My reply to the people who want to designate my neighborhood a historic district

People try to connect these issues because they are connected. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

There are many homeless people who are not living on the streets: those living in shelters, or cars, or who are frequently moving between temporary living situations with friends or family. And they may even be holding down a job, and/or relying on local support systems for, say, child care, which could make ‘move where it’s cheaper’ an untenable or very risky option.

Yes. People are flooding desirable areas, and developers (and some politicians) would like to keep trying to fight the locals to get a piece of that pie, even if it means harming those areas, rather than developing outward and stopping foreign buying. Then the resulting house-price crisis is pointed to as the reason they should be given free reign, but that's circular reasoning. That's "negotiating with terrorists".

After that, the next thing blamed is the issue of wealthy Americans using housing as an investment in high-profile areas, which takes up the public consciousness despite being such a small part of the problem.

The homelessness crisis is mostly unrelated, and the subset of it that is related is not related in the ways for which people use it as an argument. Again: Build outward. Get businesses to spread out.

There is a lot of data indicating that you are dead wrong.

This is one of many studies that took less than a minute to find if you need a citation: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

Here's one from California explaining the causal relationship between rising rents and homelessness: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-...

> The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.

This is about as disconnected from reality as it gets.

We beat out >50 applicants for our current rental by offering 6mos up front. That ad was up for less than 2 hours. Other landlords we talked to were working through 400 applications per day.

We're paying just over double for the same sq ft, in the next county out. We beat long odds for the privilege.

People all around the region - with steady gov jobs and money in the bank - moved into dodgy hotels or their cars because they had nowhere to go.

Two of my coworkers are homeless and in just that situation. I'm somewhat astounded that you can't see any reasons why people don't want to just pick up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else.

"homeless" is a larger category of which visible street people are but one subset. others are living in their cars or couch-surfing or what-have-you

There's several problems with that:

1) Most people these days want to live in cities, for good reasons: jobs are there, cultural activities are there, dating opportunities are there (for single people), good schools are there (for married people), etc. An abandoned town won't have any of that.

2) Sure, if a bunch of people moved to an abandoned town and revitalized it, it would be interesting, but how do you coordinate something like that? What are these people going to do for work in the meantime? Are you relying on a bunch of WFH people? And even if 100 WFH people suddenly move to a dying or abandoned town, how do they deal with all the things that aren't ready for them, such as the utilities, or lack of skilled labor to fix problems in their houses, etc.?

> Residents who fight against density and change aren’t doing it for scarcity or property value.

Yeah, they are. They may not ONLY be fighting for some reasons, but this absolutely one of them.

City in Washington, not the most expensive, but repeatedly very high (double digit percentage) value increases, struggling with density proposes "The Missing Middle" and looks to study how to improve medium density housing (not even huge apartment complexes).

Inevitable question: "What will this do to our property values?"

"The most conservative study shows that we expect property value increases will go from 12.9% YOY to 9.2% YOY."

Holy hell. You'd have thought the city council was executing toddlers and pouring sugar in grandma's gas tanks. As soon as that little trinket came out, everything crumbled. Despite the fact that property values were still looking at increasing nearly 10% a year.

You say all this, but I've also met more than my share of property owners who believe that property should be an appreciating asset, and that that is some form of inalienable or constitutional right, the right to considering their home an asset or "investment" that outperforms the economy significantly.

And I say that as a home owner in that same city as someone who "worked hard to find and build" my quality of life.

how ironic to call others entitled, when the NIMBYs are trying to tell builders what they can build on someone else's land, just because they enjoy the "character" of the 99% of the town they don't own.

If you want to make it about rights, how about this: People have the right to do what they want with their own belongings. And in particular, land owners have a right to build what they want on land that they own.

In my country the Constitution guarantees that "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation". But when the government tells a land owner that they can't replace a single-unit dwelling with a more valuable apartment building, they are doing exactly that.