NIMBYism is not the origin of the problem, but the consequence. Nimbyism pays off because for the owner, increased rents is a stronger incentive than increased value. The more people go into, for example, San Francisco, and less units are build, rents go up, and city revenues go up as well. Thus NYMBIsm has a strong incentive to be used.
The situation would be exactly opposite if San Francisco did not charge, for example, Sales taxes to everyone, and used prop taxes to levvy its revenues. Ideally, they would use land value tax. This would change the basic incentive to be nymby: the more the city spends and builds, the more people in low density housing will have to pay. And then they will be asking themselves for developers to build and give them units, which is what happens in cities that have alligned incentives.
This is an important idea: this means that the solution is NOT to prevent NIMBY, because you cant fight against powerful incentives.
The single most powerful thing the city could do is move sales taxes into land value taxes: every worker's income will increase, including landlords, but will shift the burden from poor to rich, from landlod to renter, and from non-labor to labor.
The more your house increases in value, the more tax you pay.
I love Seattle for its shitty weather and somewhat affordable housing for how much companies are willing to pay.
Did you know that it is illegal to build apartments in over 73% of San Francisco neighborhoods?[0]
That's why I don't support this ideal of tax proposition to cater for homeless as it is being introduced. The proponents are just chasing shadow while leaving the substance. Instead I suggest proposition to dismantle zoning as the first step in the right direction.
I wonder though if there is one for the job part as well. Even if you fix the housing problem to some degree by having much more capacity and cheaper housing. I doubt this would stay stable, if the Bay Area continues to grow - I don't see any serious sign that this is not the case - the problem will emerge eventually again. I wonder how the job market would have to look like to make this stable.
I'm assuming there's political pressure from wealthy land lords who don't want their cash cow slain?
Comapre to Massachusetts. We have a law against snob zoning. So while there is a homeless problem, we're making steady progress because of developers buying people out and building apartments. (Mind you're, they're mostly buying parking lots, gas stations, and mini strip malls and putting housing there. And nobody's eminent domaining anybody.)
If you could just do something there are a number of solutions to housing affordability. Building, zoning, public transport, taxes or mortgage regulation. None of these by themselves solve the actual problem.
Boo-hoo. Poor rich people.
Then sell it and stop being that person. There's no obstacle. The interests of the landlords financial situation requires no extra care, let alone at the expense of tax payers or citizens at large.
Everyone person that buys a house is responsible for that decision, and punishing renters to protect them is straight up poor payers for the rich.
The only case where property values would drop is if you were in an area that exists unnaturally due to how low density the city core is. The trick is though if California ever fixed this problem the immense influx of capital investment, job creation, and migration pressure since the economy would be kicked into overdrive would drive those property values back up and way higher than the currently crippled density environment can allow. It might take longer than some owners are comfortable with (ie, decades) but considering how much growth Cali sees while stabbing itself in its own foot I'd imagine almost any currently developed and commutable single family home in any major metro area of the state would be worth twice what it is now in 30 years (adjusted for inflation) if they allowed unlimited building because the manic development you would see would drive density up in all directions of city cores for miles around each year.
Before I moved into my current place, I was in low income HUD subsidized housing. It was a brand new building with rent control. Rent control worked great, but the owners didn't keep their side of the promise. Maintenance took months, all amenities we paid for were broken, access to the garage to store our vehicles was broken for 4+ months, elevators were broken for months at a time.
There is no way to get people to freely build affordable housing in or around larger cities under this current system.
This is largely true but needs more qualifiers. There are non-profits that have done this successfully in cooperation with federal and local governments for the long term, for example Arlington Housing Corporation
https://www.ahcinc.org/
Like many business models it is often a challenge to pull off successfully and attempts to make it work without the right combination of people with the right skills, motivation, long term vision, persistence... will fail.
Thats how revolutions start. Be sure to do a door-to-door inspection for firearms before tearing down someone's house without their consent.
OR, people in the Bay Area can MOVE. Why can't you move?
Why can't you move?
Yeah but the problem is you can’t. Additional capacity always comes in onesie-twosie, not fast enough to outstrip the seemingly limitless demand to live in the area. Put up a couple thousand unit high rises? Big deal, won’t affect prices one bit, they’ll get snapped up before breaking ground. You really would have to build a million units all at once to do anything, and logistically you can’t.
Because the mechanism by which NIMBYism works is democratic control of the relevant governments, not a few hold outs refusing to sell out to a government-approved development (because if there was a such a development, it would use eminent domain from the outset, so such resistance would fail.)
Eminent domain isn't so much fun when its your stuff is it?
And these one million new apartments...where shall they get their water to drink or send their waste water? Where will these people park? What highway will they use?
Drives me nuts that my left-wing brethren often oppose upzoning, development, increasing density.
Rent control is not a long term fix and ultimately makes the problem worse.
Our democracy is possible BECAUSE of capitalism AND socialism, not despite one or the other.
There's more housing than people in the USA. At this point, the most likely durable remedy is UBI, thereby enabling people to repopulate (or stay in) the interior, mitigating the urbanization trend.
PS: The first US colonies actually took a crazy amount of capital to set up. The west was largely settled by people in covered wagons which for the time period also represented a lot of capital ~50,000+$ in 2018 USD.
For example, basically all of New England that isn't on the coast was settled by people who got so fed up with the puritanical authoritarians in Boston that upending their lives and moving a few days ride west (and risking starvation/financial run in the first few years) was the better option.
The underground railroad gets a lot of coverage, but it's peak never reached 1,000 slaves per year where 23,191,876 slaves where part of the 1850 sensuous. So, people are talking about a migration of ~0.004% per year.
Cheaper land makes being a farmer vastly easier. The same capital allows for more either more farm land or better farm land. Remember, farms are just like any business you can extract more money when the output stays the same but your costs drop.
But the west was first colonized by the Spanish.
One of the first Anglos to reach Alta California was the Bartleson-Bitwell party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Belden
Also, saying significant wealth is required to setup a colony is very different from individuals having that wealth. Consider the wealth required to build a 80 story high rise generally vastly outstrips the wealth of people living in it.
PS: That said, looking at modern immigration even illigal immigrants to the US tend to be better educated than the average peopulaion of their origin countries. Likely becase immigration is a lot of effort, weeding out the less motivated and capable.
Twenty-two dollars.
That adds up quickly.
"Back-breaking" isn't just a figure-of-speech; modern medicine isn't (yet?) advanced enough that a rational actor should ever choose construction work over something else; and there are just enough desperate people around that I doubt anyone is willing to pay the true cost of construction-work to a not-as-desperate would-be construction-worker.
The limited resource here, then, is actually: desperate people who are still smart enough to do construction work.
I can't wait until construction becomes a non-human-powered activity - even if it still requires a human to control the machinery.
That trend is so powerful precisely because lots of trade-working parents don't want their kids to suffer the kinds of medical bills, chronic pains (with potential resulting opioid addictions) and stunted healthspans, that they do.
Granted, construction is rather especially bad among the trades in this manner: things like welding are not quite as physically-demanding.
Their homes would do quite nicely as office-parks or some other commercial property, but those people both are rich enough and value their places irrationally enough, to [pay out their butts, and/or lose out on a big payout, to] stay there instead of taking their share of what developers think they can earn from that land.
This is the problem: "High rents reflect the success of California’s businesses—but also decades of low investment and over-regulation. The California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970, aimed to ensure that environmental concerns got a proper hearing in planning and development. In practice, the act has become a NIMBYs’ charter. Four-fifths of all suits filed under it have sought to stop infill development in cities (ie, on land already zoned for building) even though this usually has a smaller environmental impact than building on green fields. California’s development and impact fees are about three times higher than the national average. Zoning laws and parking requirements are onerous, too."
SF isn't even the worst offender compared to cities like Belmont and Palo Alto. While there are real safety concerns that limit development since 1. we're in earthquake country, and also because of 2. some Superfund sites in parts of the Bay Area; most of the problems just stem from current homeowners of single family homes (NIMBYs), who do not want high-density housing near their house. Until this changes, no reasonable amount of income assistance will solve this problem for the poor or the middle class. There's just too little usable land here to be exclusively used for traditional single-family homes.
This has more detail about the problem in SF: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/How-powerful-is...