Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs
i.stanford.edu
i.stanford.edu
That said, the public process in general (aside from NIMBYs) is necessary and useful. The most prominent example from my experience is the public opposition marshaled by Cambridge MA against the original "Scheme Z" Charles River crossing plan for the Big Dig. From an engineering point-of-view, it made perfect sense, but it would have been a hideous monstrosity that the city would have been stuck with for 50 years. The opposition made the project go back to the drawing board and resulted in the iconic Zakim bridge. The public process worked.
In my own direct experience, there have been times when me or my team missed something on an analysis (we may have mistaken a home for a garage for example) and the public process makes us aware of that so we can properly account for impacts. It works. Yet the process can be hijacked by NIMBY's and if those opponents know who to work the politics, it can cause real problems.
The problem is trying to separate the NIMBYs from the legitimate concerns. Planners and public staff have been trying to deal with this for decades with no real progress. If you eliminate the public process, you get the original Boston Central Artery where the state came in, bulldozed entire neighborhoods at pennies on the dollar, and constructed an eyesore that divided the city for decades. With the process, you get the Big Dig where a whole bunch of interests use Section 4(f), NEPA, MEPA, and Army Corp of Engineer regulations to blackmail the project into funding dozens of pet projects.
This is definitely an area in need of disruption. If you have ideas, get them out there.
All the libertarians want to use any government problem as an excuse to just scrap the whole government. But you make it clear that the problem is not ALL government, the problem is BAD government, and government CAN be improved.
One response would be to push as much of the decision-making process as possible down to the local level, but that creates its own problem, as well as inefficiencies.
Obviously, it's a hard problem; if it wasn't, it would have been solved by now.
The question is whether you have a democratically-run municipal or regional/county government with the power to make urban-planning decisions, or whether you instead resolve everything through a tangled network of property-rights lawsuits.
Trial by jury works pretty well. Instead of a public hearing by interested parties, a random bunch of citizens could be tasked with reviewing the process, with a skilled arbitrator (like a judge) ensuring submissions by special interest group are done in a fair way.
Cars are the epitomy of an externality and are inherently anti-community and anti-commons. A vehicle that can move at 20mph to 70+ mph and comes in contact with human beings (as opposed to being segregated from them by barriers or being buried underground like a train) can only ever be detrimental to the commons. Everyone with a car wants it to move slowly around their own neighborhood and fast through everyone else's.
Yet healthcare is the total opposite of anti-community !
It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.
Anything that gets the people who actually live there out on the street, particularly in the nighttime hours, increases security.
Our modern, sterile "city planning" where everything is separated and zoned off into their own areas is a huge factor in the decline of our quality of life.
For an extensive treatment of this thesis, see the work of Jane Jacobs.
She argues that people are less likely to engage in any type of antisocial behavior when they're in their own neighborhoods, where people know them.
I'm not interested in the "is copyright infringement theft" debate. Words mean what people understand them to mean. "Stealing" encodes a moral condemnation of the activity, which can be objectionable when it is used to frame the debate. But it's also a lot easier to say than "acquiring a relative net benefit" or the like. Moreover, I'm just using the author's terms. All I mean to say is that constructing traffic obstructions and obstructing the construction of power plants are either both stealing or neither are, and in any event they're both socially expensive.
>It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.
It's still the same thing. You're either arguing that we shouldn't have pubs at all or you're arguing that we shouldn't have them in your neighborhood. If you're arguing the second, you're still a "bad NIMBY" because the pub then has to go in someone else's neighborhood and you're just foisting the cost of the drunkards onto those people.
And if you're arguing the first, we tried that already (see: prohibition) and it was a disaster. In the general case, there will be some things that are always net undesirable, but the people qualified to make that determination are scientists and statisticians, not the self-interested local residents in whatever place they propose to construct a potentially beneficial thing with known local negative externalities.
Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets.
Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red light). Split revenue with the city.
Hmm, maybe I should run this by my city council. :)
So its only the 'vicious' ones that have any effect at all.
Since people like even numbers, the standard speed limit in america should be 30mph, not 25mph.
Translation: I actually support giant SUVs doing 40 mph on my road. It's those goddamn Miatas that I want to slow down to 25.
Consideration for (unexpected) pedestrians (children etc) and cyclists seems to the primary motivation for low speed limits on residential side streets. I think that makes sense.
A speeding camera is a better solution than a speedbump. You turn the problem into a revenue stream. And then you'll create a negative incentive for locals to reduce the speed limit even further.
The proposed solution to study the consequences could also be returned and simplified - to mesure the impact of the proposed changed on property value and to refuse by default any change that would raise it.
(the best way would be to accept changes that increase the global utility, but it might be hard to measure - giving a number to the increased property value would be hard, but giving a number due to lost time due to lower speeds or other inconveniences would be even harder)
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/09/us-politics-of-medicin...
Very interesting indeed- it seems to be the simplest pitfall of democracy : when the repartition of voters becomes detached from the repartition of the consequences and advantages.
It's difficult to see how this is at the expense of the majority since it's not exclusive: the majority will eventually become members of the beneficial group. I.e., why not have a policy that benefits the elderly since most of us will one day be elderly?
If I were a senior, I could vote in benefits that today would benefit me, but create enough budget pressure that later groups would receive benefits that are worse than what I receive now.
Even though it may theoretically make sense if the reallocation is frictionless, that's not how it turns out.
In this specific case, a better investment strategy is to put the money where you will get the most of it, i.e. on the health of people still young, and reduce the investment as the people age.
We also have health problems when we are young. All things being equal, we are also more likely to take advantage of healthcare "done" at a young age than at an older age - if only because of the longer lifespan.
I can't see any logic behind medicare - money should be spend on young adult so that they can become productive again, not on old retired people.
If we had technology to make death avoidable or just far away enough than say being 80 became being young, it would be wise to spend healthcare money on 80 years old.
At the present time it is not.
If you feel like emigrating from a country where this became government policy, I would feel like immigrating to that country, if only because of the better economic prospects removing part of the healthcare "tax" would bring - and hopefully the other good policies that might come from such a country.
And BTW I'm not at all against spending money for healthcare of 80 years old people (and I hope I'll be 80 years old someday!) as long as it is their money. Not tax money, not my money ? Then it's not my problem either.
You know the saying - it is far too easy to spend other people money.
Middle class people found themselves in situations where they were forced to make choices that were either morally questionable or difficult to bear. What do you do when your parents lose their faculties and require care?
Before Medicare and Medicaid, you had three basic choices: pay for nursing care at great expense and impact you ability to provide for your kids, care for them yourself to the degree that you can (ie, cramming the kids into one bedroom and doing what you can, probably destroying your marriage in the process), or essentially discard them and allow them to die, which is morally reprehensible and hard in the soul.
Forget about the bunkum of modern politics. Do you think it is ethically or morally sound to cut off access to healthcare to the elderly? Should my father die of congestive heart failure because my family doesn't have $30k for a cardiac stent?
In my opinion, the answer is no. Society as a whole should provide some rational level of quality health care to all.
Its a minima of road-per-house, thus a minima of cost. More greenspace, quieter neighborhoods.
This American habit of gridding roads everywhere has a huge impact on quality-of-life, costs a bundle, and stems from what? Some surveyors' sense of symmetry?
I think it's fine for people to desire quieter neighborhoods in this era of high population density. I don't think that the people in all of those examples were pursuing change for the financial gain.
Policymaking based on parochial interests without regard to the effect those policies have on the rest of a city tends to be a bad strategy. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in many cities.
So when I hear about communities in Palo Alto "viscously" blocking traffic, I wonder if perhaps they are simply attempting to return traffic levels that were present when they bought their houses to raise their children.
Now, there is another route, along a major roadway, with a higher speed limit and more lanes. But its not a direct route and is 0.8 miles longer. I doubt that the quality of life of this new community would be severely impacted if they were "encouraged" to take this existing route.
Anyway, take a video of people barreling down the hill and send it to a city council member. Newspapers also like this sort of thing when it's egregious enough.
When should it be resolved?
It's definitely the case that most drivers gain a bit of speed going down a hill, but it's been that way forever and it's not something you're going to change. So if one of your main concerns is the speed of traffic outside, don't buy a house at the bottom of a freaking hill.
It's fine for people to desire see things (either quiet ,increased property values, or both), but the point of the article as I see it is that they don't necessarily deserve to have them when it comes at the expense of even a mild cost to lots of people.
That argument has been used to justify demolishing inner-city neighborhoods to make way for overhead freeways benefiting suburban commuters.
And therefore it's a real pleasure to bike, walk, or take transit.
Having moved away from Berkeley to a city that prioritizes car travel above all else, I find I choose now to drive two blocks rather than walk because it's just unpleasant to get buzzed by cars doing 50 in a 35 on residential streets.
How in the world is that honorable? "No halfway house in my backyard" means "halfway house in someone else's backyard, please" (or "no halfway house at all, please").
I don't, actually. Anyone wanna clue me in?
*But why the reference to tags.js? Javascript is not used.
1. Because real estate "always goes up", and because Americans are delusional in general and seem to have a housing fetish, people have the deluded belief that they aren't paying for housing but investing in something that will always appreciate. This mentality creates bubbles. By the way, we're still in a real estate bubble-- just in a valley of one, and the "star" locations have barely dipped (yet).
2. Because people have absurd quantities (often over 30% of income and 80% of wealth) of their resources invested in housing, they have strong economic incentives toward NIMBYism. If I were going to lose 50c/dollar on 90% of my net worth (assuming I had any, but that's another story... don't work for shitty startups, kids) because of a speed limit change, I'd be pretty pissed too. The real problem is not locational change (necessary) but overinvestment in an asset that is highly sensitive to such change. It's simply not wise to invest 90% of your wealth in an asset whose value can plummet because some piece of shit decides to clear-cut a nearby hill and ruin your view... but some people have no other choice because housing is so stupidly expensive.
3. NIMBYism actually forces property values to stay high. Housing should be worth about $100-125 per square-foot, with about a 50-100% premium for top locations (urban areas) due to increased construction costs and reduced transportation costs (proximity to desirable places). Housing over $250/ft^2 would be an extreme anomaly were it not for outright regulatory corruption (read: NIMBY). However, due to the extreme price inelasticity of housing, even slight scarcities (1-2 percent) cause huge upward movements in prices. Hence the price levels observed in Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder up behind them.
People also tend to inappropriately overvalue land, given how easily its value can be reduced to near-zero by nearby goings-on over which one has no control. For most land-- a very small set of trophy locations being excepted-- the value is a function of proximity and the fair value can be determined from transportation costs for an average working person in that area, and land would be pretty close to free (in comparison to the construction costs for the house itself) except for the artificial scarcity imposed by NIMBYism.
It ends very badly. Bubbles, cultural rot, and urban decay. People associate expensive real estate with success, but the most expensive city (real estate wise) is Luanda, where more than half of the residents are in poverty. Moscow and Sao Paulo aren't cheap, either, even though those cities have massive poverty problems.
This is so unbelievably true of the UK at the moment. In fact, we have the problem even worse given the higher population density (almost ten times that of the US).
Here the baby boomer generation got rich by sitting on the property ladder. Now we have a generation who simply can't afford to get on the ladder. Average prices are 20 times average wages in parts of the country.
Existing homeowners are paying down their mortgages with record low interest rates, while there are no mortgages available for first-time buyers, so the wealth gap is just getting larger.
Oh well. Here's to a lifetime of living with the parents while we cruise towards a pensions disaster...
Edit: By way of example, this is what £90,000 ($145,000) gets you in London these days: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210436/
You know things are seriously broken when a senior Tory minister writes a book entitled "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back.".
NIMBYism has a lot to do with this, but the whole system is rigged against the young. We have a generation of teenagers, many of whom have a more mature understanding of issues such as student loans than older generations, but are not allowed to have a say.
BRB: Setting up a political party to represent Generation Y. Abolish the minimum voting age, massive housing expansion, force older generations to retrospectively pay tuition fees, reform drug policy, abolish copyright protection, appoint Cheryl Cole as the Queen, etc.
How'd you arrive at this number? Citation needed?
In southern California, many of the highest priced areas have seen property values literally fall by half. I know many other such areas around the country have been similarly affected by the housing collapse, though I haven't seen any data measuring just top-end properties.
My theory is that this is an artifact of the damage done to job markets everywhere else by the recession. The few places where the job market remains strong are seeing rents hold ground or even increase, on account of what is effectively supply destruction of an extremely inelastic good.
I agree with your theories about rent in these areas.