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This land isn't "abandoned". Nobody is sitting on vacant RE in Texas and getting fucked by sky high TX property taxes for the fun of it. It's fundamentally a

This land isn't "abandoned". Nobody is sitting on vacant RE in Texas and getting fucked by sky high TX property taxes for the fun of it. It's fundamentally a long bet that basically the same people (demographically if not often individually) who are complaining about this will turn around and pass legislation that makes development even more onerous and therefore makes their existing cheap 30-60yo building with a simple uninterrupted parking lot and un-engineered drainage ditches (the typical form vacant commercial RE seems to take) even more valuable.

pessimizer 1y ago
This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments. The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
- immibis 1y ago
  The idea is to drive up demand for land in general, and then make your piece of land the valuable one. Please note that we don't live in a perfectly efficient market.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  You can't build an infinite height tower with no parking if the market doesn't support it. You need to be building that in a neighborhood of half infinite height towers to make it make sense. But there are no neighborhoods like that because we have regulated incremental development out of existence. There is no gradual redevelopment anymore because nobody can afford to get kicked in the dick by huge amounts of of compliance cost bullshit (all of which the useful idiots and those with financial motive are more than capable of justifying in abstract, no one droplet feels responsible for the flood and all that) to just take an incremental step. The only way to make the math make sense is to go whole hog, seek a variance and put up something huge and make back the costs. This is why it "looks" like local residents care. They'd be fine with triple deckers organically filling in as well as subdivisions, back lot houses, etc, etc. They just don't want a N-over-1 in their suburban neighborhood. This is exacerbated by the fact that anyone who could be living in such a place at such a time when that conversation is happen is rich enough to have no other real problems.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Demand for floorspace is very large, but it is not infinite. Allowing more floorspace on a given lot of land in an in a place people want to live, increases land value solely because the status quo mandates floorspace scarcity in those places. In a world where everyone had all the interior floorspace they could ever desire, rezoning a random vacant lot for an infinite height building would have no effect whatsoever because there would be no demand the additional floorspace. Allowing vast quantities of floorspace on every lot within city limits would surely enrich some homeowner-occupiers who own land, but only those whose land was in locations ppl actually wanted to live. Those in other locations, whose only current draw is “you aren’t allow to live/build in the place You want to be, so come here instead” would lose value.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    I'd assume that floorspace close to the ground would be worth more than floorspace that takes a half hour commute by elevator to reach.
    - appreciatorBus 1y ago
      lol true :) Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.
readthenotes1 1y ago
10,000 acres of abandoned buildings? That's 1/4th of a Liechtenstein. Surely no one can just simply be betting their vacant building will become valuable with so much competition?
- heartbreak 1y ago
  Welcome to Houston, TX, a monument to urban sprawl.
  - thechao 1y ago
    > "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
- potato3732842 1y ago
  They're not competing with each other. They're competing with the warehouses that blanket the industrial parts of LA and areas south of Newark. If they have low grade tenants off and on for 10yr they'll be in the black. The big money cash out is when some company who's expansion is being strangled somewhere else decides that they're gonna open a new site. And if you look at the macro trends this is slowly what's happening. It's like the big boy version of how self storage can be a speculative RE investment rather than a income stream producing investment.
- doodlebugging 1y ago
  >10,000 acres of abandoned buildings? Since this is such a large contributor to the heat problem in the Houston area they should tear down the abandoned buildings and build Olympic-sized swimming pools on each of these locations. By my calculations, seeing that a pool occupies 0.31 acres, they could replace these abandoned buildings with up to 32258 swimming pools which would immediately improve the quality of life in the Houston area. The water is available if you just use one of those MIT condensation gizmos that passively pulls moisture from the air. That would mitigate some of the horrendous humidity issues that Houstononianites feel during their two seasons (warm and humid followed by hot and humid). Houston could be a veritable seaside paradise with this one simple change.
deleted 1y ago
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pessimizer 1y ago

This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments. The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."

immibis 1y ago
The idea is to drive up demand for land in general, and then make your piece of land the valuable one. Please note that we don't live in a perfectly efficient market.
potato3732842 1y ago
You can't build an infinite height tower with no parking if the market doesn't support it. You need to be building that in a neighborhood of half infinite height towers to make it make sense. But there are no neighborhoods like that because we have regulated incremental development out of existence. There is no gradual redevelopment anymore because nobody can afford to get kicked in the dick by huge amounts of of compliance cost bullshit (all of which the useful idiots and those with financial motive are more than capable of justifying in abstract, no one droplet feels responsible for the flood and all that) to just take an incremental step. The only way to make the math make sense is to go whole hog, seek a variance and put up something huge and make back the costs. This is why it "looks" like local residents care. They'd be fine with triple deckers organically filling in as well as subdivisions, back lot houses, etc, etc. They just don't want a N-over-1 in their suburban neighborhood. This is exacerbated by the fact that anyone who could be living in such a place at such a time when that conversation is happen is rich enough to have no other real problems.
appreciatorBus 1y ago
Demand for floorspace is very large, but it is not infinite. Allowing more floorspace on a given lot of land in an in a place people want to live, increases land value solely because the status quo mandates floorspace scarcity in those places. In a world where everyone had all the interior floorspace they could ever desire, rezoning a random vacant lot for an infinite height building would have no effect whatsoever because there would be no demand the additional floorspace. Allowing vast quantities of floorspace on every lot within city limits would surely enrich some homeowner-occupiers who own land, but only those whose land was in locations ppl actually wanted to live. Those in other locations, whose only current draw is “you aren’t allow to live/build in the place You want to be, so come here instead” would lose value.
- thfuran 1y ago
  I'd assume that floorspace close to the ground would be worth more than floorspace that takes a half hour commute by elevator to reach.
  - appreciatorBus 1y ago
    lol true :) Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.

readthenotes1 1y ago

10,000 acres of abandoned buildings? That's 1/4th of a Liechtenstein. Surely no one can just simply be betting their vacant building will become valuable with so much competition?

heartbreak 1y ago
Welcome to Houston, TX, a monument to urban sprawl.
- thechao 1y ago
  > "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
potato3732842 1y ago
They're not competing with each other. They're competing with the warehouses that blanket the industrial parts of LA and areas south of Newark. If they have low grade tenants off and on for 10yr they'll be in the black. The big money cash out is when some company who's expansion is being strangled somewhere else decides that they're gonna open a new site. And if you look at the macro trends this is slowly what's happening. It's like the big boy version of how self storage can be a speculative RE investment rather than a income stream producing investment.
doodlebugging 1y ago
>10,000 acres of abandoned buildings? Since this is such a large contributor to the heat problem in the Houston area they should tear down the abandoned buildings and build Olympic-sized swimming pools on each of these locations. By my calculations, seeing that a pool occupies 0.31 acres, they could replace these abandoned buildings with up to 32258 swimming pools which would immediately improve the quality of life in the Houston area. The water is available if you just use one of those MIT condensation gizmos that passively pulls moisture from the air. That would mitigate some of the horrendous humidity issues that Houstononianites feel during their two seasons (warm and humid followed by hot and humid). Houston could be a veritable seaside paradise with this one simple change.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]