8 ms·

Let me give a concrete example. Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop o

by ipnon 5y ago

Let me give a concrete example. Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop owners and families) are competing with short term residents (young professionals and tourists). These two forces already competed for rentals, the long term residents controlled the properties. The short term residents are willing to pay a premium in the form of AirBNB to remain in the neighborhood.[a] This can take the form of a young professional staying in an AirBNB for a month while looking for a rental, or a tourist staying in the neighborhood for a few weeks. This has 3 important effects: 1) AirBNB makes money, 2) an apartment that could have been a rental becomes unavailable to long term residents, and 3) the lister of the AirBNB, who is typically a wealthy long term resident of Bed Stuy, makes a profit. The result of these 3 factors is a continuous squeeze on poor, long term residents of Bed Stuy. It comes in the form of an increase in price on their most demanding economic cost: housing. (1) and (3) incentive the continuation of this process. (2) contributes to the downfall of the neighborhood in the form of housing instability. For those who doubt that housing instability contributes to violence, look at the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing. The wait lists are years long, the applicants are supremely vetted, and felons are generally not allowed. Any yet crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy. edit: [a] The flip side of this AirBNB housing premium is experienced by poor, long term residents in the form of rent increases.

baby 5y ago
Love the upside though, I've been traveling during covid and staying one month here and there, and this wouldn't have been possible without AirBnB. I've also used AirBnB to stay for a month in SF while I was looking for apartment in the same neighborhood (not my first time doing this). I can't remember the last time I booked a hotel honestly, unless I was forced by work it must have been a decade.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  It's a great upside for you. It's a huge downside for the people who actually need to live and work in an area. AirBnB is one of the worst things to have happened in some cities (I know Barcelona has reacted quite negatively to it). In Dublin, for instance, the pandemic literally doubled the long-term rental supply as houses/apartments flooded off AirBnB.
  - baby 5y ago
    “You” is everybody who has travelled pretty much. If you travel today you most likely are taking advantage of Airbnb
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      And that's exactly why it's a problem. So many people are traveling, and so many are taking houses that could go to residences of the area. Also, I don't like that generalization. I stay at hotels when I travel, and actually so do most of the people I know who travel regularly. They prefer what they get with a hotel over AirBnB. So it's not quite as widespread as that, though I do agree, and will counter that that only exacerbates the problem. It's the entitlement of tourists to feel like they should live like the locals when they're not.
      - handoflixue 5y ago
        If one party is willing to pay higher prices, isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher? You keep talking about how this is bad for some people, but that just means a tradeoff is being made, and you're not making any argument that it's a bad tradeoff. Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't? (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
        dorchadas 5y ago
        > isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher? This assumes basic free market economics is good in all cases, which is not something I agree with. Especially with something this is an essential need (living residences) and in a finite supply. > Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't? I mean, the locals actually live and work there. The tourists don't. They come in, do what they want and leave. They want to live like a local while they're there, though, even though they're not locals. And them living like a local actually harms the real locals. It's the entitlement that they feel that they should live as if they're members of the community when they're not, and that it happens at the expense of the residents of the town. I find it hard to believe someone is "entitled" to be able to live like a local in their own town. > (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad) Because it destroys the housing market for the residents of the town/city. Driving up prices for them, and driving them further out of the city, etc. Lots of negative externalities come from it for the people who actually need to live and work there.
youeseh 5y ago
I think it's fair to say that, the more pressure there is to meet short-term obligations, the higher the crime rate. Let's say there was no short-term renting allowed in Bed Stuy. Then, would there be enough supply of affordable housing to meet demand? What sort of obstacles do projects that introduce new housing supply face in Bed Stuy?
- ipnon 5y ago
  New housing developments almost always will raze a decades old building with 3 or 4 apartments per floor for a shiny new building with 1 or 2 "luxury" apartments per floor. This is partly due to zoning (affordable housing is effectively illegal at a municipal level) and partly due to the housing market (the working class cannot afford to purchase new housing, they must rent the old).
  - youeseh 5y ago
    Do people in Bed Stuy (or the rest of the city) organize against new construction that reduces supply?
    - skystarman 5y ago
      The answer to your question is that people in Bed Stuy and NYC in general organize against ALL new construction.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > I think it's fair to say that, the more pressure there is to meet short-term obligations, the higher the crime rate. I don't understand what that means. Pressure on whom? Property owners paying down debt? Residents paying for an Airbnb or rent?
  - omginternets 5y ago
    I'll take a stab at rephrasing the parent post: "desperation leads to crime".
mlinksva 5y ago
> the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing How is public housing unstable? Are public housing residents frequently forced to move? AFAIK that's the definition of unstable housing.
- ipnon 5y ago
  It is unstable in that 1) it is a housing option of last resort and 2) no one wants to stay longer than they need to. It is not a place where people "put down their roots," partially by design, partially by circumstances.
  - bitcurious 5y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/nyregion/as-new-york-rents-soar-public-housing-becomes-lifelong-refuge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/nyregion/as-new-york-rent... In 2015 the average length of stay was 22 years. In general the idea that folks would wait years on a waitlist with the intent of leaving ASAP doesn’t pass the smell test.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      I doubt length-of-stay is normally distributed. I would wager that the distribution is skewed heavily to the left. This would result in a that the median is much lower, with a mean that it is biased to the right due to a small number of unusually long leases. tl;dr: the mean is almost certainly the wrong statistic.
      - padastra 5y ago
        How skewed do you think it would have to be for the mean stay to be “short” eg 2-3 years, given the upper bound of human lifetime? This is one of those things that sounds smart but fails the common sense test.
        omginternets 5y ago
andromeduck 5y ago
We could also just build more housing...
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  I live in Minneapolis. The amount of high end condos and lofts going up around the city is staggering. Same thing in the outer ring suburbs. They're going up faster than they can fill them. My buddy was a professional hockey player. He played most of his career in Europe and just recently moved back. Moved into a nice condo in the down town area. Four months after moving in, he's seeing ads for the many, many open condos in his building, which have been discounted some $20-$30K below what he paid. We're now creating a deluge of high end housing that is now sitting empty and the owners/developers are having to compete side by side with each other for tenets now and its become completely cut throat. Add in businesses and people are fleeing the city and those owners are already starting to see the coming nightmare. So yes, I agree we need to build more house, but FFS we need to build according to the needs of the community, not the developer who's in a "get rich" scheme to gentrify huge swaths of the city.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Lenders and developers invest based on an expectation of demand for high-end housing. What explains these outcomes?
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Pretty much nothing in your screed is factual. The Minneapolis "building boom" reflects the general trend in most of the nation: expansion of the housing stock since about 2005 has been negligible, much less than 1 per hundred residents per year. This is about half the rate of real expanding cities like Houston. I don't know what better signal you expect than the fact that median sale price of homes in Minneapolis proper has gone up 45% in only 5 years and the time to sell is now 11 days instead of 21 days in 2016, according to Redfin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Fu56 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Fu56
  - tqi 5y ago
cactus2093 5y ago
Grouping young professionals and tourists together under short term residents is a little bit ridiculous. This type of thinking seems to dominate housing discussions, that young people (or any incoming immigrants to a city/neighborhood) are a nuisance that must be put up with, and the good, ideal state of the neighborhood would be for nothing to ever change and everyone to stay where they are. You need more housing supply in Bed Stuy with or without Airbnb. It's reasonable to try to limit Airbnb so it doesn't get too out of hand, but it's definitely not the major driver of demand today. And you won't avoid gentrification by pretending that the demand is somehow not legitimate and can be easily controlled so that you never need to build anything new.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  We knocked down a 1930s depression house to put up a half million dollar home. My property tax is 5x my neighbors. Who's complaining? My neighbors who have fantastic schools and pay trivial taxes?
  - skystarman 5y ago
    I'm assuming you're in California. Their property tax laws are absolutely insane but good luck ever changing it.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Who's complaining? We know more about gentrification than starting the discussion from scratch. What is your experience with the downsides of gentrification?
- antihero 5y ago
  I think one problem at least is that if an area gets filled with young professionals with cash to burn, the businesses in the area either start realising they can start charging premium rates for things or they get bought by people who do. In addition to this, as the area becomes more desirable and affluent, landlords realise that they can increase the rents. This means that over time, the area becomes unaffordable for those who have lived there for decades, unless there's something like rent control introduced.
skystarman 5y ago
The effect of Airbnb on the price of housing is pretty small, maybe a few percentage increase. Not saying that isn't worth doing something about but there it certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list. End onerous and restrictive zoning and increase housing supply should be the first move. https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbnb-effect-on-housing-and-rent/?sh=41b0fc9b2226 https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbn...
- dorchadas 5y ago
  The pandemic literally caused housing supply in Dublin Ireland to double due to people fleeing the short-term rental market when tourism dried up. We're talking from ~1600 listings to 3000+. Even if it doesn't affect cost, which is ludicrous given those numbers, it's certainly affecting the supply at a huge rate.
  - skystarman 5y ago
    You're attributing the surge in rental supply in a major city during the pandemic entirely to Airbnb? This is really lazy, unserious analysis. Housing supply in cities across the entire western world shrank because people were working remotely and fleeing urban centers which were shut down and huge centers of spread. So no. Not just Airbnb.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      No, it was a good chunk of AirBnB: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dublin-rent.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dubli...
- ipnon 5y ago
  A few percentage increase in a city of 8 million results in thousands of uprooted lives at the margin. I used Bed Stuy as an example because it seems to me a marginalized community. It is surrounded by poorer and richer neighborhoods that do not have the same housing problem I have described. In some sense Bed Stuy is the "frontline" where the processes I describe converge. Much like in war, the people on the "frontline" experience direct disturbance to their way of life, while those who live far away from the "frontline" have their lives go on as normal even if they are aware of the problems nearby.
dcolkitt 5y ago
This analysis glosses over the underlying problem that drives the dynamic: the existence of NIMBY regulation and restrictions that artificially constricts the supply of housing. Without supply constraints, the existence of wealthy high-end housing demand subsidizes not competes with working class demand. That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. Today’s luxury housing becomes tomorrow’s middle class housing. This isn’t just theoretical speculation. We know this is exactly how markets without supply constraints work because of the used car market. Rich car drivers who insist on new, luxury vehicles dramatically lower the cost of car ownership for everyone else by creating a robust used car market. There’s no such thing as “auto gentrification” because carmakers can simply create new and better supply to satisfy high-end demand. Product quality improves continuously and the poor have access to 10 year old cars that are virtually identical to new luxury cars at a small fraction of the price. The used car market is arguably the greatest source of tangible wealth redistribution in the American economy.
- nohuck13 5y ago
  > That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. The primary characteristic of high-end housing is the characteristic of being located in an already desirable neighborhood.
  - proxyon 5y ago
    Not even close. The labor and materials cost far more than the land.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop owners and families) are competing with short term residents (young professionals and tourists). My friends just bought in Bed Stuy. If one of them hadn't worked for the city's planning department for a few years, there is zero way they would have gotten their paperwork approved in the timeline and cost envelope they needed. They would love to add a story to the building and rent it out, but that's impossible under their community board. One of the most insidious unions in recent history is large landlords and anti-gentrification activists. Activists increase regulations and the cost of building and new entry. Landlords get asset appreciation while paying for "affordable housing. The latter creates multi-generational, heritable voting bloc to keep the whole mechanism in motion.
wolverine876 5y ago
> crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy Could you provide support for that? I know many people suspect it and it's a well-known stereotype, but I don't know that it's true.
- ipnon 5y ago
  Compare the NYPD crime map[0] with a map of the NYC Housing Authority's developments.[1] [0] https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/ https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authority#/media/File:NYCHA_Map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Correlation is not causation. Maybe public housing is put in neighborhoods with high crime rates. Maybe poor neighborhoods tend to have both.
mrobins 5y ago
Crime doesn’t “proliferate” around housing projects in Bed Stuy, it exists just as it does everywhere. Bed Stuy and NYC as a whole rank as one of the safest cities, especially large cities. Linking the housing projects to crime without rigorously accounting for all other factors is irresponsible. Perhaps housing projects are more heavily policed so more crime is recorded. What factors (ie poverty and low political capitol) led the housing project to be placed where it was. Housing instability is a critical issue and increasing density and available housing stock is an urgent need.
refurb 5y ago
Ok, so get rid of AirBnB. Wouldn’t an influx of wealthy professions squeeze all the low income renters out anyways?
CryptoPunk 5y ago
This totally ignores the positive impact of making housing available to those willing to pay the most for it. If a young professional is willing and able to pay $3,000 a month for a unit, and a poor long-term resident is only willing and able to pay $2,000, renting to the former will lead to the more productive party gaining access to the high productivity neighbourhood. If there is a 20% productivity boost from living in the high productivity location, and the young professional generates $12,000 a month in value, while the poor long-term resident generates $5,000 a month, allowing the young professional to outbid the poor long-term resident will lead to a $1,400 boost in monthly productivity. That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people.
- cloudfifty 5y ago
  > That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people. So your take is that giving more money to the property owner will produce more jobs for poor people? As in trickle-down economics?
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    It is not just giving more money to the property owner. It's increasing how much is produced in total. Higher GDP == higher per capita GDP.

by ipnon 5y ago

baby 5y ago

Love the upside though, I've been traveling during covid and staying one month here and there, and this wouldn't have been possible without AirBnB. I've also used AirBnB to stay for a month in SF while I was looking for apartment in the same neighborhood (not my first time doing this). I can't remember the last time I booked a hotel honestly, unless I was forced by work it must have been a decade.

dorchadas 5y ago
It's a great upside for you. It's a huge downside for the people who actually need to live and work in an area. AirBnB is one of the worst things to have happened in some cities (I know Barcelona has reacted quite negatively to it). In Dublin, for instance, the pandemic literally doubled the long-term rental supply as houses/apartments flooded off AirBnB.
- baby 5y ago
  “You” is everybody who has travelled pretty much. If you travel today you most likely are taking advantage of Airbnb
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    And that's exactly why it's a problem. So many people are traveling, and so many are taking houses that could go to residences of the area. Also, I don't like that generalization. I stay at hotels when I travel, and actually so do most of the people I know who travel regularly. They prefer what they get with a hotel over AirBnB. So it's not quite as widespread as that, though I do agree, and will counter that that only exacerbates the problem. It's the entitlement of tourists to feel like they should live like the locals when they're not.
    - handoflixue 5y ago
      If one party is willing to pay higher prices, isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher? You keep talking about how this is bad for some people, but that just means a tradeoff is being made, and you're not making any argument that it's a bad tradeoff. Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't? (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
      - dorchadas 5y ago
        > isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher? This assumes basic free market economics is good in all cases, which is not something I agree with. Especially with something this is an essential need (living residences) and in a finite supply. > Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't? I mean, the locals actually live and work there. The tourists don't. They come in, do what they want and leave. They want to live like a local while they're there, though, even though they're not locals. And them living like a local actually harms the real locals. It's the entitlement that they feel that they should live as if they're members of the community when they're not, and that it happens at the expense of the residents of the town. I find it hard to believe someone is "entitled" to be able to live like a local in their own town. > (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad) Because it destroys the housing market for the residents of the town/city. Driving up prices for them, and driving them further out of the city, etc. Lots of negative externalities come from it for the people who actually need to live and work there.

youeseh 5y ago

I think it's fair to say that, the more pressure there is to meet short-term obligations, the higher the crime rate. Let's say there was no short-term renting allowed in Bed Stuy. Then, would there be enough supply of affordable housing to meet demand? What sort of obstacles do projects that introduce new housing supply face in Bed Stuy?

ipnon 5y ago
New housing developments almost always will raze a decades old building with 3 or 4 apartments per floor for a shiny new building with 1 or 2 "luxury" apartments per floor. This is partly due to zoning (affordable housing is effectively illegal at a municipal level) and partly due to the housing market (the working class cannot afford to purchase new housing, they must rent the old).
- youeseh 5y ago
  Do people in Bed Stuy (or the rest of the city) organize against new construction that reduces supply?
  - skystarman 5y ago
    The answer to your question is that people in Bed Stuy and NYC in general organize against ALL new construction.
wolverine876 5y ago
> I think it's fair to say that, the more pressure there is to meet short-term obligations, the higher the crime rate. I don't understand what that means. Pressure on whom? Property owners paying down debt? Residents paying for an Airbnb or rent?
- omginternets 5y ago
  I'll take a stab at rephrasing the parent post: "desperation leads to crime".

mlinksva 5y ago

> the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing How is public housing unstable? Are public housing residents frequently forced to move? AFAIK that's the definition of unstable housing.

ipnon 5y ago
It is unstable in that 1) it is a housing option of last resort and 2) no one wants to stay longer than they need to. It is not a place where people "put down their roots," partially by design, partially by circumstances.
- bitcurious 5y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/nyregion/as-new-york-rents-soar-public-housing-becomes-lifelong-refuge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/nyregion/as-new-york-rent... In 2015 the average length of stay was 22 years. In general the idea that folks would wait years on a waitlist with the intent of leaving ASAP doesn’t pass the smell test.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    I doubt length-of-stay is normally distributed. I would wager that the distribution is skewed heavily to the left. This would result in a that the median is much lower, with a mean that it is biased to the right due to a small number of unusually long leases. tl;dr: the mean is almost certainly the wrong statistic.
    - padastra 5y ago
      How skewed do you think it would have to be for the mean stay to be “short” eg 2-3 years, given the upper bound of human lifetime? This is one of those things that sounds smart but fails the common sense test.
      - omginternets 5y ago

andromeduck 5y ago

We could also just build more housing...

at-fates-hands 5y ago
I live in Minneapolis. The amount of high end condos and lofts going up around the city is staggering. Same thing in the outer ring suburbs. They're going up faster than they can fill them. My buddy was a professional hockey player. He played most of his career in Europe and just recently moved back. Moved into a nice condo in the down town area. Four months after moving in, he's seeing ads for the many, many open condos in his building, which have been discounted some $20-$30K below what he paid. We're now creating a deluge of high end housing that is now sitting empty and the owners/developers are having to compete side by side with each other for tenets now and its become completely cut throat. Add in businesses and people are fleeing the city and those owners are already starting to see the coming nightmare. So yes, I agree we need to build more house, but FFS we need to build according to the needs of the community, not the developer who's in a "get rich" scheme to gentrify huge swaths of the city.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Lenders and developers invest based on an expectation of demand for high-end housing. What explains these outcomes?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Pretty much nothing in your screed is factual. The Minneapolis "building boom" reflects the general trend in most of the nation: expansion of the housing stock since about 2005 has been negligible, much less than 1 per hundred residents per year. This is about half the rate of real expanding cities like Houston. I don't know what better signal you expect than the fact that median sale price of homes in Minneapolis proper has gone up 45% in only 5 years and the time to sell is now 11 days instead of 21 days in 2016, according to Redfin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Fu56 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Fu56
- tqi 5y ago

cactus2093 5y ago

Grouping young professionals and tourists together under short term residents is a little bit ridiculous. This type of thinking seems to dominate housing discussions, that young people (or any incoming immigrants to a city/neighborhood) are a nuisance that must be put up with, and the good, ideal state of the neighborhood would be for nothing to ever change and everyone to stay where they are. You need more housing supply in Bed Stuy with or without Airbnb. It's reasonable to try to limit Airbnb so it doesn't get too out of hand, but it's definitely not the major driver of demand today. And you won't avoid gentrification by pretending that the demand is somehow not legitimate and can be easily controlled so that you never need to build anything new.

deregulateMed 5y ago
We knocked down a 1930s depression house to put up a half million dollar home. My property tax is 5x my neighbors. Who's complaining? My neighbors who have fantastic schools and pay trivial taxes?
- skystarman 5y ago
  I'm assuming you're in California. Their property tax laws are absolutely insane but good luck ever changing it.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Who's complaining? We know more about gentrification than starting the discussion from scratch. What is your experience with the downsides of gentrification?
antihero 5y ago
I think one problem at least is that if an area gets filled with young professionals with cash to burn, the businesses in the area either start realising they can start charging premium rates for things or they get bought by people who do. In addition to this, as the area becomes more desirable and affluent, landlords realise that they can increase the rents. This means that over time, the area becomes unaffordable for those who have lived there for decades, unless there's something like rent control introduced.

skystarman 5y ago

The effect of Airbnb on the price of housing is pretty small, maybe a few percentage increase. Not saying that isn't worth doing something about but there it certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list. End onerous and restrictive zoning and increase housing supply should be the first move. https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbnb-effect-on-housing-and-rent/?sh=41b0fc9b2226 https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbn...

dorchadas 5y ago
The pandemic literally caused housing supply in Dublin Ireland to double due to people fleeing the short-term rental market when tourism dried up. We're talking from ~1600 listings to 3000+. Even if it doesn't affect cost, which is ludicrous given those numbers, it's certainly affecting the supply at a huge rate.
- skystarman 5y ago
  You're attributing the surge in rental supply in a major city during the pandemic entirely to Airbnb? This is really lazy, unserious analysis. Housing supply in cities across the entire western world shrank because people were working remotely and fleeing urban centers which were shut down and huge centers of spread. So no. Not just Airbnb.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    No, it was a good chunk of AirBnB: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dublin-rent.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dubli...
ipnon 5y ago
A few percentage increase in a city of 8 million results in thousands of uprooted lives at the margin. I used Bed Stuy as an example because it seems to me a marginalized community. It is surrounded by poorer and richer neighborhoods that do not have the same housing problem I have described. In some sense Bed Stuy is the "frontline" where the processes I describe converge. Much like in war, the people on the "frontline" experience direct disturbance to their way of life, while those who live far away from the "frontline" have their lives go on as normal even if they are aware of the problems nearby.

dcolkitt 5y ago

This analysis glosses over the underlying problem that drives the dynamic: the existence of NIMBY regulation and restrictions that artificially constricts the supply of housing. Without supply constraints, the existence of wealthy high-end housing demand subsidizes not competes with working class demand. That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. Today’s luxury housing becomes tomorrow’s middle class housing. This isn’t just theoretical speculation. We know this is exactly how markets without supply constraints work because of the used car market. Rich car drivers who insist on new, luxury vehicles dramatically lower the cost of car ownership for everyone else by creating a robust used car market. There’s no such thing as “auto gentrification” because carmakers can simply create new and better supply to satisfy high-end demand. Product quality improves continuously and the poor have access to 10 year old cars that are virtually identical to new luxury cars at a small fraction of the price. The used car market is arguably the greatest source of tangible wealth redistribution in the American economy.

nohuck13 5y ago
> That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. The primary characteristic of high-end housing is the characteristic of being located in an already desirable neighborhood.
- proxyon 5y ago
  Not even close. The labor and materials cost far more than the land.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop owners and families) are competing with short term residents (young professionals and tourists). My friends just bought in Bed Stuy. If one of them hadn't worked for the city's planning department for a few years, there is zero way they would have gotten their paperwork approved in the timeline and cost envelope they needed. They would love to add a story to the building and rent it out, but that's impossible under their community board. One of the most insidious unions in recent history is large landlords and anti-gentrification activists. Activists increase regulations and the cost of building and new entry. Landlords get asset appreciation while paying for "affordable housing. The latter creates multi-generational, heritable voting bloc to keep the whole mechanism in motion.

wolverine876 5y ago

> crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy Could you provide support for that? I know many people suspect it and it's a well-known stereotype, but I don't know that it's true.

ipnon 5y ago
Compare the NYPD crime map[0] with a map of the NYC Housing Authority's developments.[1] [0] https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/ https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authority#/media/File:NYCHA_Map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Correlation is not causation. Maybe public housing is put in neighborhoods with high crime rates. Maybe poor neighborhoods tend to have both.

mrobins 5y ago

Crime doesn’t “proliferate” around housing projects in Bed Stuy, it exists just as it does everywhere. Bed Stuy and NYC as a whole rank as one of the safest cities, especially large cities. Linking the housing projects to crime without rigorously accounting for all other factors is irresponsible. Perhaps housing projects are more heavily policed so more crime is recorded. What factors (ie poverty and low political capitol) led the housing project to be placed where it was. Housing instability is a critical issue and increasing density and available housing stock is an urgent need.

refurb 5y ago

Ok, so get rid of AirBnB. Wouldn’t an influx of wealthy professions squeeze all the low income renters out anyways?

CryptoPunk 5y ago

This totally ignores the positive impact of making housing available to those willing to pay the most for it. If a young professional is willing and able to pay $3,000 a month for a unit, and a poor long-term resident is only willing and able to pay $2,000, renting to the former will lead to the more productive party gaining access to the high productivity neighbourhood. If there is a 20% productivity boost from living in the high productivity location, and the young professional generates $12,000 a month in value, while the poor long-term resident generates $5,000 a month, allowing the young professional to outbid the poor long-term resident will lead to a $1,400 boost in monthly productivity. That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people.

cloudfifty 5y ago
> That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people. So your take is that giving more money to the property owner will produce more jobs for poor people? As in trickle-down economics?
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  It is not just giving more money to the property owner. It's increasing how much is produced in total. Higher GDP == higher per capita GDP.