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Being priced out of their home is one option. The other option is to ease pressure on home prices by laying down the NIMBYism and letting more housing be built

Being priced out of their home is one option. The other option is to ease pressure on home prices by laying down the NIMBYism and letting more housing be built in your community in a sustainable way! This is the whole the point of self-corrective market forces: sure, you can choose to keep your low-density housing in a region that is attracting demand with great weather and strong industry, but prices are going to appreciate if you keep your doors closed to newcomers. Keep the door closed long enough and your self-defeating actions will force yourself out as well (see palo alto, where they now need to subsidize housing for anyone making under $250k/yr so they can have people like teachers and firefighters still live in the community). The fact that taxes DON'T increase with demand distorts the self-corrective market forces that would otherwise stop people from closing the door to affordability.

gozur88 11y ago
>The other option is to ease pressure on home prices by laying down the NIMBYism and letting more housing be built in your community in a sustainable way! That doesn't actually work in the real world. If you live in a desirable area, and you increase the housing supply in such a way that the area is still desirable, as soon as the price drops a tiny bit people move in from the outside and drive it back up again.
- skewart 11y ago
  That can happen at the small scale - neighborhoods or suburban villages. It doesn't really happen at the city or metro area scale. (If you have evidence of urban areas that have allowed lots of construction during periods of high population and job growth - cities like Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta - and have also seen high housing prices, please share it; I'm genuinely curious). Part of the problem in the bay area is that there is minimal cooperation between the dozens of municipal governments to allow more housing. None of them want to be the first or only one to do it out of fear that they'll just end up with more density and high prices. It's a bit of a prisoner's dillema.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    It happened in Southern California. In the area where I grew up the cities allowed developers to build hundreds of homes at a time - it's probably four times as dense as it was when I lived there. Orange groves and strawberry fields and outdoor movie theaters and old military bases were all leveled and turned into housing tracts. But housing didn't get any cheaper - the state added 20 million people from 1970 to 2010, because there were jobs and it had the reputation of being a nice place to live.

gozur88 11y ago

>The other option is to ease pressure on home prices by laying down the NIMBYism and letting more housing be built in your community in a sustainable way! That doesn't actually work in the real world. If you live in a desirable area, and you increase the housing supply in such a way that the area is still desirable, as soon as the price drops a tiny bit people move in from the outside and drive it back up again.

skewart 11y ago
That can happen at the small scale - neighborhoods or suburban villages. It doesn't really happen at the city or metro area scale. (If you have evidence of urban areas that have allowed lots of construction during periods of high population and job growth - cities like Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta - and have also seen high housing prices, please share it; I'm genuinely curious). Part of the problem in the bay area is that there is minimal cooperation between the dozens of municipal governments to allow more housing. None of them want to be the first or only one to do it out of fear that they'll just end up with more density and high prices. It's a bit of a prisoner's dillema.
- gozur88 11y ago
  It happened in Southern California. In the area where I grew up the cities allowed developers to build hundreds of homes at a time - it's probably four times as dense as it was when I lived there. Orange groves and strawberry fields and outdoor movie theaters and old military bases were all leveled and turned into housing tracts. But housing didn't get any cheaper - the state added 20 million people from 1970 to 2010, because there were jobs and it had the reputation of being a nice place to live.