7 ms·

"Sadly, the bill is already encountering opposition from homeowners’ groups, which are no doubt eager to push up their property values." My impression is that

by ISL 9y ago

"Sadly, the bill is already encountering opposition from homeowners’ groups, which are no doubt eager to push up their property values." My impression is that neighborhood groups aren't generally interested in raising property values, but rather in preserving the less-developed neighborhood in which they have invested and chosen to live.

mjevans 9y ago
I agree, it's more the "I got mine, screw everyone else" mentality.
- robotrout 9y ago
  A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life, either by increased crime, or just by increased congestion, increased noise, decreased property values, and possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture. To minimize these concerns in the way you do seems non-productive and can only lead to more polarization. These types of initiatives stem from Agenda 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 proponents that, while advocating many admirable things, tend to completely ignore the feelings of the populations they are intent on engineering a radically different future for. I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    ...guaranteed to lower your quality of life... This is why many people (not me!) support draconian immigration restrictions.
    - robotrout 9y ago
      I assume you are talking about Japan and Israels immigration restrictions. I support their right to them, personally, but I know there are many Americans who riot and march because those countries restrict their immigration so carefully.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        No, I was thinking of an American politician who has been in the news quite a bit, who is a big opponent of immigration. He really represents the values of his NIMBY supporters.
  - Arbalest 9y ago
    If you're worried infill will cause cultural degradation, then perhaps your culture is not well suited to centralisation. That is, not suited to city living. Why else use Tokyo as an example of the success of infill? Japan is famous for it's low (petty at least) crime rate The point of decreased property values is even mentioned in the article as desirable and here you are saying it isn't. The objective here is to make housing affordable, not the preservation of wealth centres.
  - spoonie 9y ago
    If the lot your house sits on in rezoned to allow for taller buildings your property’s value will very likely go up. It is definitely less conveneient to have to move out of your house and wait for something bigger to be built.
  - xracy 9y ago
    This is the definition of "vaguely racist": "increased crime... and possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture" Don't want none of them other demographics moving here to increase the crime, and marginalize the culture.
    - robotrout 9y ago
      If you look at any crime heat map of a city, you will note, hopefully with no surprise, that crime rate is inversely proportional to income distribution. If low income housing enters an area, the crime will go up. You may be fine with that, but you have to imagine that the already established residents of that area might not wish their crime rate to increase. Calling those concerns selfish is just name calling.
      - xracy 9y ago
        Yeah, You'll notice I called what you said racist, specifically because your statement didn't tie what you were saying to income, but instead to "demographics".
        xienze 9y ago
        “Demographics can refer to any subdivision of a population, it’s not a synonym for “race”.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      Is that bad? If someone lives in a community that is 90% their race, with their neighbors listening to their kind of music, engaging in their kind of activities, going to the same kind of events, not wanting to become a 10% minority? It would be like a Chinese person not wanting to move to India or vice versa.
    - Mononokay 9y ago
      . . . It wasn't, though? He could easily be talking about Midwesterners moving there, too. He never brought up race, and thinking "Increased crime rates!? Demographic shifts by [Anything can go here, try "Neoconservatives" or "Neoliberals" or "Social Conservatives" or "Fiscally Conservative Liberals"]??!? HE MUST BE THINKING ABOUT [RACE]!" I think they're not the racist one here.
  - arebop 9y ago
    Cities are built on network effects. It's the suburbs specifically that are conceived and designed such that growth and diversity destroys value.
  - devopsforlyfe 9y ago
    > I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes. It was always a futile dream, mostly propagated by people who themselves enjoy small towns and certainly not "shared by all". It turns out that many knowledge workers actually like big cities for the leisure options, health services, people and neighbourhood diversity, much bigger selection of potential life partners, and high availability of jobs.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Circular? Remote workers means, there aren't more jobs just because you're in a city. As for neighborhoods, an expanding cityscape of just more apartment blocks means no neighborhoods at all. As for leisure options, a beach shared by 1M other people is not much of an option. Living in Colorado has orders of magnitude more leisure options for instance.
      - lotsofpulp 9y ago
        Isn’t that why Colorado cities are some of the hottest markets to be in right now? I’ve heard a lot of complaining from people in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, etc.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    > A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life Speak for yourself. My quality of life has been very positively correlated with population density. It's why I'm settling down on the east side of San Francisco, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new development there.
- Arbalest 9y ago
  The term for that is NIMBY. Frankly, this is not news. The fact it has such an acronym means it is well established.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  If developers were given the chance they would turn every plot of land into a Kowloon walled city. We need someone pushing the other way to keep some spaces livable.
  - sdwa 9y ago
    We do, but clearly the balance right now is far too much in the favour of the naked self interest of shameless home owners. I mean a place to live is not a luxury, it's up there with food and water.
    - zeth___ 9y ago
      And if you're starving and there is free food one block over you go and eat there. There is plenty of very cheap land to live in. The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now. The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it. Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        > The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it. 10 minutes away: $1,000,000 20 minutes away: $2,000,000? 60 minutes away: $32,000,000?
        zeth___ 9y ago
        P_0 * exp(-k*d) Where P_0 is the price in the heart of the city, d is the effective distance to the heart of the city and k is a factor to get units matching up.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Usually saying one quantity "grows with" another quantity would mean that one rising causes the other to rise, not fall.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I think often it's more complex than that. If prices are high enough in LA, it might actually be a case of "I got mine, screw everyone else" mentality, but I think much more often is more nuanced. People work hard to afford s home, and how do you explain to someone that saved for five plus years to afford a home that because of a new housing policy, it's possible their home could drop quite a bit in value, and not just because of normal cyclical market forces (meaning it could take decades to reach the same real value, if ever)? It's a hard decision to support legislation or policies that may may hurt double digit percentages of your populace, just because of bad timing on their part. At the same time, the need for cheaper housing is real. It's just not as simple as rich vs poor.
  - davidw 9y ago
    People were (and many still are) convinced that if black people move in next door, that the value of their house would fall. So they created policies, and acted, both formally and informally, to prevent that. These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified. Maybe one day we'll view exclusionary zoning in the same way. Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does: at a certain point, people become less enthusiastic about investing in new housing, so it's a much smoother curve that, realistically, is probably not going to crash prices. In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      > ... These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified. Sure, but does that mean the family of five that was finally able to afford a home last year after scraping for years should pay for that? They could even be in the same demographic as the original victims of those exclusionary policies. > Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does I'm not so sure, depending on how it's handled. Housing is a free market, and as such it's subject not just to supply and demand, but people's expectations of supply and demand. If I just bought a house and policies were announced that I thought might not just stagnate my house value, but actually reduce it over time, inflation-be-damned, I would be mightily tempted to sell if I had options. Get enough people doing that, and you might have a run-away market drop. The people who mainly benefit from that are those that are poised to take advantage of the situation on short notice (those with money available already and can take advantage of the eventual rebound). There are obviously ways you could crater the housing market in an area on purpose through policy, so it's not out of the question it could happen accidentally. I'm mainly arguing for people to see both sides and try to prevent that, and soften any blow and be prepared to counter a market that looks to be behaving irrationally. > In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value. I agree. I just think it's a complex situation that requires nuanced policy and constant attention, and isn't as simple as "build more houses" implies.
zkms 9y ago
> rather in preserving the less-developed neighborhood in which they have invested and chosen to live. If they didn't buy the property, they should have absolutely zero say about what kind of housing someone else builds on their property. Central-planning-via-veto (the effective state of USian land use law) is utterly broken in its giving veto authority to the most meddlesome moralistic normies on anything that they might not like, whether it be a cell tower, an apartment building, or bloody clothes lines (not kidding about the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_No...). That these people (the Twitter thread here has some prime material https://twitter.com/maelig/status/975219562433015808 https://twitter.com/maelig/status/975219562433015808) have the ability to obstruct the construction of housing (to the point that there are people literally living, shitting, and dying in US streets because housing is so unaffordable) is heinous. This is not how well-functioning societies look like.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  The UK has a similar homelessness problem as far as I can tell from perusing the BBC. Do you think the causes are the same? I only keep up with the news there so not certain of historical trends except impending Brexit has seemed to have cause a slight dip in housing prices in London.

by ISL 9y ago

mjevans 9y ago

I agree, it's more the "I got mine, screw everyone else" mentality.

robotrout 9y ago
A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life, either by increased crime, or just by increased congestion, increased noise, decreased property values, and possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture. To minimize these concerns in the way you do seems non-productive and can only lead to more polarization. These types of initiatives stem from Agenda 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 proponents that, while advocating many admirable things, tend to completely ignore the feelings of the populations they are intent on engineering a radically different future for. I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  ...guaranteed to lower your quality of life... This is why many people (not me!) support draconian immigration restrictions.
  - robotrout 9y ago
    I assume you are talking about Japan and Israels immigration restrictions. I support their right to them, personally, but I know there are many Americans who riot and march because those countries restrict their immigration so carefully.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      No, I was thinking of an American politician who has been in the news quite a bit, who is a big opponent of immigration. He really represents the values of his NIMBY supporters.
- Arbalest 9y ago
  If you're worried infill will cause cultural degradation, then perhaps your culture is not well suited to centralisation. That is, not suited to city living. Why else use Tokyo as an example of the success of infill? Japan is famous for it's low (petty at least) crime rate The point of decreased property values is even mentioned in the article as desirable and here you are saying it isn't. The objective here is to make housing affordable, not the preservation of wealth centres.
- spoonie 9y ago
  If the lot your house sits on in rezoned to allow for taller buildings your property’s value will very likely go up. It is definitely less conveneient to have to move out of your house and wait for something bigger to be built.
- xracy 9y ago
  This is the definition of "vaguely racist": "increased crime... and possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture" Don't want none of them other demographics moving here to increase the crime, and marginalize the culture.
  - robotrout 9y ago
    If you look at any crime heat map of a city, you will note, hopefully with no surprise, that crime rate is inversely proportional to income distribution. If low income housing enters an area, the crime will go up. You may be fine with that, but you have to imagine that the already established residents of that area might not wish their crime rate to increase. Calling those concerns selfish is just name calling.
    - xracy 9y ago
      Yeah, You'll notice I called what you said racist, specifically because your statement didn't tie what you were saying to income, but instead to "demographics".
      - xienze 9y ago
        “Demographics can refer to any subdivision of a population, it’s not a synonym for “race”.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Is that bad? If someone lives in a community that is 90% their race, with their neighbors listening to their kind of music, engaging in their kind of activities, going to the same kind of events, not wanting to become a 10% minority? It would be like a Chinese person not wanting to move to India or vice versa.
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    . . . It wasn't, though? He could easily be talking about Midwesterners moving there, too. He never brought up race, and thinking "Increased crime rates!? Demographic shifts by [Anything can go here, try "Neoconservatives" or "Neoliberals" or "Social Conservatives" or "Fiscally Conservative Liberals"]??!? HE MUST BE THINKING ABOUT [RACE]!" I think they're not the racist one here.
- arebop 9y ago
  Cities are built on network effects. It's the suburbs specifically that are conceived and designed such that growth and diversity destroys value.
- devopsforlyfe 9y ago
  > I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes. It was always a futile dream, mostly propagated by people who themselves enjoy small towns and certainly not "shared by all". It turns out that many knowledge workers actually like big cities for the leisure options, health services, people and neighbourhood diversity, much bigger selection of potential life partners, and high availability of jobs.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Circular? Remote workers means, there aren't more jobs just because you're in a city. As for neighborhoods, an expanding cityscape of just more apartment blocks means no neighborhoods at all. As for leisure options, a beach shared by 1M other people is not much of an option. Living in Colorado has orders of magnitude more leisure options for instance.
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      Isn’t that why Colorado cities are some of the hottest markets to be in right now? I’ve heard a lot of complaining from people in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, etc.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  > A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life Speak for yourself. My quality of life has been very positively correlated with population density. It's why I'm settling down on the east side of San Francisco, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new development there.
Arbalest 9y ago
The term for that is NIMBY. Frankly, this is not news. The fact it has such an acronym means it is well established.
zeth___ 9y ago
If developers were given the chance they would turn every plot of land into a Kowloon walled city. We need someone pushing the other way to keep some spaces livable.
- sdwa 9y ago
  We do, but clearly the balance right now is far too much in the favour of the naked self interest of shameless home owners. I mean a place to live is not a luxury, it's up there with food and water.
  - zeth___ 9y ago
    And if you're starving and there is free food one block over you go and eat there. There is plenty of very cheap land to live in. The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now. The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it. Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it. 10 minutes away: $1,000,000 20 minutes away: $2,000,000? 60 minutes away: $32,000,000?
      - zeth___ 9y ago
        P_0 * exp(-k*d) Where P_0 is the price in the heart of the city, d is the effective distance to the heart of the city and k is a factor to get units matching up.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Usually saying one quantity "grows with" another quantity would mean that one rising causes the other to rise, not fall.
kbenson 9y ago
I think often it's more complex than that. If prices are high enough in LA, it might actually be a case of "I got mine, screw everyone else" mentality, but I think much more often is more nuanced. People work hard to afford s home, and how do you explain to someone that saved for five plus years to afford a home that because of a new housing policy, it's possible their home could drop quite a bit in value, and not just because of normal cyclical market forces (meaning it could take decades to reach the same real value, if ever)? It's a hard decision to support legislation or policies that may may hurt double digit percentages of your populace, just because of bad timing on their part. At the same time, the need for cheaper housing is real. It's just not as simple as rich vs poor.
- davidw 9y ago
  People were (and many still are) convinced that if black people move in next door, that the value of their house would fall. So they created policies, and acted, both formally and informally, to prevent that. These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified. Maybe one day we'll view exclusionary zoning in the same way. Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does: at a certain point, people become less enthusiastic about investing in new housing, so it's a much smoother curve that, realistically, is probably not going to crash prices. In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > ... These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified. Sure, but does that mean the family of five that was finally able to afford a home last year after scraping for years should pay for that? They could even be in the same demographic as the original victims of those exclusionary policies. > Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does I'm not so sure, depending on how it's handled. Housing is a free market, and as such it's subject not just to supply and demand, but people's expectations of supply and demand. If I just bought a house and policies were announced that I thought might not just stagnate my house value, but actually reduce it over time, inflation-be-damned, I would be mightily tempted to sell if I had options. Get enough people doing that, and you might have a run-away market drop. The people who mainly benefit from that are those that are poised to take advantage of the situation on short notice (those with money available already and can take advantage of the eventual rebound). There are obviously ways you could crater the housing market in an area on purpose through policy, so it's not out of the question it could happen accidentally. I'm mainly arguing for people to see both sides and try to prevent that, and soften any blow and be prepared to counter a market that looks to be behaving irrationally. > In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value. I agree. I just think it's a complex situation that requires nuanced policy and constant attention, and isn't as simple as "build more houses" implies.

zkms 9y ago

> rather in preserving the less-developed neighborhood in which they have invested and chosen to live. If they didn't buy the property, they should have absolutely zero say about what kind of housing someone else builds on their property. Central-planning-via-veto (the effective state of USian land use law) is utterly broken in its giving veto authority to the most meddlesome moralistic normies on anything that they might not like, whether it be a cell tower, an apartment building, or bloody clothes lines (not kidding about the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_No...). That these people (the Twitter thread here has some prime material https://twitter.com/maelig/status/975219562433015808 https://twitter.com/maelig/status/975219562433015808) have the ability to obstruct the construction of housing (to the point that there are people literally living, shitting, and dying in US streets because housing is so unaffordable) is heinous. This is not how well-functioning societies look like.

stevenwoo 9y ago
The UK has a similar homelessness problem as far as I can tell from perusing the BBC. Do you think the causes are the same? I only keep up with the news there so not certain of historical trends except impending Brexit has seemed to have cause a slight dip in housing prices in London.