That Viral Photo of San Francisco NIMBYs Shows Why Housing Is Winning
inpractice.yimbyaction.org
inpractice.yimbyaction.org
I’m not sure how property taxes work in California, but in my state the increases are capped each year and are reassessed when a home is bought by a new owner. So telling them to move somewhere else not only hurts their ability to age in place, but could also have a significant impact on property taxes, to the point they may not be able to afford the move if on a fixed income… at least not within the area they call home.
I find it interesting how excited YIMBY people get about making people feel like they’re no longer welcome in their own neighborhoods. They seem to claim to have all this empathy, yet they can’t seem to put themselves in the shoes of one of these home owners.
There's plenty of opportunity to build apartments for old people to live in the area they're already in, if they can tolerate the shock and indignity of trading a detached single family home with a back yard for an apartment.
If this logic was applied to everything else people would riot. Imagine if existing local businesses could veto a new competitor opening up because it would create "too much traffic," or if you could veto someone buying a car because it takes up space on your street. We only accept this anti-competitive, anti-growth mindset when it comes to housing.
Someone just moved in down the street from me with multiple work trucks and a trailer that they park on the street. It’s created a choke point in the primary means in and out of the neighborhood. They treat the area like a private cul-de-sac. I wish someone could have vetoed all of that stuff. It’s makes every trip to and from my home worse. I’m pretty sure they are also violating parking laws by parking too close to stop signs and intersections with crosswalks.
I don’t want to be that guy that calls the city to complain, but I think about it and curse to myself every time I need to navigate their maze of commercial vehicles in my residential area.
> We only accept this anti-competitive, anti-growth mindset when it comes to housing.
I don’t think this is the right framing of the mindset. They bought homes under certain conditions and with certain expectations. They would not have bought those homes if they were next to a high-rise. They want to maintain the environment that made the area valuable to them in the first place.
It’s not all that different than what happened during the national highway project. Neighborhoods that were once nice had a highway placed next to them that cut them off from the rest of the city and fundamentally changed the experience of living in those areas. Decades later people are still upset and we’ve seen effort to try and right some of those wrongs, but it’s not easy.
The YIMBY people and those who want to reconnect these neighborhoods torn apart by highways, are often of the same mindset and trying to help the same groups of people. Yet the ideas of growth or anti-growth seem selectively applied based on the goal. One could argue the highways were necessary for growth as well, but was it ok to fundamental change or devalue communities to do it? The difference I see is that the SF situation is framed as rich white people, while the highway projects impacted more poor and black communities. If destroying one was wrong, they’re probably both wrong.
That said, I’m not sure what your point is here. Renters still vote. Though they don’t have the same skin in the game that a home owner has, they aren’t excluded from the democratic process.
I don’t feel like I changed social classes when moving from an apartment to a house, and don’t think I would lower my social class by going back to renting.
Having some wealthy developers come to town, who aren’t part of the community, and ignore the democratic process for financial gain, sounds like the a more damaging form of classism. We’re seeing this play out in real time with AI data centers. One an hour from me was voted down, but is happening anyway, because the billionaires sued and the town can’t afford to fight corporate lawyers, and folded. Now the town just has to deal with it, and the developers don’t really care what happens them. They aren’t people to them, just impediments.
There’s a reason all the people at these things are in the same socioeconomic demographic
Besides, most of the jobs in SF will be done by AI soon. Look what's happening to SOMA.
Those 80 year-olds are going to hold onto their homes for decades!
If this is a problem that solves itself, it would have solved itself already.
How do you think major cities in the US grew in the 1800s? It wasn't because of perfect zoning or astronomical land prices.
“When I consider the structure of power in American politics, it often cleaves along lines that have nothing to do with being a billionaire. Homeowners dominate land use politics, professional associations capture licensing rules, industry representatives shape low-salience regulations on their issues because few other people care enough to engage. All of this can produce profoundly unequal outcomes without being the work of a coherent oligarchic class.”