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I accept that, but policy seems to enforce single family home neighbourhoods in many places. This exacerbates the problem of haves and have-nots in the housing

by s_Hogg 7y ago

I accept that, but policy seems to enforce single family home neighbourhoods in many places. This exacerbates the problem of haves and have-nots in the housing market. I'm not in the "ban SFH neighbourhoods" camp, but I think we shouldn't have as much of a problem with them becoming denser. Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if they want. This doesn't mean developers should be allowed to let rip either - as one of the other posts says, increased density leads to increased demand for other infrastructure as well. Basically neither Manhattan nor Houston are really ideal states in my mind. There should be a way to live in the burbs if you want to do that, but I don't think public policy should be vigorously defending the people who do that regardless of obvious social and economic costs.

leetcrew 7y ago
> Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if they want. the developers have a significant amount of leverage in this situation. if they can build one large apartment building in a low-density sfh neighborhood, they can take a significant chunk of value off all the neighboring homes. if they can secure land to build several large buildings, they can seriously devalue these homes. when they start looking to buy property for the nth building, the homeowner isn't going to get anything close to the original value. as a society, we should never have allowed this situation to happen in the first place, but now that we have, it's not going to be easy to solve. until you get to pretty high percentiles of wealth, homes tend to be a large fraction of a family's net worth. to suddenly remove the zoning would be a pretty big hit for these people; a lot of them could get upside-down on their mortgages.
- spoonie 7y ago
  I get that those opposed to density claim this is one of the reasons they oppose it, but is there any evidence of it? Usually an increase in density in an area will increase land values rather then depress them.

by s_Hogg 7y ago

leetcrew 7y ago

> Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if they want. the developers have a significant amount of leverage in this situation. if they can build one large apartment building in a low-density sfh neighborhood, they can take a significant chunk of value off all the neighboring homes. if they can secure land to build several large buildings, they can seriously devalue these homes. when they start looking to buy property for the nth building, the homeowner isn't going to get anything close to the original value. as a society, we should never have allowed this situation to happen in the first place, but now that we have, it's not going to be easy to solve. until you get to pretty high percentiles of wealth, homes tend to be a large fraction of a family's net worth. to suddenly remove the zoning would be a pretty big hit for these people; a lot of them could get upside-down on their mortgages.

spoonie 7y ago
I get that those opposed to density claim this is one of the reasons they oppose it, but is there any evidence of it? Usually an increase in density in an area will increase land values rather then depress them.