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Changing conditions within an incredibly dense metro area are part of the terms and conditions into one moving there. If you want land, there's plenty of space
by jeffbax 8y ago
Changing conditions within an incredibly dense metro area are part of the terms and conditions into one moving there. If you want land, there's plenty of space for it -- outside the city as opposed to where people have a pressing need to work and live without spending hours commuting and are willing to put up with the density. It is unreasonable to expect things to stay static when so many lives depend on things changing.
Chances are that a 50 story building isn't going next to a single family home without serious changes to the entire block. More likely, people want to build multi-families which are not going to ruin your sunlight. Additionally, changing all of this takes a lot of time, just because zoning may be relaxed doesn't mean overnight its going to turn in to Manhattan or Hong Kong as opposed to Paris which largely is ~6 stories and not particularly known for being a hellhole.
It is immoral to always in favor of the people lucky enough to have bought at the right time. Surely it is a difficult balance, but chances are your home has appreciated enough to give you a lot of options too.
- emodendroket 8y agoWho's going to buy the home at the original price, let alone an appreciated one, if it's now next to a paper mill?
- csallen 8y agoIt doesn't make any sense to assume that someone would want to buy Home A, tear it down, and build a paper mill there, but that nobody could ever want to buy Home B next door and build a profitable venture there as well. Often in these situations, housing values go up, because the opportunity exists to build something more valuable than a house. Furthermore, when you buy a house, you are a taking a risk. You're making an investment. I don't see why the rest of the world should be bending over backwards and living in stasis to protect your investment. If you want absolute control over what happens on your block, buy your block.
- emodendroket 8y agoI think if you look a little harder you can find entire neighborhoods of homes becoming worthless because of industrial ventures nearby but I guess your theory sounds nice on paper.
- csallen 8y agoThat doesn't contradict my point, as I never claimed that was impossible for housing values to depreciate, only that the alternative happens "often". Specifically: You're treating all real estate as if it's the same, but the world is more complex than that. We're talking about dense metro areas, where development primarily happens to support growing populations and an influx of businesses. How many expensive homes in downtown SF have become worthless because of industrial ventures nearby? Far, far, far less than have become extremely valuable, if any. This isn't just some theory on paper.
- emodendroket 8y agoAre we? I was responding to a claim that property owners should have absolute rights to build whatever they please on their property. Nobody builds big smoke stacks in the middle of major cities anymore but you could refer to some 19th-Century writing about London to see how that could be bad as well. Or you could read about the time the Thames stank so bad Parliament all had to leave and was finally compelled to do something about waterway pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink In short there are a lot of reasons to want to regulate what people build.
- csallen 8y agoAs far as I can gather from jeffbax's comment, yes, that's what he was talking about. Not giving property owners absolute rights to build whatever they please. I don't know how many people would seriously support going to that extreme.
- emodendroket 8y ago