If that fails they fall back on generic environment arguments, “taking down any building is bad for the environment”.
I think it’s all just status quo bias and resistance to change, resistance to building.
All of the arguments that come after that are driven entirely by motivated reasoning. If you lean left it’s the left nimby canon, if you lean right it’s the right version of that.
I just want more housing supply.
Over long enough time-spans and large enough areas of a city, I agree. But, that doesn't change the impact on individuals who get priced out of their specific apartment (where that apartment was rented below market because it was run-down, and was replaced with a market-rate apartment).
Which isn't to say its right/correct that the individual can potentially block development to the detriment of the city as a whole. We would all be much better off with a different approach to zoning/development.
I'm going to be a little pedantic, but I think we're mostly in agreement. A rundown apartment is not priced at 'below market' - it gets the price the market supports which is just lower than a nice place that more people want. That demand still exists, it just prices up other stuff even higher.
In a restricted supply environment that price will still be very high, it just won't be as high as a place that's actually nice (which will be even higher). It's why awful places in Palo Alto are worth $2M (see: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom... - in case that link goes away it's a basically condemned house for $1.7M next to train tracks. It's dirty and they didn't even clean up before taking pictures.)
I'll concede that if you replace crappy housing with nicer housing (and don't increase the number of units overall) some of the demand that wouldn't consider it before now will so the market price goes up (and the market price of other fancier housing likely reduces a bit).
> "Which isn't to say its right/correct that the individual can potentially block development to the detriment of the city as a whole. We would all be much better off with a different approach to zoning/development."
In total agreement here - I wish there was a way to align incentives such that we built a lot more housing. It'd be cool if there was a way to have people have vested interest in a city's success rather than their own home asset price via scarcity. Maybe a way for people to recognize increased city GDP directly or something? I'm just making stuff up, but clearly the current set up causes a lot of problems.
I'll concede that if you replace crappy housing with nicer housing (and don't increase the number of units overall) some of the demand that wouldn't consider it before now will so the market price goes up (and the market price of other fancier housing likely reduces a bit).
This is the crux of the problem. There is just so much pent up housing demand that the market is totally out-of-kilter and below-average units get replaced with above-average units. And even if that nudges the average down marginally, the residents of the below-average units are now priced out of town.
That is the argument and the desire. Have any cities ever proven that it's true? My experience has universally been that prices go up indefinitely, until the local economy dies and there is no money left to pay the rent.
If 10,000 yuppies move to town and 1000 apartments' worth of old buildings are torn down to build new apartments for them, then 1000 people are displaced. But consider the alternative: if 10,000 yuppies move in and no new housing is built, they'll bid up the price of run down old buildings until nobody else can afford them, and 10,000 people are displaced.
The US is a mess given the incentives towards home ownership as an investment. The Bay Area and California make this incentive worse with Prop 13.
We hear similar arguments in DC, but they tend to come from current residents, who are often Black or other PoC, and not traditional (young, white) liberals.
Related anecdote: After gentrification, DC gets some interesting side-effects... there are several "neighborhood" churches where most of the congregants live 30+ minutes away in the suburbs, due to being priced out of the local rental market. And these church-goers do everything in their power to block bicycle lanes downtown, because they need the street-side parking for the church.