Re:A group of techies is using data skills to alter Seattle'...
by kd0amg on Friday April 27, 2018 @04:46PM
(#16944161)
But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints.
If so, then yes, but how many millionaires are there trying to grab up huge tracts of urban land for their own personal residences?
And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.
They have that incentive collectively, but when rents are high, an individual developer's incentive is to build more apartments to rent out. Sure, building them might reduce the per-unit rent, but that developer collects more rent in total.
"If the distribution of wealth is incredibly skewed, how exactly could the distribution of home ownership not be similarly skewed?"
YIMBY seems reasonable as response to homeowners leveraging zoning to distort building priorities and so protect their home values. But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints. And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.
State housing projects and zoning that actually incentivizes affordable density indeed could help that. But here, not only have housing project not been build but a lot of these projects have been torn down (leveraged by poor-people horror-stories of course).
Anyway, I would answer my question above as "the way we've have decent housing for working class and poor people has generally involved the rich and powerful being far-thinking and seeing improving everyone's conditions improves their position overall." But a variety of factors have thrown out all the far-thinkingness of the powerful today, as is evident in any number of fronts.