What they do care about are traffic, parking, noise, school overcrowding, and other quality of life issues. Some people simply don't like living in densely populated areas. If you want to win over the NIMBYs then you have to address their concerns rather than just demonizing them as greedy property owners.
She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc.
I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it.
At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.
If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational.
Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.
Thing is I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s-2000s and SF always felt like a global mega-city in my mind up there with New York and London. That's how I always pictured it mentally even though I knew it wasn't as big. I was just so influenced by the culture it had exported since the 60s counterculture all the way up through 80s-90s hacker/tech culture, etc.
Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away. I don't live there, which in a way might make my view more objective. The city no longer seems to be the beacon of culture or intellect that it once was. Maybe for the NIMBYs that was the goal, but in keeping the city the way it was physically they might have succeeded in destroying the way it was socially.
I live in SoCal now and like it down here too. I strongly support action on the housing crisis to prevent SF's real estate hyperinflation cancer from spreading down here. It already has to some extent, but San Angeles (what I call LA/OC/Riverside/SanDiego) has what may be a non-metastatic non-terminal case that could still be treated with a dose of chemo.
"Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away."
I completely sympathize, but here's the thing: now that I've lived in a number of different cities, it's become obvious to me just how comically limited San Francisco actually is. If you go to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris...you see these massive, sprawling cities with incredible transit systems and infrastructure. SF is a dinky little geographical backwater. It's landlocked (i.e. "supply limited"), with terrible transit and worse traffic. It's not a place that wants to be a global mega city, nor could it be one if it wanted to be.
I firmly believe that the real solution to the acute housing crisis in SF is other half of the demand equation: eventually, the tech industry is going to come to its senses and begin relocating. It has to happen.
Apple's going to be here for a while, they can afford the salaries people are demanding to be here.
The trend is already clear and accelerating for smaller firms. No startups can afford to hire here on a 500k seed. You'd be paying 200k/head all-in, you can't even run a 4-person company 18 months on that.
The bigcos will be slow and conservative like they are with everything. But change is already very obviously underway.
Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal.
I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation.
I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.
GAP global HQ, Levi Strauss global HQ, PG and E HQ, Wells Fargo global HQ, Charles Schwab global HQ, Pottery Barn/Williams Sonoma...
You can certainly make that argument but it's on a whole different level now. Apple is earning 60-80 billion in profit per quarter. Many of the companies you list don't even have market caps that high.
This latest housing crisis began in 2012.
The key is recognizing that it is an inherently selfish constituency, and you have to give voice to the people who don't yet live there or who are renters and less likely to vote or attend city council meetings. The homeownership rate in CA is already bordering just half (53.8%) and decreasing, so this is a growing constituency which just needs to be activated. That's why there's a need to remove local control on density limits, as the constituency probably exists at the state or regional level, but not so much at the individual neighborhood level.
I have. Among other things, they like to ramble on about the importance of neighborhood character. They're also reliably very, very vague on what they actually think that means. In my experience, it's functionally impossible to address concerns that people refuse to communicate, no matter how much sympathy, empathy, compassion, and kindness you engage them with.
I often find myself thinking "neighborhood character" is code for "freeze my world in amber" and "keep people with different skin color away".
And guess what? Most tech workers in the Bay Area want to own a home in a nice neighborhood if they don't own one already.
Come on, this (specifically) is untrue. Your average NIMBY homeowner isn't trying to maliciously price poor folks out. The closest you can get to that would be wanting to prevent their property value from decreasing because of eyesores.
While that can be problematic in its own right, it's not malice directed specifically towards folks who make less than $N per year. You'd find the same aversion if somebody making 2x their salary left their home in a shambles.
Folks buy homes partially as an investment, and understandably they have aversions to things that could damage their investment.
For the laws of supply and demand to be accurate they require that only quantity and price changes. The housing market in popular areas, other than being inelastic, tends to suffer from demand shifts. There is nothing in economics saying that building more housing can't result in neighborhoods being less affordable.
What this fails to consider is that, if a bunch of people are moving to an area, they have to go SOMEWHERE, so it's not a "here vs. there" question, it's "which here will it be?" Proponents like to believe they can somehow put people "elsewhere" without realizing the poor always get screwed when rents rise, and they absolutely will rise everywhere in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion, if more supply doesn't come to market.
At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, bye. Then see what happens when all those pension and infrastructure payments come due. Hilarity will ensue.
That’s the fallacy here, that more housing is going to meet or exceed the demand hyper growth-focused companies will continue to produce for employees.
[0] https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/3-2-shif...
It's people who own houses that are YIMBYs, because removing zoning restrictions causes land value to go up. It's people who live in them who are NIMBYs, because they fear density in their neighborhoods will lower their quality of life, and that they will eventually be forced to sell due to a rise in property taxes as a result of their property values rising.
If they're old, that's a scary proposition. If they're young enough that they have kids in the public schools, they're probably young enough that they won't have a problem selling their home for a boatload of profit and moving to another exclusive neighborhood.
Also, California's weird laws mean that property taxes don't go up much even when the value of houses rise a lot.
So most NIMBY homeowners are genuinely defending against property values dropping.
It's a perfectly rational set of motivations. It's the same reason people move to nicer neighborhoods in the first place. With limited development over period of time you get the benefits of living in a more expensive neighborhood, without having paid the premium for it.
These arguments don't play well in public, especially in a socially progressive city like SF, so the rhetoric gets confusing. NIMBY groups sometimes float arguments such as: building more housing will make neighborhoods less affordable.
Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, and support NIMBY policies too, so it's not just homeowners. In the end, most people don't know what to think, and gravitate to the status-quo (ie, limited development.)