3 ms·

Single use zoning lives due to NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision. The former stays forever while the latter is in play.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." Corporations that own houses don't want their value to decline. People renting properties out on AirBNB don't want their value to decline. They're just different categories of existing property owners who want property values to stay high or increase more. The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do. Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem. All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Strangely enough Americans demonize building more houses while in Germany it is the obvious solution.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." That would be why I made the point repeatedly that it isn't any one factor that got us here and cautioned against trying to frame it that way.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Because all the same factors have the same cause. If housing prices are too high, landlords will want them to stay high. You can say that it's male landlords and female landlords and gay landlords and redneck landlords and atheist landlords and thin landlords and fat landlords and look how many factors there are. But you're just bisecting the group "existing property owners" along arbitrary lines that have nothing to do with anything.

It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." Corporations that own houses don't want their value to decline. People renting properties out on AirBNB don't want their value to decline. They're just different categories of existing property owners who want property values to stay high or increase more. The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do. Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem. All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.

imtringued 5y ago
Strangely enough Americans demonize building more houses while in Germany it is the obvious solution.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." That would be why I made the point repeatedly that it isn't any one factor that got us here and cautioned against trying to frame it that way.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  Because all the same factors have the same cause. If housing prices are too high, landlords will want them to stay high. You can say that it's male landlords and female landlords and gay landlords and redneck landlords and atheist landlords and thin landlords and fat landlords and look how many factors there are. But you're just bisecting the group "existing property owners" along arbitrary lines that have nothing to do with anything.