6 ms·

Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tip

by ip26 5y ago

Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read. In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works). [1]: I think it was https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

parineum 5y ago
> In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.
- scarface74 5y ago
  What happens historically that if a government has a choice between destroying wealth in a minority neighborhood or destroying wealth in a non minority neighborhood, it’s usually the minority neighborhood.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.
- icelancer 5y ago
  Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional. I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I think the amount paid should be based on the average market rate of properties where the person must move to have the same commute and amenities. If the government wants to destroy the poorest area, at least folks there can move somewhere nicer without much inconvenience.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
  This would be a great way for corrupt politicians to funnel large sums of real estate money to their friends and donors (or to trigger wild speculation bubbles anywhere people think eminent domain is likely to be applied). I do think these payouts need to be well in excess of market rates (in order to properly compensate people for inconvenience / related expenses / opportunity costs, but tripling or quadrupling property values is a bit far fetched.
  - tinco 5y ago
    You could make it conditional on some things. The goal is to compensate for discomfort, not to compensate lost income. So you could say you only compensate primary residences and self operated businesses, both occupied for 3+ years. Or you could approach it from a different angle and compensate each resident and business operators with $10,000 relocation cost (in addition to buying their property with a 5% extra). That has the added benefit of eliminating more of the market price risk from projections.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      I think the optimal course is to have a very painful eminant domain process that pays a crappy above market rate so that government is incentivized to offer actual market rate (big project wants your land so market rate is vastly increased as a result). I have seen corn fields sold for millions because a state college wanted it for a new campus. The market rate was well under $1MM. For that land eminant domain would have been a nightmare because of the particular politics and unimproved nature of the site....so they had to offer actual market rate...which is the rate demanded of someone when they know it's a monied developer that wants it.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Whatever, pork-barrel corruption is already an everyday part and parcel of our system. Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere. Any time you have a massive building project you're going to get corruption. If you can't even eminent domain it through useful areas, you're just going to get developers buying land in the middle of nowhere and selling it back to the government as the only remaining viable route.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  That is an incredibly easy way to waste money. Political donor: Hey Mr. Politician, I am going to buy some massive apartment complexes. Do me a favor and put a road through them, would you? Politician: Sure thing, there's an election coming up and I do so love helping out our citizens! holds out hand to receive wads of donations
  - p20z 5y ago
    The current model enables the same behavior and makes it harder to track. Stalled projects have ongoing costs that make the project developers real money in exchange for no real effort. The same donor simply says “hey mr politician, give my company the exclusive contract and never mind that my aunt owns a building in our way. I’ll only charge you 30% for each year we are stalled.” We burn money on these projects either way. A good windfall to property owners gives regular families a chance at enjoying some profits… and makes donors who block progress just a little easier to track!
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    This is in fact how many projects get built today, even without eminent domain.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      If graft is a problem, the answer should not be "make graft easier and more common"
      - technobabbler 5y ago
        Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem. I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it. By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  Don’t want them to be TOO happy to have property seized. Creates a bunch of perverse incentives
throwaway290 5y ago
IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.) rather than the governments not having the crazy power to just do anything they want if they think it is "public good". The latter is horrifying, I fail to see how it is ever desirable (even if it occasionally leads to positive outcomes, it cannot be trusted to do so reliably).
- jolux 5y ago
  > why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them Because if the government can't exercise eminent domain then those people are incentivized to extract maximum value from the government over the land. They may not want to sell it, or they may charge an exorbitant price.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It's kind of strange how the law recognizes that land ownership is a source of power yet does absolutely nothing against it. If the government has to override the law, just imagine how much they distort the private economy, where there is no easy way out. So many apartments couldn't be built and so many people could not be housed.
    - jolux 5y ago
      Land value tax would solve this.
- ip26 5y ago
  There's a host of problems. A simple example is a holdout who sees they are the only remaining obstacle to a project, and demand ten million dollars for a fifty thousand dollar plot of land the government needs for the project. A very capitalist mindset! But poison to public works. There's no "working with" someone who thinks they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket. Another simple problem is that of guarantees. If the government is certain to be able to secure the land in a reasonable timeframe, they can structure the whole project on top of that certainty, planning from start to finish, establishing financing, signing contracts... If acquisition is an open-ended negotiation in which the holdout can linger for decades, either nothing can be done until every last square foot of land is secured, or else you risk suspending everything halfway (very expensive).
z1nc 5y ago
Then the important thing is that a process of weighing those rights/costs/benefits and so on exists. e.g., if they needed to tear down a couple of apartment buildings and disrupt hundreds of folks, I could see an argument against that. But for just one guy? Eh... --- That article has a lot of disturbing things in it- 200 extra workers (that even the union guys said weren't needed), inflated costs, low competition driving up bids, gifts given to government officials from contractors, and so on. This bit is the most concerning: “Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.” If you gotta play semantics on whether you're in a rigged system or a corrupt one...
slothtrop 5y ago
New York has an interesting History of projects being ramrodded through dubious means (at the expense of the public) under Robert Moses in the early 20th Century, I imagine stops were put in place to prevent that from occurring again.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  It’s common wisdom to say these projects were dubious. There’s no question they came with costs—-but would we rather not have the BQE, Cross Bronx Expressway, or Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? I don’t think we would. It’s easy to fantasize about public transit alternatives but even with Robert Moses NYC is a significant outlier in the US for public transit both in the city and in the region.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    There’s a tail wagging the dog factor to the highway stuff. The FHA sealed the fate of those neighborhoods by cutting off the oxygen. I live in a small city that was carved up by redlining. My block was in the “yellow” zone, and the houses built after 1935 or so are very different than the houses on the next block, which is in the “green zone”. Yellow = Italians and Greeks, 1 and 2 family small houses. Green = old money types, bigger houses on fancy lots.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Easy to say when your neighborhood wasn't the one destroyed.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      NYC is about change. If you want stability there’s the whole rest of the country. I have no patience for people that want it both ways.
  - DogOfTheGaps 5y ago
    BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway definitely not. Building highways through cities is extremely damaging and exist only to ferry suburbanites into and out of the city. Moses wanted to build a highway through Greenwich village. That would have been devastating for lower Manhattan. Intra-city Highways destroy the very vibrancy required for them to adapt and change. Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? That is a good project. Connecting different areas across bodies of water is good.

by ip26 5y ago

parineum 5y ago

> In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.

scarface74 5y ago
What happens historically that if a government has a choice between destroying wealth in a minority neighborhood or destroying wealth in a non minority neighborhood, it’s usually the minority neighborhood.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.
icelancer 5y ago
Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional. I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I think the amount paid should be based on the average market rate of properties where the person must move to have the same commute and amenities. If the government wants to destroy the poorest area, at least folks there can move somewhere nicer without much inconvenience.
BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
This would be a great way for corrupt politicians to funnel large sums of real estate money to their friends and donors (or to trigger wild speculation bubbles anywhere people think eminent domain is likely to be applied). I do think these payouts need to be well in excess of market rates (in order to properly compensate people for inconvenience / related expenses / opportunity costs, but tripling or quadrupling property values is a bit far fetched.
- tinco 5y ago
  You could make it conditional on some things. The goal is to compensate for discomfort, not to compensate lost income. So you could say you only compensate primary residences and self operated businesses, both occupied for 3+ years. Or you could approach it from a different angle and compensate each resident and business operators with $10,000 relocation cost (in addition to buying their property with a 5% extra). That has the added benefit of eliminating more of the market price risk from projections.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I think the optimal course is to have a very painful eminant domain process that pays a crappy above market rate so that government is incentivized to offer actual market rate (big project wants your land so market rate is vastly increased as a result). I have seen corn fields sold for millions because a state college wanted it for a new campus. The market rate was well under $1MM. For that land eminant domain would have been a nightmare because of the particular politics and unimproved nature of the site....so they had to offer actual market rate...which is the rate demanded of someone when they know it's a monied developer that wants it.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Whatever, pork-barrel corruption is already an everyday part and parcel of our system. Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere. Any time you have a massive building project you're going to get corruption. If you can't even eminent domain it through useful areas, you're just going to get developers buying land in the middle of nowhere and selling it back to the government as the only remaining viable route.
zdragnar 5y ago
That is an incredibly easy way to waste money. Political donor: Hey Mr. Politician, I am going to buy some massive apartment complexes. Do me a favor and put a road through them, would you? Politician: Sure thing, there's an election coming up and I do so love helping out our citizens! holds out hand to receive wads of donations
- p20z 5y ago
  The current model enables the same behavior and makes it harder to track. Stalled projects have ongoing costs that make the project developers real money in exchange for no real effort. The same donor simply says “hey mr politician, give my company the exclusive contract and never mind that my aunt owns a building in our way. I’ll only charge you 30% for each year we are stalled.” We burn money on these projects either way. A good windfall to property owners gives regular families a chance at enjoying some profits… and makes donors who block progress just a little easier to track!
- technobabbler 5y ago
  This is in fact how many projects get built today, even without eminent domain.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    If graft is a problem, the answer should not be "make graft easier and more common"
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem. I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it. By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
Don’t want them to be TOO happy to have property seized. Creates a bunch of perverse incentives

throwaway290 5y ago

IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.) rather than the governments not having the crazy power to just do anything they want if they think it is "public good". The latter is horrifying, I fail to see how it is ever desirable (even if it occasionally leads to positive outcomes, it cannot be trusted to do so reliably).

jolux 5y ago
> why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them Because if the government can't exercise eminent domain then those people are incentivized to extract maximum value from the government over the land. They may not want to sell it, or they may charge an exorbitant price.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's kind of strange how the law recognizes that land ownership is a source of power yet does absolutely nothing against it. If the government has to override the law, just imagine how much they distort the private economy, where there is no easy way out. So many apartments couldn't be built and so many people could not be housed.
  - jolux 5y ago
    Land value tax would solve this.
ip26 5y ago
There's a host of problems. A simple example is a holdout who sees they are the only remaining obstacle to a project, and demand ten million dollars for a fifty thousand dollar plot of land the government needs for the project. A very capitalist mindset! But poison to public works. There's no "working with" someone who thinks they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket. Another simple problem is that of guarantees. If the government is certain to be able to secure the land in a reasonable timeframe, they can structure the whole project on top of that certainty, planning from start to finish, establishing financing, signing contracts... If acquisition is an open-ended negotiation in which the holdout can linger for decades, either nothing can be done until every last square foot of land is secured, or else you risk suspending everything halfway (very expensive).

z1nc 5y ago

Then the important thing is that a process of weighing those rights/costs/benefits and so on exists. e.g., if they needed to tear down a couple of apartment buildings and disrupt hundreds of folks, I could see an argument against that. But for just one guy? Eh... --- That article has a lot of disturbing things in it- 200 extra workers (that even the union guys said weren't needed), inflated costs, low competition driving up bids, gifts given to government officials from contractors, and so on. This bit is the most concerning: “Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.” If you gotta play semantics on whether you're in a rigged system or a corrupt one...

slothtrop 5y ago

New York has an interesting History of projects being ramrodded through dubious means (at the expense of the public) under Robert Moses in the early 20th Century, I imagine stops were put in place to prevent that from occurring again.

bradleyjg 5y ago
It’s common wisdom to say these projects were dubious. There’s no question they came with costs—-but would we rather not have the BQE, Cross Bronx Expressway, or Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? I don’t think we would. It’s easy to fantasize about public transit alternatives but even with Robert Moses NYC is a significant outlier in the US for public transit both in the city and in the region.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  There’s a tail wagging the dog factor to the highway stuff. The FHA sealed the fate of those neighborhoods by cutting off the oxygen. I live in a small city that was carved up by redlining. My block was in the “yellow” zone, and the houses built after 1935 or so are very different than the houses on the next block, which is in the “green zone”. Yellow = Italians and Greeks, 1 and 2 family small houses. Green = old money types, bigger houses on fancy lots.
- lupire 5y ago
  Easy to say when your neighborhood wasn't the one destroyed.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    NYC is about change. If you want stability there’s the whole rest of the country. I have no patience for people that want it both ways.
- DogOfTheGaps 5y ago
  BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway definitely not. Building highways through cities is extremely damaging and exist only to ferry suburbanites into and out of the city. Moses wanted to build a highway through Greenwich village. That would have been devastating for lower Manhattan. Intra-city Highways destroy the very vibrancy required for them to adapt and change. Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? That is a good project. Connecting different areas across bodies of water is good.