6 ms·

Unfortunately it seems so far that voters in California are reacting to the problem by supporting more of the policies that caused the problem in the first plac

Unfortunately it seems so far that voters in California are reacting to the problem by supporting more of the policies that caused the problem in the first place, e.g. rent control, opposing new market-rate housing, etc. It's pretty easy for politicians to sell those bad solutions, which is why we ended up with them in the first place. I doubt the YIMBY movement is going to solve the problem, because they have alienated many lower-income voters.

ng12 8y ago
> because they have alienated many lower-income voters. How so?
- twblalock 8y ago
  They think the YIMBYs are dismissing their concerns about gentrification and displacement. I'm not sure that's true, but either way, the YIMBY movement's image is of a bunch of affluent white tech workers who don't care about low-income, minority residents whose neighborhoods might get gentrified. That image will need to change if the YIMBYs want to succeed.
  - wbl 8y ago
    Minorities in CA are more likely to support building more homes than whites.
    - abalone 8y ago
      Yes but not necessarily market-rate developments that accelerate gentrification and displacement. BMR housing, for sure.
  - hunter23 8y ago
    I don't know why you are being downvoted - SFgate recently published an article talking about Yimby members yelling over minority groups and those minority groups basically called Yimby a bunch of "affluent white tech workers". So it's definitely a problem of Yimby not managing it's image and forming alliances well.
    - ng12 8y ago
      I think anyone who's trying to shout down another group based on their race doesn't deserve to be allied with.
- hunter23 8y ago
  Because they don't have low income leaders in their organization and they've been dismissive of minority concerns. See: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting-protesters-color/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting... While I support the Yimby approach the truth is it is largely led by upper middle class white people. To get things done in politics, you don't to have the best argument, you need to have the best consensus of citizens and $$ supporting you. The yimby org doesn't realize this - they think they can steam roll over minority groups to get things done, but frankly they need to a better job building bridges with these groups. This is how politics work.
  - cavisne 8y ago
    A hilariously biased article... how anyone could dream of linking that as a reference astounds me
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    The fundamental interests of the various groups aren't necessarily fully aligned, are they? E.g. it may be the case that rent control and other roadblocks increase the cost of housing in the long run (bad for anyone new moving to the Bay Area), but it certainly benefits the current occupants of rent-controlled housing. That's one reason to be slightly skeptical of the label 'minority' organizations—it's unclear whether all minorities have the same interests at stake. In particular, minorities who currently live in below-market cost housing have markedly different expected payoff from a change in policy than minorities who currently live outside of the city. Certainly, good politics and making nice can smooth over some amount of disagreement, but is there really a mechanism right now that could make everyone better off? I, too, would like to live in a world where: - Minorities and/or lower income people aren't priced out of the city - ... and will have enough units to live in in the future - and widespread construction so tech workers or other immigrants have cheaper rent - the character of our neighborhoods aren't gentrified away - and it isn't too expensive to build ...but experience as engineers tells us that there is always a compromise to be made when you ask for everything. The political fight here is who is will end up compromising, and how much.
    - 8y ago
api 8y ago
> they have alienated many lower-income voters. It seems like lower income voters reliably vote against their economic self-interest across the United States.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  Which voting block, besides rural land owners, does this?
majos 8y ago
The amount of popular support for rent control depresses me in the same way that the popularity of lottery tickets does. People in general seem to have an endless capacity to believe that the rare, improbable, valuable opportunity will go to them.
- majormajor 8y ago
  Rent control to reduce uncertainty for people already living there isn't a lottery odds thing - it's not a solution to the problem of hard to find new places, it's a solution to the problem of getting priced out by external forces. It has side effects, but is also addressing a specific problem people want to handle that isn't necessarily fixed by "just build a bunch of new market-rate housing." Weakening rent control in the 90s in CA didn't prevent the current homelessness problems, so I have some skepticism around taking that even further. Pushing people who could afford marginal housing into no longer being able to afford it seems like a bang-up way to increase homelessness. Part of the root of the problem seems to be cities that trying to both avoid densifying but also increase commercial and office space and occupancy and jobs. Either policy would be fine by itself, but they explode when put together. Some cities are slowly starting to realize this, but saying "we don't need a constant economic growth rate of X% if we don't want the feel of our city to change" may not be an easy choice for politicians to sell.
  - majos 8y ago
    Good point. I was thinking of this from the perspective of people who can't afford to live in place x, not people trying to avoid being forced out of place x by rising rents. I'm not well-versed in the state of rent control in CA, but I am seeing more rent control put forth as a viable alternative to just building more residences. That strikes me as a bad idea.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    > It has side effects, but is also addressing a specific problem people want to handle that isn't necessarily fixed by "just build a bunch of new market-rate housing." It is a sad fact of life that the best outcome for everybody is to let the economically productive take first pick of any available resources; because they will by definition take them and turn them into more resources. This idea that someone has a right to live somewhere because they were there first is not unreasonable, but the path of least suffering is that people pay the market price for rent. There needs to be pretty overwhelming evidence that the problem is with what consenting adults agree to rather than the government being unreasonable with the rules on constructing new building. I'd bet that the US hasn't reached that threshold yet.
cft 8y ago
That's one of the fundamental problems "bugs" with popular democracy- most popular decisions are often far from the best.
Shivetya 8y ago
Green lining, red lining of old disguised with terms and claims that make you feel guilty opposing.
mc32 8y ago
I’d say even the present form of rent control needs reform. People should be means tested every so often so that you don’t end up with situations like where the burning man self described founder, mr. Harvey, who had money kept his rent controlled apt till the end.
- intopieces 8y ago
  > People should be means tested every so often This would create disincentives for seeking a higher salary (because an increase in salary might be offset by getting kicked out of your BMR unit).
  - mc32 8y ago
    That’s okay, if people wanna shoot themselves in the foot and undermine their own career development, so be it, but often enough you have people who can afford market rate housing living in rent controlled properties, more or less undercutting the programme itself.
abalone 8y ago
> I doubt the YIMBY movement is going to solve the problem, because they have alienated many lower-income voters. I think you're right and part of the problem is reflected in your comment. YIMBYs are supremely confident in its diagnosis of the complex housing problem: it's rent control and other impediments to the free market. They are so confident that it's literally at the level of flipping the bozo bit[1] on low-income and minority housing activists and attempting to speak on their behalf. They think the answer is so obvious that to think otherwise means you're being manipulated by rich white NIMBY homeowners. That's understandably a bit insulting. It's led longtime housing activists to note that YIMBY has a "white privilege problem... They don't understand poverty."[2] Meanwhile housing activists are saying things like, hey, maybe it has something to do with, I dunno, massively defunding the major force in constructing affordable housing for the poor and working class (HUD)?[3] Perhaps the income disparity is so great between low-income renters and tech workers that there is a wee bit of understandable skepticism that market-rate development alone will bring down the market price to something the working poor can afford? YIMBYs need to do a better job of listening to and understanding the legitimate concerns from these communities if they want to be successful -- not attempt to talk over them (literally[4]) or rush through legislation that gets patched up later after protest. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit [2] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failure-equity-groups-20180502-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu... [3] http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald-reagan-made-homelessness-permanent/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- epistasis 8y ago
  > YIMBYs are supremely confident in its diagnosis of the complex housing problem: it's rent control and other impediments to the free market YIMBYs do not have a position on rent control, because both sides are advocated for and debated. The biggest problem with the YIMBY movement is people blindly accepting criticisms of YIMBY without bothering to investigate what YIMBY movements actually believe. When there was a big panel discussion in my small Bay Area town last year, without a YIMBY member on the panel, the panel all concluded that YIMBYs oppose affordable housing. However, in this small town, the ONLY PEOPLE WHO SHOWED UP to advocate for recent affordable housing projects were YIMBY members. And it turns out that SB 35, the only YIMBY legislation I know about, is actually about building affordable housing. So please stop reinforcing false beliefs. YIMBYs do a great job of listening. They have changed their engagement in response to this. They are politically naive in that they believe they can advocate for ideas and trust that people will listen to them, instead of seeking out engagement of current power brokers first. And for example they didn't expect SB 827 to get the momentum that it got, perhaps not realizing that including transportation and basic good urban planning they will wake up a lot more people than with they did with the SB 35 affordable housing bill. California politics is all about optics, unfortunately. At least, it is, until we stop letting that happen.
brudgers 8y ago
To me, expecting US housing markets facing affordability problems to build their way out of their affordability problems ignores the fact these markets are markets. And it ignores the timelines and investment goals of real estate investors. Sure real-estate investors often complain about regulations. But those complaints are rooted in the effects of regulation on liquidity and profits, not on afforadability. Up market housing gets built because that's what people with money want [1] and where the net returns from developable parcels are often higher...commercial development has much higher potential returns still. That's why the big money like insurance reserves often prefers Class A office, retail, and industrial REIT's over single family or condominiums. The big money in real-estate that drives markets is at a scale where affordable or even ordinary housing deals aren't big enough. The timelines of big real-estate money are often 30-50 years to match liabilities like life-insurance. The only part of the US housing market which comes close to that timeline is conventional 30 year mortgages. But at $100-200k per deal, it takes thousands of deals just to get $1 billion out the door. Then the thirty years is still just theory: there's refinancing and home sales making the practical investment turnover five or ten years (times thousands of investments). Unaffordablility is a sign of high market demand where affordable housing is less preferred by investors than raw land or unredeveloped redevelopable property. Holding developable property means there's a real asset beneath the investment and the risk/reward can be spread across multiple economic cycles. Construction not only requires the injection of additional capital, but ties the risk/reward to a particular economic cycle. Again, it is worth keeping in mind that at the macro level the real-estate markets are largely driven by parked capital not borrowed money in the form of money. B2C isn't what drives real-estate markets over the long term. The US housing market is driven by government intervention. FHA mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction are two easy examples. These exist because traditionally there has not been much incentive for the bulk of capital in the real-estate market to invest in houses for ordinary Americans. Historically, the sprawling checkerboard suburbs are largely the result of smaller ad hoc deals not the really big players. Though that's changing a bit, the involvement of the big players tends to encourage housing to move upscale and into multi-use developments with commercial and retail components..."the affordable lifestyle" doesn't look good on a sales brochure. [1] Selling to people with money is a good sales strategy.
- deleted 8y ago

ng12 8y ago

> because they have alienated many lower-income voters. How so?

twblalock 8y ago
They think the YIMBYs are dismissing their concerns about gentrification and displacement. I'm not sure that's true, but either way, the YIMBY movement's image is of a bunch of affluent white tech workers who don't care about low-income, minority residents whose neighborhoods might get gentrified. That image will need to change if the YIMBYs want to succeed.
- wbl 8y ago
  Minorities in CA are more likely to support building more homes than whites.
  - abalone 8y ago
    Yes but not necessarily market-rate developments that accelerate gentrification and displacement. BMR housing, for sure.
- hunter23 8y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted - SFgate recently published an article talking about Yimby members yelling over minority groups and those minority groups basically called Yimby a bunch of "affluent white tech workers". So it's definitely a problem of Yimby not managing it's image and forming alliances well.
  - ng12 8y ago
    I think anyone who's trying to shout down another group based on their race doesn't deserve to be allied with.
hunter23 8y ago
Because they don't have low income leaders in their organization and they've been dismissive of minority concerns. See: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting-protesters-color/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting... While I support the Yimby approach the truth is it is largely led by upper middle class white people. To get things done in politics, you don't to have the best argument, you need to have the best consensus of citizens and $$ supporting you. The yimby org doesn't realize this - they think they can steam roll over minority groups to get things done, but frankly they need to a better job building bridges with these groups. This is how politics work.
- cavisne 8y ago
  A hilariously biased article... how anyone could dream of linking that as a reference astounds me
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  The fundamental interests of the various groups aren't necessarily fully aligned, are they? E.g. it may be the case that rent control and other roadblocks increase the cost of housing in the long run (bad for anyone new moving to the Bay Area), but it certainly benefits the current occupants of rent-controlled housing. That's one reason to be slightly skeptical of the label 'minority' organizations—it's unclear whether all minorities have the same interests at stake. In particular, minorities who currently live in below-market cost housing have markedly different expected payoff from a change in policy than minorities who currently live outside of the city. Certainly, good politics and making nice can smooth over some amount of disagreement, but is there really a mechanism right now that could make everyone better off? I, too, would like to live in a world where: - Minorities and/or lower income people aren't priced out of the city - ... and will have enough units to live in in the future - and widespread construction so tech workers or other immigrants have cheaper rent - the character of our neighborhoods aren't gentrified away - and it isn't too expensive to build ...but experience as engineers tells us that there is always a compromise to be made when you ask for everything. The political fight here is who is will end up compromising, and how much.
  - 8y ago

api 8y ago

> they have alienated many lower-income voters. It seems like lower income voters reliably vote against their economic self-interest across the United States.

Larrikin 8y ago
Which voting block, besides rural land owners, does this?

majos 8y ago

The amount of popular support for rent control depresses me in the same way that the popularity of lottery tickets does. People in general seem to have an endless capacity to believe that the rare, improbable, valuable opportunity will go to them.

majormajor 8y ago
Rent control to reduce uncertainty for people already living there isn't a lottery odds thing - it's not a solution to the problem of hard to find new places, it's a solution to the problem of getting priced out by external forces. It has side effects, but is also addressing a specific problem people want to handle that isn't necessarily fixed by "just build a bunch of new market-rate housing." Weakening rent control in the 90s in CA didn't prevent the current homelessness problems, so I have some skepticism around taking that even further. Pushing people who could afford marginal housing into no longer being able to afford it seems like a bang-up way to increase homelessness. Part of the root of the problem seems to be cities that trying to both avoid densifying but also increase commercial and office space and occupancy and jobs. Either policy would be fine by itself, but they explode when put together. Some cities are slowly starting to realize this, but saying "we don't need a constant economic growth rate of X% if we don't want the feel of our city to change" may not be an easy choice for politicians to sell.
- majos 8y ago
  Good point. I was thinking of this from the perspective of people who can't afford to live in place x, not people trying to avoid being forced out of place x by rising rents. I'm not well-versed in the state of rent control in CA, but I am seeing more rent control put forth as a viable alternative to just building more residences. That strikes me as a bad idea.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > It has side effects, but is also addressing a specific problem people want to handle that isn't necessarily fixed by "just build a bunch of new market-rate housing." It is a sad fact of life that the best outcome for everybody is to let the economically productive take first pick of any available resources; because they will by definition take them and turn them into more resources. This idea that someone has a right to live somewhere because they were there first is not unreasonable, but the path of least suffering is that people pay the market price for rent. There needs to be pretty overwhelming evidence that the problem is with what consenting adults agree to rather than the government being unreasonable with the rules on constructing new building. I'd bet that the US hasn't reached that threshold yet.

cft 8y ago

That's one of the fundamental problems "bugs" with popular democracy- most popular decisions are often far from the best.

Shivetya 8y ago

Green lining, red lining of old disguised with terms and claims that make you feel guilty opposing.

mc32 8y ago

I’d say even the present form of rent control needs reform. People should be means tested every so often so that you don’t end up with situations like where the burning man self described founder, mr. Harvey, who had money kept his rent controlled apt till the end.

intopieces 8y ago
> People should be means tested every so often This would create disincentives for seeking a higher salary (because an increase in salary might be offset by getting kicked out of your BMR unit).
- mc32 8y ago
  That’s okay, if people wanna shoot themselves in the foot and undermine their own career development, so be it, but often enough you have people who can afford market rate housing living in rent controlled properties, more or less undercutting the programme itself.

abalone 8y ago

> I doubt the YIMBY movement is going to solve the problem, because they have alienated many lower-income voters. I think you're right and part of the problem is reflected in your comment. YIMBYs are supremely confident in its diagnosis of the complex housing problem: it's rent control and other impediments to the free market. They are so confident that it's literally at the level of flipping the bozo bit[1] on low-income and minority housing activists and attempting to speak on their behalf. They think the answer is so obvious that to think otherwise means you're being manipulated by rich white NIMBY homeowners. That's understandably a bit insulting. It's led longtime housing activists to note that YIMBY has a "white privilege problem... They don't understand poverty."[2] Meanwhile housing activists are saying things like, hey, maybe it has something to do with, I dunno, massively defunding the major force in constructing affordable housing for the poor and working class (HUD)?[3] Perhaps the income disparity is so great between low-income renters and tech workers that there is a wee bit of understandable skepticism that market-rate development alone will bring down the market price to something the working poor can afford? YIMBYs need to do a better job of listening to and understanding the legitimate concerns from these communities if they want to be successful -- not attempt to talk over them (literally[4]) or rush through legislation that gets patched up later after protest. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit [2] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failure-equity-groups-20180502-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu... [3] http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald-reagan-made-homelessness-permanent/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 8y ago
> YIMBYs are supremely confident in its diagnosis of the complex housing problem: it's rent control and other impediments to the free market YIMBYs do not have a position on rent control, because both sides are advocated for and debated. The biggest problem with the YIMBY movement is people blindly accepting criticisms of YIMBY without bothering to investigate what YIMBY movements actually believe. When there was a big panel discussion in my small Bay Area town last year, without a YIMBY member on the panel, the panel all concluded that YIMBYs oppose affordable housing. However, in this small town, the ONLY PEOPLE WHO SHOWED UP to advocate for recent affordable housing projects were YIMBY members. And it turns out that SB 35, the only YIMBY legislation I know about, is actually about building affordable housing. So please stop reinforcing false beliefs. YIMBYs do a great job of listening. They have changed their engagement in response to this. They are politically naive in that they believe they can advocate for ideas and trust that people will listen to them, instead of seeking out engagement of current power brokers first. And for example they didn't expect SB 827 to get the momentum that it got, perhaps not realizing that including transportation and basic good urban planning they will wake up a lot more people than with they did with the SB 35 affordable housing bill. California politics is all about optics, unfortunately. At least, it is, until we stop letting that happen.

brudgers 8y ago

To me, expecting US housing markets facing affordability problems to build their way out of their affordability problems ignores the fact these markets are markets. And it ignores the timelines and investment goals of real estate investors. Sure real-estate investors often complain about regulations. But those complaints are rooted in the effects of regulation on liquidity and profits, not on afforadability. Up market housing gets built because that's what people with money want [1] and where the net returns from developable parcels are often higher...commercial development has much higher potential returns still. That's why the big money like insurance reserves often prefers Class A office, retail, and industrial REIT's over single family or condominiums. The big money in real-estate that drives markets is at a scale where affordable or even ordinary housing deals aren't big enough. The timelines of big real-estate money are often 30-50 years to match liabilities like life-insurance. The only part of the US housing market which comes close to that timeline is conventional 30 year mortgages. But at $100-200k per deal, it takes thousands of deals just to get $1 billion out the door. Then the thirty years is still just theory: there's refinancing and home sales making the practical investment turnover five or ten years (times thousands of investments). Unaffordablility is a sign of high market demand where affordable housing is less preferred by investors than raw land or unredeveloped redevelopable property. Holding developable property means there's a real asset beneath the investment and the risk/reward can be spread across multiple economic cycles. Construction not only requires the injection of additional capital, but ties the risk/reward to a particular economic cycle. Again, it is worth keeping in mind that at the macro level the real-estate markets are largely driven by parked capital not borrowed money in the form of money. B2C isn't what drives real-estate markets over the long term. The US housing market is driven by government intervention. FHA mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction are two easy examples. These exist because traditionally there has not been much incentive for the bulk of capital in the real-estate market to invest in houses for ordinary Americans. Historically, the sprawling checkerboard suburbs are largely the result of smaller ad hoc deals not the really big players. Though that's changing a bit, the involvement of the big players tends to encourage housing to move upscale and into multi-use developments with commercial and retail components..."the affordable lifestyle" doesn't look good on a sales brochure. [1] Selling to people with money is a good sales strategy.

deleted 8y ago