6 ms·

The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so t

by tlb 9y ago

The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded. It's a perfectly rational set of motivations. It's the same reason people move to nicer neighborhoods in the first place. With limited development over period of time you get the benefits of living in a more expensive neighborhood, without having paid the premium for it. These arguments don't play well in public, especially in a socially progressive city like SF, so the rhetoric gets confusing. NIMBY groups sometimes float arguments such as: building more housing will make neighborhoods less affordable. Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, and support NIMBY policies too, so it's not just homeowners. In the end, most people don't know what to think, and gravitate to the status-quo (ie, limited development.)

sushid 9y ago
But if they want public infra to be well funded, then they have to pay their taxes. For the older houseowners, they're paying a fraction of the taxes they should be paying. They can't have their cake and eat it too!
nradov 9y ago
This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values. What they do care about are traffic, parking, noise, school overcrowding, and other quality of life issues. Some people simply don't like living in densely populated areas. If you want to win over the NIMBYs then you have to address their concerns rather than just demonizing them as greedy property owners.
- dangjc 9y ago
  It's probably not possible to win over NIMBYs. Incoming population will always create more traffic. Taller buildings always overshadow something. They have almost no interest in letting in more people. The key is recognizing that it is an inherently selfish constituency, and you have to give voice to the people who don't yet live there or who are renters and less likely to vote or attend city council meetings. The homeownership rate in CA is already bordering just half (53.8%) and decreasing, so this is a growing constituency which just needs to be activated. That's why there's a need to remove local control on density limits, as the constituency probably exists at the state or regional level, but not so much at the individual neighborhood level.
- eldavido 9y ago
  My wife's grandmother is a CA NIMBY. Prop 13 and all. She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc. I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it. At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.
  - api 9y ago
    LA/OC and SF are global mega-cities full of people who seem to want to live in small towns in the country, yet choose to live in global mega-cities. It's weird.
    - timr 9y ago
      It's not weird. SF wasn't a "global mega city" until perhaps the late 90s (it's honestly pretty debatable that it is one today). If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational. Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.
      - eldavido 9y ago
        Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree. Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal. I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation. I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.
- Kalium 9y ago
  > This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values. I have. Among other things, they like to ramble on about the importance of neighborhood character. They're also reliably very, very vague on what they actually think that means. In my experience, it's functionally impossible to address concerns that people refuse to communicate, no matter how much sympathy, empathy, compassion, and kindness you engage them with. I often find myself thinking "neighborhood character" is code for "freeze my world in amber" and "keep people with different skin color away".
guiolo 9y ago
> Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, [...] For the laws of supply and demand to be accurate they require that only quantity and price changes. The housing market in popular areas, other than being inelastic, tends to suffer from demand shifts. There is nothing in economics saying that building more housing can't result in neighborhoods being less affordable.
- tlb 9y ago
  Can you explain the mechanism by which building more housing causes neighborhoods to become less affordable?
  - eldavido 9y ago
    There's a popular meme that it makes an area more desirable, therefore increasing property prices. And there's probably some truth to that. What this fails to consider is that, if a bunch of people are moving to an area, they have to go SOMEWHERE, so it's not a "here vs. there" question, it's "which here will it be?" Proponents like to believe they can somehow put people "elsewhere" without realizing the poor always get screwed when rents rise, and they absolutely will rise everywhere in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion, if more supply doesn't come to market.
    - Kalium 9y ago
      For plenty of people, so long as the answer is "not near me" then the details are irrelevant. You can see the policy mess that results.
      - eldavido 9y ago
        Typical collective action problem. Everybody wants to move here but nobody wants to house them. At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, bye. Then see what happens when all those pension and infrastructure payments come due. Hilarity will ensue.
pessimizer 9y ago
> The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded. It's people who own houses that are YIMBYs, because removing zoning restrictions causes land value to go up. It's people who live in them who are NIMBYs, because they fear density in their neighborhoods will lower their quality of life, and that they will eventually be forced to sell due to a rise in property taxes as a result of their property values rising. If they're old, that's a scary proposition. If they're young enough that they have kids in the public schools, they're probably young enough that they won't have a problem selling their home for a boatload of profit and moving to another exclusive neighborhood.
- wbl 9y ago
  In California property taxes are fixed.
- tlb 9y ago
  It depends on how supply is increased. If you allow single-unit housing stock to be converted to multi-unit, that causes existing homes to rise in price as you say. But rezoning industrial buildings to high-density residential causes existing homes to drop in price. I believe the solution in SF will mostly be the latter, such as converting warehouses in the Mission into lofts. Also, California's weird laws mean that property taxes don't go up much even when the value of houses rise a lot. So most NIMBY homeowners are genuinely defending against property values dropping.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
I'm gonna say that anyone who throws out something like "people who don't understand supply and demand" likely doesn't understand them past the ultra-simplistic view presented in Econ 101.
- tlb 9y ago
  The simplistic view is correct almost all time. Given a fixed demand curve, more supply leads to lower prices and less supply leads to higher prices. Exceptions can exist in special circumstances, but they are rare and usually short-term.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    Not when it comes to human behavior it's not. The simplistic view tends to assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor, and that there aren't other forces at play.
- manfredo 9y ago
  Even if we accept the premise that the housing market mysteriously transcends the rules of supply and demand, the pidgeonhole principle is going to come into effect. How is San Francisco going to accommodate 5-10 thousand new residents each year when only 2-3 thousand units of housing are added each year. Even if we ignore price, there just isn't enough space unless we build more housing.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    I'm saying that the rules of supply and demand are not as simple and as clear cut in reality as they are presented in Econ 101.
toephu2 9y ago
This exactly. Who doesn't want to live in a nice neighborhood and have their kids goto good schools? Publicly it may not be a popular stance, but you can bet your bucket that privately this is what most homeowners and aspiring homeowners desire. And guess what? Most tech workers in the Bay Area want to own a home in a nice neighborhood if they don't own one already.
barsonme 9y ago
> and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people Come on, this (specifically) is untrue. Your average NIMBY homeowner isn't trying to maliciously price poor folks out. The closest you can get to that would be wanting to prevent their property value from decreasing because of eyesores. While that can be problematic in its own right, it's not malice directed specifically towards folks who make less than $N per year. You'd find the same aversion if somebody making 2x their salary left their home in a shambles. Folks buy homes partially as an investment, and understandably they have aversions to things that could damage their investment.

by tlb 9y ago

sushid 9y ago

But if they want public infra to be well funded, then they have to pay their taxes. For the older houseowners, they're paying a fraction of the taxes they should be paying. They can't have their cake and eat it too!

nradov 9y ago

This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values. What they do care about are traffic, parking, noise, school overcrowding, and other quality of life issues. Some people simply don't like living in densely populated areas. If you want to win over the NIMBYs then you have to address their concerns rather than just demonizing them as greedy property owners.

dangjc 9y ago
It's probably not possible to win over NIMBYs. Incoming population will always create more traffic. Taller buildings always overshadow something. They have almost no interest in letting in more people. The key is recognizing that it is an inherently selfish constituency, and you have to give voice to the people who don't yet live there or who are renters and less likely to vote or attend city council meetings. The homeownership rate in CA is already bordering just half (53.8%) and decreasing, so this is a growing constituency which just needs to be activated. That's why there's a need to remove local control on density limits, as the constituency probably exists at the state or regional level, but not so much at the individual neighborhood level.
eldavido 9y ago
My wife's grandmother is a CA NIMBY. Prop 13 and all. She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc. I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it. At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.
- api 9y ago
  LA/OC and SF are global mega-cities full of people who seem to want to live in small towns in the country, yet choose to live in global mega-cities. It's weird.
  - timr 9y ago
    It's not weird. SF wasn't a "global mega city" until perhaps the late 90s (it's honestly pretty debatable that it is one today). If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational. Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.
    - eldavido 9y ago
      Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree. Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal. I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation. I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.
Kalium 9y ago
> This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values. I have. Among other things, they like to ramble on about the importance of neighborhood character. They're also reliably very, very vague on what they actually think that means. In my experience, it's functionally impossible to address concerns that people refuse to communicate, no matter how much sympathy, empathy, compassion, and kindness you engage them with. I often find myself thinking "neighborhood character" is code for "freeze my world in amber" and "keep people with different skin color away".

guiolo 9y ago

> Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, [...] For the laws of supply and demand to be accurate they require that only quantity and price changes. The housing market in popular areas, other than being inelastic, tends to suffer from demand shifts. There is nothing in economics saying that building more housing can't result in neighborhoods being less affordable.

tlb 9y ago
Can you explain the mechanism by which building more housing causes neighborhoods to become less affordable?
- eldavido 9y ago
  There's a popular meme that it makes an area more desirable, therefore increasing property prices. And there's probably some truth to that. What this fails to consider is that, if a bunch of people are moving to an area, they have to go SOMEWHERE, so it's not a "here vs. there" question, it's "which here will it be?" Proponents like to believe they can somehow put people "elsewhere" without realizing the poor always get screwed when rents rise, and they absolutely will rise everywhere in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion, if more supply doesn't come to market.
  - Kalium 9y ago
    For plenty of people, so long as the answer is "not near me" then the details are irrelevant. You can see the policy mess that results.
    - eldavido 9y ago
      Typical collective action problem. Everybody wants to move here but nobody wants to house them. At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, bye. Then see what happens when all those pension and infrastructure payments come due. Hilarity will ensue.

pessimizer 9y ago

> The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded. It's people who own houses that are YIMBYs, because removing zoning restrictions causes land value to go up. It's people who live in them who are NIMBYs, because they fear density in their neighborhoods will lower their quality of life, and that they will eventually be forced to sell due to a rise in property taxes as a result of their property values rising. If they're old, that's a scary proposition. If they're young enough that they have kids in the public schools, they're probably young enough that they won't have a problem selling their home for a boatload of profit and moving to another exclusive neighborhood.

wbl 9y ago
In California property taxes are fixed.
tlb 9y ago
It depends on how supply is increased. If you allow single-unit housing stock to be converted to multi-unit, that causes existing homes to rise in price as you say. But rezoning industrial buildings to high-density residential causes existing homes to drop in price. I believe the solution in SF will mostly be the latter, such as converting warehouses in the Mission into lofts. Also, California's weird laws mean that property taxes don't go up much even when the value of houses rise a lot. So most NIMBY homeowners are genuinely defending against property values dropping.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

I'm gonna say that anyone who throws out something like "people who don't understand supply and demand" likely doesn't understand them past the ultra-simplistic view presented in Econ 101.

tlb 9y ago
The simplistic view is correct almost all time. Given a fixed demand curve, more supply leads to lower prices and less supply leads to higher prices. Exceptions can exist in special circumstances, but they are rare and usually short-term.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Not when it comes to human behavior it's not. The simplistic view tends to assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor, and that there aren't other forces at play.
manfredo 9y ago
Even if we accept the premise that the housing market mysteriously transcends the rules of supply and demand, the pidgeonhole principle is going to come into effect. How is San Francisco going to accommodate 5-10 thousand new residents each year when only 2-3 thousand units of housing are added each year. Even if we ignore price, there just isn't enough space unless we build more housing.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I'm saying that the rules of supply and demand are not as simple and as clear cut in reality as they are presented in Econ 101.

toephu2 9y ago

This exactly. Who doesn't want to live in a nice neighborhood and have their kids goto good schools? Publicly it may not be a popular stance, but you can bet your bucket that privately this is what most homeowners and aspiring homeowners desire. And guess what? Most tech workers in the Bay Area want to own a home in a nice neighborhood if they don't own one already.

barsonme 9y ago

> and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people Come on, this (specifically) is untrue. Your average NIMBY homeowner isn't trying to maliciously price poor folks out. The closest you can get to that would be wanting to prevent their property value from decreasing because of eyesores. While that can be problematic in its own right, it's not malice directed specifically towards folks who make less than $N per year. You'd find the same aversion if somebody making 2x their salary left their home in a shambles. Folks buy homes partially as an investment, and understandably they have aversions to things that could damage their investment.