8 ms·

The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation. People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house

The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation. People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house on a golf course accepting that it could be turned it into an asbestos refinery the next day. Pay them for the economic loss of value, and then for emotional damages. They can either be happy with the money, or move on. I mean, I think more people would be willing to accept a meth clinic in their neighborhood if they didn't pay property taxes from now on and could afford private security now to give them piece of mind.

xnx 3y ago
I like this idea. I know properties can sell off their "air rights" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-midtown-east-air-rights.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-...). Are there other examples of rights (air quality? noise? etc.) that can be sold off?
- lq9AJ8yrfs 3y ago
  "Easement" is a term that means this [1]. You can give someone an easement allowing them to use your property somehow, and you can make the offer contingent on something in return, such as payment. It's a type of contract and not uncommon to see for things like utilities or nature preserves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement.
bobthepanda 3y ago
Eminent domain is pretty expensive because it takes so many legal appeals, and some people won’t accept compensation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)
- morkalork 3y ago
  Worse because while is it expensive legally, it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner. Kind of like class action lawsuits, the only ones that come out better off are the lawyers. Also, I've heard stories about some extended family that lost their farm by eminent domain for an airport. They never recovered.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner How often is that true? In my very limited exposure to the process (2 friends over 25 years, both in VA) the result was fair. Obviously there are cases that make the news, but I assume these are the outliers.
    - morkalork 3y ago
      I have no idea but it's got a pretty rough history of abuse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/10/more-cities-seek-redress-widespread-20th-century-destruction-black-neighborhoods/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/10/more-citi...
    - phlakaton 3y ago
      Take a look at the disputes that have arisen over CAHSR's use of eminent domain to see how thorny these issues can get. https://cchsra.org/cahsr-eminent-domain/ https://cchsra.org/cahsr-eminent-domain/
    - Arrath 3y ago
      Anecdotally, a portion of my parents land (and my childhood home) was taken by eminent domain to widen the county road. My parents had to fight a legal battle with the county, who wanted to pay only for the value of the bare land they were taking, disregarding the fact that the house was on that portion of the property. My parents were eventually able to get fair compensation but it took time and effort to get the county to pony up.
swatcoder 3y ago
You've just restyled "eminent domain"... turns out, people can get pretty finicky about it and often look at it as a form of immoral coercion. Noncooperation and even violence or vandalism are common. For as necessary as it might be sometimes, it's been shown to be a pretty messy and conflict-engendering approach.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
[flagged]
coding123 3y ago
> I think more people would be willing to accept a meth clinic in their neighborhood if they didn't pay property taxes from now on and could afford private security What? Property taxes are maybe $5000 per year for a typical property, maybe more maybe less shrug. How do you hire a full-time (24/7) armed guard for your house for $5000 per year? Even if you allocated that $5000 toward some group in your community paying for an armed guard... ask as many people as you know today the following question: What scenario do you prefer: 1) Pay $5000 per year and not have a meth clinic near your house. 2) Pay $5000 per year and have a meth clinic and someone with an AK47 guarding your neighborhood. Other than that, I agree with the general idea - however I would reject the government paying for that - because ultimately that means a new tax. It would have to be the "entity" that wants to fuck up the area.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > What? Property taxes are maybe $5000 per year for a typical property, maybe more maybe less shrug. How do you hire a full-time (24/7) armed guard for your house for $5000 per year? You hire it for the neighborhood jointly. I mean 12 neighbors cover a single guard. That means a neighborhood can have several of them patrolling. And you don’t need 1/12. So you pocket the savings. So you get maybe $4,000 cash per year and one guard per street. Obviously not personal security detail.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    Doesn’t that sort of ignore the need for shifts and guards to have holidays, sick leave and so on. For whatever minimum staffing you think you need you need to multiply it by 3-4x. Not to mention the logistics involved in terms of vehicles, work space and so on. And the sheer dystopian vibes to this calculus is crazy.
    - coding123 3y ago
      It's not some dystopian future - this is the YIMBY movement. It's not about housing. You think some rich person struggling to find land for his next prison that doubles his wealth cares about your kids playing in the street? No he's going to donate to YIMBY to double his wealth.
jpalawaga 3y ago
IMO, if your community has decided to build mass transit with state/federal dollars, you've also forgone any reasonable expectation that densification won't happen. yes, owning a single family home near a major transit corridor is nice, but let's be realistic: that transit corridor is for everyone to enjoy.
api 3y ago
The example you give is a case where this makes sense, but most of the time NIMBYism is more like cartel behavior where existing home-owners work to restrict supply of housing in an entire area to boost their own property values. "My home value will go up forever" can't be a built-in guaranteed expectation when purchasing a home. Property appreciation is not an entitlement. If we want entitled money we should just implement basic income.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Depends. Sdf shelters and win turbines? Sure. Facilities emitting unhealthy fumes or dumping pollution in the water? That would set a dangerous precedent where society would validate the behavior as long as there is money in the mix. It already does mind you. But at least is considered wrong at the moment. What would have happened to the asbestos scandal is instead of cleaning the stuff, we just paid compensations? Carnage.
- rickydroll 3y ago
  I would argue for mixed use of hazardous industries and residential/commercial properties. There is a long history of forcing the pollution generate through your daily life onto lower income communities. If you take a poop, the sewage treatment plant should be in your neighborhood. Drink water, the water treatment plant should be in your neighborhood, use electricity, electricity generation in your neighborhood. In other words, don't force your crap on to somebody else.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Ok if it applies to the rich as well, which it won't.
    - rickydroll 3y ago
      You are quite right. It wouldn't even though it should. The refusal of the rich to clean up their own shit is behind environmental injustices.
mjevans 3y ago
Land Value Tax should help reflect the opportunity cost for the community as well as the benefit to cashing out of a property.
- phlakaton 3y ago
  LVT takes no consideration of the improvements done to the property, of course. Great for aligning taxation to the opportunity cost of the property, but I would think it would dramatically underestimate the value of cashing out of the property.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    You imply it's the only tax, rather than one of the total taxes.
Guvante 3y ago
If you didn't buy it then why should I compensate you? Why should my previous houses height be your concern? Did you pay me for that? If you had a view before for free why is it my problem that you don't now? You could have bought the land to guarantee it, why didn't you? Some of these are HoA restrictions which were shared covenants agreed upon in the past but we really need to reconsider the efficacy of allowing those to be enforceable. Why is it up to a group of people who are all dead how tall a house I can build? Very infrequently are people making housing decisions based on such covenants and pricing ignores them. However when NIMBY comes up suddenly people want to be compensated for what they didn't pay for, didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase, and weren't party to the original agreement.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase because those are just too difficult to all list. The solution to that is a mutually shared list of conditions which is then called "zoning", which HN loves to rail about. I'm offering a fair value compensation in lieu of zoning. If you really don't think you should have anything to say about your neighbors' houses, I will happily buy all of them and build tall fences that ensure your house only ever sees light at noon, and then maybe still at 12:01. Complaining about people's "I've got mine, so screw you buddy" with "I want mine, so screw you" is unbecoming. can't just be market rate though, because there is legitimate pain and suffering to disrupting the community and breaking it apart etc, so that needs to be comped too.
  - Guvante 3y ago
    Zoning needs to be logical. Not allowing any residential in commercial is ridiculous for instance. We had homes above businesses for longer than we haven't and dropping them was a mistake. Industrial restrictions are fine. Commercial restrictions could be okay if we allowed anything within walking distance of most homes. It isn't that zoning laws are bad it is that the current set don't match what we should be planning for. Making up examples where you could piss someone off on purpose is pointless and avoids actually engaging on my point. Why does something you could gain but never actually valued something you should be paid for. In many cases people simply block because "there will be more traffic" as if they have a right to a certain amount of traffic. You can gain benefits for free but stop pretending society needs to pay you to remove those benefits. On the topic of culture: gentrification has been ignored so I don't care fundamentally. Mostly "culture" is just a new form of redlining "I don't want to be near poor people they are gross".
happytoexplain 3y ago
Yup, this lack of basic empathy is a big part of the tension. It's the same situation played out over and over in different contexts. Each side of every issue judges the other side by their worst constituents, imagined or otherwise. Now that whole side of the issue is just "villains". There are unreasonably NIMBY people, but virtually human being exhibits a minimum reasonable amount of NIMBYism. You can't bring harm to people's home and communities (concrete harm, societal harm, or statistical harm) and then call them names and declare their opinions and emotions invalid. I mean, you can - sometimes politics works that way. You shouldn't, morally.
snickerbockers 3y ago
>You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house on a golf course accepting that it could be turned it into an asbestos refinery the next day. But that's not how it works. People buy a house adjacent to a golf course and then the golf course sells out to a developer who wants to build higher-density housing (your "asbestos refinery" example is ridiculous and hyperbolic, nobody's trying to put dangerous industrial facilities in a residential zone) and then the people who live in houses adjacent to the old golf course complain that they are somehow injured by other property property owners building on their own land, often citing damages to "the view" or something entirely intangible such as "the character of the neighborhood" or "the environment". If they wanted to save the golf course they should have put in a bid when it was up for sale. There's no reason why anybody should have a stake in land they don't own.
- ip26 3y ago
  There's no reason why anybody should have a stake in land they don't own Except that defies market value in practice. Evaluated in a bubble, every quarter acre of dirt is generally no more or less valuable than any other quarter acre of dirt. Yet we all know that's not how real estate works. A plot of land downtown in a cute walkable neighborhood full of midcentury modern houses is valuable, and people want to live there, in large part because of those things. We haven't really figured out how to reconcile this with absolutist views on private property rights. I see HOA's as a crude attempt to tackle this, whereby residents all agree the neighborhood is better if everyone cleans up their yard, and legally commit to do so.
  - welder 3y ago
    It's like gambling. You buy property knowing you can't control it's surroundings. Edit: Unless you're a local politician or well-connected individual. Then you can change laws to preserve your property value like in the article.
  - pc86 3y ago
    But markets change, and sometimes people lose when that happens, and you're not due any compensation when that happens. If you invest in tech stocks you'll make a killing most of the time. Sometimes you'll lose half your investment. That's literally the whole point of markets - there's no guarantee, and you don't have damages (in the legal, someone-now-owes-you-something sense) when it goes wrong. You have the right to buy whatever property you want and can afford, but you don't have the right - for the most part - to impose restrictions and covenants on other people's property just to prop your values up, especially without their consent.
wnc3141 3y ago
Housing, not unlike other assets classes have expectations baked into the price at purchase. However those expectations are not entitlements to future outcomes, unless you also purchased the rights to the variables at hand. (Ex: the only way to make sure someone doesn't move in next door is to buy the house nextdoor) Essentially the benefit of private parties not developing on their property is an externality of their decision. Of course government interventions often address externalities as many a Nimby have figured out.
tsss 3y ago
So property owners should profit from appreciation when new infrastructure is built around them, and this is pretty much the only reason that their land ever increases in value, but be compensated when the opposite happens? Sounds grant.
SubjectToChange 3y ago
People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them,… If someone buys real estate with some expectation of ROI, then why should they be shielded from risk?
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation Does it work the other way - ifgovernment improves an area, for example builds mass transit, and property values go up, do homeowners pay?

xnx 3y ago

I like this idea. I know properties can sell off their "air rights" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-midtown-east-air-rights.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-...). Are there other examples of rights (air quality? noise? etc.) that can be sold off?

lq9AJ8yrfs 3y ago
"Easement" is a term that means this [1]. You can give someone an easement allowing them to use your property somehow, and you can make the offer contingent on something in return, such as payment. It's a type of contract and not uncommon to see for things like utilities or nature preserves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement.

bobthepanda 3y ago

Eminent domain is pretty expensive because it takes so many legal appeals, and some people won’t accept compensation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)

morkalork 3y ago
Worse because while is it expensive legally, it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner. Kind of like class action lawsuits, the only ones that come out better off are the lawyers. Also, I've heard stories about some extended family that lost their farm by eminent domain for an airport. They never recovered.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  it is often unjustly low in compensation to the land owner How often is that true? In my very limited exposure to the process (2 friends over 25 years, both in VA) the result was fair. Obviously there are cases that make the news, but I assume these are the outliers.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    I have no idea but it's got a pretty rough history of abuse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/10/more-cities-seek-redress-widespread-20th-century-destruction-black-neighborhoods/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/10/more-citi...
  - phlakaton 3y ago
    Take a look at the disputes that have arisen over CAHSR's use of eminent domain to see how thorny these issues can get. https://cchsra.org/cahsr-eminent-domain/ https://cchsra.org/cahsr-eminent-domain/
  - Arrath 3y ago
    Anecdotally, a portion of my parents land (and my childhood home) was taken by eminent domain to widen the county road. My parents had to fight a legal battle with the county, who wanted to pay only for the value of the bare land they were taking, disregarding the fact that the house was on that portion of the property. My parents were eventually able to get fair compensation but it took time and effort to get the county to pony up.

swatcoder 3y ago

You've just restyled "eminent domain"... turns out, people can get pretty finicky about it and often look at it as a form of immoral coercion. Noncooperation and even violence or vandalism are common. For as necessary as it might be sometimes, it's been shown to be a pretty messy and conflict-engendering approach.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

[flagged]

coding123 3y ago

> I think more people would be willing to accept a meth clinic in their neighborhood if they didn't pay property taxes from now on and could afford private security What? Property taxes are maybe $5000 per year for a typical property, maybe more maybe less shrug. How do you hire a full-time (24/7) armed guard for your house for $5000 per year? Even if you allocated that $5000 toward some group in your community paying for an armed guard... ask as many people as you know today the following question: What scenario do you prefer: 1) Pay $5000 per year and not have a meth clinic near your house. 2) Pay $5000 per year and have a meth clinic and someone with an AK47 guarding your neighborhood. Other than that, I agree with the general idea - however I would reject the government paying for that - because ultimately that means a new tax. It would have to be the "entity" that wants to fuck up the area.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
> What? Property taxes are maybe $5000 per year for a typical property, maybe more maybe less shrug. How do you hire a full-time (24/7) armed guard for your house for $5000 per year? You hire it for the neighborhood jointly. I mean 12 neighbors cover a single guard. That means a neighborhood can have several of them patrolling. And you don’t need 1/12. So you pocket the savings. So you get maybe $4,000 cash per year and one guard per street. Obviously not personal security detail.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Doesn’t that sort of ignore the need for shifts and guards to have holidays, sick leave and so on. For whatever minimum staffing you think you need you need to multiply it by 3-4x. Not to mention the logistics involved in terms of vehicles, work space and so on. And the sheer dystopian vibes to this calculus is crazy.
  - coding123 3y ago
    It's not some dystopian future - this is the YIMBY movement. It's not about housing. You think some rich person struggling to find land for his next prison that doubles his wealth cares about your kids playing in the street? No he's going to donate to YIMBY to double his wealth.

jpalawaga 3y ago

IMO, if your community has decided to build mass transit with state/federal dollars, you've also forgone any reasonable expectation that densification won't happen. yes, owning a single family home near a major transit corridor is nice, but let's be realistic: that transit corridor is for everyone to enjoy.

api 3y ago

The example you give is a case where this makes sense, but most of the time NIMBYism is more like cartel behavior where existing home-owners work to restrict supply of housing in an entire area to boost their own property values. "My home value will go up forever" can't be a built-in guaranteed expectation when purchasing a home. Property appreciation is not an entitlement. If we want entitled money we should just implement basic income.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Depends. Sdf shelters and win turbines? Sure. Facilities emitting unhealthy fumes or dumping pollution in the water? That would set a dangerous precedent where society would validate the behavior as long as there is money in the mix. It already does mind you. But at least is considered wrong at the moment. What would have happened to the asbestos scandal is instead of cleaning the stuff, we just paid compensations? Carnage.

rickydroll 3y ago
I would argue for mixed use of hazardous industries and residential/commercial properties. There is a long history of forcing the pollution generate through your daily life onto lower income communities. If you take a poop, the sewage treatment plant should be in your neighborhood. Drink water, the water treatment plant should be in your neighborhood, use electricity, electricity generation in your neighborhood. In other words, don't force your crap on to somebody else.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Ok if it applies to the rich as well, which it won't.
  - rickydroll 3y ago
    You are quite right. It wouldn't even though it should. The refusal of the rich to clean up their own shit is behind environmental injustices.

mjevans 3y ago

Land Value Tax should help reflect the opportunity cost for the community as well as the benefit to cashing out of a property.

phlakaton 3y ago
LVT takes no consideration of the improvements done to the property, of course. Great for aligning taxation to the opportunity cost of the property, but I would think it would dramatically underestimate the value of cashing out of the property.
- mjevans 3y ago
  You imply it's the only tax, rather than one of the total taxes.

Guvante 3y ago

If you didn't buy it then why should I compensate you? Why should my previous houses height be your concern? Did you pay me for that? If you had a view before for free why is it my problem that you don't now? You could have bought the land to guarantee it, why didn't you? Some of these are HoA restrictions which were shared covenants agreed upon in the past but we really need to reconsider the efficacy of allowing those to be enforceable. Why is it up to a group of people who are all dead how tall a house I can build? Very infrequently are people making housing decisions based on such covenants and pricing ignores them. However when NIMBY comes up suddenly people want to be compensated for what they didn't pay for, didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase, and weren't party to the original agreement.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
> didn't require as a stipulation of the property purchase because those are just too difficult to all list. The solution to that is a mutually shared list of conditions which is then called "zoning", which HN loves to rail about. I'm offering a fair value compensation in lieu of zoning. If you really don't think you should have anything to say about your neighbors' houses, I will happily buy all of them and build tall fences that ensure your house only ever sees light at noon, and then maybe still at 12:01. Complaining about people's "I've got mine, so screw you buddy" with "I want mine, so screw you" is unbecoming. can't just be market rate though, because there is legitimate pain and suffering to disrupting the community and breaking it apart etc, so that needs to be comped too.
- Guvante 3y ago
  Zoning needs to be logical. Not allowing any residential in commercial is ridiculous for instance. We had homes above businesses for longer than we haven't and dropping them was a mistake. Industrial restrictions are fine. Commercial restrictions could be okay if we allowed anything within walking distance of most homes. It isn't that zoning laws are bad it is that the current set don't match what we should be planning for. Making up examples where you could piss someone off on purpose is pointless and avoids actually engaging on my point. Why does something you could gain but never actually valued something you should be paid for. In many cases people simply block because "there will be more traffic" as if they have a right to a certain amount of traffic. You can gain benefits for free but stop pretending society needs to pay you to remove those benefits. On the topic of culture: gentrification has been ignored so I don't care fundamentally. Mostly "culture" is just a new form of redlining "I don't want to be near poor people they are gross".

happytoexplain 3y ago

Yup, this lack of basic empathy is a big part of the tension. It's the same situation played out over and over in different contexts. Each side of every issue judges the other side by their worst constituents, imagined or otherwise. Now that whole side of the issue is just "villains". There are unreasonably NIMBY people, but virtually human being exhibits a minimum reasonable amount of NIMBYism. You can't bring harm to people's home and communities (concrete harm, societal harm, or statistical harm) and then call them names and declare their opinions and emotions invalid. I mean, you can - sometimes politics works that way. You shouldn't, morally.

snickerbockers 3y ago

>You cannot just violate them, because no one would buy a house on a golf course accepting that it could be turned it into an asbestos refinery the next day. But that's not how it works. People buy a house adjacent to a golf course and then the golf course sells out to a developer who wants to build higher-density housing (your "asbestos refinery" example is ridiculous and hyperbolic, nobody's trying to put dangerous industrial facilities in a residential zone) and then the people who live in houses adjacent to the old golf course complain that they are somehow injured by other property property owners building on their own land, often citing damages to "the view" or something entirely intangible such as "the character of the neighborhood" or "the environment". If they wanted to save the golf course they should have put in a bid when it was up for sale. There's no reason why anybody should have a stake in land they don't own.

ip26 3y ago
There's no reason why anybody should have a stake in land they don't own Except that defies market value in practice. Evaluated in a bubble, every quarter acre of dirt is generally no more or less valuable than any other quarter acre of dirt. Yet we all know that's not how real estate works. A plot of land downtown in a cute walkable neighborhood full of midcentury modern houses is valuable, and people want to live there, in large part because of those things. We haven't really figured out how to reconcile this with absolutist views on private property rights. I see HOA's as a crude attempt to tackle this, whereby residents all agree the neighborhood is better if everyone cleans up their yard, and legally commit to do so.
- welder 3y ago
  It's like gambling. You buy property knowing you can't control it's surroundings. Edit: Unless you're a local politician or well-connected individual. Then you can change laws to preserve your property value like in the article.
- pc86 3y ago
  But markets change, and sometimes people lose when that happens, and you're not due any compensation when that happens. If you invest in tech stocks you'll make a killing most of the time. Sometimes you'll lose half your investment. That's literally the whole point of markets - there's no guarantee, and you don't have damages (in the legal, someone-now-owes-you-something sense) when it goes wrong. You have the right to buy whatever property you want and can afford, but you don't have the right - for the most part - to impose restrictions and covenants on other people's property just to prop your values up, especially without their consent.

wnc3141 3y ago

Housing, not unlike other assets classes have expectations baked into the price at purchase. However those expectations are not entitlements to future outcomes, unless you also purchased the rights to the variables at hand. (Ex: the only way to make sure someone doesn't move in next door is to buy the house nextdoor) Essentially the benefit of private parties not developing on their property is an externality of their decision. Of course government interventions often address externalities as many a Nimby have figured out.

tsss 3y ago

So property owners should profit from appreciation when new infrastructure is built around them, and this is pretty much the only reason that their land ever increases in value, but be compensated when the opposite happens? Sounds grant.

SubjectToChange 3y ago

People buy property with expectations. You cannot just violate them,… If someone buys real estate with some expectation of ROI, then why should they be shielded from risk?

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> The problem with NIMBYism can be solved with compensation Does it work the other way - ifgovernment improves an area, for example builds mass transit, and property values go up, do homeowners pay?