhood was nice, low traffic, never lock your doors(so to speak). In comes 'low income housing', ie jamming as many terrible apartment complexes as they could wherever they could.

Traffic shot way up, too much for the roads. Why would the developer care. Noise also shot up, constant noises of bass from cars at all hours. Lastly, crime shot up. I went from living almost in the middle of nowhere to having my car broken into twice in my own driveway.

Sorry all, I agree that housing is a crisis, but I no longer want dense housing anywhere near me.

I wish normal housing were more affordable instead.

Also, low-income housing sort of sucks. For example, in my area, some low-income apartments were recently constructed, but they do not have washer and dryer receptacles. It's not that they aren't included. You cannot even bring your own, because you won't have anything to hook them up to. Apparently, you are supposed to use the laundromat only.

But now that people with low income can live there, suddenly my complex no longer has to worry about those people, because the availability of the low-income apartments reduces the amount of people who would even consider living here. Suddenly, you're not losing potential customers by raising the price, because all the customers that you would have been losing are now all living in the low-income apartments instead.

That hurts people like me who have a higher standard of living (such as owning a washer and dryer) but still don't exactly make enough money to justify spending $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment (ours is currently around $1,800). I suppose I'm the customer they'd be losing by raising the price, but the risk to them is probably still far lower now.

Great points. I've often thought the most underserved group wrt housing are the working lower middle class. Which is weird, because that's how I grew up. We had tiny houses(5 of us in a house < 900sqft), but in decent blue collar neighborhoods where everyone was respectful and getting by.

That just doesn't exist much today. You either spend more than you can afford to live with upper middle class in a house two sizes too big, or you live in shared low income apartments. They just don't build small SFH neighborhoods anymore, apparently.

They 100% do, just not where most people want to live.

I know many midwest cities with newly built small houses. Maybe not <900 sq feet. But 3-4 family bedroom houses at around 1500 sq feet. These houses are basic and inexpensive. You won't get much land either but may get a neighborhood park.

that sounds great, if they're inexpensive to buy, the only land i'd really need is the land the house is on. my hope is one day we'll have enough money to consider such a thing, probably once we make 150k+ a year, but that doesn't seem so far out of reach at the moment, could happen some time in the next 6 months

there are other constraints of course (such as isp), but right now the biggest one is that we don't have millions to spend on a single bedroom.

You've explained the issue very well. I've tried to make similar points before. People look at a nice neighborhood and say "we should give more people this experience". But you can't - the low density is what makes it good.

I've also lived in an area that seemed to have reduced this problem by a huge factor. I lived in a community of 150 townhomes where 50% of them were Section 8 and the other 50% were privately-owned. Due to how the community was built, you could never tell which units were which.

I was able to have a 3bd/2.5ba 1,200sqft townhome for only $1,200/month. I think there was only 1 shooting in the 3 years I lived there. Yeah there was noise, but it was also a college town so that's unavoidable in the area.

It's an idea that I felt worked very well, and I really wish more cities would try it out for semi-dense housing solutions.

Where is this egalitarian place with 50% section 8 and 50% not, but built so "you could never tell which units were which?"

A community in North Charleston, SC named Horizon Village.

North Charleston (in general) is considered an unsafe area, but this community was built to battle the stigma against Section 8 housing that is very prevalent in the Charleston area. After I moved out they've continued to build out more privately-owned homes in the community. Back in 2018 rents were around $1,200 for a 3bd, but the privately-owned homes are now renting for over $3k for 3bd, and starting around $400k for sale. While the Section 8 housing is still operating as it normally does for the area with reduced costs.

It's helped to revitalize the area (take a look at Park Circle just north of the community), while ensuring that further gentrification and displacement doesn't occur like it did in the downtown Charleston Westside neighborhood.

This isn't difficult to understand. Nobody that I know actually thinks "I like this neighborhood, I hope poor people don't come".

1. When you save your whole life for a downpayment and buy a house, you want it to at least KEEP it's value, nobody wants to buy a house and lose money. That is common sense.

2. People generally move to areas they desire for reasons. They want to also keep this the same or improve. They don't want it to deteriorate.

So now we can debate what lowers values (nominal terms) and what causes areas to be undesirable and how they get there.

What I can think of: Increases in crime, Dropping maintenance/services, increased pollution, increased noise, increased traffic etc...

Nowhere above has anything to do with "poors".

> social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.

Value doesn't only mean monetary value. Social prestige is one of the values too. And sometimes they are transferable. The invisible hand is not just about the literal money

> They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.

.. which they will literally state in terms of property value.

I don't think property value is the root of it. Rather, property value is the polite face they put on it, while their real concern is things like crime, whether it be petty vandalism and litter or more serious crime. It might not be fair for them to associate low income housing with crime, but I think this association is intuitively obvious to many if not most of the rich people living in exclusive neighborhoods.

While there may be some material value to a property, as the saying goes: Location, location, location. In other words, it is the things like crime that ultimately define a property's value. That is why property value decline is of concern to property owners. It is all the same at the end of the day.

You don't think people in low income areas are concerned about crime in their neighborhoods?

I didn't say that, did I? Why do you believe I think that?

TBF you didn't say it - It appeared that way if you followed the logic at the time regarding the gp you responded to two posts up about keeping poors away.

>> property value is the polite face they put on it, while their real concern is things like crime

It's polite to be concerned about money and impolite to be concerned about crime?

Almost all street-level crime (burglaries, robberies etc) is caused by degenerates (homeless, mentally ill, 'professional' criminals) and there's often a race component to it (even outside of the US).

You can't really talk about those things in polite company, so house prices are the euphemism used instead.

Crime is a factor in many cases, sure. But then so is emergency access/egress. If there is a wildfire near this neighborhood, we only have two ways out, and over 900 homes to evacuate via those two ways. Consider the traffic jams that we saw during the Steiner Ranch fire years ago.

Now, make each one of those properties dual family housing, and suddenly you’ve got twice as many people to evacuate, but you haven’t upgraded the roads or any of the other utilities. And that’s very bad news. Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that the Austin city council has created.

Property values are certainly going to go down as they cram more and more housing into this space. But the cost will be in human lives when the wildfires do hit.

Can we prosecute our city council for manslaughter? Or even murder? How long do we have to wait for these deaths to occur, so that we can finally prosecute for them?

Sure but what GP said and what I think is a common perception is that wealthy people oppose development because they want the value of their house to grow in the same way that you would want the value of a stock to grow. I.e. so you can turn it into more money later. I don’t think they care so much about turning it into more money later, but more about the other factors I mentioned. Of course indirectly preserving or enhancing the other factors may result in also being able to turn it into more money later, but that is not usually the goal when opposing development around one’s primary residence IMO.

Where did you ever see that? In particular for the actually wealthy? "Oh no, my house went from $10m to $9m, woe is me"? At most, it's a proxy for the above. As a not-so-wealthy, but well-to-do techie, for me the exclusion is absolutely about keeping poor people out. People are just too timid do admit it.

Now I do have to say as a semi-libertarian I support YIMBY, building up everything and making most zoning illegal. Sorta against my self-interest.

But at the same time, I strongly dislike US poor. It's almost an oxymoron that the more meritocratic the society, the better the sorting, and thus the worse an average non-immigrant poor people are. US, compared to most places, is pretty meritocratic. An average person at the same percentile poverty level in Russia (or, I bet, Mexico or China or Nigeria or whatever) is a much better human being than a corresponding non-immigrant in the US (any race). If the way to keep the latter out is to keep local property unaffordable, so be it. I don't really care about broad property values otherwise - I don't want to move and if I do I'd probably buy a similar house.. in fact given the transaction costs, cheaper housing may make moving cheaper.

I believe the US “poor” could be made to behave better if standards were raised (more and better policing). Nobody seems to have the stomach for that so coddling is the solution.

Didn’t Andreesen publish a self important manifesto about building then block local development near his home?

Such a perfect example.

It’s time to build… somewhere over there please and yes as a private market evangelist I’ll use state power against private parties to protect my interests.

In California the permit laws are aggressive and slow, so much so that it's common practice to make most modifications unpermitted. This severely limits new home supply, because permits include new homes. The solution? Federal program which gives huge subsidies to purchasing an expensive home (they give you a cut to buy the house, no interest, and they take a cut when you sell).

This is complicated by a property tax law similar to rent control, where your taxes are frozen at the time of purchase. This results in a market where few people are willing to sell and most people are unable to build. Thus rental prices in the region are dirt cheap relative to home prices, versus an appalachian town where the opposite is true.

For me, this is an example of red light cameras causing MORE accidents than without the camera because it interferes with human behavior. Specifically, the painfully slow permit process causes most building to be done unpermitted and therefore at risk of harm to human life (the purpose of the permit is to assure safety). As we know, the unspoken purpose of the red light camera is revenue, thus representing a conflict of interest between true safety and revenue, and I think a similar conflict is rotting California's real estate situation as well, in service to wealth building more than it's in service to the common man.

"Slowing things down" also directly translates to "more expensive". Both by having to hold the property in the meantime (or rights to it) - cost of money, and by having to bride layer after layer of consulted people and administrations with expensive features that even the developer and future buyers agree are not optimal, and by having to professionally manage endless extra paperwork and meetings.

> And it turns out that some of that process doesn't actually help the more vulnerable groups it was intended to help, but gets hijacked by wealthy people (...)

Welcome to London, UK

Wait what? As an American that lived in London and also NY/Chicago I always though London did mixed housing very well (but not perfect).

There are council houses spread throughout London with no real "slums" like Chicago used to have with it's public housing.

https://youtu.be/y6ADuQOXMmA?si=G-5eVxRrNnEolJrO this American does not quite agree with you.

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