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> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars There. You've hit upon the crux of it. Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing

> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars There. You've hit upon the crux of it. Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing developments because it's going to lower their property values. Period. End of story. They're too fucking cowardly to come right out and say it, which is why I not only have no respect for these people, it's why I call them out on their bullshit - to their face - every single chance I get. "Doing good" requires sacrifice. Always. Because if it was fuckin' easy, everyone would be a do-gooder. Everyone would be rushing into burning buildings to save someone, diving into sub-zero temperature water through the ice to grab the person who fell in, sacrificing their wealth to make the world better, etc. Most of these people want to feel good, they don't actually want to do good. Buying a Tesla, installing solar panels, recycling your paper and plastic, donating (usually just enough to offset tax burdens) to charities doesn't make you a good person. YOU have to personally suffer and give up something of significant value - in this case, your multi-million dollar valuations on your housing. /rant

ddingus 5y ago
>"Doing good" requires sacrifice. Always. Great rant! I never really boiled it down to the bare nubs like that, but you are right. I am going to share that basic idea around some. More people need to internalize it. Having not done that is likely why people love stories about other people doing good.
- pas 5y ago
  It depends though. If someone grew up in a dense neighborhood then they might not care at all, or they even find the densification of a typical car centric sprawl a good thing :)
- TimPC 5y ago
  Careful. I have a strong disagreement with this. Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact. Some of those things require personal loss or suffering but it’s not the personal loss or suffering that makes those things into good acts. Also there are many good things that you can do that require less suffering. Ideally we can get both but we shouldn’t glorify suffering at the expense of outcomes.
  - dgfitz 5y ago
    > Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact. I strongly disagree with that definition. Holding the door for someone is doing good. Picking up a plastic bottle off the street and putting it in a recycle bin is doing good. Doing good does not need to be high impact, or to even directly impact anyone at all.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Well, I have never done good without some degree of sacrifice on my part. And I thought through it in detail, taking your comment seriously. Now, at times there is way more reward than sacrifice. And it may be very minor league, but it is there. I agree with you completely in that the good is all about the target of the good, not our cost of action. Not all good is high impact too. Just being a good human, holding doors, helping in small ways all add right up to impact the world we inhabit. Broad impact that is catchy. Everyone benefits. But there simply is a cost of action, yes? (Great discussion, BTW)
    - scruple 5y ago
      I've never thought of holding a door open for someone as being a personal sacrifice on my part. What am I missing?
      - ddingus 5y ago
        It cost you time and agency. The sacrifice is small, but there as a cost all the same.
chrischen 5y ago
How do we choose who has to sacrifice? Isn’t one group bearing the brunt of sacrifice the very definition of inequality. Often times it could be a rich person defending his property name but it could just add easily be a poor family. I’m no NIMBY but often times the solution isn’t easy because it has to be fair.
- mavhc 5y ago
  If you own a house you're probably not poor
- pas 5y ago
  The dead simple solution to gentrification (the unfair pricing out of the locals) is to mandate building houses that are basically a strict superset of the already present ones. Which allows the locals to stay in the neighborhood with very similar conditions (eg. similar rent for years). Naturally this means that developments will be big to absorb these costs.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    What would life be like if we had adopted those kind of policies in the middle ages? Hmm Things change over time. Whether it be 10 years or 100 years. Arguing about character of a neighborhood is somewhat nonsensical IMO.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > How do we choose who has to sacrifice? The people who want to hold the moral high ground have to also accept the suffering and sacrifice that go with it. "Doing the right thing" has a cost to it. That's exactly why I call these people out. They want to be seen as good people, but aren't willing to suffer the burden that goodness requires. > Isn’t one group bearing the brunt of sacrifice the very definition of inequality. No, it isn't, because I'm talking about voluntarily sacrificing for your community in the pursuit of a higher good than your own personal enrichment and the enrichment of your children. > Often times it could be a rich person defending his property name but it could just add easily be a poor family. Define "rich". Define "poor". When I was a young child, people who could afford to eat three meals a day were "rich". Today, I define "poor" as being unable to eat at a restaurant every day of the week and not being able to afford a first-class flight. It's an ever-sliding scale based on your own income, and everyone's comfortable sacrificing more - or less - than someone else.
nostrademons 5y ago
"Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing developments because it's going to lower their property values. Period. End of story." This explanation is commonly repeated, but it rings false, for a couple reasons. One is that if you ever talk to a NIMBY boomer (or are related to one), you'll very rarely hear them talk about their home value, except in the context of lamenting how their kids can't live near them anymore. Instead, you'll hear them talk about how they'll lose their view if the high-rise goes up, or they'll be in shadow, or that it'll bring in the riff-raff, or the roads can't support more traffic, or how will the school systems cope, or it'll change the bucolic character of the town, or you won't be able to know your neighbors. It's all about preserving lifestyle, not money. A second is that even if these are bullshit excuses for actually wanting money, their incentives don't add up. The worst NIMBYs are people who intend to die in their home and never move again. Economically, they shouldn't care about their home value, because by the time they can turn it into cash, they'll be dead. A lot of them are even childless, so the "leave an inheritance for the kids" argument doesn't apply. A third reason is that development usually raises home values. 30 units on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $10M; 1 unit on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $3-4M. This is how developers profit, and how they can convince homeowners to sell to them in the first place. Upzone a 1/2 acre SFH and the homeowner can pocket a million or two over fair market value, and the developer pockets maybe $3M after construction costs. A more likely explanation is to a.) take NIMBYs at their word when they say it's all about quality of life rather than finances and b.) understand that development privatizes gains among former and non-residents, socializes losses among current residents, and socializes gains among future residents. When a lot gets upzoned, the people who make a financial windfall are the developer (non-resident) and the seller (former resident). The people who enjoy a better quality of life are the new residents who move in and wouldn't otherwise have a home in a desirable community (future residents). The people who suffer a worse quality of life - for all the reasons listed above - are the existing homeowners (current residents). Guess who are the voters?
- makomk 5y ago
  Also, the big elephant in the room here is that the denser housing is, the more quality-of-life for people living there is affected by things outside the bounds of their individual property and the more important it becomes for them to have a say in that. YIMBY campaigners can post all the photos they like of high-rises surrounded by parkland to argue that high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape, but when the founding principle of YIMBY-ism is that developers could replace those parks with a blank wall blocking out all sunlight to the residents' windows or an art gallery full of visitors looking directly into their lives all day and the residents should have no way of stopping it that's basically just a bait-and-switch. (The art gallery example and the YIMBY reaction to it is something that actually happened in London!)
Y_Y 5y ago
My feeling on this is similar, and I'd take it a step further. Somebody wants to build some houses in Nimbyville. They developer stands to make money, and increasing the supply of housing will benefit those who want to move there[0] by (presumably) lowering the cost of housing overall. This is fine, but there's a good chance the people in Nimbyville who own houses will see the value of those houses go down in the event these new ones are built. Or they may be hurt in some other less tangible way, the salient point is that they think it would be bad for them and are willing to expend some effort or forgo some utility in order to prevent the construction. Furthermore and importantly, they current residents have power over the new builds, via city councils and zoning and objections etc. Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them. The developers can offer to pay the people who stand to lose property value, until the proposition is profitable for the Nimbys. If the price gets too high then it might be worth it to go down another route like legislative change from a higher power like state government, or a PR guilt campaign. This seems to be what's happening now. I wonder though if you couldn't just pay people off? [1] [0] Even if the housing isn't cheap, since it potentially frees up a cheaper house in the same area. [1] You may argue that this constitutes rent seeking on behalf of the Nimbyvillians.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them. Wouldn't the nimbys hold out for a higher price forever? That's what happens if you try to build something like a railway: Once you've brought up 95% of the land you need, the owners of the final 5% realise they can demand a huge sum.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Contingent contracts and subsequent graphing could fix that. Ask for everybody along proposed "grid-maps" of territory if they would be willing to sell for a railroad, and how much at an upfront price and make all pending a successful route negotiation. Then it becomes a graphing problem to find the cheapest path which fits the constraints.
- pas 5y ago
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
Why should people be in favor of lowering their property values? Also even if it sounds good and social, you can also turn it on its head and realize why socialism breeds hopelessness: if you establish a rule that people have to live in properties with low value, nobody will have to hope to ever escape those conditions.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  You throw around the word socialism as an epithet but the status quo you are defending is one of the least free markets in the world. Those escalating values are the result of manipulation at every level of government.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    I'm just arguing from the principle that people should be allowed to desire certain living conditions and work towards obtaining them. Not saying the current state of affairs is ideal. Nevertheless it seems OK to me if, say, a city designates some area for building and says "this is for a part of town with lots of parks and only single family homes" or whatever. Then it would be unfair to later come around and say oopsi, now you'll have to accept "affordable" homes in your neighborhood. Presumably the city sells the land to the builders, and it comes with a certain promise.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      That sounds an awful lot like central planning to me. Aren’t you worried about breeding hopelessness?
      - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        Well if the land belongs to the city, they can do with it as they please, including central planning? I'm not saying it is ideal, but I think that is usually how it is done? And if you want to sell land to people to build houses for their family, you better provide them with some incentives, like promising to build schools, sanitation and so on. It also is not as hopeless as socialism because people are not forced to take the offer. they can negotiate with the city, too. They can even start their own cities.

ddingus 5y ago

>"Doing good" requires sacrifice. Always. Great rant! I never really boiled it down to the bare nubs like that, but you are right. I am going to share that basic idea around some. More people need to internalize it. Having not done that is likely why people love stories about other people doing good.

pas 5y ago
It depends though. If someone grew up in a dense neighborhood then they might not care at all, or they even find the densification of a typical car centric sprawl a good thing :)
TimPC 5y ago
Careful. I have a strong disagreement with this. Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact. Some of those things require personal loss or suffering but it’s not the personal loss or suffering that makes those things into good acts. Also there are many good things that you can do that require less suffering. Ideally we can get both but we shouldn’t glorify suffering at the expense of outcomes.
- dgfitz 5y ago
  > Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact. I strongly disagree with that definition. Holding the door for someone is doing good. Picking up a plastic bottle off the street and putting it in a recycle bin is doing good. Doing good does not need to be high impact, or to even directly impact anyone at all.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Well, I have never done good without some degree of sacrifice on my part. And I thought through it in detail, taking your comment seriously. Now, at times there is way more reward than sacrifice. And it may be very minor league, but it is there. I agree with you completely in that the good is all about the target of the good, not our cost of action. Not all good is high impact too. Just being a good human, holding doors, helping in small ways all add right up to impact the world we inhabit. Broad impact that is catchy. Everyone benefits. But there simply is a cost of action, yes? (Great discussion, BTW)
  - scruple 5y ago
    I've never thought of holding a door open for someone as being a personal sacrifice on my part. What am I missing?
    - ddingus 5y ago
      It cost you time and agency. The sacrifice is small, but there as a cost all the same.

chrischen 5y ago

How do we choose who has to sacrifice? Isn’t one group bearing the brunt of sacrifice the very definition of inequality. Often times it could be a rich person defending his property name but it could just add easily be a poor family. I’m no NIMBY but often times the solution isn’t easy because it has to be fair.

mavhc 5y ago
If you own a house you're probably not poor
pas 5y ago
The dead simple solution to gentrification (the unfair pricing out of the locals) is to mandate building houses that are basically a strict superset of the already present ones. Which allows the locals to stay in the neighborhood with very similar conditions (eg. similar rent for years). Naturally this means that developments will be big to absorb these costs.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  What would life be like if we had adopted those kind of policies in the middle ages? Hmm Things change over time. Whether it be 10 years or 100 years. Arguing about character of a neighborhood is somewhat nonsensical IMO.
cbozeman 5y ago
> How do we choose who has to sacrifice? The people who want to hold the moral high ground have to also accept the suffering and sacrifice that go with it. "Doing the right thing" has a cost to it. That's exactly why I call these people out. They want to be seen as good people, but aren't willing to suffer the burden that goodness requires. > Isn’t one group bearing the brunt of sacrifice the very definition of inequality. No, it isn't, because I'm talking about voluntarily sacrificing for your community in the pursuit of a higher good than your own personal enrichment and the enrichment of your children. > Often times it could be a rich person defending his property name but it could just add easily be a poor family. Define "rich". Define "poor". When I was a young child, people who could afford to eat three meals a day were "rich". Today, I define "poor" as being unable to eat at a restaurant every day of the week and not being able to afford a first-class flight. It's an ever-sliding scale based on your own income, and everyone's comfortable sacrificing more - or less - than someone else.

nostrademons 5y ago

"Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing developments because it's going to lower their property values. Period. End of story." This explanation is commonly repeated, but it rings false, for a couple reasons. One is that if you ever talk to a NIMBY boomer (or are related to one), you'll very rarely hear them talk about their home value, except in the context of lamenting how their kids can't live near them anymore. Instead, you'll hear them talk about how they'll lose their view if the high-rise goes up, or they'll be in shadow, or that it'll bring in the riff-raff, or the roads can't support more traffic, or how will the school systems cope, or it'll change the bucolic character of the town, or you won't be able to know your neighbors. It's all about preserving lifestyle, not money. A second is that even if these are bullshit excuses for actually wanting money, their incentives don't add up. The worst NIMBYs are people who intend to die in their home and never move again. Economically, they shouldn't care about their home value, because by the time they can turn it into cash, they'll be dead. A lot of them are even childless, so the "leave an inheritance for the kids" argument doesn't apply. A third reason is that development usually raises home values. 30 units on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $10M; 1 unit on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $3-4M. This is how developers profit, and how they can convince homeowners to sell to them in the first place. Upzone a 1/2 acre SFH and the homeowner can pocket a million or two over fair market value, and the developer pockets maybe $3M after construction costs. A more likely explanation is to a.) take NIMBYs at their word when they say it's all about quality of life rather than finances and b.) understand that development privatizes gains among former and non-residents, socializes losses among current residents, and socializes gains among future residents. When a lot gets upzoned, the people who make a financial windfall are the developer (non-resident) and the seller (former resident). The people who enjoy a better quality of life are the new residents who move in and wouldn't otherwise have a home in a desirable community (future residents). The people who suffer a worse quality of life - for all the reasons listed above - are the existing homeowners (current residents). Guess who are the voters?

makomk 5y ago
Also, the big elephant in the room here is that the denser housing is, the more quality-of-life for people living there is affected by things outside the bounds of their individual property and the more important it becomes for them to have a say in that. YIMBY campaigners can post all the photos they like of high-rises surrounded by parkland to argue that high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape, but when the founding principle of YIMBY-ism is that developers could replace those parks with a blank wall blocking out all sunlight to the residents' windows or an art gallery full of visitors looking directly into their lives all day and the residents should have no way of stopping it that's basically just a bait-and-switch. (The art gallery example and the YIMBY reaction to it is something that actually happened in London!)

Y_Y 5y ago

My feeling on this is similar, and I'd take it a step further. Somebody wants to build some houses in Nimbyville. They developer stands to make money, and increasing the supply of housing will benefit those who want to move there[0] by (presumably) lowering the cost of housing overall. This is fine, but there's a good chance the people in Nimbyville who own houses will see the value of those houses go down in the event these new ones are built. Or they may be hurt in some other less tangible way, the salient point is that they think it would be bad for them and are willing to expend some effort or forgo some utility in order to prevent the construction. Furthermore and importantly, they current residents have power over the new builds, via city councils and zoning and objections etc. Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them. The developers can offer to pay the people who stand to lose property value, until the proposition is profitable for the Nimbys. If the price gets too high then it might be worth it to go down another route like legislative change from a higher power like state government, or a PR guilt campaign. This seems to be what's happening now. I wonder though if you couldn't just pay people off? [1] [0] Even if the housing isn't cheap, since it potentially frees up a cheaper house in the same area. [1] You may argue that this constitutes rent seeking on behalf of the Nimbyvillians.

michaelt 5y ago
> Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them. Wouldn't the nimbys hold out for a higher price forever? That's what happens if you try to build something like a railway: Once you've brought up 95% of the land you need, the owners of the final 5% realise they can demand a huge sum.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Contingent contracts and subsequent graphing could fix that. Ask for everybody along proposed "grid-maps" of territory if they would be willing to sell for a railroad, and how much at an upfront price and make all pending a successful route negotiation. Then it becomes a graphing problem to find the cheapest path which fits the constraints.
pas 5y ago

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

Why should people be in favor of lowering their property values? Also even if it sounds good and social, you can also turn it on its head and realize why socialism breeds hopelessness: if you establish a rule that people have to live in properties with low value, nobody will have to hope to ever escape those conditions.

bradleyjg 5y ago
You throw around the word socialism as an epithet but the status quo you are defending is one of the least free markets in the world. Those escalating values are the result of manipulation at every level of government.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  I'm just arguing from the principle that people should be allowed to desire certain living conditions and work towards obtaining them. Not saying the current state of affairs is ideal. Nevertheless it seems OK to me if, say, a city designates some area for building and says "this is for a part of town with lots of parks and only single family homes" or whatever. Then it would be unfair to later come around and say oopsi, now you'll have to accept "affordable" homes in your neighborhood. Presumably the city sells the land to the builders, and it comes with a certain promise.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    That sounds an awful lot like central planning to me. Aren’t you worried about breeding hopelessness?
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      Well if the land belongs to the city, they can do with it as they please, including central planning? I'm not saying it is ideal, but I think that is usually how it is done? And if you want to sell land to people to build houses for their family, you better provide them with some incentives, like promising to build schools, sanitation and so on. It also is not as hopeless as socialism because people are not forced to take the offer. they can negotiate with the city, too. They can even start their own cities.