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Why would they allow more housing to be built? That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. Discard any notion that all but

• nostromo 5y ago
  I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers. In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart. This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.
  • beebmam 5y ago
    Completely agree. We should be aiming to elect doctors and engineers (i.e. people who understand Systems Theory) for political positions, not people who have prescriptive solutions.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      There are plenty of stupid doctors and engineers.
      • beebmam 5y ago
        Well, duh. There's plenty of stupid people of ANY classification. But at least most doctors and engineers have proven that they can understand systems analysis and think critically, or they wouldn't have their licenses. Software engineering is barely regulated/licensed, so I certainly wouldn't apply this to most software engineers.
        • endisneigh 5y ago
          What does understanding systems analysis have to do with being a good politician?
    • coding123 5y ago
      What would a doctor or engineer do differently?
      • sitkack 5y ago
        Make a decision based on emotion and then retroactively use math to justify that decision.
        • idiotsecant 5y ago
          I am so glad that this response is here. HN in general has this disease, but it's pretty prevalent in STEM fields in general- The "I know how to solve a differential equation so that means I am a rational decision maker" disease. It's important to acknowledge that the more education a person has the more likely they are to reverse-engineer a reason to think something that they want to think, especially when it comes to emotionally charged issues like those that politicians encounter every day. Having technical skills does not automagically make you a good leader or policymaker. It just means you have good technical skills. I would go so far as to say there are probably more people with good technical skills that should not be making policy than the opposite.
          • sitkack 5y ago
            I think having technical people on staff is really important. That the elected leader has a STEM background? Not important. Leaders should be general purpose coordinators of groups that solve problems. Understanding the psychology of all the participants is as important as solving the specific issue. In context, a STEM background is someone who has and can actually engineer or science. Writing some code doesn't qualify. Every human on the planet should be able to design an experiment and do basic statistics. I think the bar we have for our fellow human should be much higher than it currently is. The moniker, that person is an "Every (Hu)Man" , should be a badge of honor.
      • dodobirdlord 5y ago
        Approve construction of market rate housing, presumably.
    • cultofmetatron 5y ago
      thats more or less what china does
      • SomewhatLikely 5y ago
        Minus the "we ... elect" part.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Most Chinese officials aren't engineers or doctors, they might have a degree given to them in something like Chemical engineering, but they've never practiced as an engineer and have the full life training of a politician.
    • testfoobar 5y ago
      Easier to win votes by selling castles in the sky.
  • pirate787 5y ago
    This is my experience as well, after being heavily involved in a local issue. In my state the state employee leaders are also, on the main, very low caliber people.
  • xondono 5y ago
    > This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government. There’s a bit of both, but it’s not a conspiracy. Most cities have this problem (even outside US), because the issue is that most baby boomers have their financial health tied in real estate. This makes those policies ideal, because they look like attacking the problem without really fixing anything.
  • tangjurine 5y ago
    ...but if you were a smart homeowner, wouldn't you want to elect a 'useful idiot' to carry out your desired policy? Just because the policy makers are dumb, doesn't mean that the voters behind them are too.
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      The risk of collateral damage by a bumbling fool who just happens to stumble upon your favored policy is way too high. She might do what you want in matter X, but might also do completely wrongheaded moves in matters Y, Z, or even in X itself from another angle. All you need for confirmation is to look at what Seattle looks like today: I doubt that there is a single voter who can look at the city and honestly say “I support policies of the city government in entirety, and the current state of affairs is to my liking”.
    • testfoobar 5y ago
      "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States#...
    • Izikiel43 5y ago
      It seems you haven't been around Seattle DT. I'm from a 3rd world country and it's really bad even by my standards.
  • syshum 5y ago
    I would say the problem is we give government the power to solve the problem, we expect the government to solve the problem, while electing idiots to government I also suspect many believe the solution to this problem is to "stop electing idiots" when in reality the solution is to stop expecting government to solve the problem, and recognize we should remove the power from the government and allow private actors to solve it
  • hemloc_io 5y ago
    Haha I can see that from my experience with local politicians. It's rough that talent in these large cities generally flows to the megacorps or private companies in general. I'd personally love to leave my tech job temporarily for city govt if the pay/environment was similar.
  • testfoobar 5y ago
    I've also interacted with elected officials. Econ 101 might as well be as hard as quantum chromodynamics.
    • exdsq 5y ago
      For fun, could you ELI5 quantum chromodynamics?
      • testfoobar 5y ago
        Haha. No. I quit advanced physics at Schrodinger's equation. Turns out I preferred studying Hamilton instead of Hamiltonians.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers. > In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart. Is that on top of all the house building that has been done and is being done still? If they are so incompetent, why are new town homes, condos, and apartment complexes popping up all over the place? Sure, it still can't keep up with demand...a 25% growth in population over the last decade is no joke. But Seattle is nowhere near as dysfunctional as SF, at the very least.
    • coryrc 5y ago
      That's like saying your government is run better than Somalia; damning with faint praise. All the growth is concentrated on like 5% of the land and unaffordable for normal people. Open it all up for development.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        You mean like…Houston? Can you come up with some better examples of a city that does this that doesn’t suck?
    • Izikiel43 5y ago
      DT Seattle and other parts are probably the same as SF with tent villages.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    The proliferation of ignorant idiots in politics is pretty universal problem. It is not any better ten timezones from Seattle... Genuinely smart people are usually satisfied with their own line of work, or realize that politicians and their families in the age of (a)social networks are subject to constant barrage of unhinged hate messaging and threats emanating from the Internet. So they think twice before even entering the race for any public office. We would probably be better off with sortition (basically, drawing lots and choosing random people to serve in legislatures).
  • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    > In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart. It's not about whether they're smart people or not, it's about whether they're smarter than the problem they're trying to solve. I, aware of the risk of Dunning-Kruger effect, nonetheless consider myself to be a pretty smart guy. I'm a well-educated a computer engineer; I score well in interviews, in exams, and also in Trivial Pursuit. But the steel, silicon, and copper that I work with and am respected for is highly predictable. Electrons and hydraulic fluid are intimidating to a layman but with a bit of education and experience can be broken down into understandable subcomponents and reliable mathematics. Back in school, we engineers with our mathematical, physics-based hard science liked to denigrate the 'soft science' employed in educational, social, and political fields. However, after further growth, I've come to realize that physics is simple and people are really, really complicated.
• ditonal 5y ago
  The narrative that housing is blocked by rich NIMBYs protecting their land value is true BUT The less popular narrative that’s just as true, at least in California if you pay attention to the politics, is that PHIMBYs who are mostly renters and insist on 100% affordable or nothing, play just as big a role. If you look at who blocked SB50 or who pitched the “Mission moratorium , it was PHIMBY renters. It’s easy to rally people up against greedy rich people. But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification. You can agree or disagree with the PHIMBY position but most people find it complex enough they just pretend that faction doesn’t exist despite the huge role it plays.
  • cheriot 5y ago
    That's only true in relatively small areas. Most places resisting home construction are full of homeowners. The political impact is larger in SF/LA because they give left cover to homeowners, but even that's not a thing in most states and cities.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • rdw 5y ago
    Acronym stands for Public Housing In My Backyard. (I had to look this up)
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > PHIMBYs Basically don't exist. AHIMBYs do, but even people who demand affordable units don't want public units anywhere close to where they live. > But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification. In any place without open space, the only way to build new housing is redevelopement; if you target the top of the market (which is what “market rate” housing means), you cannot have any hyperlocal (and wider, on a short-term scale) effect besides more gentrification. The intermediate term, wider area (but still somewhat local) effect may be more affordable housing as existing housing becomes more down-market through competitive forces, but that also could be offset by further increasing nonhousing costs and reduction in nonhousing services targeting the lower income segment as the gentrifiers reshape local markets.
• wallacoloo 5y ago
  > That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. does it actually work that way? a large part of land value seems to come from network effects: the more densely populated a region, the more valuable each sqft. upzoning a plot often seems to be an immediate profit, too. SFH worth $1M, gets upzoned, suddenly a developer can pay $2M for the plot and tear down the house + build high-density units that are very valuable. maybe values fall once you overbuild, but i have yet to see that in my lifetime.
  • xondono 5y ago
    Long term vs short term. Long term they’ll be worth more, but short term prices will go down. No one sees prices really go down because that could trigger another ‘08 style collapse. Banks are less leveraged, but there’s a lot of people with mortgages too big for their sake.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > does it actually work that way? Yes, density drives up the price of land, but much of the value of a home isn't land value; poorer people in the neighborhood drives down the value per square foot of existing dwelling because people with money don't want to live near people without money by and large, both directly and indirectly. (E.g., better off people want to, and will pay a premium to, live near “good schools”, but there is pretty solid evidence that almost none of the difference in the things which people look to to assess that is due to the school itself, it is almost entirely incidental consequences of the demographics of the students attending the school: “good schools” aren't ones that make better students, they are made by better students.) Until the potential realizable by dense redevelopment drives up the land value so much that the added land value exceeds the lost value of the existing improvements, it's a loss, and even then it's a gain that can only be realized by abandoning the home, which becomes a liability that needs to be dealt with to unlock the value. Homeowners want the value of their home to increase, but often what they more specifically want is to continue living in the home while leveraging greater equity to enhance their lifestyle. This is not served by land value increases (even if they reach the level of net property value increases after decrease in value of existing improvements) that are only accessible by redevelopment. People who live in homes they own are not like absentee owners and tend to ascribe significant value to existing community character and significant negative value to moving, on top of theit investment interests in the property.
• cheriot 5y ago
  Owners of SFHs tend to be the most stiff resistance despite the fact that upzoning increases the value of their land. This is a culture war first and foremost. It's racism, classism, and fear of the unknown.
• bennysomething 5y ago
  I honestly believe my friends aren't motivated by keeping their house price up, they just don't understand simple supply and demand. I tried explaining rent controls don't work, they even agreed but said "something must be done". Rent control is the easiest solution to justify and implement. I really wish supply and demand was taught in schools.
  • coding123 5y ago
    Rent control also has the opposite negative effect of causing a lot of people to stay still forever, causing the only AVAILABLE rentals (that all smell like cat pee, laundry detergent/freshner and next door to basketball hoops) to be $3500 a month. If the rent wasn't controlled then the nice apartments would be available at $3500 and the pee/laundry baskebetball ones would be available at least at $700/mo for those that need housing.
    • phillypham 5y ago
      Serious question. What's wrong with living next to basketball hoops? I live across the street from one in NYC and consider it a big positive to have a park nearby.
      • simplestats 5y ago
        Presumably the noise. It's a pretty common source of friction between neighbors.
      • coding123 5y ago
        They can be noisy when there's a kid just shooting for half the day. If you're outside of the noise shot and you have good insulation, then it's probably fine.
      • pgwhalen 5y ago
        My guess would be noise. A basketball hoop across the street is an amenity, but one right outside the window might be an annoyance.
• dv_dt 5y ago
  Here's the weird part, policies to encourage density to go higher would almost certainly dramatically increase the value of the real estate homeowners already own. I suspect it's the desire to limit change more than really some asset value calculation.
• dionidium 5y ago
  No, it wouldn't. The land is what's valuable and the land in those extremely high-demand areas would be worth more money if the zoning allowed more uses on it.