8 ms·

Short & medium term effects on real estate prices is only part of the issue. Ultimately, NIMBYism exists for a bunch of reasons... and the reasons don't matter

by netcan 6y ago

Short & medium term effects on real estate prices is only part of the issue. Ultimately, NIMBYism exists for a bunch of reasons... and the reasons don't matter much. Once you have actual organized NIMBYism, you are selling to existing property owners and residents. They have no real reason to "buy" this story. Either low cost housing doesn't affect anything, or it is against their interests. In no scenario does benefit them, so why shouldn't they object... just to be safe? At the least, construction is noisy and unsightly. I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them. That's how organised NIMBYs see it. That's how it plays out in practice. YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally. NIMBYism exists. The relevant questions are about how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it.

oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
Highly agree. It seems like the only recourse these days is simply overriding NIMBYs at the state level (I think CA is close to this point) when the housing crisis becomes so acute that it becomes politically viable to simply go against the many NIMBYs' wishes at the higher levels.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  NIMBY is only one face of the coin that makes it difficult for building. Local governments are also extremely satisfied placing a high bureaucratic burden (red tape) on new development. Think of setback laws, environment impact studies, zoning, facade ordinances.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    To my knowledge that's often because local governments are inherently NIMBYs since they only represent locals by definition. Local governments don't listen to potential locals or outsiders. So I don't really agree that local governments and NIMBYs are different sides of a coin. There is a great amount of overlap and personally I suspect any rules that slow development to be NIMBY motivated.
  - netcan 6y ago
    Those things are never, arguably. The problem is that once they exist, they serve whatever purposes whoever controls them wants. If they want NIMBY stuff, they can be used for this purpose. I think addressing NIMBY at this level is a fools errand. You can always replace one tool with another.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Another recourse would be not to build stuff in other people's backyards. There's plenty of space in the US.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    The NIMBYs could move to those places and not have to worry anymore
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      Yes, with some effort you can make NIMBY people move out. As a result, jobs and money also tend to move out. Somehow the low-income people, who now have all the space and jobs to themselves happen to be uncapable of running the place.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        I don't see how this would become real in practice. The YIMBYs don't want to drive out NIMBYs they just want denser housing. If you replace a single family home with a 4 story apartment building you get 4 times the density. Most of the people who want to move in aren't actually low income people. They are migrants who are about to double their salary but can't find a place without displacing low income people. There are lots of cities in California that want to stay "small" which also means that they throw away growth opportunities. The low income people that are being displaced are actually the californians.
      - Waterfall 6y ago
        The idea of low income housing is itself ridiculous. Why are there no low income Porsches? There's plenty of places that don't need affordable housing because housing is affordable without the government tearing the fabric of the free market. Lots of places that didn't have affordable housing didn't overinvest in houses like Texas where the houses remained stable compared to the heavily populated areas with high density.
        6y ago
chii 6y ago
> how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it. i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard".
- Tyrek 6y ago
  but if, as the OP article suggests, there is no lost value, then there is no incremental value to pay existing NIMBYs. Otherwise you're just paying people off based on some subjective measure, which does not seem eminently sustainable. Obviously, there are plenty of potential issues, such as sampling bias that may confound the article's conclusions, but it's not something to outright ignore, either.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    The problem then is you can avoid paying NIMBYs by manufacturing studies claiming they didn't lose any value... Which may be the motivation here. It's very easy to fudge a study, even direct analyses like this. I'm skeptical.
  - Waterfall 6y ago
    Only if you believe 1996-2006 is impartial information 14 years later and not cherry picked
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard". Suppose the difference is actually large. Their currently million dollar house will be worth half a million dollars. Who is paying this money? Low income people who need housing? They haven't got it, that was the original problem. Local taxpayers? That's just the original homeowners paying themselves.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    The property developer who built the new construction.
Waterfall 6y ago
The article was useless. They could have showed asylums, prisons and liquor stores built during 1996-2006, you know, the year that housing prices peaked and said it had no effect on housing prices.
- darawk 6y ago
  The article is comparing < 2000 feet away to < 4000 feet away home prices. So, any broader market trend is accounted for.
  - Waterfall 6y ago
    Doesn't really matter when they use booming housing prices from over a decade ago to justify their cooked statistics.
    - darawk 6y ago
      Yes, it does. By comparing them to teach other, the broader trend in the housing market is held constant. They may be making other errors, but this isn't one of them.
      - Waterfall 6y ago
        I'm sure they have other decades they could use, but they choose the time right when the housing boomed and right before it burst. I doubt the prices had anything to do with affordable housing, and more with other factors that could have easily negated it.
bananaface 6y ago
I think the best approach is just to spread the risk. If I own a house and someone builds a fracking station behind it, I'll lose most of what I have worked my whole life to build. I shouldn't be able to buy a house and have jurisdiction over the entire surrounding area, but I also shouldn't be at risk of losing 50% of my property overnight. To be honest, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of insurance policy that covers this kind of thing. You'd pay a premium to be protected from large value reductions, and the risk is distributed across a large number of homeowners.
- kyleee 6y ago
  Don't give the insurance companies any ideas...
- pirocks 6y ago
  The core problem here is that so much value is tied up in houses. People view houses as an investment. If houses depreciated like cars then people aren't so concerned about the value of there house b/c it won't make or break retirement. Any long term housing solution needs to find a way of preventing houses from becoming investments.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Houses do depreciate like cars. Houses are money pits. It’s land that is the investment. The earth may have a huge amount of land but the amount of desirable land is tiny by comparison. Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. To them, the house essentially had negative value. The land was all they wanted.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      > Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. At this stage, you're not talking about regular people who are holding their house as their nest egg. Many, many people hold their house as a location they can put money every month that won't disappear and someday might make more money. The kind of people that are buying houses for the land and the kind of people that are buying existing houses to live in are two entirely different income brackets. Lots and lots of people are in the poorer income bracket.
conanbatt 6y ago
> I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them I don't think this is necessarily true. Allowing further construction and development raises the value of land, it doesn't decrease it: a square foot in a dense city is worth a lot more than in a sparse one. Its possible NIMBYism exists on the wrong belief that it's in their economic interest to prevent new housing though I'm skeptical. The core problem of NIMBYism is not the pulling-rope game of wanting and not wanting housing: its a crisis of tax design and political design. If California, and a city like san francisco, eliminated sales taxes and income taxes and would gather those revenues with property taxes and land taxes, they would be so high that property wouldn't be worth a damn. (SF city alone spends something like 1000U$S per household per month) This distortive tax does benefit old landlords, and in a state with such a transient population it should be politically popular to change that. But it doesn't because of a political design issue: renters and immigrants either can't or tend not to vote. SF population is like 25% immigrants, almost all of them renters and with no capacity to politically fight back anything. It is my belief that these things will change when they have to be changed and not a minute sooner.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
NIMBYism exists because so much personal savings is tied up in real estate. This is mostly due to maybe tax incentives and government policy favoring landowners. We need land value taxes to encourage the efficient use of land, discourage this ridiculous house-as-a-nest-egg system, and encourage housing development to match demand, but it won't happen until renters start voting more than landowners. (Landowners are technically outnumbered 2-to-1 in the bay.)
specialist 6y ago
"I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. ... YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally." I fully agree with your realpolitik analysis and conclusions. Your strategy is far more healthy than my own. Thank you. I was very involved in local politics. Long time member of one of the few remaining orgs regularly doing endorsement interviews. My own large (largest?) precinct is in the most progressive legislative district, in the most progressive congressional district, in a very blue state. For a rough sense, IIRC, our 2016 caucus had ~140 Bernie supporters and ~10 HRC supporters. That liberal bubble you hear about? I was deep in it. Our executive board regularly has some very divisive arguments. But I now know these were the narcissism of small differences. Collectively, we were very far to the left of our broader community. I have a rueful laugh whenever told how left-wing my area is. People just don't know. That liberalism hard stops when the topics are housing, homelessness, and adjacent issues. The policy positions blithely voiced by electeds, candidates, other org leaders, activists, neighbors, etc. have made many of us board members blanche. I've had some very rough conversations with friends, family, and associates about zoning, development, social services. The kinds of convos where I just have to stop for fear of damaging the relationship. It's not a good feeling. Any way. Thank you for your clear-eyed take. I wish I had your views a decade ago.

by netcan 6y ago

oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago

Highly agree. It seems like the only recourse these days is simply overriding NIMBYs at the state level (I think CA is close to this point) when the housing crisis becomes so acute that it becomes politically viable to simply go against the many NIMBYs' wishes at the higher levels.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
NIMBY is only one face of the coin that makes it difficult for building. Local governments are also extremely satisfied placing a high bureaucratic burden (red tape) on new development. Think of setback laws, environment impact studies, zoning, facade ordinances.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  To my knowledge that's often because local governments are inherently NIMBYs since they only represent locals by definition. Local governments don't listen to potential locals or outsiders. So I don't really agree that local governments and NIMBYs are different sides of a coin. There is a great amount of overlap and personally I suspect any rules that slow development to be NIMBY motivated.
- netcan 6y ago
  Those things are never, arguably. The problem is that once they exist, they serve whatever purposes whoever controls them wants. If they want NIMBY stuff, they can be used for this purpose. I think addressing NIMBY at this level is a fools errand. You can always replace one tool with another.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Another recourse would be not to build stuff in other people's backyards. There's plenty of space in the US.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  The NIMBYs could move to those places and not have to worry anymore
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    Yes, with some effort you can make NIMBY people move out. As a result, jobs and money also tend to move out. Somehow the low-income people, who now have all the space and jobs to themselves happen to be uncapable of running the place.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      I don't see how this would become real in practice. The YIMBYs don't want to drive out NIMBYs they just want denser housing. If you replace a single family home with a 4 story apartment building you get 4 times the density. Most of the people who want to move in aren't actually low income people. They are migrants who are about to double their salary but can't find a place without displacing low income people. There are lots of cities in California that want to stay "small" which also means that they throw away growth opportunities. The low income people that are being displaced are actually the californians.
    - Waterfall 6y ago
      The idea of low income housing is itself ridiculous. Why are there no low income Porsches? There's plenty of places that don't need affordable housing because housing is affordable without the government tearing the fabric of the free market. Lots of places that didn't have affordable housing didn't overinvest in houses like Texas where the houses remained stable compared to the heavily populated areas with high density.
      - 6y ago

chii 6y ago

> how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it. i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard".

Tyrek 6y ago
but if, as the OP article suggests, there is no lost value, then there is no incremental value to pay existing NIMBYs. Otherwise you're just paying people off based on some subjective measure, which does not seem eminently sustainable. Obviously, there are plenty of potential issues, such as sampling bias that may confound the article's conclusions, but it's not something to outright ignore, either.
- bananaface 6y ago
  The problem then is you can avoid paying NIMBYs by manufacturing studies claiming they didn't lose any value... Which may be the motivation here. It's very easy to fudge a study, even direct analyses like this. I'm skeptical.
- Waterfall 6y ago
  Only if you believe 1996-2006 is impartial information 14 years later and not cherry picked
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> i think it's "easy" - pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost value when constructing objects in their "backyard". Suppose the difference is actually large. Their currently million dollar house will be worth half a million dollars. Who is paying this money? Low income people who need housing? They haven't got it, that was the original problem. Local taxpayers? That's just the original homeowners paying themselves.
- lliamander 6y ago
  The property developer who built the new construction.

Waterfall 6y ago

The article was useless. They could have showed asylums, prisons and liquor stores built during 1996-2006, you know, the year that housing prices peaked and said it had no effect on housing prices.

darawk 6y ago
The article is comparing < 2000 feet away to < 4000 feet away home prices. So, any broader market trend is accounted for.
- Waterfall 6y ago
  Doesn't really matter when they use booming housing prices from over a decade ago to justify their cooked statistics.
  - darawk 6y ago
    Yes, it does. By comparing them to teach other, the broader trend in the housing market is held constant. They may be making other errors, but this isn't one of them.
    - Waterfall 6y ago
      I'm sure they have other decades they could use, but they choose the time right when the housing boomed and right before it burst. I doubt the prices had anything to do with affordable housing, and more with other factors that could have easily negated it.

bananaface 6y ago

I think the best approach is just to spread the risk. If I own a house and someone builds a fracking station behind it, I'll lose most of what I have worked my whole life to build. I shouldn't be able to buy a house and have jurisdiction over the entire surrounding area, but I also shouldn't be at risk of losing 50% of my property overnight. To be honest, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of insurance policy that covers this kind of thing. You'd pay a premium to be protected from large value reductions, and the risk is distributed across a large number of homeowners.

kyleee 6y ago
Don't give the insurance companies any ideas...
pirocks 6y ago
The core problem here is that so much value is tied up in houses. People view houses as an investment. If houses depreciated like cars then people aren't so concerned about the value of there house b/c it won't make or break retirement. Any long term housing solution needs to find a way of preventing houses from becoming investments.
- chongli 6y ago
  Houses do depreciate like cars. Houses are money pits. It’s land that is the investment. The earth may have a huge amount of land but the amount of desirable land is tiny by comparison. Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. To them, the house essentially had negative value. The land was all they wanted.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    > Lots of people will spend a million dollars on a house and tear it down to the ground so they can rebuild. At this stage, you're not talking about regular people who are holding their house as their nest egg. Many, many people hold their house as a location they can put money every month that won't disappear and someday might make more money. The kind of people that are buying houses for the land and the kind of people that are buying existing houses to live in are two entirely different income brackets. Lots and lots of people are in the poorer income bracket.

conanbatt 6y ago

> I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them I don't think this is necessarily true. Allowing further construction and development raises the value of land, it doesn't decrease it: a square foot in a dense city is worth a lot more than in a sparse one. Its possible NIMBYism exists on the wrong belief that it's in their economic interest to prevent new housing though I'm skeptical. The core problem of NIMBYism is not the pulling-rope game of wanting and not wanting housing: its a crisis of tax design and political design. If California, and a city like san francisco, eliminated sales taxes and income taxes and would gather those revenues with property taxes and land taxes, they would be so high that property wouldn't be worth a damn. (SF city alone spends something like 1000U$S per household per month) This distortive tax does benefit old landlords, and in a state with such a transient population it should be politically popular to change that. But it doesn't because of a political design issue: renters and immigrants either can't or tend not to vote. SF population is like 25% immigrants, almost all of them renters and with no capacity to politically fight back anything. It is my belief that these things will change when they have to be changed and not a minute sooner.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

NIMBYism exists because so much personal savings is tied up in real estate. This is mostly due to maybe tax incentives and government policy favoring landowners. We need land value taxes to encourage the efficient use of land, discourage this ridiculous house-as-a-nest-egg system, and encourage housing development to match demand, but it won't happen until renters start voting more than landowners. (Landowners are technically outnumbered 2-to-1 in the bay.)

specialist 6y ago

"I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. ... YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally." I fully agree with your realpolitik analysis and conclusions. Your strategy is far more healthy than my own. Thank you. I was very involved in local politics. Long time member of one of the few remaining orgs regularly doing endorsement interviews. My own large (largest?) precinct is in the most progressive legislative district, in the most progressive congressional district, in a very blue state. For a rough sense, IIRC, our 2016 caucus had ~140 Bernie supporters and ~10 HRC supporters. That liberal bubble you hear about? I was deep in it. Our executive board regularly has some very divisive arguments. But I now know these were the narcissism of small differences. Collectively, we were very far to the left of our broader community. I have a rueful laugh whenever told how left-wing my area is. People just don't know. That liberalism hard stops when the topics are housing, homelessness, and adjacent issues. The policy positions blithely voiced by electeds, candidates, other org leaders, activists, neighbors, etc. have made many of us board members blanche. I've had some very rough conversations with friends, family, and associates about zoning, development, social services. The kinds of convos where I just have to stop for fear of damaging the relationship. It's not a good feeling. Any way. Thank you for your clear-eyed take. I wish I had your views a decade ago.