CDs vs. NIMBY

Can you show me an example where prices went down (in the long term)?

the problem is that all supply is not equal. in the classic NIMBY case, we’re talking about single family home owner in a neighborhood that has high housing demand, meaning it is largely built out, and they are opposing the introduction of multifamily housing to their neighborhood. in order for new multifamily units to come online, this means that over time existing SFH units are being converted/redeveloped into multifamily homes. this means that at the point where NIMBY pushback starts to matter, the number of SFH in a neighborhood has already largely peaked, and that the supply of that type of home will only ever go down and become more scarce (especially as a percentage of overall units). as more people move into a neighborhood in new multifamily buildings (and bring jobs, businesses, services, and general opportunity) the demand for that neighborhood goes up as well—demand is not fixed, and often goes up with supply, and depending on other macro factors can even outpace it if the agglomeration benefits are working properly. in this case, the NIMBY’s SFH value goes up, because the land value is much higher due to redevelopment potential, and also because that type of home is scarce and highly desirable to wealthy people who want proximity to opportunity in an urban place with the privacy and luxury of a detached SFH.

tl;dr: “while demand remains steady” is doing a lot of heavy lifting that doesn’t really make sense in a real dynamic urban system.

LVT : housing :: guaranteed income policy : labor.

It's not a bad idea, but it doesn't moot the underlying questions, because it will never be deployed at the scale where it would be dispositive.

Are there more housing units in Manhattan or Dubuque?

Which one has more expensive housing units?

Part of the purpose of development is to make more shit happen and increase demand. It's rarely just "new increaesed supply vs constant demand"

Or rather: a demand that would result in anyone producing new housing units does not happen in a vacuum. And outpacing that rate of demand rarely happens from construction alone.

He said home values, not prices.

The value of a home to an owner should be higher than the price, otherwise they should sell and move. (We're talking theory here, there are a lot of good reasons why people don't do what they should).

Building more houses will decrease prices, but increase value. Until the two meet and then the new houses will stay unsold and will stop getting built.

I wonder if it’s akin to how adding lanes to a road doesn’t reduce traffic. Once the road has more capacity, people use it more, using up the added capacity and leaving it in the same congested condition.

I think their theory with housing was similar. Added supply would create the conditions for increased demand to fill it, and everything would equal out. Maybe a short term dip (as is the case with traffic), but not a a long-term downtrend.

Bringing people to the city could also act as more of a feeder for future single-family home buyers in the area, and those still do have a more limited supply.

I think the big question will be what happens if we build a ton home housing right as the baby boomers are vacating their homes. Is this a short term crunch, where building to meet it will create a surplus of housing over the next 10-15 years that will tank the market?

Increasing supply always decreases price compared to a counterfactual without the supply but with all else equal.

If anything, my experience is that NIMBY's also strongly oppose things that would reduce traffic, noise and pollution. Because a low traffic zone, reduced speed limits, or bicycle lanes, would infringe on their ability to drive their car everywhere without any disturbance.

Don't forget the gas powered leaf blowers. A whole symphony of them.

Do urban centers deal with NIMBY vs YIMBY? It was always my impression that this was more of a suburban thing… multi-family or mixed use developments going into areas that are all single-family homes.

These are people who left the urban area to get away from the density of the city, but didn’t want to move far enough away from conveniences for it to actually be quiet.

These are area that typical have poor public transit (at least the places I’ve lived), so adding more density does add more traffic and noise. Offering alternatives to address that is a decades long project that requires a lot of political will and significant inconveniences for residents during construction.

I lived in a city that implemented a lot of road diets, while building more apartments and condos, and it was a mess. If you happened to live downtown and were staying in a walkable area downtown, it was fine. But getting to and from downtown, to go grocery shopping, was painful. It was possible to live outside that downtown ring for easier access to the surrounding area, but then going downtown for dinner had significant friction, as they didn’t have good solutions. It was either a very slow and infrequent bus, or use a car.

> Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.

I used to live a block away from a Metra stop in Chicagoland. I now live near where two interstates cross and there are a lot of street racers. While I do hate the bikers, when those trains would stack up and 3 or 4 of them would spend 5 minutes blowing their whistles back and forth constantly while I was trying to sleep, it would drive me insane. I can hear the trains from where I am now, but I’m a bit further away and it’s not like those rush hour Metra trains.

I have the feeling there are a lot of different situations with trains. I had an AirBnb in London and 3 days in I realize the window (covered with curtains) had been wide open the whole time. When I looked outside there was a ton of train tracks, but I didn’t even notice any noise.

>I feel like the main thing that NIMBY fear is change, any change.

Broadly disparaging large, diverse groups of people like this is what makes things harder, not easier. This is tribalism.

But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are? Why does it need to share the parking, facilities, retail, roads, schools, etc. of something that was built and has been maintained and evolved for 50-100 years? Why not build the high density with it's own transit, roads, malls, parks, schools etc?

This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. They develop a high density area with new facilities that can grow and evolve for how people want to live there, rather than mowing down houses (in communities of color) or plopping 5-7 story apartments without parking or parks right next to single story SFH, as developers like to do in the US.

I assume it's because it's more profitable for the developers. They don't have to build anything, but the part they can immediately sell, and they ride on the value of the neighborhood created by the people who already live there. I think some infill near commercial districts or malls also faces much less "NIMBY" criticism.

To give a more personal example: I like the location and view of where you live. I like the plants you water, and you keep the house looking clean. I want to just build another large room on top of your house, where me and a bunch of friends will live. We'll just share the stairs, hallways, and front door, and of course our share of the water and electric bill. We probably won't be too loud most nights, and usually when friends come over they won't use your bathroom or take anything from your rooms, or at least we'll ask them not to. Sorry about the construction noise while we do it, and just think you'll get to meet so many new people! Sorry that the part of your house you still own will be worth less than your neighbors when we're done, but that's the price you need to pay for living in a nice place and keeping it up.

The argument that SFH infrastructure repair is subsidized by new building is a much better one. Of course that was true of the tax increases and subsidy of the original town, when the SFH were built as well.

If all the things you describe came to fruition, the current residents will have to live with the consequences of their decisions and suffer a lower quality of life (which they don't want to do), and the problem would resolve itself.

Or in reality, desirable locations remain desirable, and the current residents who had a hand in making it desirable have a right to prevent a reduction of their quality of life for the benefit of people who would prefer to live there but are unable to successfully compete with others in the housing market.

Absolutely, but this is just the opposite logical extension, corollary to "if we allow infinite development, there will only be a dystopia of super-high-density living everywhere".

Both things are bad, and we must "prioritize" a balance, not one or the other. It's perfectly possible to build inward/upward in some places, and outward in other places. It's perfectly possible to build affordable/high-density housing without ruining existing areas. It's perfectly possible to accept that some places are highly desirable because an infinite number of people can not live there - that certain amounts (high amounts) of development defeat the entire point by removing the desirability of those locations. We can strike a reasonable balance between allowing developers to do whatever they want without regard for infrastructure or community, vs, on the other end, not allowing any new construction in already-populated areas.

We can expand existing desirable areas reasonably, while also building new desirable areas, but that's difficult because it requires time and investment, and in the meantime it's not as "desirable" as people would like. The simple fact is that people are reproducing within and migrating into desirable areas at a rate that is not compatible with keeping those areas desirable, and developers are leveraging this conflict to pretend they can't build anywhere else, hence the crisis.

More shortly: You're understating the importance of quality of life (the concept of "home" is one of the most important things in the history of humanity), and implying a false conflict that we can't both have both quality of life and more development.

No need to be obnoxious. Just say that your opinion/experience is different.

It seems natural to me that the majority of emotions regarding one's home and community are in regards to the idea of home and community, rather than their monetary value, since that's the obvious human perspective. And of course you can care about both things at once, which maybe you assumed I was omitting? I only said the the majority of people care about their home/community, and implied that I believe it's the stronger emotion, not that the majority of people do not also care about the investment (which does materially affect their actual life, as opposed to the more common image of a wealthy "investor").

I could be wrong. It's a sentiment, so it's not something easily measured (unless you fall for the trap of over-interpreting statistics, which is common in an engineering-minded folks).

Development raises land value. That's the entire reason it's done, after all. Look at the cost of land in Manhattan vs suburban Atlanta. In the supply-choked cities in the US, development isn't gonna tank the wealth of land-owners, quite the opposite. There are exceptions, but they're "this is the largest available plot in Beverly Hills"-style outliers.

What people want, even in those denser supply-choked cities, is basically just stability. "I don't want to be forced out because a bunch of rich people move in next door, and I don't want it it turn into something dramatically different experience-wise than what I bought."

If everyone in those areas just wanted to maximize the financial side they'd be looking to flip their single family home for a fourplex and put the profit into another, etc etc.

"We don't want this to turn into Manhattan" is NOT what anyone owning land in a maybe-could-turn-into-Manhattan place if they were just interested in the money.

(That's less viable in the middle-of-the-country suburbs because the "increased land value" of the old empty pasture next door could still result in lower land value for your on-the-suburban-fringe neighborhood, if there's high amounts of empty land and more new identical suburbs popping up. But that's not where the problem is most acute, anyway!)

You're confusing amount of money with amount of people.

Financial investor mindset is a real and dramatic example, but a minority in the set of reasons that individual people care about the community they worked so hard to live in.

> On the other hand, if you're in an inner ring suburb

I live in an urban village, and my taxes and utility fees _already_ disproportionately go to fix the issues caused by new development. I'll be paying around $150000 in incremental property taxes for a failed light rail that does not go anywhere close to me.

Yet the surrounding streets are already overloaded with traffic because the city allowed developers to construct dense housing about 2 decades _before_ the supposed arrival of the rail.

I see absolutely NO upsides from increased density pretty much ANYWHERE. Density is universally bad except in artificial formations like Singapore.