Anyone who is already a home owner will find that increasing supply of homes a necessary function of the society decreases the value of the asset in which they have parked most of their wealth. Even when it increases the value you can't get them on board. Look at your own logic.
> my taxes will spike 200%+ to cover your luxury development
You aren't covering the cost of their development they are actually increasing the value of your property. For your taxes to spike 200% they would literally have to triple the value of your property. It's like they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bags full of hundred dollar bills over your fence and you are complaining about income tax.
Presumably if someone did something like build a crack house and halved the value of your property you wouldn't thank them for halving your tax bill!
Basically for any given project locals have interests that are almost always out of alignment with the rest of society. The some people in aggregate elect your state wide officials but at least those folks are apt to think and plan based on a broader perspective than the locals whose attitude is universally "I've got mine"
This is both the worst timeline and the worst most selfish nation.
They aren't throwing dollars over the fence, they're throwing debt over the fence.
Sure, my property is on-paper worth more. If I cash that out, I just have to spend it all (every other house got more expensive by an equal amount, and I have to live somewhere). And the new person who buys it now has to cover all that extra debt directly in their mortgage, they get soaked too!
Property values are not real wealth, it's not real money. It's fake. Coastal folks can treat it like it's real, because they can play markets against each other, they can depend on moving to some "low COL" area as their cash-out-to-real-money exit strategy. Those of us in low COL already (or who can't play markets, because they have to stay here for family/work reasons) don't have similar luck, the chain ends here, there's nowhere left to go.
> Presumably if someone did something like build a crack house and halved the value of your property you wouldn't thank them for halving your tax bill!
I would thank them, actually. Property should depreciate. It's the only way housing will ever get affordable for real humans again. I don't expect to get every dollar I paid for a house, back again. No one should.
> locals have interests that are almost always out of alignment with the rest of society.
Locals are the "rest of society". Locals don't all own property, half of our locals rent. Locals who own, still often have kids who need to buy houses, and they want them to be able to afford to live near them. The selfish behaviour seems to be coming entirely from developers or 'urbanists' who think if they just keep ignoring the ramifications of their actions, they can strongarm society into accepting forever-increasing housing costs. Why you paint "Locals" with that brush, when Locals carry every penny of those increased costs, I have no idea.
When you reduced the projected change in price to a more reasonable increase like 10% your argument about not being able to move to a lower col area becomes true because everything has gone up equally but it is hard to argue that the increase has greatly burdened your life to the point that people ought not be allowed to build on property they own.
For example locally if assessed value went from 200k to 220k my taxes would increase 16 per month. 400-450k would net me a cool $41 per month.
Looking at actually realistic figures makes it much harder to justify constraining housing supply which negatively effects all of society in order to optimize your tax bill.
It's not, at least in the us. In the past nine years, my house went from a real-world value of ~$90k (2012), to now being worth ~$240k (2021), despite wages being mostly flat. This is not uncommon, most homes in this or any nearby city have posted somewhat similar gains (plus or minus 10%). This property specifically, recorded it's highest jump ($40k over a single year) in the year after they built luxury apartments in the lot directly behind it.
And that's not a NYC / SF / Chicago / Seattle / Austin type hip place. It's just generic small-city Midwest nowheresville. A place with no restrictions on housing construction whatsoever, and has entire neighborhoods of new development in the past decade to prove it.
> If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room
You are not getting it. No, I literally can not do that. If my house went from 200k to 600k, then every other house has also gone up a similar amount. If I sell my house to cash out, my family is homeless, I don't have a "new living room". And if I want a "new living room" to live in, I have to give every single dollar of that 600k back, for some new property at similar high prices. It's not real money, it's debt that I happen to be holding in my hands in paper form, and the future occupant of my house is now on the hook for.
Californians simply can not seem to wrap their head around this. They just assume the money is real, because "move to the south or the midwest" is always an option for them, so they can cash out and keep a bunch of it. Some of us already live in these places, and don't have a magic "high quality housing at cheaper-than-my-home-market rate" place to escape to.
> justify constraining housing supply
Literally no one is arguing to constrain housing supply. Blocking a shitty luxury development never constrains housing, it frees it to be used for real housing.
Fighting against Poisoned Milk sales is not "justifying constraining milk supplies". Fighting against cost-raising developments for private equity firms is not in any way "justifying less housing". You can want more housing and not want everyone's rent to spike, these are not in conflict in any way.
Whatever you discovered assigning all growth in your property value to that singular event is clearly erronious. As you mentioned all houses in urban areas have gone up substantially. If we assign 10% of that effect to adjacent luxury development we would conclude they had added 15k to your property value. Of course tax calculations vary by state but lets go with WA for a for instance.
It costs you about $12 a month if you save monthly towards your annual property tax. If we assign 20% to the presence of the luxury development which is almost certainly too much it cost you closer to $25 a month.
The truth is certainly underwhelming.
Yeah, it's absolutely disgusting.
I don’t know, having $100k+ more in equity than a couple years ago it acts like having an asset with real monetary value when I go to a bank looking for credit, having a big effect on both the amount of funds I have access to and the terms on which I can get them.
It’s not liquid like cash, so there is more work to take advantage of it, but its definitely real.
Surely you realize that's not how it works. If the appraisal value goes up, the only receiving any money is the government from their increased tax collection. The owner didn't receive a penny.
Artificially constraining expensive housing isn't a good thing. If the demand is there in the first place, doing so just means that the people who are interested will insteaad buy or rent existing homes that could have otherwise gone to lower-wealth families.
Again, this isn't California. This is the Midwest. We have gentrification problems even in cities that are still losing population. And we've never constrained housing, for our cities that are slowly growing, many have built more new units than residents for years now. Most cities have no meaningful housing shortage here, but every city currently has a housing market manipulation problem.
> If the demand is there in the first place, doing so just means that the people who are interested will insteaad buy or rent existing homes that could have otherwise gone to lower-wealth families.
Or you could just reduce demand. Perhaps Pension Funds shouldn't be allowed to buy housing at all. Make them invest in something that doesn't hurt citizens. That would reduce prices instantly, without requiring the construction of fake-unusable for-equity-firms-to-hold-only housing.
In what world does it make sense for real humans to have to compete with private equity firms or pension funds for housing? Real humans are constrained by their incomes (incomes that famously haven't grown in decades), everything else is not.
A realistic approach in the face of coming climate doom would be max 0.5, for the people that really need cars as primary transport due to disability etc.
Great, you manage to artificially limit parking. So the new housing development moves another 10 miles outside of town, to get away from your artificial limit, and now their mowing down a cornfield out there instead for their build, so they can get the parking residents actually need.
If cities want to be a solution to climate change, they have to let people actually live in them. That means, they have to care about the price points of developments (they can't just keep deflecting and saying "luxury housing lowers prices in 50+ years when it trickles down") and they have to care about supporting residents actual transportation needs. (they can't just hide behind "everyone will bike or whatever").
Everytime they deflect on either of those, another farm or forest gets razed instead.
Los Angeles is suffering from this. Towers and towers of expensive apartments left empty at 4000+/mo meanwhile the homeless population grows and the population on the border of homelessness grows.
Traffic increases as people move out of the city center and need to commute in and then those people are taxed through congestion charges or tolls and provided with no, or tremendously expensive, parking.
The whole effort seems to conspire against exactly what made the city a city. Dense, mixed zoned, mixed class living
They never do though. It’s always the poor neighborhoods close in that subsidize the rich people in the suburbs.
Digging a trench for that new pipe out in boonies over a dirt field can be done in an afternoon by one guy with a backhoe. Putting in the same length of pipe underground in Manhattan will probably take a decade and astronomical amount of money.
There is no additional infrastructure cost placed on cities. You are just plain wrong.
Many places are switching to parking maximums instead of minimums.
Why? That's kind of an important point.
For example, unless this is NYC or similar, 49 townhomes is going to need a minimum of at least 110 parking spots (just to hold the occupants alone, assuming no one ever has guests ever). A realistic parking minimum should be 2.5 spots per townhouse.
A lot of builders outsource their pollution to the local neighborhood, especially on infrastructure (parking, water, sewer, electrical, natgas, etc). It's a common reason to opposed development, and it's a good one.
It's usually done to save cash, and it saves literally just pennies. (Parking on these projects, for example, is always less than 6% of the total cost. Cuts to sewer and electrical are less than 12% of total cost). Builders do it anyway, builders will generally build the literally shittiest thing code lets them get away with -- they'd build buildings that fall apart in the slightest breeze, if it were legal to do so.
This is why zoning rules, building codes, and the large piles of regulations are so important.
> The project would have been the most dense townhome development in 4 counties.
Ok, that means it would likely carry the highest prices per square foot in 4 counties, which means it would immediately make that neighborhood the most expensive neighborhood in 4 counties. Could that be a reason it was opposed? Density isn't free, it's a form of financial pollution that the other residents will mostly have carry the burden of. Not everywhere is California, not everywhere gets free unlimited property tax lock-ins. If you built a luxury townhouse next to a generic house, their taxes will spike 200%+ to cover your luxury development, and all nearby rents would spike in a similar way against nearby renters.
I get that California and San Francisco specifically is it's own unique terrible experience. But here in the Midwest, generally speaking, locals are pretty reasonable. You can get away with building almost anything you want, so long as you don't screw over the locals. (And I mean that quite literally, we have almost 100 new developments here in our small city, including the worlds gaudiest ugliest castle monstrosity -- zoning never stops builders ever, you can build anything you want anywhere you want, as long as you don't hurt too many people)
What is actually happening in most cases, is that some sort of builder wants to screw over all residents, residents rightly complain, and then those residents get labeled "NIMBY". The only time a project gets cancelled is when it makes residents bleed so much, they push back hard. And even then, local residents only win that fight about ~40% of the time.