8 ms·

The thing is somewhere that occurs naturally could change tomorrow. I live in a quiet dead end by a small park with nothing interesting near by. Or well, nothin

by shados 7y ago

The thing is somewhere that occurs naturally could change tomorrow. I live in a quiet dead end by a small park with nothing interesting near by. Or well, nothing USED to be interesting near by. A small family shop around the corner sold their lot and a giant apartment building via special permit is replacing it, and with it a bunch of other conversions around happened, all in the span of a few MONTHS. And now it's a permanent construction zone and heavy traffic. No one would have guessed that was going to happen. The area was a freagin slum with no one wanting to touch it with a stick until then. Until we (and people like us) decided to make it nicer. Often with our own money. Some people definitely care about their property value and generally use their house as an investment and a retirement plan. A heck of a lot of people just want to be able to keep sleeping at night. Short of buying a lot in the middle of nowhere, it's ALWAYS going to be a gamble, and its pretty natural to expect it not too change too much if there's no indication it will. I'll give you that if you buy a single family in SF today and think it's going to stay that way, you're pretty silly. But it was well within my lifetime/adulthood where it wasn't that crazy an idea.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> The thing is somewhere that occurs naturally could change tomorrow. So could a million other things. The local government could become corrupt and raise taxes while cutting services to divert money to cronies, leaving you in the middle of a violent slum with a high unemployment rate. Your employer could move its offices thirty miles further from where you live. Climate change could put your whole town underwater. The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet. And at least in this case you're effectively being compensated for it, because an area that is being developed will cause your land to be worth more. Some developer will pay you a lot of money to put up more apartments or condos where you are, and then you have all that money to go somewhere else -- where the land will generally be less expensive, yielding you a nice profit to compensate you for your trouble. You can live in any kind of place you want. You can't expect that place to never change. And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City, and a person making the same prediction twenty years ago would also have been right. San Francisco is the exception, not the rule.
- davidw 7y ago
  Also: zoning tends to bottle up changes, so rather than gradually getting some 2-plexes, 4-plexes, and a few 6-plexes, you go straight from single family units to larger apartments, which are more of an abrupt change. Where I lived in Italy, it was pretty normal to see everything from SFHs to 10-plexes, but big apartments with dozens of units were not very common at all.
- shados 7y ago
  > The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work. Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things. Yes, some people can do that without breaking a sweat, but it sure got exhausting. If I lived to 1000, I wouldn't really care, but life is short and there's only so many times you can do life altering changes. If moving was that simple, there wouldn't be so much criticism over people getting displayed by raising housing costs, after all. > And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work. The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there but can't afford to and thereby don't get a vote even though they have a stake. So then you get efforts to overrule the cities at the state level and so on, and the outcome of that process is whoever can capture 50%+1 of the votes regardless of your preference as an individual. Whereas if you move to somewhere your preferences are likely to remain satisfied you don't have to worry about any of that. > Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things. Moving is work. But so is fighting everybody just so you don't have to. And the people who want to be able to live in the city don't have that option. Moving into the city is what they want, but the housing needed for all of them to do that doesn't exist, so their only option is to cause it to. > Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning. Not a lot of ten story apartment buildings go up in the middle of a hundred square miles of farmland.

by shados 7y ago

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> The thing is somewhere that occurs naturally could change tomorrow. So could a million other things. The local government could become corrupt and raise taxes while cutting services to divert money to cronies, leaving you in the middle of a violent slum with a high unemployment rate. Your employer could move its offices thirty miles further from where you live. Climate change could put your whole town underwater. The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet. And at least in this case you're effectively being compensated for it, because an area that is being developed will cause your land to be worth more. Some developer will pay you a lot of money to put up more apartments or condos where you are, and then you have all that money to go somewhere else -- where the land will generally be less expensive, yielding you a nice profit to compensate you for your trouble. You can live in any kind of place you want. You can't expect that place to never change. And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City, and a person making the same prediction twenty years ago would also have been right. San Francisco is the exception, not the rule.

davidw 7y ago
Also: zoning tends to bottle up changes, so rather than gradually getting some 2-plexes, 4-plexes, and a few 6-plexes, you go straight from single family units to larger apartments, which are more of an abrupt change. Where I lived in Italy, it was pretty normal to see everything from SFHs to 10-plexes, but big apartments with dozens of units were not very common at all.
shados 7y ago
> The solution to things changing in a way you don't like is to vote with your feet Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work. Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things. Yes, some people can do that without breaking a sweat, but it sure got exhausting. If I lived to 1000, I wouldn't really care, but life is short and there's only so many times you can do life altering changes. If moving was that simple, there wouldn't be so much criticism over people getting displayed by raising housing costs, after all. > And predicting this isn't really that hard. I can predict with reasonable certainty that twenty years from now Des Moines will still not have the population density of New York City Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Or you know, just vote in municipal election or go to cityhall hearings, since that's how cities work, and that's exactly how people do it. It's not super weird for people living in a city to try and dictate how the city they live in work. The problem obviously being that there are people who work in the city and would like to live there but can't afford to and thereby don't get a vote even though they have a stake. So then you get efforts to overrule the cities at the state level and so on, and the outcome of that process is whoever can capture 50%+1 of the votes regardless of your preference as an individual. Whereas if you move to somewhere your preferences are likely to remain satisfied you don't have to worry about any of that. > Last time I moved cities I ended up having to move 3 times in a row because of unexpected things. Moving is work. But so is fighting everybody just so you don't have to. And the people who want to be able to live in the city don't have that option. Moving into the city is what they want, but the housing needed for all of them to do that doesn't exist, so their only option is to cause it to. > Except a NIMBY thinks about "their backyard" for a reason: Who cares about the city's population density. The problem is the 10 story building popping up across the super tiny quiet street because a special permit was issued to override zoning. Not a lot of ten story apartment buildings go up in the middle of a hundred square miles of farmland.