4 ms·

Looking to learn more on the subject, but why isn't it in the interest of any city these days to NOT build more housing? They are almost perfectly incentivized

Looking to learn more on the subject, but why isn't it in the interest of any city these days to NOT build more housing? They are almost perfectly incentivized to attract working young people and families to help increase their tax base (property tax, income tax, sales tax) and housing would help them do that. Given most large cities are facing huge financial deficits, wouldn't this make sense? (Yes, I'm aware of regulatory capture and the inefficiency of local government, but shouldn't there be SOME common sense?)

alexsereno 3y ago
This is quite simple, cities are run by voters. Any property owner, and all the landlords, are incentivized to keep housing stock as low as possible. To get around this you need federal housing regulation to prevent local governments from doing what’s clearly in their loudest voters best interest, and instead change the incentives to favor building high rise condos and dense housing
ipnon 3y ago
The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not because their individual net worths are mostly in their home prices. Since a city is really just a set of geographically constrained voters, housing supply decreases.
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  In my city in California, developers are replacing old single-family homes with multi-family (apartments, condos, townhomes). It's great, it's needed. Every time a new development gets started in our neighborhood, Facebook neighbor groups explode. The older generations hate how it's ruining the character of the neighborhood. The younger generations ask where the fuck they're supposed to live when prices are so high. Thankfully, in the last few years it feels like the YIMBY voices are getting a lot louder.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    A 12 unit apartment looks better than 12 tents surrounded by trash.
- jjav 3y ago
  > The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not I have difficulty understanding this often repeated assertion. I've been voting for over 30 years. I've never (to my best recollection) had a ballot question about increasing housing supply in my town. The town government is constantly approving (and sometimes rejecting) housing developments, but they have never asked me.
jfim 3y ago
For California specifically, there's proposition 13 which caps the rate of increase of property taxes for housing to a rate that's below inflation. For areas like the Bay area where the cost of living is high (making city employees expensive), zoning for residential instead of commercial means that they're limiting their future tax base while having to provide services to these houses, so cities avoid building housing as much as possible.
- wahern 3y ago
  Prop 13 restricts reassessments for commercial properties, too. Ultimately, the fundamental calculus is similar in that commercial development is deemed to be better for city finances, but the difference is much smaller than if commercial properties weren't part of Prop 13.[1] And perhaps the difference disappears or inverts in urban contexts. Suburban services aren't financially viable long-term even for commercial zones, but that's not true in dense, urban areas where inviting people to live can definitely have a positive RoI long-term. The reason urban areas, especially coastal cities, don't permit more housing has more to do with NIMBYism and, more recently, leftist politics that sees all private and even much public development as evil--because so-called gentrification, because money changes hands, etc. [1] Note that the way schools are organized and funded in California means there's less local disincentive stemming from the need to fund schools than might exist elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the numbers, but if you're a municipality looking to keep tax money flowing through your area as opposed to being redistributed elsewhere, I wouldn't be surprised if public schools are a net win.
lukas099 3y ago
It IS in the interest of the city. This does not translate into policymaking because of the intersection of these realities: 1) The 'special interest' effect — where narrow groups of highly-motivated individuals become more politically organized and effective than the rest, whose interests are at odds with the minority group but whose members are, on an individual basis, not affected enough to take political action. This is especially true when the special interest group is highly-resourced. 2) The USA system of deciding what gets constructed where is slow, bureaucratic, and tends to have lots of nucleation sites for local special interest groups to assert their political power. 2) NIMBYs are, by definition, landed gentry, and therefore more highly-resourced than young renters.

alexsereno 3y ago

This is quite simple, cities are run by voters. Any property owner, and all the landlords, are incentivized to keep housing stock as low as possible. To get around this you need federal housing regulation to prevent local governments from doing what’s clearly in their loudest voters best interest, and instead change the incentives to favor building high rise condos and dense housing

ipnon 3y ago

The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not because their individual net worths are mostly in their home prices. Since a city is really just a set of geographically constrained voters, housing supply decreases.

dmazzoni 3y ago
In my city in California, developers are replacing old single-family homes with multi-family (apartments, condos, townhomes). It's great, it's needed. Every time a new development gets started in our neighborhood, Facebook neighbor groups explode. The older generations hate how it's ruining the character of the neighborhood. The younger generations ask where the fuck they're supposed to live when prices are so high. Thankfully, in the last few years it feels like the YIMBY voices are getting a lot louder.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  A 12 unit apartment looks better than 12 tents surrounded by trash.
jjav 3y ago
> The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not I have difficulty understanding this often repeated assertion. I've been voting for over 30 years. I've never (to my best recollection) had a ballot question about increasing housing supply in my town. The town government is constantly approving (and sometimes rejecting) housing developments, but they have never asked me.

jfim 3y ago

For California specifically, there's proposition 13 which caps the rate of increase of property taxes for housing to a rate that's below inflation. For areas like the Bay area where the cost of living is high (making city employees expensive), zoning for residential instead of commercial means that they're limiting their future tax base while having to provide services to these houses, so cities avoid building housing as much as possible.

wahern 3y ago
Prop 13 restricts reassessments for commercial properties, too. Ultimately, the fundamental calculus is similar in that commercial development is deemed to be better for city finances, but the difference is much smaller than if commercial properties weren't part of Prop 13.[1] And perhaps the difference disappears or inverts in urban contexts. Suburban services aren't financially viable long-term even for commercial zones, but that's not true in dense, urban areas where inviting people to live can definitely have a positive RoI long-term. The reason urban areas, especially coastal cities, don't permit more housing has more to do with NIMBYism and, more recently, leftist politics that sees all private and even much public development as evil--because so-called gentrification, because money changes hands, etc. [1] Note that the way schools are organized and funded in California means there's less local disincentive stemming from the need to fund schools than might exist elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the numbers, but if you're a municipality looking to keep tax money flowing through your area as opposed to being redistributed elsewhere, I wouldn't be surprised if public schools are a net win.

lukas099 3y ago

It IS in the interest of the city. This does not translate into policymaking because of the intersection of these realities: 1) The 'special interest' effect — where narrow groups of highly-motivated individuals become more politically organized and effective than the rest, whose interests are at odds with the minority group but whose members are, on an individual basis, not affected enough to take political action. This is especially true when the special interest group is highly-resourced. 2) The USA system of deciding what gets constructed where is slow, bureaucratic, and tends to have lots of nucleation sites for local special interest groups to assert their political power. 2) NIMBYs are, by definition, landed gentry, and therefore more highly-resourced than young renters.