7 ms·

As a property owner, I've always found this to be remarkably short sighted. If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small su

by gretch 4y ago

As a property owner, I've always found this to be remarkably short sighted. If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value. edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.

dahfizz 4y ago
Some people just want to live in a small suburb
- Ar-Curunir 4y ago
  Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)
- jaywalk 4y ago
  Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue. edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed... Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
      - ticviking 4y ago
        How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents? They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...
        ackfoobar 4y ago
        Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development? From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development. "In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
- GalenErso 4y ago
  You can't have your cake and eat it too.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA. 61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
      - Spivak 4y ago
        If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
        pwinnski 4y ago
        That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit. But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs. But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
- eli 4y ago
  And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live
kube-system 4y ago
Value can be non-monetary, particularly for owner-occupied non-investment property.
singlow 4y ago
A little game theory may come to play though. If the whole city booms and just my neighborhood stays single-family large lot, my price/sqft may increase drastically, and I may get better return on any improvements I do to my property based on my investment profile. If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate. So its not necessarily illogical.
- fragsworth 4y ago
  No, it's almost entirely short-sighted, at least in terms of economics. First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell. Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments. You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    > I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
  - singlow 4y ago
    I never meant that anyone was forced to sell, legally. Only that the economics forced them to sell at a different schedule or terms than they would have preferred.
rcpt 4y ago
It's the variance. If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment
hemloc_io 4y ago
It can be when you can artificially induce a housing shortage. E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years. Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people. As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.

by gretch 4y ago

dahfizz 4y ago

Some people just want to live in a small suburb

Ar-Curunir 4y ago
Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)
jaywalk 4y ago
Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue. edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
- uoaei 4y ago
  If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed... Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents? They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...
        ackfoobar 4y ago
        Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development? From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development. "In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
GalenErso 4y ago
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA. 61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit. But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs. But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
eli 4y ago
And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live

kube-system 4y ago

Value can be non-monetary, particularly for owner-occupied non-investment property.

singlow 4y ago

A little game theory may come to play though. If the whole city booms and just my neighborhood stays single-family large lot, my price/sqft may increase drastically, and I may get better return on any improvements I do to my property based on my investment profile. If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate. So its not necessarily illogical.

fragsworth 4y ago
No, it's almost entirely short-sighted, at least in terms of economics. First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell. Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments. You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
- anticensor 4y ago
  > I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
- singlow 4y ago
  I never meant that anyone was forced to sell, legally. Only that the economics forced them to sell at a different schedule or terms than they would have preferred.

rcpt 4y ago

It's the variance. If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment

hemloc_io 4y ago

It can be when you can artificially induce a housing shortage. E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years. Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people. As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.