A data centre provides almost no jobs (except during construction), and draws a significant amount of resources (electricity, water, noise pollution).
Why should any community want something that only enriches Amazon taking up vast swaths of land in their backyard?
The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.
Maybe it doesn’t benefit some individuals, but the community improves.
All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.
> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.
Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!
Most importantly, location!
Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.
There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.
I think it would have been pointless though, because LVT doesn't stand a chance: Conservatives would hear "tax" and immediately say "no", and progressives would be unhappy that their elderly mom wouldn't be able to live alone in their 6-bedroom childhood home.
Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.
Plenty of tax breaks though.
YIMBYs also regularly support work on non-regulatory barriers, such as the rent increase caps in California (ABA1482), and have even supported social housing bills in California.
There's also lots of talk of transfer taxes amongst YIMBYs, see for example: https://cayimby.org/blog/if-you-tax-the-things-you-want-less...
There are two types of discussions about YIMBYs: 1) that by far-leftists that see the battle as ideological and about regulation/deregulation and trickle-down housing vs. revolution, and 2) the actual YIMBY activism on the ground which is all about more housing and making housing less of a financial and emotional burden for renters.
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...
[1] https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.
> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.
The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.
I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.
I've checked Zillow though.
There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.
The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.
"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.
Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.
Huh? There are housing shortages in plenty of low-density places.