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I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels lik

by 49531 4y ago

I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
imachine1980_ 4y ago
In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.
Ma8ee 4y ago
You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.
  - gkop 4y ago
    Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-mcgrath-reflects-on-sheltering-a-homeless-couple-and-making-national-news https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...
  - telchar 4y ago
    You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  How is it a problem to recognize that in Real Life things are rarely as binary as they are made out to be on the Internet? Shade of grey and all that... most things exist on a continuum that ranges between the extremes, and not only as a binary dichotomy.
  - Judgmentality 4y ago
    The person you're responding to never said or implied there is no spectrum. But if someone says "I'm very much anti-NIMBY" and then goes on to point out his hypocrisy, it's fair to call him out for it. Especially since said someone specifically asked for criticism and seems open to a conversation. Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to change themselves.
- 49531 4y ago
  Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect house prices in this area". What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could hurt residents I mean things like gentrification, legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights, relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of confused :P
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I definitely think that's NIMBYism because it stifles construction, and lack of supply is the problem.
    - 49531 4y ago
      Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a bit more polarization on that front. California in particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's very acute there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's institutional investors! But the data never supports those accusations. I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help. Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment to create some basic right to build housing on your own land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn this tide. I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good professional fortune and generational wealth have led me to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now I'm hoping to open that community up to more people. Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars. Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The main way to make affordable housing is to make more housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want to dwell. But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed. Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota [1] which approached rent control in very different ways. Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it needed to apply rent control to all units including new construction. > housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions. > Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added. No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed. [1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-since-passage-of-st-pauls-rent-control-ordinance-housing-construction-is-way-down/ https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...
throwaway5752 4y ago
"a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents" A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.
jlhawn 4y ago
YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1]. The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds. [1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/7099171535570881838 https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/ https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/
- zbrozek 4y ago
  St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw permit applications rise in the same time. It should be plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units reduces the demand to build them. https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-since-passage-of-st-pauls-rent-control-ordinance-housing-construction-is-way-down/ https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...
  - jlhawn 4y ago
    St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.
patwater10 4y ago
Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane, obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon future urban development is, there's really a TON of opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually get things built. See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/ https://www.incitu.us/
zbrozek 4y ago
From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil. Someone built the place you're living in. Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.
- Amasuriel 4y ago
  I don’t know what they are like in California, but where I live in Canada developers are generally disliked because 1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example it’s rare a developer will include parks, community spaces like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else to make the housing tracts livable 2) They don’t tend to expand infrastructure to match, so you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts strain on the existing community resources 3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat, so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad view of developers Combine all this with generally extremely poor build quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries for the most part.
  - sagarm 4y ago
    It's not a developers job to build infrastructure IMO, it's the city's job to build infrastructure and zone appropriately.
oceanplexian 4y ago
> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum. Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Government housing can work, but it needs large, sustained amounts of funding, which is not really a reality with cash-strapped local and state governments and extremely low federal appetite for such a program. There isn‘t a realistic path to a solid, pro-public housing bloc of 60 senators.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  > Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This is not necessarily the case. Social housing in Vienna has both low-income residents who are subsidized and higher-income residents who are not. We haven’t done it as well as they do historically here in the US, but we could!
- uncomputation 4y ago
  > I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap Good. It is real estate "investors" like you that have contributed to the Bay Area, and California in general, pricing people out and becoming a rent-only housing economy where only the rich of the rich can even dream of buying a fairly modest house. Housing should not make you investment-style returns like the stock market. You're profiting by rent-seeking, arbitrary zoning requirements, and NIMBYism driving up the price of housing constantly just so you can make a nice "investment." Housing and shelter are for people to live, not to extract money for real estate investors. > You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building Have you considered that poor people also need a place to live and maybe that doesn't involve you leaching every percent of profit you can? > Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away Section 8 housing in LA - as house prices have surged to multi-million two-bedroom homes since COVID - can lower prices at least as low as $400/mo after the voucher. You are simply and transparently lying for your own benefit and it is shameful.
ironman1478 4y ago
I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input to projects. I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.
- Clubber 4y ago
  >I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. I think that's the core issue with most of our political dialog. "Regulations are bad." The person saying it is thinking A, B, and C and is probably right. The person hearing it is thinking D, E, and F and is also probably right. They aren't even talking about the same thing. It's no wonder they can't come to common ground. "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. To your point, words certainly matter.
  - leetcrew 4y ago
    > "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. or the person may see the contradiction clearly and oppose the idea of social security benefits, while also being opposed to having it clawed back after they've spent their entire working life paying into the system.
jboy55 4y ago
Two thoughts, 1) it will be impossible to get out of our current housing hole without making developers rich. 2) We are so far into the hole that any availability will be gobbled up by those with money or those with connections. I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".
flyandscan88 4y ago
I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  By “homes” do you mean buildings here or housing units? Because if it’s the latter, doesn’t that preclude most apartment buildings?
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  What about renters? People who own multiple residences usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to own the buildings.
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    People don't rent for the fun of it, they rent because they can't afford a house. Pretty much anybody would be glad to swap paying rent for morgage payments. As it is, you often have the messed up situation of your rent going to pay somebody else's mortgage interest
    - Larrikin 4y ago
      Renting is not always just an intermediate step to being too poor to buy a home, it can be a freeing experience to not have the hassle of a home. With WFH especially now you can work in various parts of the city or move all over the world and at most be tied down to a place for about a year. Homeowners also never talk about things like paying tens of thousands of dollars when a pipe burst or the roof needs repairing.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      That's not true. Owning a home is a hassle and ties you down. Like I said, most people in Montreal rent, and Montreal has some of the cheapest housing in Canada.
ryukafalz 4y ago
YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant protections. On rent control it’s more divided; some are in favor and some aren’t. It doesn’t seem likely to solve the housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so I’m generally I’m favor of it personally, but only in tandem with building more as well. But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.
cwp 4y ago
There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO. One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable. The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.
- itsumoiru 4y ago
  > I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO This is a common problem in American policy. You're going to have the thing and it's going to be nice, or you're going to be priced out of having it at all. See minimum floor space regulations, (non-fire related) residential occupancy limits, regulations requiring certain coverage in medical insurance plans, etc. There is a reason that short term insurance plans (STLDIs) that are not subject to as many regulations are much cheaper.
kareemsabri 4y ago
> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.
- Sebguer 4y ago
  > Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. Yes, because they're rare, and the only way to not be uprooted. How are you posing this as a bad thing? If there were more rent control, then this wouldn't be a problem. Why should rent get to rise so drastically above inflation? The core reason it does today is because people are buying them endlessly as investments, and as the property exchanges hands at completely arbitrary values, the new owners have to raise rents.
  - yojo 4y ago
    Pretty sure you have this backward. Landlords don’t get to decide how much people are willing to pay to rent. They charge the market clearing price (or as close to it as possible). This isn’t based on what they paid for the property, though the value of a property will at least in part be based on the income it can generate. If rents seem too high, it is because demand has outstripped supply, and the marginal renter in the market has more money than you do. If you want rent to come down for everyone, you can: 1. Reduce demand by making the area less desirable. 2. Increase supply by making more rental units. Rent control is just a lottery that benefits the people lucky enough to get it at the expense of everyone else. I had a rent controlled apartment for 5 years in San Francisco. Which, incidentally, I was subletting from someone who had moved to LA but didn’t want to lose his place in case he came back. In no way was I deserving of special financial treatment, I had a high paid tech job, and a wife making decent money. Anyone else who moved into my neighborhood was paying literally double when I left. It was nice to randomly get a $20k/year windfall, but did not feel like sound housing policy.
asdff 4y ago
Because one only need to look at history in past times of housing crisis in our history. The response and solution to times of housing shortages and high prices has always been to build out more supply. There was a housing crisis in the 1940s due to decades of stagnation of building homes from the great depression and WWII, and homes were unaffordable, until the 1950s brought on supply that was not generated by government intervention but by private developers and even the Sears catalogue. About all the government did was stimulate the private market by providing capital in the form of the GI bill, and coupled with the available zoned capacity surrounding cities, developers were able to build and meet demand that now had capital to afford supply which was able to be built thanks to the available zoned capacity. Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners. 1. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717 https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717
huevosabio 4y ago
YIMBY Action (https://yimbyaction.org https://yimbyaction.org) member here. You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections. I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.). But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most. We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism. Come join us!
epistasis 4y ago
You are probably just getting too much anti-YIMBY propaganda from the high level overview. The problem is that developers built nearly everybody's home, yet people want to hate developers. Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk. That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.
igorkraw 4y ago
While the replies are jumping onto rent control (which is bad) the other parts of your suggestions bare a much better solution imo: public or for-public housing. My native germany also fucks this one up, but the best thing would he to use some form of eminent domain to kick out stratefically located villas and old homes, tear them down/renovate them and build up public housing in small-but-cheap apartmenta that can then be given to resident coops or other democratic-but-not-the-state entities. Vienna does this (public housing, not evicting millionaires or old-settles-residents) and it works quite well because it addresses the demand side. Induced demand for housing of this type is limited I think (it's a big decision and people don't generally choose cities only because od the price) and you could even adress the "granny loses her old house" to some degrew by offering evicted tenants extra-nice apartments as a reimbursement on top of the eminent domain reimbursment (at least in germany this one exists, government cannot simply take your land). Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control

by 49531 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

imachine1980_ 4y ago

In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.

Ma8ee 4y ago

You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?

bombcar 4y ago
Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.
- gkop 4y ago
  Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-mcgrath-reflects-on-sheltering-a-homeless-couple-and-making-national-news https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...
- telchar 4y ago
  You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.
mindcrime 4y ago
How is it a problem to recognize that in Real Life things are rarely as binary as they are made out to be on the Internet? Shade of grey and all that... most things exist on a continuum that ranges between the extremes, and not only as a binary dichotomy.
- Judgmentality 4y ago
  The person you're responding to never said or implied there is no spectrum. But if someone says "I'm very much anti-NIMBY" and then goes on to point out his hypocrisy, it's fair to call him out for it. Especially since said someone specifically asked for criticism and seems open to a conversation. Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to change themselves.
49531 4y ago
Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect house prices in this area". What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could hurt residents I mean things like gentrification, legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights, relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of confused :P
- zbrozek 4y ago
  I definitely think that's NIMBYism because it stifles construction, and lack of supply is the problem.
  - 49531 4y ago
    Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a bit more polarization on that front. California in particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's very acute there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's institutional investors! But the data never supports those accusations. I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help. Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment to create some basic right to build housing on your own land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn this tide. I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good professional fortune and generational wealth have led me to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now I'm hoping to open that community up to more people. Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.

ceeplusplus 4y ago

Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars. Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.

bombcar 4y ago
The main way to make affordable housing is to make more housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want to dwell. But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed. Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota [1] which approached rent control in very different ways. Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it needed to apply rent control to all units including new construction. > housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions. > Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added. No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed. [1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-since-passage-of-st-pauls-rent-control-ordinance-housing-construction-is-way-down/ https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

throwaway5752 4y ago

"a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents" A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.

jlhawn 4y ago

YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1]. The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds. [1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/7099171535570881838 https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/ https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

zbrozek 4y ago
St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw permit applications rise in the same time. It should be plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units reduces the demand to build them. https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-since-passage-of-st-pauls-rent-control-ordinance-housing-construction-is-way-down/ https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...
- jlhawn 4y ago
  St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.

patwater10 4y ago

Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane, obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon future urban development is, there's really a TON of opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually get things built. See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/ https://www.incitu.us/

zbrozek 4y ago

From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil. Someone built the place you're living in. Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.

Amasuriel 4y ago
I don’t know what they are like in California, but where I live in Canada developers are generally disliked because 1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example it’s rare a developer will include parks, community spaces like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else to make the housing tracts livable 2) They don’t tend to expand infrastructure to match, so you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts strain on the existing community resources 3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat, so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad view of developers Combine all this with generally extremely poor build quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries for the most part.
- sagarm 4y ago
  It's not a developers job to build infrastructure IMO, it's the city's job to build infrastructure and zone appropriately.

oceanplexian 4y ago

> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum. Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Government housing can work, but it needs large, sustained amounts of funding, which is not really a reality with cash-strapped local and state governments and extremely low federal appetite for such a program. There isn‘t a realistic path to a solid, pro-public housing bloc of 60 senators.
ryukafalz 4y ago
> Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This is not necessarily the case. Social housing in Vienna has both low-income residents who are subsidized and higher-income residents who are not. We haven’t done it as well as they do historically here in the US, but we could!
uncomputation 4y ago
> I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap Good. It is real estate "investors" like you that have contributed to the Bay Area, and California in general, pricing people out and becoming a rent-only housing economy where only the rich of the rich can even dream of buying a fairly modest house. Housing should not make you investment-style returns like the stock market. You're profiting by rent-seeking, arbitrary zoning requirements, and NIMBYism driving up the price of housing constantly just so you can make a nice "investment." Housing and shelter are for people to live, not to extract money for real estate investors. > You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building Have you considered that poor people also need a place to live and maybe that doesn't involve you leaching every percent of profit you can? > Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away Section 8 housing in LA - as house prices have surged to multi-million two-bedroom homes since COVID - can lower prices at least as low as $400/mo after the voucher. You are simply and transparently lying for your own benefit and it is shameful.

ironman1478 4y ago

I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input to projects. I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.

Clubber 4y ago
>I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. I think that's the core issue with most of our political dialog. "Regulations are bad." The person saying it is thinking A, B, and C and is probably right. The person hearing it is thinking D, E, and F and is also probably right. They aren't even talking about the same thing. It's no wonder they can't come to common ground. "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. To your point, words certainly matter.
- leetcrew 4y ago
  > "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. or the person may see the contradiction clearly and oppose the idea of social security benefits, while also being opposed to having it clawed back after they've spent their entire working life paying into the system.

jboy55 4y ago

Two thoughts, 1) it will be impossible to get out of our current housing hole without making developers rich. 2) We are so far into the hole that any availability will be gobbled up by those with money or those with connections. I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".

flyandscan88 4y ago

I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.

ryukafalz 4y ago
By “homes” do you mean buildings here or housing units? Because if it’s the latter, doesn’t that preclude most apartment buildings?
frosted-flakes 4y ago
What about renters? People who own multiple residences usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to own the buildings.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  People don't rent for the fun of it, they rent because they can't afford a house. Pretty much anybody would be glad to swap paying rent for morgage payments. As it is, you often have the messed up situation of your rent going to pay somebody else's mortgage interest
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    Renting is not always just an intermediate step to being too poor to buy a home, it can be a freeing experience to not have the hassle of a home. With WFH especially now you can work in various parts of the city or move all over the world and at most be tied down to a place for about a year. Homeowners also never talk about things like paying tens of thousands of dollars when a pipe burst or the roof needs repairing.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    That's not true. Owning a home is a hassle and ties you down. Like I said, most people in Montreal rent, and Montreal has some of the cheapest housing in Canada.

ryukafalz 4y ago

YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant protections. On rent control it’s more divided; some are in favor and some aren’t. It doesn’t seem likely to solve the housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so I’m generally I’m favor of it personally, but only in tandem with building more as well. But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.

cwp 4y ago

There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO. One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable. The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.

itsumoiru 4y ago
> I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO This is a common problem in American policy. You're going to have the thing and it's going to be nice, or you're going to be priced out of having it at all. See minimum floor space regulations, (non-fire related) residential occupancy limits, regulations requiring certain coverage in medical insurance plans, etc. There is a reason that short term insurance plans (STLDIs) that are not subject to as many regulations are much cheaper.

kareemsabri 4y ago

> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.

Sebguer 4y ago
> Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. Yes, because they're rare, and the only way to not be uprooted. How are you posing this as a bad thing? If there were more rent control, then this wouldn't be a problem. Why should rent get to rise so drastically above inflation? The core reason it does today is because people are buying them endlessly as investments, and as the property exchanges hands at completely arbitrary values, the new owners have to raise rents.
- yojo 4y ago
  Pretty sure you have this backward. Landlords don’t get to decide how much people are willing to pay to rent. They charge the market clearing price (or as close to it as possible). This isn’t based on what they paid for the property, though the value of a property will at least in part be based on the income it can generate. If rents seem too high, it is because demand has outstripped supply, and the marginal renter in the market has more money than you do. If you want rent to come down for everyone, you can: 1. Reduce demand by making the area less desirable. 2. Increase supply by making more rental units. Rent control is just a lottery that benefits the people lucky enough to get it at the expense of everyone else. I had a rent controlled apartment for 5 years in San Francisco. Which, incidentally, I was subletting from someone who had moved to LA but didn’t want to lose his place in case he came back. In no way was I deserving of special financial treatment, I had a high paid tech job, and a wife making decent money. Anyone else who moved into my neighborhood was paying literally double when I left. It was nice to randomly get a $20k/year windfall, but did not feel like sound housing policy.

asdff 4y ago

Because one only need to look at history in past times of housing crisis in our history. The response and solution to times of housing shortages and high prices has always been to build out more supply. There was a housing crisis in the 1940s due to decades of stagnation of building homes from the great depression and WWII, and homes were unaffordable, until the 1950s brought on supply that was not generated by government intervention but by private developers and even the Sears catalogue. About all the government did was stimulate the private market by providing capital in the form of the GI bill, and coupled with the available zoned capacity surrounding cities, developers were able to build and meet demand that now had capital to afford supply which was able to be built thanks to the available zoned capacity. Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners. 1. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717 https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717

huevosabio 4y ago

YIMBY Action (https://yimbyaction.org https://yimbyaction.org) member here. You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections. I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.). But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most. We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism. Come join us!

epistasis 4y ago

You are probably just getting too much anti-YIMBY propaganda from the high level overview. The problem is that developers built nearly everybody's home, yet people want to hate developers. Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk. That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.

igorkraw 4y ago

While the replies are jumping onto rent control (which is bad) the other parts of your suggestions bare a much better solution imo: public or for-public housing. My native germany also fucks this one up, but the best thing would he to use some form of eminent domain to kick out stratefically located villas and old homes, tear them down/renovate them and build up public housing in small-but-cheap apartmenta that can then be given to resident coops or other democratic-but-not-the-state entities. Vienna does this (public housing, not evicting millionaires or old-settles-residents) and it works quite well because it addresses the demand side. Induced demand for housing of this type is limited I think (it's a big decision and people don't generally choose cities only because od the price) and you could even adress the "granny loses her old house" to some degrew by offering evicted tenants extra-nice apartments as a reimbursement on top of the eminent domain reimbursment (at least in germany this one exists, government cannot simply take your land). Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control