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I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. In Portland, they passed some radical new zoni

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it should be a no-brainer, so I'll bring up and ask why not? And there are basically two reasons: - There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families. - They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. Even though adding a rental could be pretty lucrative, there's just not enough motivation to go through with it. To me it has little to do with incumbent politicians and everything to do with the incumbent middle class. I'm all for removing red tape and restrictions, but we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things.

TulliusCicero 2y ago
> In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem. Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most. And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.
- legitster 2y ago
  > invest tens of millions of public dollars every year into new public housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy An SRO costs 25% as much to build as a studio apartment. The real obvious solution is to take all of the money we are pumping into "long-term" affordable housing options into basically just dormitories. If it's good enough for college students, it should be good enough for anyone looking to get off the streets. I think people really underrate how much of a knock-on affect there would be if we built enough SROs to meet demand. It would essentially establish a housing "floor" in any housing market, and undercut the ability to rent-seek up the rest of the housing market.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Yeah, I think form factors like this should be part of the answer. But part of it has to be getting costs down for regular apartments too. It's not uncommon to see that even non-profit orgs take 400k or 500k per 1br apartment in a building in major cities, which is just crazy.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Oakland was looking at 800k for half size shipping containers retrofitted into single room studios with windows.
      - legitster 2y ago
        Shipping containers are a huge red flag that a project is a gimmick. People have this mistaken idea that there are a ton of shipping containers that need to be recycled (there was a brief period in the mid aughts where this may have been true). But a used shipping container is neither cheap nor a great material to build a home from.
        ty6853 2y ago
        Last I checked you could get a 20 ft container for what, 6 grand? That's 160 sq ft. And you need a foundation. And to frame inside for insulation. If you go Amish style without mains power you could finish out a kacynziski sized studio for under 20k.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        800-20k is a pretty tidy profit margin for someone with connections. I think the bid was for a hundred of them.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    100 years ago rooming houses housed a large fraction of the population. They've been zoned out of existence. Let them come back.
e40 2y ago
>* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.* This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters).
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  The balance simple - renters have total rights as long as they pay on time and there is no damage on the property except normal wear and tear and 0 when when not paying. You as landlord can't say anything as long as the property is not damaged for the duration of the contract. You always renegotiate at market rates. There is no concept of squatting and evictions are fast. That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits like rent control or whatever.
  - singpolyma3 2y ago
    This is ideal if you're a landlord, but hell if you're a tenant.
    - baggy_trough 2y ago
      That is quite an overstatement.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      The courts should be speedy at forcing landlords to rectify problems just as the courts should be speedy at forcing out squatters. There is no reason either should take 6 months+ to litigate (real world example). I even had an email from the tenant stating they would start paying again if we would reduce the rent. No damage, no question about the facts, just someone who knew that worst case scenario is 6 months free housing for them, simply because that’s how long paperwork apparently takes. End result? I’m even more selective to who I rent out to, and the costs are borne by innocent people who just don’t happen to have sufficient history.
matthest 2y ago
YIMBYism is having a much greater impact in red states. Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-states https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta... In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
anon7000 2y ago
It’s more about long term, but I see what you mean about lighting a fire under butts. One of the most eye opening discoveries for me on my urbanism journey is how Amsterdam got better. It wasn’t always a bicycle paradise; its city center had massive parking lots, huge roads, and a poor pedestrian environment. But today it’s much different — because policies were enacted decades ago which ensure roads are re-configured when it’s time to replace them. So over time, the city has become better. These long-term policies are deeply important. We didn’t get into the current situation because someone woke up and decided housing scarcity would be cool. It happened after decades of planning and building under policies which seemed like the future 60 years ago, but have become unsustainable. Parking minimums don’t instantly turn your town into a parking lot — it takes decades as buildings are replaced and more and more land is carved out for parking. So yes, YIMBY doesn’t instantly solve the crisis, and we need to do more. But over time, as houses and lots sell, people remodel and build, the financial incentive to make more housing units available is very strong —- so over many years, things will definitely densify.
- rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
  Boston was a mess before the big dig. Enough ink has been spilled over how long it took, but just about everybody agrees the city is better for it.
  - silverlake 2y ago
    There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4
    - MostlyStable 2y ago
NullPrefix 2y ago
what are ADUs?
- dboreham 2y ago
  fwiw Google search works well for this, but it means "Accessory Dwelling Unit", aka "Granny flat".
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  See https://www.cityofithaca.org/786/Accessory-Dwelling-Units-ADUs https://www.cityofithaca.org/786/Accessory-Dwelling-Units-AD... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_suite
- creaturemachine 2y ago
  Additional Dwelling Units, basically additional houses on lots traditionally zoned for only one.
baggy_trough 2y ago
> There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families. Yes, there's no chance I'm going to rent an ADU under these incredibly tenant-biased regulations as in California. I have to be able to evict people at the end of their lease for any reason if they are going to be in an ADU on my property.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I rent an ADU in California, and many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland. I would not want to rent a separate property in CA as an individual, especially as counties start banning criminal background checks.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    > many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland And this can change overnight... CA cities have made some pretty drastic changes quite suddenly in the past. Not worth it. Eg: https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-strengthens-rent-control-protections-for-mobile-homes/ https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-stren...
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Oh how I know it. I know someone who got fucked by the COVID eviction moratorium. 3 years of lost rent on a Bay area house while eating the mortgage, plus 250k property damage. Judgement proof Tennant mean that comes out of retirement and college funds. Makes me wish criminal charges were viable.
      - harambae 2y ago
        How did they do 250k of property damage? Not doubting it, just curious. Ripped out all copper, all appliances, and flooded it intentionally on the way out?
gotoeleven 2y ago
It's not really surprising that places with the most onerous "tenants rights" regimes have the biggest problems with housing inventory. I wish the people enacting these laws understood that for every squatter or rent deadbeat you prevent a landlord from evicting, there's a hundred potential landlords that just say no thanks I'll just leave my property empty. https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-francisco-homes-are-vacant/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  Is it that they don't understand, or that they actively seek that result?
- roenxi 2y ago
  I'd guess that it is actually the other way around than you might expect. First there was an affordability problem so everyone was pushed into rentals, then the renters were a big enough political block to soft-seize the houses from the landlords. So I'd anticipate places with tenants rights laws to associate with huge amounts of housing inventory while the incentives really catch up. Then the tenants get pushed to move somewhere else and the laws go away as the renting bloc loses numbers.
ragingroosevelt 2y ago
I live in Portland and own my house. I'd love to put in an ADU and rent to some of my friends but it's pretty expensive and I can't afford it.
- legitster 2y ago
  The permitting in PDX is very permissive if you do the work yourself. You don't need to build a second house - you can essentially stand up a large shed and do some pretty basic work to finish it into a studio apartment. Alternatively, the tiny home bubble has popped, and you can buy a used, pre-built tiny home and just park them on your property.
- korse 2y ago
  That sounds nice, but don't rent to your friends. I've been there and it sucks. Everything works great until someone hits the hard times and the resource imbalance between parties gets amplified. You're either going to end up trashing friendships and dealing with the emotional baggage, making a really poor business decision or both. Rent to people you're comfortable evicting/taking legal action against if things sour and then if you're so inclined, help your friends out by subsidizing outings/entertainment etc.
  - rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
    “When you loan money to a friend, be prepared to lose the money or the friend” is a maxim I’ve lived by and has guided me through some tough decisions over time.
PaulHoule 2y ago
As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York. I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but at least he was paying rent. Between that and another tenant losing her shit we lost at least a years rent plus still have a unit vacant even though we have been using the time to catch up on maintainance. I’ve seen other small landlords in the same situation where they were psychologically devastated by the process of dealing with a bad tenant and evicting them. Right now my wife is helping a friend who inherited two homes from their parents who recently passed away which might have been a takeaway and not a gift because she has yet to clean up the mess left behind and struggles to with precarity (doesn’t have a working car, can’t find the title abstract and will have to cough up a few $1000 to be able to sell, …) renting the place out for a few years made some money but probably resulted in lost value in selling it. The juiciest gossip in our small town us that the owner of an equipment rental company (probably able to afford to do it right) attempted an illegal ‘self-help” eviction by crashing into the building with a backhoe which is not only an own goal in terms of property damage but could probably cost $10,000 or more in court. (A friend of our who has struggled with homelessness got a settlement of that much for being illegally evicted by the homeless shelter when it closed but then struggled to cash the check because he had no bank account an no id to create a bank account…)
- legitster 2y ago
  My dad is landlord of an 8-plex in a small town. My brother is a social worker in a big city. When they get together and talk it's amazing how much their jobs overlap. So much of the job as a small time landlord these days is dealing with drug abuse, interpersonal problems, police, social services, housing authorities, etc.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Around the time we bought our place we had some spare cash and thought about getting another house. I'd seen the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book which had the advice that you should buy a rental property only it was wildly cashflow positive after the mortgage. That's not realistic in most cases but we saw one rental property which looked crazy profitable that was full of Section 8 tenants. We passed on it because it was really buying yourself a job as a social worker and the fact that we were bleeding hearts would make it harder, not easier. I think my wife and I have gained the maturity that we might be able to handle that now but we've also gotten better at setting boundaries such that we wouldn't.
adverbly 2y ago
I actually think it's kind of a good sign that the policy was able to be passed without significant immediate disruptions. I have some pretty radical views about the benefits of land value taxes, but I don't think it's a good idea to immediately change all taxes by a large amount because disruptions are very painful. If you can enact positive incentives slowly with gradual changes then you can avoid disruptions while moving towards a better future.
orange_joe 2y ago
the extremely unpopular but logical next step in managing change would be to induce development by increasing property taxes. Basically compel people to move and sell their land to developers who build up the land.
- vondur 2y ago
  So, what if it were you in that position? What if your income was reduced and now the Government increases the property tax so you can no longer afford to pay for it? And let's add in the Government has a large tax on capital gains, which will kick in if you sell that property, and now you can't afford a new property somewhere else?
  - orange_joe 2y ago
    1. I’m being descriptive not prescriptive. property taxes being used to drive urbanization and development is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth. 2. Your issue with what I said seems very dependent on something you chose to “add in” — Why am I being asked to defend something I never said?
    - dmitrygr 2y ago
      > is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth Do you thus imply that ANY part of LA at all is a sane model for anything at all?
- csomar 2y ago
  Do you mean vacant land property taxes or property taxes for all real-estate?
stefan_ 2y ago
People don't put 10k of their money towards the bakery opening up next block either. They put it in the bank, which will loan it out. No one needs a million negligent single-rental landlords to create housing. But it does mean you are not entitled to having the same style McMansion built on the close empty lot in eternity, it might just be something with some more space efficiency. It means you can't continue paying a tax rate set 30 years ago for land that has appreciated many magnitudes in value.
deleted 2y ago
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Fauntleroy 2y ago
It's amusing to me that anyone would think a random smattering of ADUs would do anything at all to push the needle when it comes to housing. This is like fixing linter warnings (but not even doing that!) instead of building an entirely new section of an app. We need the latter.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Fixing housing isn't one thing, it's many dozens. ADU's are just one of many. If your list isn't at least 50 items long it's going to be ineffectual. Here's one example of a reasonable list, it's 55 items long: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force-report https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force... And there are still many other things I would add.
seryoiupfurds 2y ago
As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect. True YIMBY policy would be zoning for six-story apartments by-right citywide, with density going up to 20 stories near rapid transit. But even policies that sound great on paper are often sabotaged by cities with unworkable affordability requirements that prevent anything from being built.
- GenerWork 2y ago
  >As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect. This is such a weird thing to say. Why would lawmakers ever want to support a new YIMBY policy when the people that support them openly admit that it was never meant to achieve what they claimed was going to achieve?
  - mac-mc 2y ago
    If you listen to the histrionics that NIMBYs say, it's an example legislation that would lead to typical NIMBY histrionics, but when implemented leads to none of those claimed issues, because it doesn't get used that much. "See, that wasn't that hard". It's baby's first upzoning.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  In 2007, my house was re-zoned from R-9600 (Single family residential, 9600 SF lots minimum) to a high-density transit oriented zoning (the acronym changes every other year, but was originally PCBTPV, Planned Community Business Transit Pedestrian Village), in expectation that a light rail station will be opening within 1/4 to 1/2 mile by 2035. The new zoning requirement is six story minimum, minimum of 50 dwelling units/acre density, tax credits for elder housing and child care facilities, etc. This is in a suburb just north of Seattle. I am currently 4 miles from the nearest light rail station, which is a 5 minute walk + a 10 minute bus ride that comes along very frequently, then a 40 minute ride to downtown Seattle, so by US suburban standards the foot/transit access is already pretty darn good. There is a small neighborhood market and a few restaurants a 5 minute walk away, and a large supermarket is really only 15 minutes walk. (but yeah, we usually drive there.) So far, zero occupied single-family houses have been knocked down to build high density developments. There were a few dilapidated/abandoned old houses on large parcels along the freeway that were bulldozed for apartments, which was an improvement. But even if you put policies and incentives in place to encourage re-development, it can take decades for market forces to reach a tipping point where developers are actually willing to make cash offers at or above the market value on existing properties to make these changes happen.
danphilibin 2y ago
> we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things. I've been watching something similar happen in LA with Measure HLA, a "safe streets" bill that was supposed to require the city to include safety improvements for pedestrians and cyclists during regular road maintenance. The bill passed with broad support but none of the people in charge of the agencies seem to want to do any of that stuff, so they either drag their feet or simply don't comply, leading to lawsuits and delays. (Just today, Metro voted unanimously to not include a now-legally mandated bike lane along a major new busway, claiming it's not their problem. Which might be true — and that's a separate issue — but playing hot potato with safety & mobility improvements feels like a leadership problem, not a legal problem.) I like designing good incentives but in this case just passing laws is not working. You also need the actors to want the change. (I personally would be focusing on installing new leadership.)
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  What usually happens with these mandates is you get road markings that pretend to be a bike lane just to satisfy the contract requirements and siphon off federal ISTEA funding for the budgetary savings. The reality is that they are usually fancy death traps with no engineering rigor put into making them safe or functional for bicyclists.
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    Or worse, "sharrows" in the middle of a busy car lane. Ride here if you don't value your life.
MrDarcy 2y ago
I also live in Portland. Look into our local taxes for the answer. We have the highest local tax rate in the nation for families earning more than 200K a year, higher than Manhattan. It simply doesn't pencil to build an ADU and rent it out long term, so you’re incentivized to a short term rental like Airbnb, which does little to nothing to help the housing situation. It’s the same for new apartment buildings. Next time you drive over the Fremont Bridge look at the skyline. 5 years ago there were 13 visible cranes mostly constructing high density apartment buildings. Today there are none. It’s the same reason, Portland has made it simply unprofitable to develop new high density housing.
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  What specific tax rates over 200k are you referring to? The SHS is 1% and the state also jumps just about 1% how is that not worth making over 200k?
dmitrygr 2y ago
> There's a general fear of being a landlord Yes. And this is fixable, if there is political will. There is a long list of locales where I'd never want to be a landlord due to how little recourse you have in cases of tenant misbehavior/nonpayment. CA is near the top. Portland is too. Until this is fixed, however, those locales will tend to lose independent landlords, as they cannot afford the rent losses as they are not diversified enough. Big faceless companies like Avalon will grow cause they can.
poulsbohemian 2y ago
My small city in Washington is the template for the state's ADU law and multi-family density law. When the ADU law passed, we saw a lot of people convert garages into ADUs and anymore any custom builds almost always add an ADU. But to your point - it isn't clear how many have become rentals. What I observe is that many people saw it as good resale value, as multi-generational living, or simply a place to put guests when they came to visit. It was about the same time we put a moratorium on VRBOs, which had been another reason people saw these as beneficial without becoming a full-time landlord. Personally I have one and it has been beneficial income while also giving my tenants a good transition point (college students, people escaping bad marriages, people who need a place to land while they look for a place to buy, etc)
- harambae 2y ago
  > as multi-generational living Arguably this still improves the housing situation overall (slightly), if the grandmother was previously living somewhere else.
evilsetg 2y ago
Maybe landlord coops could be a solution. Band together to co-own with multiple small landlords and share the risk.
bradlys 2y ago
Third: I have my own property because I don't want to share it with someone else. If I wanted to share, I'd rent a room or get a townhouse or some other form of housing where sharing space is common. Fourth: Building an ADU is actually very expensive and the payback time is quite long. You have to dig for sewage and water, pour a foundation, and so forth. If doing it at a high level, it's going to be as intensive as building a house... It's just smaller. Most people are not handy at all and therefore will need to hire out every bit of it... Which is very expensive.
yaba_money 2y ago
I live in an area in Los Angeles that passed a similar law a few years ago (actually I live in an ADU) I can say the exact opposite has been true here. SO many houses have added ADUs - some rented out - but the vast majority are turning their properties into multi-generational living. Can't say that rent has come down per-say, but I have managed to rent one at below market. Having individual landlords with the pressure of paying their HELOC means they are less likely to sit on an empty unit for 5 months waiting for the most high dollar tenant. I 100% feel like this policy has been a big net positive. what I would really like to see now is allowing owners to sub-divide and sell the ADU. This could bring back the "starter-home" that no longer exists and has kept me out of the market
smadge 2y ago
This is because ADU laws don’t go far enough. If you can sell your property to a developer for 3x the times the price you paid for it because all of a sudden it’s legal and financially viable to build a sixplex, many people will take that offer.
brailsafe 2y ago
They did something similar in Vancouver, BC. To me it just seemed like everyone's been leaving the city and saying "We literally can not afford to own a place here" and politicians heard "You want us to manufacture more landlords and pull up the ladder even further!? Ok, we'll try". Yes in my backyard shouldn't mean literally yes, you can live in my actual physical backyard, more than there shouldn't be undue restrictions on building more densely nearby
uses 2y ago
I don't understand why you brought up ADUs... nobody thinks ADUs are the solution to the decade+ long housing crisis. Blue states need massive state-wide zoning reform that overrides local control.
HEmanZ 2y ago
Just a bit north of you, in Seattle, it feels like every house in my neighborhood with enough land added an adu, a dadu, and condoized. My realtor says almost everyone looking for single family homes wants an existing dadu or somewhere they can build a dadu. I don’t know that anyone has claimed allowing ADUs is all you need to do to solve our housing crisis. But in a lot of places it’s the only thing the NIMBYs will let you get away with. So if you can’t middle housing, at least allowing ADUs gets you something more. If the demand to live in your city dramatically outstrips the any possible number of ADUs that can be built, then it won’t help on its own, the cup still runs over.
bobthepanda 2y ago
I think people would like money but being a landlord in addition to probably being a multi-income household is a lot. A lot can go wrong being a landlord even in a place with permissive laws. One thing that I think would be interesting would be allowing the sale and transfer of unused development rights (AKA "air rights.") That lets somebody take advantage of the development capacity without the landowner having to make a gamble on what could be a very risky development. A lot of jurisdictions have something like this allowed already but generally limit it to certain districts, or only landmarked properties get to sell development rights like this, or something else.
BrtByte 2y ago
Removing barriers is necessary, but not always sufficient
anovikov 2y ago
TL;RD: to make housing affordable you need to make everyone poor - not just the renters, but owners too.
imtheopposite 2y ago
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lupusreal 2y ago
What does it even mean to "light a fire under the butt" of a middle class home owner who is scared to rent because they'd be unable to evict a destructive junkie? What kind of fire do you have in mind, that would scare them even worse than that possible outcome? Whatever it is, it will probably make you or any politician who advances it very unpopular.
stronglikedan 2y ago
ADU = Accessory Dwelling Units (for those of us not "in the know" or whatever)
vintermann 2y ago
> They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. This is a part of the problem which I think isn't discussed often enough. Because of the varying marginal utility of money, if the divide between rich and poor becomes big enough, owners will not want to rent out in their own homes, because nothing the tenant can pay will make any significant difference to their personal budget, and certainly not enough to make up for the stress/risk. Maybe they can find someone non-threatening enough where the benefit of having someone living in the cellar apartment, to discourage break-ins when they're away etc. makes up for the risk. That is, I guess, how I managed to get a rental in one of the most expensive parts of Oslo ~20 years ago. But I really doubt I'd gotten that if I wasn't extremely non-threatening, let alone if I had been a minority of some sort.
- mapt 2y ago
  The really expensive neighborhoods are too desirable for anyone to live there. They exist as capital anchors for overseas sovereign wealth funds and various long-run finance concerns to sink into a deeper market than their own, to act as collateral for their business adventures and as a currency reserve hedged against local inflation. No rent you could pay is worth the risk. Low property taxes are highly conducive to this use-case, and notably, tenant residents can vote on raising property taxes and overseas sovereign wealth funds can't.
Enginerrrd 2y ago
The issue I'm seeing is that right now, you won't even be cashflow positive unless you can put 40-50% down on the construction costs. That's a HUGE ask for someone to build an ADU! If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you just become a developer? The answer is obvious: capital. But that applies at every scale, and thus to a whole lot of those homeowners you're showing disdain for too. People complain the rents in my area are too high. But the costs of the underlying real estate, maintenance, construction, and repairs are so high right now that it barely pencils out if at all. Most houses in the area were constructed in the 70's or the 90's and have not been well-maintained. So there's added costs of trying to bring old structures back up to snuff. New construction, even medium/high density stuff doesn't make sense unless you have 40-50% down or access to some ridiculously low interest loan. Something has to give. Either prices need to come down on land, labor and construction materials, or rents need to go even higher.
mapt 2y ago
There are often a lot of redundant parts of the legal & zoning code intended to limit development. You can legalize ADUs de jure, but you probably still have setbacks that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have parking or curb or utility requirements that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have HOAs that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have "impact fees" and utility billing issues and all sorts of recently-added building codes that de facto prohibit ADUs. On top of that, the ADUs are usually extremely limited in character - "less than 1200sqft, less than 30% of the floor area of the house, no more than two residents", etc, etc. On top of that, you're paying for a financing category that the banks don't know how to deal with, without the subsidies that homeowners enjoy on mortgage payments, you're suddenly getting a property tax bill that's higher, and you're facing the possibility of squatting tenants under a regime that's designed to be inherently hostile to landlords. You still have all sorts of laws against doing the thing you just supposedly legalized.
- jprokay13 2y ago
  We recently completed an ADU project in California and figuring out the financing was particularly difficult. Add on additional requirements like mandatory solar, fees on top of fees ($5000 school impact fee was just one of many), a local building department with one person reviewing everything… It’s not an easy undertaking at all!
dughnut 2y ago
We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our democracy”. I just really don’t know what more you want here. Confiscate everyone’s bank anccount and liquidate it to build housing projects? The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.
- daveguy 2y ago
  Our monetary policy changes by the month. And currently it is sustaining a 3% inflation just like it was when the ship was turned around during Biden's admin. The target is a 2% inflation rate, which no one considers "highly inflationary".
rcpt 2y ago
> radical new zoning laws > ADUs on their property If this is "radical" then it just shows how far we've fallen.
grandempire 2y ago
Another factor for me is there is risk to hiring contractors. If i could just pay money and have confidence things on my house would be fixed I would do it in a heartbeat. But you have to become a lawyer and project manager to make sure they do it. > There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights Yes, these laws also increase the cost of housing.
- packetlost 2y ago
  Laws that protect individuals vs corporations usually hurt small businesses vs individuals a lot. Maybe not more than the harm caused by big corps, but it certainly has unfortunate side-effects.
  - grandempire 2y ago
    Yes. I agree. It could still be a net benefit. But it does have cost.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
>They don't need the money Yeah. At a certain affluence, I'd rather have extra space and privacy than extra money. I can't think of a reasonable amount of money that would incentivize me to rent out an ADU in my backyard. $10k a month? idk my kids play in that yard...
morsecodist 2y ago
I am a big fan of YIMBY-ism but I think your points here are fair. This is a controversial take among YIMBYs but I think the benefits of ADUs are oversold. Of course I am all for allowing them if that is all we can do but the idea of the ADU only exists because it is supposed to allow building more housing while preserving the overall "character" of single family neighborhoods. Subdividing a lot and building a new home is better in every way for both the homeowner and the resident of the eventual structure. ADUs seem like they could provide a lot of housing because it is a huge increase in what is theoretically allowed but it is not a huge increase in what people will realistically build in the United States in 2025 in single family neighborhoods. This is true for the reasons you state and also many other reasons because it is the opposite of economies of scale that typically brings costs down. We have an answer to building more housing at a lower cost and it's apartment buildings. We need more apartment buildings. We don't need them everywhere, there will still be plenty of places with predominantly single family homes, but we need them in more places than they are today. They don't have to be big high rises but there needs to be a enough number of units in a single building to make projects pencil.
directevolve 2y ago
ADUs are particularly ineffective, because each one requires the owner to work as a part-time landlord with the tenant being almost their housemate. All the headache without much increase in income. I happen to have chatted with the head of a large commercial contractor in Portland a few months ago. He told me Portland's unattractive to developers because, compared to other cities, rents are low and the cost to build is high, so the flow of real estate investment dollars into Portland is slow. Since the problem we're trying to solve is making rent cheaper, conditional on the current state of the economy, the solution here is making it cheaper to build dense residential in Portland in the urban core and improve transit options.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
It takes a pretty specific type of property to accommodate an ADU and it has to be in a specific location to make the ADU worthwhile. If you're in the suburbs you also have HOA rules to contend with. The only place we could put an ADU in our suburban house is to build out our 4-car garage -- it's large enough (and we onyl need 1 car), but we'd have to build a bathroom and a kitchenette. But even if we could afford the initial substantial outlay, I don't think we'd have a lot of takers as people who are likely to rent an ADU typically need to live closer to the city.
LauraFoote 2y ago
(author here; ED of YIMBY Action) I'm super curious about why you think YIMBY-ism is passive. I feel like the main criticism we've often gotten is that we're too in-your-face with our advocacy. Say more.
cake_robot 2y ago
Maybe it's not the bulk of the cost but site development fees for a new ADU in Portland are like $40k, to say nothing of the cost of actually getting approval checked off.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

> In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem. Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most. And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.

legitster 2y ago
> invest tens of millions of public dollars every year into new public housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy An SRO costs 25% as much to build as a studio apartment. The real obvious solution is to take all of the money we are pumping into "long-term" affordable housing options into basically just dormitories. If it's good enough for college students, it should be good enough for anyone looking to get off the streets. I think people really underrate how much of a knock-on affect there would be if we built enough SROs to meet demand. It would essentially establish a housing "floor" in any housing market, and undercut the ability to rent-seek up the rest of the housing market.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Yeah, I think form factors like this should be part of the answer. But part of it has to be getting costs down for regular apartments too. It's not uncommon to see that even non-profit orgs take 400k or 500k per 1br apartment in a building in major cities, which is just crazy.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Oakland was looking at 800k for half size shipping containers retrofitted into single room studios with windows.
    - legitster 2y ago
      Shipping containers are a huge red flag that a project is a gimmick. People have this mistaken idea that there are a ton of shipping containers that need to be recycled (there was a brief period in the mid aughts where this may have been true). But a used shipping container is neither cheap nor a great material to build a home from.
      - ty6853 2y ago
        Last I checked you could get a 20 ft container for what, 6 grand? That's 160 sq ft. And you need a foundation. And to frame inside for insulation. If you go Amish style without mains power you could finish out a kacynziski sized studio for under 20k.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        800-20k is a pretty tidy profit margin for someone with connections. I think the bid was for a hundred of them.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  100 years ago rooming houses housed a large fraction of the population. They've been zoned out of existence. Let them come back.

e40 2y ago

>* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.* This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters).

ReptileMan 2y ago
The balance simple - renters have total rights as long as they pay on time and there is no damage on the property except normal wear and tear and 0 when when not paying. You as landlord can't say anything as long as the property is not damaged for the duration of the contract. You always renegotiate at market rates. There is no concept of squatting and evictions are fast. That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits like rent control or whatever.
- singpolyma3 2y ago
  This is ideal if you're a landlord, but hell if you're a tenant.
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    That is quite an overstatement.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    The courts should be speedy at forcing landlords to rectify problems just as the courts should be speedy at forcing out squatters. There is no reason either should take 6 months+ to litigate (real world example). I even had an email from the tenant stating they would start paying again if we would reduce the rent. No damage, no question about the facts, just someone who knew that worst case scenario is 6 months free housing for them, simply because that’s how long paperwork apparently takes. End result? I’m even more selective to who I rent out to, and the costs are borne by innocent people who just don’t happen to have sufficient history.

matthest 2y ago

YIMBYism is having a much greater impact in red states. Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-states https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta... In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

anon7000 2y ago

It’s more about long term, but I see what you mean about lighting a fire under butts. One of the most eye opening discoveries for me on my urbanism journey is how Amsterdam got better. It wasn’t always a bicycle paradise; its city center had massive parking lots, huge roads, and a poor pedestrian environment. But today it’s much different — because policies were enacted decades ago which ensure roads are re-configured when it’s time to replace them. So over time, the city has become better. These long-term policies are deeply important. We didn’t get into the current situation because someone woke up and decided housing scarcity would be cool. It happened after decades of planning and building under policies which seemed like the future 60 years ago, but have become unsustainable. Parking minimums don’t instantly turn your town into a parking lot — it takes decades as buildings are replaced and more and more land is carved out for parking. So yes, YIMBY doesn’t instantly solve the crisis, and we need to do more. But over time, as houses and lots sell, people remodel and build, the financial incentive to make more housing units available is very strong —- so over many years, things will definitely densify.

rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
Boston was a mess before the big dig. Enough ink has been spilled over how long it took, but just about everybody agrees the city is better for it.
- silverlake 2y ago
  There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4
  - MostlyStable 2y ago

NullPrefix 2y ago

what are ADUs?

dboreham 2y ago
fwiw Google search works well for this, but it means "Accessory Dwelling Unit", aka "Granny flat".
PaulHoule 2y ago
See https://www.cityofithaca.org/786/Accessory-Dwelling-Units-ADUs https://www.cityofithaca.org/786/Accessory-Dwelling-Units-AD... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_suite
creaturemachine 2y ago
Additional Dwelling Units, basically additional houses on lots traditionally zoned for only one.

baggy_trough 2y ago

> There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families. Yes, there's no chance I'm going to rent an ADU under these incredibly tenant-biased regulations as in California. I have to be able to evict people at the end of their lease for any reason if they are going to be in an ADU on my property.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
I rent an ADU in California, and many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland. I would not want to rent a separate property in CA as an individual, especially as counties start banning criminal background checks.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  > many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland And this can change overnight... CA cities have made some pretty drastic changes quite suddenly in the past. Not worth it. Eg: https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-strengthens-rent-control-protections-for-mobile-homes/ https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-stren...
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Oh how I know it. I know someone who got fucked by the COVID eviction moratorium. 3 years of lost rent on a Bay area house while eating the mortgage, plus 250k property damage. Judgement proof Tennant mean that comes out of retirement and college funds. Makes me wish criminal charges were viable.
    - harambae 2y ago
      How did they do 250k of property damage? Not doubting it, just curious. Ripped out all copper, all appliances, and flooded it intentionally on the way out?

gotoeleven 2y ago

It's not really surprising that places with the most onerous "tenants rights" regimes have the biggest problems with housing inventory. I wish the people enacting these laws understood that for every squatter or rent deadbeat you prevent a landlord from evicting, there's a hundred potential landlords that just say no thanks I'll just leave my property empty. https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-francisco-homes-are-vacant/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-...

deleted 2y ago
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baggy_trough 2y ago
Is it that they don't understand, or that they actively seek that result?
roenxi 2y ago
I'd guess that it is actually the other way around than you might expect. First there was an affordability problem so everyone was pushed into rentals, then the renters were a big enough political block to soft-seize the houses from the landlords. So I'd anticipate places with tenants rights laws to associate with huge amounts of housing inventory while the incentives really catch up. Then the tenants get pushed to move somewhere else and the laws go away as the renting bloc loses numbers.

ragingroosevelt 2y ago

I live in Portland and own my house. I'd love to put in an ADU and rent to some of my friends but it's pretty expensive and I can't afford it.

legitster 2y ago
The permitting in PDX is very permissive if you do the work yourself. You don't need to build a second house - you can essentially stand up a large shed and do some pretty basic work to finish it into a studio apartment. Alternatively, the tiny home bubble has popped, and you can buy a used, pre-built tiny home and just park them on your property.
korse 2y ago
That sounds nice, but don't rent to your friends. I've been there and it sucks. Everything works great until someone hits the hard times and the resource imbalance between parties gets amplified. You're either going to end up trashing friendships and dealing with the emotional baggage, making a really poor business decision or both. Rent to people you're comfortable evicting/taking legal action against if things sour and then if you're so inclined, help your friends out by subsidizing outings/entertainment etc.
- rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
  “When you loan money to a friend, be prepared to lose the money or the friend” is a maxim I’ve lived by and has guided me through some tough decisions over time.

PaulHoule 2y ago

As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York. I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but at least he was paying rent. Between that and another tenant losing her shit we lost at least a years rent plus still have a unit vacant even though we have been using the time to catch up on maintainance. I’ve seen other small landlords in the same situation where they were psychologically devastated by the process of dealing with a bad tenant and evicting them. Right now my wife is helping a friend who inherited two homes from their parents who recently passed away which might have been a takeaway and not a gift because she has yet to clean up the mess left behind and struggles to with precarity (doesn’t have a working car, can’t find the title abstract and will have to cough up a few $1000 to be able to sell, …) renting the place out for a few years made some money but probably resulted in lost value in selling it. The juiciest gossip in our small town us that the owner of an equipment rental company (probably able to afford to do it right) attempted an illegal ‘self-help” eviction by crashing into the building with a backhoe which is not only an own goal in terms of property damage but could probably cost $10,000 or more in court. (A friend of our who has struggled with homelessness got a settlement of that much for being illegally evicted by the homeless shelter when it closed but then struggled to cash the check because he had no bank account an no id to create a bank account…)

legitster 2y ago
My dad is landlord of an 8-plex in a small town. My brother is a social worker in a big city. When they get together and talk it's amazing how much their jobs overlap. So much of the job as a small time landlord these days is dealing with drug abuse, interpersonal problems, police, social services, housing authorities, etc.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Around the time we bought our place we had some spare cash and thought about getting another house. I'd seen the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book which had the advice that you should buy a rental property only it was wildly cashflow positive after the mortgage. That's not realistic in most cases but we saw one rental property which looked crazy profitable that was full of Section 8 tenants. We passed on it because it was really buying yourself a job as a social worker and the fact that we were bleeding hearts would make it harder, not easier. I think my wife and I have gained the maturity that we might be able to handle that now but we've also gotten better at setting boundaries such that we wouldn't.

adverbly 2y ago

I actually think it's kind of a good sign that the policy was able to be passed without significant immediate disruptions. I have some pretty radical views about the benefits of land value taxes, but I don't think it's a good idea to immediately change all taxes by a large amount because disruptions are very painful. If you can enact positive incentives slowly with gradual changes then you can avoid disruptions while moving towards a better future.

orange_joe 2y ago

the extremely unpopular but logical next step in managing change would be to induce development by increasing property taxes. Basically compel people to move and sell their land to developers who build up the land.

vondur 2y ago
So, what if it were you in that position? What if your income was reduced and now the Government increases the property tax so you can no longer afford to pay for it? And let's add in the Government has a large tax on capital gains, which will kick in if you sell that property, and now you can't afford a new property somewhere else?
- orange_joe 2y ago
  1. I’m being descriptive not prescriptive. property taxes being used to drive urbanization and development is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth. 2. Your issue with what I said seems very dependent on something you chose to “add in” — Why am I being asked to defend something I never said?
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    > is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth Do you thus imply that ANY part of LA at all is a sane model for anything at all?
csomar 2y ago
Do you mean vacant land property taxes or property taxes for all real-estate?

stefan_ 2y ago

People don't put 10k of their money towards the bakery opening up next block either. They put it in the bank, which will loan it out. No one needs a million negligent single-rental landlords to create housing. But it does mean you are not entitled to having the same style McMansion built on the close empty lot in eternity, it might just be something with some more space efficiency. It means you can't continue paying a tax rate set 30 years ago for land that has appreciated many magnitudes in value.

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Fauntleroy 2y ago

It's amusing to me that anyone would think a random smattering of ADUs would do anything at all to push the needle when it comes to housing. This is like fixing linter warnings (but not even doing that!) instead of building an entirely new section of an app. We need the latter.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Fixing housing isn't one thing, it's many dozens. ADU's are just one of many. If your list isn't at least 50 items long it's going to be ineffectual. Here's one example of a reasonable list, it's 55 items long: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force-report https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force... And there are still many other things I would add.

seryoiupfurds 2y ago

As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect. True YIMBY policy would be zoning for six-story apartments by-right citywide, with density going up to 20 stories near rapid transit. But even policies that sound great on paper are often sabotaged by cities with unworkable affordability requirements that prevent anything from being built.

GenerWork 2y ago
>As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect. This is such a weird thing to say. Why would lawmakers ever want to support a new YIMBY policy when the people that support them openly admit that it was never meant to achieve what they claimed was going to achieve?
- mac-mc 2y ago
  If you listen to the histrionics that NIMBYs say, it's an example legislation that would lead to typical NIMBY histrionics, but when implemented leads to none of those claimed issues, because it doesn't get used that much. "See, that wasn't that hard". It's baby's first upzoning.
buildsjets 2y ago
In 2007, my house was re-zoned from R-9600 (Single family residential, 9600 SF lots minimum) to a high-density transit oriented zoning (the acronym changes every other year, but was originally PCBTPV, Planned Community Business Transit Pedestrian Village), in expectation that a light rail station will be opening within 1/4 to 1/2 mile by 2035. The new zoning requirement is six story minimum, minimum of 50 dwelling units/acre density, tax credits for elder housing and child care facilities, etc. This is in a suburb just north of Seattle. I am currently 4 miles from the nearest light rail station, which is a 5 minute walk + a 10 minute bus ride that comes along very frequently, then a 40 minute ride to downtown Seattle, so by US suburban standards the foot/transit access is already pretty darn good. There is a small neighborhood market and a few restaurants a 5 minute walk away, and a large supermarket is really only 15 minutes walk. (but yeah, we usually drive there.) So far, zero occupied single-family houses have been knocked down to build high density developments. There were a few dilapidated/abandoned old houses on large parcels along the freeway that were bulldozed for apartments, which was an improvement. But even if you put policies and incentives in place to encourage re-development, it can take decades for market forces to reach a tipping point where developers are actually willing to make cash offers at or above the market value on existing properties to make these changes happen.

danphilibin 2y ago

> we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things. I've been watching something similar happen in LA with Measure HLA, a "safe streets" bill that was supposed to require the city to include safety improvements for pedestrians and cyclists during regular road maintenance. The bill passed with broad support but none of the people in charge of the agencies seem to want to do any of that stuff, so they either drag their feet or simply don't comply, leading to lawsuits and delays. (Just today, Metro voted unanimously to not include a now-legally mandated bike lane along a major new busway, claiming it's not their problem. Which might be true — and that's a separate issue — but playing hot potato with safety & mobility improvements feels like a leadership problem, not a legal problem.) I like designing good incentives but in this case just passing laws is not working. You also need the actors to want the change. (I personally would be focusing on installing new leadership.)

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
What usually happens with these mandates is you get road markings that pretend to be a bike lane just to satisfy the contract requirements and siphon off federal ISTEA funding for the budgetary savings. The reality is that they are usually fancy death traps with no engineering rigor put into making them safe or functional for bicyclists.
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  Or worse, "sharrows" in the middle of a busy car lane. Ride here if you don't value your life.

MrDarcy 2y ago

I also live in Portland. Look into our local taxes for the answer. We have the highest local tax rate in the nation for families earning more than 200K a year, higher than Manhattan. It simply doesn't pencil to build an ADU and rent it out long term, so you’re incentivized to a short term rental like Airbnb, which does little to nothing to help the housing situation. It’s the same for new apartment buildings. Next time you drive over the Fremont Bridge look at the skyline. 5 years ago there were 13 visible cranes mostly constructing high density apartment buildings. Today there are none. It’s the same reason, Portland has made it simply unprofitable to develop new high density housing.

Braxton1980 2y ago
What specific tax rates over 200k are you referring to? The SHS is 1% and the state also jumps just about 1% how is that not worth making over 200k?

dmitrygr 2y ago

> There's a general fear of being a landlord Yes. And this is fixable, if there is political will. There is a long list of locales where I'd never want to be a landlord due to how little recourse you have in cases of tenant misbehavior/nonpayment. CA is near the top. Portland is too. Until this is fixed, however, those locales will tend to lose independent landlords, as they cannot afford the rent losses as they are not diversified enough. Big faceless companies like Avalon will grow cause they can.

poulsbohemian 2y ago

My small city in Washington is the template for the state's ADU law and multi-family density law. When the ADU law passed, we saw a lot of people convert garages into ADUs and anymore any custom builds almost always add an ADU. But to your point - it isn't clear how many have become rentals. What I observe is that many people saw it as good resale value, as multi-generational living, or simply a place to put guests when they came to visit. It was about the same time we put a moratorium on VRBOs, which had been another reason people saw these as beneficial without becoming a full-time landlord. Personally I have one and it has been beneficial income while also giving my tenants a good transition point (college students, people escaping bad marriages, people who need a place to land while they look for a place to buy, etc)

harambae 2y ago
> as multi-generational living Arguably this still improves the housing situation overall (slightly), if the grandmother was previously living somewhere else.

evilsetg 2y ago

Maybe landlord coops could be a solution. Band together to co-own with multiple small landlords and share the risk.

bradlys 2y ago

Third: I have my own property because I don't want to share it with someone else. If I wanted to share, I'd rent a room or get a townhouse or some other form of housing where sharing space is common. Fourth: Building an ADU is actually very expensive and the payback time is quite long. You have to dig for sewage and water, pour a foundation, and so forth. If doing it at a high level, it's going to be as intensive as building a house... It's just smaller. Most people are not handy at all and therefore will need to hire out every bit of it... Which is very expensive.

yaba_money 2y ago

I live in an area in Los Angeles that passed a similar law a few years ago (actually I live in an ADU) I can say the exact opposite has been true here. SO many houses have added ADUs - some rented out - but the vast majority are turning their properties into multi-generational living. Can't say that rent has come down per-say, but I have managed to rent one at below market. Having individual landlords with the pressure of paying their HELOC means they are less likely to sit on an empty unit for 5 months waiting for the most high dollar tenant. I 100% feel like this policy has been a big net positive. what I would really like to see now is allowing owners to sub-divide and sell the ADU. This could bring back the "starter-home" that no longer exists and has kept me out of the market

smadge 2y ago

This is because ADU laws don’t go far enough. If you can sell your property to a developer for 3x the times the price you paid for it because all of a sudden it’s legal and financially viable to build a sixplex, many people will take that offer.

brailsafe 2y ago

They did something similar in Vancouver, BC. To me it just seemed like everyone's been leaving the city and saying "We literally can not afford to own a place here" and politicians heard "You want us to manufacture more landlords and pull up the ladder even further!? Ok, we'll try". Yes in my backyard shouldn't mean literally yes, you can live in my actual physical backyard, more than there shouldn't be undue restrictions on building more densely nearby

uses 2y ago

I don't understand why you brought up ADUs... nobody thinks ADUs are the solution to the decade+ long housing crisis. Blue states need massive state-wide zoning reform that overrides local control.

HEmanZ 2y ago

Just a bit north of you, in Seattle, it feels like every house in my neighborhood with enough land added an adu, a dadu, and condoized. My realtor says almost everyone looking for single family homes wants an existing dadu or somewhere they can build a dadu. I don’t know that anyone has claimed allowing ADUs is all you need to do to solve our housing crisis. But in a lot of places it’s the only thing the NIMBYs will let you get away with. So if you can’t middle housing, at least allowing ADUs gets you something more. If the demand to live in your city dramatically outstrips the any possible number of ADUs that can be built, then it won’t help on its own, the cup still runs over.

bobthepanda 2y ago

I think people would like money but being a landlord in addition to probably being a multi-income household is a lot. A lot can go wrong being a landlord even in a place with permissive laws. One thing that I think would be interesting would be allowing the sale and transfer of unused development rights (AKA "air rights.") That lets somebody take advantage of the development capacity without the landowner having to make a gamble on what could be a very risky development. A lot of jurisdictions have something like this allowed already but generally limit it to certain districts, or only landmarked properties get to sell development rights like this, or something else.

BrtByte 2y ago

Removing barriers is necessary, but not always sufficient

anovikov 2y ago

TL;RD: to make housing affordable you need to make everyone poor - not just the renters, but owners too.

imtheopposite 2y ago

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lupusreal 2y ago

What does it even mean to "light a fire under the butt" of a middle class home owner who is scared to rent because they'd be unable to evict a destructive junkie? What kind of fire do you have in mind, that would scare them even worse than that possible outcome? Whatever it is, it will probably make you or any politician who advances it very unpopular.

stronglikedan 2y ago

ADU = Accessory Dwelling Units (for those of us not "in the know" or whatever)

vintermann 2y ago

> They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. This is a part of the problem which I think isn't discussed often enough. Because of the varying marginal utility of money, if the divide between rich and poor becomes big enough, owners will not want to rent out in their own homes, because nothing the tenant can pay will make any significant difference to their personal budget, and certainly not enough to make up for the stress/risk. Maybe they can find someone non-threatening enough where the benefit of having someone living in the cellar apartment, to discourage break-ins when they're away etc. makes up for the risk. That is, I guess, how I managed to get a rental in one of the most expensive parts of Oslo ~20 years ago. But I really doubt I'd gotten that if I wasn't extremely non-threatening, let alone if I had been a minority of some sort.

mapt 2y ago
The really expensive neighborhoods are too desirable for anyone to live there. They exist as capital anchors for overseas sovereign wealth funds and various long-run finance concerns to sink into a deeper market than their own, to act as collateral for their business adventures and as a currency reserve hedged against local inflation. No rent you could pay is worth the risk. Low property taxes are highly conducive to this use-case, and notably, tenant residents can vote on raising property taxes and overseas sovereign wealth funds can't.

Enginerrrd 2y ago

The issue I'm seeing is that right now, you won't even be cashflow positive unless you can put 40-50% down on the construction costs. That's a HUGE ask for someone to build an ADU! If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you just become a developer? The answer is obvious: capital. But that applies at every scale, and thus to a whole lot of those homeowners you're showing disdain for too. People complain the rents in my area are too high. But the costs of the underlying real estate, maintenance, construction, and repairs are so high right now that it barely pencils out if at all. Most houses in the area were constructed in the 70's or the 90's and have not been well-maintained. So there's added costs of trying to bring old structures back up to snuff. New construction, even medium/high density stuff doesn't make sense unless you have 40-50% down or access to some ridiculously low interest loan. Something has to give. Either prices need to come down on land, labor and construction materials, or rents need to go even higher.

mapt 2y ago

There are often a lot of redundant parts of the legal & zoning code intended to limit development. You can legalize ADUs de jure, but you probably still have setbacks that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have parking or curb or utility requirements that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have HOAs that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have "impact fees" and utility billing issues and all sorts of recently-added building codes that de facto prohibit ADUs. On top of that, the ADUs are usually extremely limited in character - "less than 1200sqft, less than 30% of the floor area of the house, no more than two residents", etc, etc. On top of that, you're paying for a financing category that the banks don't know how to deal with, without the subsidies that homeowners enjoy on mortgage payments, you're suddenly getting a property tax bill that's higher, and you're facing the possibility of squatting tenants under a regime that's designed to be inherently hostile to landlords. You still have all sorts of laws against doing the thing you just supposedly legalized.

jprokay13 2y ago
We recently completed an ADU project in California and figuring out the financing was particularly difficult. Add on additional requirements like mandatory solar, fees on top of fees ($5000 school impact fee was just one of many), a local building department with one person reviewing everything… It’s not an easy undertaking at all!

dughnut 2y ago

We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our democracy”. I just really don’t know what more you want here. Confiscate everyone’s bank anccount and liquidate it to build housing projects? The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.

daveguy 2y ago
Our monetary policy changes by the month. And currently it is sustaining a 3% inflation just like it was when the ship was turned around during Biden's admin. The target is a 2% inflation rate, which no one considers "highly inflationary".

rcpt 2y ago

> radical new zoning laws > ADUs on their property If this is "radical" then it just shows how far we've fallen.

grandempire 2y ago

Another factor for me is there is risk to hiring contractors. If i could just pay money and have confidence things on my house would be fixed I would do it in a heartbeat. But you have to become a lawyer and project manager to make sure they do it. > There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights Yes, these laws also increase the cost of housing.

packetlost 2y ago
Laws that protect individuals vs corporations usually hurt small businesses vs individuals a lot. Maybe not more than the harm caused by big corps, but it certainly has unfortunate side-effects.
- grandempire 2y ago
  Yes. I agree. It could still be a net benefit. But it does have cost.

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago

>They don't need the money Yeah. At a certain affluence, I'd rather have extra space and privacy than extra money. I can't think of a reasonable amount of money that would incentivize me to rent out an ADU in my backyard. $10k a month? idk my kids play in that yard...

morsecodist 2y ago

I am a big fan of YIMBY-ism but I think your points here are fair. This is a controversial take among YIMBYs but I think the benefits of ADUs are oversold. Of course I am all for allowing them if that is all we can do but the idea of the ADU only exists because it is supposed to allow building more housing while preserving the overall "character" of single family neighborhoods. Subdividing a lot and building a new home is better in every way for both the homeowner and the resident of the eventual structure. ADUs seem like they could provide a lot of housing because it is a huge increase in what is theoretically allowed but it is not a huge increase in what people will realistically build in the United States in 2025 in single family neighborhoods. This is true for the reasons you state and also many other reasons because it is the opposite of economies of scale that typically brings costs down. We have an answer to building more housing at a lower cost and it's apartment buildings. We need more apartment buildings. We don't need them everywhere, there will still be plenty of places with predominantly single family homes, but we need them in more places than they are today. They don't have to be big high rises but there needs to be a enough number of units in a single building to make projects pencil.

directevolve 2y ago

ADUs are particularly ineffective, because each one requires the owner to work as a part-time landlord with the tenant being almost their housemate. All the headache without much increase in income. I happen to have chatted with the head of a large commercial contractor in Portland a few months ago. He told me Portland's unattractive to developers because, compared to other cities, rents are low and the cost to build is high, so the flow of real estate investment dollars into Portland is slow. Since the problem we're trying to solve is making rent cheaper, conditional on the current state of the economy, the solution here is making it cheaper to build dense residential in Portland in the urban core and improve transit options.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

It takes a pretty specific type of property to accommodate an ADU and it has to be in a specific location to make the ADU worthwhile. If you're in the suburbs you also have HOA rules to contend with. The only place we could put an ADU in our suburban house is to build out our 4-car garage -- it's large enough (and we onyl need 1 car), but we'd have to build a bathroom and a kitchenette. But even if we could afford the initial substantial outlay, I don't think we'd have a lot of takers as people who are likely to rent an ADU typically need to live closer to the city.

LauraFoote 2y ago

(author here; ED of YIMBY Action) I'm super curious about why you think YIMBY-ism is passive. I feel like the main criticism we've often gotten is that we're too in-your-face with our advocacy. Say more.

cake_robot 2y ago

Maybe it's not the bulk of the cost but site development fees for a new ADU in Portland are like $40k, to say nothing of the cost of actually getting approval checked off.