(as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB.
I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods.
SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one.
Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them. They naturally want to pull the ladder up.
But if you just let them, then there's 0 new homes being built in the US. And then the economy implodes.
We have to toe a line necessarily. If you just allow the tragedy of the commons to happen 100%, then everyone loses. Everyone, including those who benefit.
Its like feudalism. Feudalism seems like a fantastic idea if you're a feudal lord. But... Its actually not. No, you lose too.
Imagine how much richer those feudal lords could have been had they not impeded the progress of Europe for hundreds of years.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
The community can express its desires by building whatever kind of housing they want on their property. What you're talking about is my property having to reflect the desires of the rest of the community.
Potential new residents should have no say, and actual new residents knew what they were before they purchased the property.
From what I've seen the actual policies being pushed by "yimbys" seem much closer to yiyby.
Yimbys go even smaller. They don't care about things that are not in their backyard.
You want an apartment building on your land? Cool, none on my land thanks.
If you care about freedom, go with yimbys. The nimbys are the ones putting encumbrances on your property.
You could just be honest and say "I want to use government power to suit my needs, even if it costs other people. But no one else can do that". It's pretty selfish but at least we'll know where you stand.
You can't know that though. Unless you hold a referendum to renew the rules every year and they pass by a 100% majority.
The only honest way to do it is without invoking government power. Move to a gated community. Have a neighborhood association, funded solely by residents, whose bylaws require that it gets to have any property up for sale in the community as long as it matches any other accepted offer on it.
If you want your "dream community" spend your own money. Don't go into other people's pockets.
The key being that anyone can use them. Everyone benefits. With restrictive zoning only property owners who want their neighborhood to remain unchanged benefit but everyone pays the cost.
We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.
Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.
The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.
The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.
If you want property to be a neighbourhood thing then you should also be required to let the benefits of your own property accrue to your whole neighbourhood and not just yourself. So no tall fences for example. How come everyone else should have to do what you want, but you shouldn't have to do what everyone else wants?
Of course.
> Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do things with their property and in their neighborhood by barring covenants and other restrictions that can be put in place by municipalities and HOAs.
If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?
I have evaluated the risk and am sufficiently certain that won’t happen. The lots around my house are far too expensive to turn into landfill.
Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.
Their framing also highlights the important financial difference between children and sewers, though: the former get less expensive and more productive over time, and the latter do the opposite, which is how the problems happen.
Fiscal soundness at the local level should not be a political issue, but IMO the progressive left has turned it into one by attacking anyone and everyone who isn't in rigid alignment with every element of their housing agenda, which includes some pretty radical (and largely undesirable) changes for most Americans. And then of course when people balk at these undesirable changes, they're called racist, selfish, or both.
I don't agree that you can really claim one part of town is subsidizing others based on the analysis from firms like urban3. Sure, if you stuck 10 businesses on a plot of land where only 1 exists now and those businesses all thrive, tax revenue would be higher for that plot of land. Is there demand for 10 more businesses in your city or town, times every drive thru fast food joint or Starbucks? Is it actually a problem that businesses are paying more in taxes than they consume in services, which lets residents pay less than they consume? Would those businesses be there if their owners couldn't live in the type of housing they wanted in the city? There are so many intertwined issues that seem impossible to decouple to me, in addition to the obvious issue that the school system is the primary consumer of tax revenue in almost every area and the taxes paid by parents don't come close to covering that expense.
It's also not a coincidence that they picked an economically depressed area with a fairly high crime rate for this analysis. If they looked at a city with residents who made the median household income for the US, or even above it, I suspect you'd see a very different picture (though the larger point is still worth considering and largely valid).
I do agree completely that the federal and state governments are just setting these places up for failure (and future rounds of external funding), but I don't see YIMBYs talking about that. They just seem to be angry that people are living more comfortably than they would like in lower density housing instead of embracing the urban lifestyle they are so passionate about, and want to force everyone to align to their vision not for fiscal stability, but for ideological reasons.
This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine.
That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.
I’d be interested as to any country that recognizes this as an explicit right.
I guess that overrides centuries of precedent.
Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?
There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.
It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.
I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?
Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.
Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!
But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.
Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.
I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.
Meanwhile: it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to see change in their neighborhood, or that they buy a property in the expectation that everything good about it will remain. But that's not a reasonable constraint for the law to operate under. You do not in fact have a strict right to control things that happen outside the borders of your own lot.
Some community restrictions are reasonable. We broadly agree that it's not OK for someone to open a tannery in the middle of a suburban residential block. Others are not; for instance, neighbors several blocks over will argue that they have a right not to endure extra traffic when our local hospital, the largest employer and best hospital in the region, plans a small addition.
The most important phenomenon here is hyperlocalism. The immediate neighbors of new proposed residential developments will reliably oppose it. They'll also make up the overwhelming majority of those who show up for public comment, because normal people don't turn out to support new apartment buildings built across town. But if you accept that resistance as a given right, you're essentially saying nothing will ever get built.
The muni I'm in has managed to go from 70,000 residents to 50,000 by consistently applying this strategy, so it's not even accurate to say it's about "change", so much as it is about strangling out as many residents as possible to achieve a targeted demography.