Who's complaining? My neighbors who have fantastic schools and pay trivial taxes?
We know more about gentrification than starting the discussion from scratch. What is your experience with the downsides of gentrification?
Their property tax laws are absolutely insane but good luck ever changing it.
I assume these people exist. And anecdotally, I'm 100% sure that the anti-gentrification protesters in my neighborhood include a lot of the young people you posit are the target of the anti-gentrification protests.
So, honestly asking:
- are we all just disagreeing on the basic economics that supply drives down prices at the neighborhood level?
- are young professional people in older rental apartments arguing that gentrification is _caused_ by the building of "high-end" units, which in turn price even _them_ out?
- something else entirely?
What would an intellectually honest, no-skin-in-the-game argument be?
Granted, I've never actually heard anybody say that, but that's an intellectually honest claim that seems in line with their views and that I think that is reasonably true. If they would say that, and they would commit to increasing supply in the long term in addition to proposing short term relief measures, I think we could have a much more productive debate.
The frustrating part is that what the vast majority of these people actually say, is that supply & demand have zero bearing on housing. And they've been saying this for decades. Failed progressive policies are a big part of why we have a housing shortage.
It's like if there was a small spark of a wildfire, and I were to claim that water won't work, we better just wait and see what happens. So we wait and let the fire keep getting bigger, and keep saying water won't work. At some point it actually becomes true that water alone won't work, once it is so far out of hand that there's possible way to deploy enough water to bring it under control. But the takeaway for the next time there are new sparks somewhere else should not be that water doesn't work!
s/rent control/more housing/ and then yes.
Or perhaps do both, even better use housing vouchers instead. But you'll never rent control your way to a functional, affordable city. It can be a better bandaid than doing nothing at all but it's too untargeted and has too many downsides. And it very much falls into that same trap of thinking that young people aren't real residents who also need housing.
Local council budgets are strangled enough as it is, and social housing is quite costly.
This sort of scale has to be driven at government level and the tories have a vested interest in keeping house prices as high as possible so that their voter base sees a return on their investment.
Also, “luxury” is just a nimby boogeyman and doesn’t mean anything. Older housing is still very expensive, because there is simply not enough housing. Even if new housing does come with a small premium over older, people move out of older housing into the newer housing freeing up space in the slightly less expensive older units for lower income residents, and the market as a whole gets less expensive as you build enough housing to meet demand.
The first wave of gentrification were college students because they are the group that would pay $1,000/mo per bedroom in a 4-bedroom house (which is a common way for developers to flip a property into a rental). They did not give two shits about the neighborhood, and would constantly litter, trespass, and be noisy at all hours of the night... and as the density of students living in the area increased, it got worse (careless landlords renting to them is also part of the problem). Apartments change hands every year, so you're not even consistently dealing with the same nuisance neighbors.
I agree that neighborhoods need to change, but they need to change in a way that isn't unbridled gentrification. We need diverse multi-generational communities of families, young people, and old people because we keep each other in check (same goes for race and class). In my experience gentrification creates waves of homogenization.
You need more housing supply in Bed Stuy with or without Airbnb. It's reasonable to try to limit Airbnb so it doesn't get too out of hand, but it's definitely not the major driver of demand today. And you won't avoid gentrification by pretending that the demand is somehow not legitimate and can be easily controlled so that you never need to build anything new.