These problems have taken decades to mature (or even are an endemic part of how a system is), and it's a bit naive to think that some quick fix will undo them.
Rent control, affirmative action, drug policy, wealth disparity -- all of these have headline-grabbing proposed solutions (often with heated protests) but when it comes down to it (and you observe after a few months), people vote with their $ and behavior according to deeper considerations on the choices they actually want.
While people may say (or appear to) be in support of whatever cause-of-the-moment grabs the headlines, when it actually costs them (or their kids), they will not do what you hoped.
Or, to say it another way, as long as we tolerate politics that are basically just performance art nothing changes.
The parent comment simply makes the point that people vote with their own interests in mind, but say otherwise as long as it doesn’t cost them. We don’t just “tolerate” performance art politics - we actively encourage and vote for it because the alternatives are expensive and unpalatable.
It’s much more comfortable to “blame profits” or “blame campaign financing” or blame Jeff Bezos or blame capitalism than to acknowledge that in a city that maximizes global utility and wellness, you might not have the right to keep poor people from living near you.
Profit friendly "solutions" tend to get given prominence (e.g. a new mental health clinic or two) over profit-unfriendly solutions that actually work (e.g. rent control, building competing housing that decreases the value of existing stock).
It's not really about voter preferences, though. It's about $$$.
If you genuinely believe that homelessness is primarily solved with obviously palliative solutions like mental health clinics then you're probably quite a credulous person. The people touting these ideas certainly know they dont work and if there were more money in actually building housing they'd guide you to believe that instead.
Over the last few decades, we made home ownership a goal for the vast majority of the US populace. Now we expect those homeowners to vote against their own self-interest (to approve additional housing units/zoning).
What evidence is there that it is due to racism, classism and fear rather than rational self-interest?
Racist and classist concerns also influence property value. Blockbusting was a real estate practice that worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
Is there an example of where that happened? A developer building an apartment building can pay more than an owner occupant.
The complaints from wealthy neighborhoods start with quality of life and degrade into questioning "what kind of people" will housing/transportation/amenities attract. I base this on listening to public meetings in SF / Bay Area so lots of local bias.
From a societal POV we should be building higher density and the drawbacks are worth it, but it is also in the rational self-interest of those building neighbors to vote against the new development.
NY has alleviated this somewhat by granting all existing landowners some air-rights that they can choose to sell to nearby highrises. Something like this might be the right way to go so that the nearby owners receive some recompense.
It's the same motivation as Marin County, CA and the Georgetown neighborhood of DC refusing train stops to "keep the riff raff out". The exclusion is the point.
I don’t care who lives next to me, because my interactions with them are limited to kindly waves as we pass on the sidewalk.
If I couldn’t park my car anywhere near my house because the alternative timeline neighborhood had twice as many cars because it had twice as many kitchens and exterior doors, I’d be less satisfied with my neighborhood as compared to now where the parking is generally adequate except on street cleaning days. That’s got nothing whatsoever to do with who the other car owners are, how expensive the other cars are, or how rich they are.
This is also some of where “each new residential lot needs X feet of frontage and Y parking spaces per unit” zoning laws come from. It’s not just “keep the poors out” (although that may be a secondary motivation for some).
1. Less dense development creates suburban sprawl. This means new people live farther away from their jobs than existing residents.
2. Those new people have to drive more miles each day than existing residents. ie traffic congestion is super linear on population growth.
3. The intersections that become bottlenecks get worse every year.
Texas style sprawl spreads out the offices more so their average commute times go up every year at a slower rate (but they still go up). The only proven solution is to allow housing that's dense enough for public transit to work efficiently.
I'm not saying your motivations are based in classism, racism, and fear, but the people motivated enough to engage in the political process "protecting the suburbs" generally are. They're smart enough to educate themselves on these issues, see the consequences, and say, "yes, this is what I want".
Residential zoning creates geographic segregation between rich and poor. In America that also means the housing crisis is making racial segregation worse(https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism). With the way public services are primarily administered at local level, once people are segregated then richer, whiter areas get the best schools, better parks, better maintained infrastructure, faster emergency response times, etc
Ironically, early residential zoning had explicitly bad intentions, but the impact was limited because there was so much land available to build on. 75 years later the consequences have escalated.
It's like saying 'We want to change the zoning to make housing more affordable but don't worry it won't make housing more affordable'.
If you just add apartment house to existing residential street, you achieve neither. Especially when zoning does not allows small shops to appear.
This.
In my city (London) that happens too. The ultra luxury flats are 50% unsold and have an occupancy rate that is lower still and they are STILL building more luxury housing with swimming pools and gyms nobody uses.
The Soviet Union wasnt this bad at allocating resources.
This is a free market that needs to be taken out and shot. It's culminated in the creation of assets, much like NFTs, whose existence is not predicated on them actually being used because all it needs to do is soak up capital, and actually useful economic activity had to be mandated into existence by local government (Ordinances to mandate % affordable housing).
The worst part isnt even that. The worst part is that if developers cheap out and sell you a flammable flat they can charge you $100k++ after you've bought the flat to fix the flammability that was a result of their shoddy construction.
And if you do die, it's not their problem.
This is the culmination of decades of the UK mindlessly nodding along to the 1%'s "market knows best" propaganda.
There's a reason the supposedly "free market" Singaporean government builds 90% of the housing stock in the country like they're fervent Stalinists. Coz that's the economically efficient way to house people.
Well yeah, they’re generally amazing deals for decent quality new built apartments.
Yeah sure, the staircase looks just average and not like a luxury hotel and there’s no gym or infinity pool!
Doesn’t really seem like such a disaster when you get to live in a nice heavily discounted apartment on some of the most desirable square feet of earth in the world.
It's more profitable for them to sell appartements at 700$/sqft for only half of them to sell, costing them 350$/sqft to build, than to sell for 400$/sqft an appartment that cost 250$/sqft to build.
The disaster isn't that there is no access to the pool. The issue is that they're trying to spite the poors and shame them, because they're trying to prevent them from moving in.
If we really wanted, the government could build appartements of better quality and sell them at same price, AND make a profit on it.
As the above commenter said, it's simply a market failure. It has nothing to do with the price of the land or anything, it's that the appartements are seen as an investment asset and will be bought at an exorbitant price eventually, as long as the price of the appartment doesn't fall in that "luxury" building. It's gross resource misallocation.
That’s really not true though. The facilities beyond the “poor doors” aren’t any different from how most normal people live, they’re just right next to luxury accommodation for rich people. The contrast is obviously more apparent, but the developers aren’t doing anything to screw over the poors (what’d be the point?).
> If we really wanted, the government could build appartements of better quality and sell them at same price, AND make a profit on it.
Of course, but the politicians would rather virtue signal about “poor doors” than actually solve problems.
I'm sure that politicians are incompetent and corrupt. That being said, we can agree that there is a market failure here.
Isn’t that just… normal? Until a few years ago I thought that apartment building gyms were something that only exist in american movies.
Parking is hardly a given for any apartment in European cities, London even has tons of luxury apartments without parking.
This applies to most voters, not just liberals ones. But I agree, as someone living in the SF Bay Area, the NIMBYism is hypocritical and very annoying to see.
While I visit large cities, they often seem more dystopian then somewhere I'd actually want to live. Liberals can have them.
This is currently a massive problem in the Intermountain West in places like Boise.
> I combine the address histories with a simulation model to estimate that building 100 new market-rate units leads 45-70 and 17-39 people to move out of below-median and bottom-quintile income tracts
The people represented in your vague "liberal policymakers" are almost universally in support of "market-rate units," contrary to your claims. Did you read any of the articles or studies you linked to?
The Trump Administration suspended part of a 2016 rule designed to reduce segregation and expand opportunity for low-income families with Housing Choice Vouchers. Is he a "liberal policymaker" as well?
In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart.
This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.
Just because the policy makers are dumb, doesn't mean that the voters behind them are too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States#...
Genuinely smart people are usually satisfied with their own line of work, or realize that politicians and their families in the age of (a)social networks are subject to constant barrage of unhinged hate messaging and threats emanating from the Internet. So they think twice before even entering the race for any public office.
We would probably be better off with sortition (basically, drawing lots and choosing random people to serve in legislatures).
HN in general has this disease, but it's pretty prevalent in STEM fields in general- The "I know how to solve a differential equation so that means I am a rational decision maker" disease.
It's important to acknowledge that the more education a person has the more likely they are to reverse-engineer a reason to think something that they want to think, especially when it comes to emotionally charged issues like those that politicians encounter every day.
Having technical skills does not automagically make you a good leader or policymaker. It just means you have good technical skills.
I would go so far as to say there are probably more people with good technical skills that should not be making policy than the opposite.
In context, a STEM background is someone who has and can actually engineer or science. Writing some code doesn't qualify. Every human on the planet should be able to design an experiment and do basic statistics. I think the bar we have for our fellow human should be much higher than it currently is. The moniker, that person is an "Every (Hu)Man" , should be a badge of honor.
It's rough that talent in these large cities generally flows to the megacorps or private companies in general.
I'd personally love to leave my tech job temporarily for city govt if the pay/environment was similar.
Is that on top of all the house building that has been done and is being done still? If they are so incompetent, why are new town homes, condos, and apartment complexes popping up all over the place?
Sure, it still can't keep up with demand...a 25% growth in population over the last decade is no joke. But Seattle is nowhere near as dysfunctional as SF, at the very least.
All the growth is concentrated on like 5% of the land and unaffordable for normal people. Open it all up for development.
Turns out I preferred studying Hamilton instead of Hamiltonians.
I also suspect many believe the solution to this problem is to "stop electing idiots" when in reality the solution is to stop expecting government to solve the problem, and recognize we should remove the power from the government and allow private actors to solve it
There’s a bit of both, but it’s not a conspiracy. Most cities have this problem (even outside US), because the issue is that most baby boomers have their financial health tied in real estate.
This makes those policies ideal, because they look like attacking the problem without really fixing anything.
It's not about whether they're smart people or not, it's about whether they're smarter than the problem they're trying to solve.
I, aware of the risk of Dunning-Kruger effect, nonetheless consider myself to be a pretty smart guy. I'm a well-educated a computer engineer; I score well in interviews, in exams, and also in Trivial Pursuit. But the steel, silicon, and copper that I work with and am respected for is highly predictable. Electrons and hydraulic fluid are intimidating to a layman but with a bit of education and experience can be broken down into understandable subcomponents and reliable mathematics.
Back in school, we engineers with our mathematical, physics-based hard science liked to denigrate the 'soft science' employed in educational, social, and political fields. However, after further growth, I've come to realize that physics is simple and people are really, really complicated.
The less popular narrative that’s just as true, at least in California if you pay attention to the politics, is that PHIMBYs who are mostly renters and insist on 100% affordable or nothing, play just as big a role.
If you look at who blocked SB50 or who pitched the “Mission moratorium , it was PHIMBY renters.
It’s easy to rally people up against greedy rich people. But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.
You can agree or disagree with the PHIMBY position but most people find it complex enough they just pretend that faction doesn’t exist despite the huge role it plays.
Basically don't exist. AHIMBYs do, but even people who demand affordable units don't want public units anywhere close to where they live.
> But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.
In any place without open space, the only way to build new housing is redevelopement; if you target the top of the market (which is what “market rate” housing means), you cannot have any hyperlocal (and wider, on a short-term scale) effect besides more gentrification.
The intermediate term, wider area (but still somewhat local) effect may be more affordable housing as existing housing becomes more down-market through competitive forces, but that also could be offset by further increasing nonhousing costs and reduction in nonhousing services targeting the lower income segment as the gentrifiers reshape local markets.
If the rent wasn't controlled then the nice apartments would be available at $3500 and the pee/laundry baskebetball ones would be available at least at $700/mo for those that need housing.
does it actually work that way? a large part of land value seems to come from network effects: the more densely populated a region, the more valuable each sqft.
upzoning a plot often seems to be an immediate profit, too. SFH worth $1M, gets upzoned, suddenly a developer can pay $2M for the plot and tear down the house + build high-density units that are very valuable.
maybe values fall once you overbuild, but i have yet to see that in my lifetime.
Yes, density drives up the price of land, but much of the value of a home isn't land value; poorer people in the neighborhood drives down the value per square foot of existing dwelling because people with money don't want to live near people without money by and large, both directly and indirectly. (E.g., better off people want to, and will pay a premium to, live near “good schools”, but there is pretty solid evidence that almost none of the difference in the things which people look to to assess that is due to the school itself, it is almost entirely incidental consequences of the demographics of the students attending the school: “good schools” aren't ones that make better students, they are made by better students.)
Until the potential realizable by dense redevelopment drives up the land value so much that the added land value exceeds the lost value of the existing improvements, it's a loss, and even then it's a gain that can only be realized by abandoning the home, which becomes a liability that needs to be dealt with to unlock the value.
Homeowners want the value of their home to increase, but often what they more specifically want is to continue living in the home while leveraging greater equity to enhance their lifestyle. This is not served by land value increases (even if they reach the level of net property value increases after decrease in value of existing improvements) that are only accessible by redevelopment. People who live in homes they own are not like absentee owners and tend to ascribe significant value to existing community character and significant negative value to moving, on top of theit investment interests in the property.
This is also why the most vocal NIMBYs are often senior citizens who plan to live in their home till they die. They don't benefit from the higher land values at all, because they never intend to sell the property, and will be dead before somebody reaps the financial gains. However, they have to deal with all the community externalities, and they're often at a stage in their life where they're least suited for that.
there was a time in this scenario when those schools and public infrastructure didn't exist. presumably, the thing which justified their build-out was an earlier increase in density. one would therefore expect further increases in density to justify more forms of (or larger scale) public infrastructure. what scenarios would lead one to value the existing public infrastructure but not value the future public infrastructure? is it just a problem of time horizons/discounting (i.e. that the negative externalities of upscaling are immediate while the positives accrue over a longer time period)? that would seem to align with the anecdote about seniors, at least. but then i'm curious how the original community ever overcame these tradeoffs in order to achieve enough density and construct the earlier forms of public infrastructure.
A cluster of 4 1000-pop villages will usually share an elementary school, with students bussed 10-20 miles to it. A 4000-pop light suburban town will have its own elementary school, usually one where parents will drive their kids 1-2 miles to it. A 4000-pop dense suburban development will place a 1-2 story elementary school and associated park & fields inside the middle of the neighborhood, where most students can walk to it via footpaths without crossing major roads. A 4000-pop urban neighborhood will build a 4-6 story schoolhouse on a major avenue where all the students are close by.
A cluster of villages or small towns will have 2-lane roads snaking between major village centers. A dense suburban neighborhood has a road hierarchy, 6-lane boulevards with commercial strip malls, fed by 2-lane residential streets. An urban neighborhood builds mass transit.
In each case, you can't really upgrade the existing infrastructure to the point where it's appropriate for the new density. You have to tear it down and build it a different way, at a cost that's usually higher and more disruptive than just building it a different way in the first place.
It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. That's how we got the infrastructure in the first place: land developers generally subdivided undeveloped farm/ranch/wilderness land, and sold it to people living in overcrowded tenements in the city. Or in the case of Europe/Japan/Russia/China, bombed the hell out of each other until all the infrastructure was destroyed and then built new infrastructure from scratch to house the survivors. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek-yet-actually-practical way of looking at this might be to treat cities as disposable, with a lifetime of a few generations, and then once the people outgrow them it's time to abandon the city and build a new one.
the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases.
this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).
Long term they’ll be worth more, but short term prices will go down.
No one sees prices really go down because that could trigger another ‘08 style collapse. Banks are less leveraged, but there’s a lot of people with mortgages too big for their sake.
This is a culture war first and foremost. It's racism, classism, and fear of the unknown.
But yes, a number of liberal policies keep people on the streets. As documented multiple times in "evicted", the building inspector is sometimes responsible for more evictions than the landlord.
However there's more to it than that as we see with the homeless camps. Many of these people have little to no reason to care about anything. Often addicted to hard drugs (including alcohol) with no want to sober, no reason to. There's enough money in theft, prostitution, and odd jobs to keep homeless living sustainable. We cannot convince these people that there's more to life, and therefore we cannot convince them into free education for skilled work.
The education system on this is also broken, especially high school and universities. Therefore the problem were seeing is not simply housing, work, education, it's all symptoms of government rot. Systems that were created a long time ago of which their purpose has been lost. The solution to all this is to wipe the slate clean and start again with people that actually care and aren't sitting on a government paycheck.
Trusting the word of people is not representative of what they actually do. All of these people claimed to want X but make no effort towards it. People lie, especially to themselves.
But also, we have plenty of land if we could do something about all that ridiculous eminent domain that keeps us from building a high speed rail system. Ironically though, even in California's heartland, a lot of that land is in the hands of disinterested speculators as part of their enormous portfolios built during the Great depression and handed down generation to generation.
I doubt we do any of these things though. Until there's some sort of phase transition in our political system, everything is gridlock all the way down with occasional spurts of disruptive innovation with calls for regulation shortly thereafter.
More than likely (at least here in Seattle), the 60 year old building next door has already been bought by a developer and is just waiting its turn to be redeveloped into more fancy new luxury housing.
I'm not sure if there is a better term for it but people are highly susceptible for falling for a "it's your fault because you touched it last" bias. Luxury apartments are "bad" because their rents are high, even though they alleviate demand for regular housing. Evictions are "bad", even though the alternative is for landlords to factor that risk into the price or require very good credit and a stable income.
It's not just with housing either. Everyone loved student loans until they enabled colleges to raise their tuition prices. Now people are demanding the government to throw even more money at the problem with student loan forgiveness, which increases people's willingness to pay and would enable colleges to raise tuition even more.
Eh?
The paper you are citing doesn't mention homelessnessness at all. You might want to believe that a decrease in homelessness will follow from the kind of value-chain effects it describes -- but if so, that's your own speculation. Not something that the paper makes any claims about. Yet you're waving it about as if it does exactly that.
Meanwhile, it's a complex subject (due to secondary effects), and other papers (easily findable) have described either negative rent-lowering effects, or extremely limited rent-lowering effects (or effects that reach the mid-range but not low-range).
And the paper you cited not only does not make any statement against the social housing policies that you vilify -- in the conclusion it tacitly supports them. And it explicitly says that adjustments to market-rate housing "are not a panacea for all housing-market problems."
Incidentally, home owners tend to vote Conservative, whereas renters tend to vote Labour. Labour’s housing policy tends to revolve around cheap rentals (social housing) rather than cheap houses for sale.
Paying 5% of an entire property price is a steep price in an already expensive market. This is even worse when compared to paying nothing when not selling, which just forces people to stay where they are (specially if the market is more expensive from the last time you moved) and further constrains supply and raises house prices.
Council taxes are effectively based on property price, in a weird kind of way.
Making it expensive for home owners to move constrains supply and raises house prices even more.
There's a couple really good books that delve into this complex issue [1], [2]. The TLDR is that early 20th century American cities were quick to level entire neighborhoods to bring in modern infrastructure. It was swift and brutal, wiping out 50 to 100 years of history without much thought. All replaced with boring concrete roads and bland architecture.
So in the 60s and 70s, activists changed city laws to empower local residents with the ability to delay or out-right block housing projects.
What you're seeing now is the result of 40-50 years of cities stuck going through very tedious processes to get anything moved forward.
The problem with empowering any local resident is that you see only the people who want to stop something at the hearings and all it really takes are a hand-full. The rest of the residents are impartial or just too busy to care.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America...
“Without much thought” is whitewashing. There was usually very careful thought about who was targeted for harm, and who for gains (race, ethnicity, and class were central focuses of this thought.)
Obviously, there was a lot of very careful thought that went into every project. Public opinion has always mattered in government and it'd always get faster approval if you tackle infrastructure projects in certain areas over others. It'd also become a much more affordable effort if you did it in areas with cheaper land value and used cheaper building materials.
Still, my mistake for using that expression, as it's distracting you from my main point.
That said, preventing gentrification requires an active effort from policy makers.
When the most luxurious homes drop to that rent price, the standard places will drop even further.
And those landowners that can't afford to maintain it anymore will be forced to sell, increasing supply, and reducing the number of real estate tycoons that squat land without living on it or using it, in turn making ownership cheaper for middle class residents, and reducing the number of people that need to rent. As ownership gets cheaper, property taxes will then crash, which is also good for even cheaper rents.
That's how you kill a city.
And if housing prices go down that might allow the wrong sort of person into their communities. Some people conceive this in racial terms but for others its that they think of poor people as lazy or impulsive and so not good neighbors.
And I've certainly heard coworkers complaining that if poor people could move into their communities they wouldn't be paying their "fair share" of the school's running cost and so spending per pupil would drop.
And, least concretely, I think, developers would profit and they align with our mental images of greedy capitalists more than landlords do. At least for non-renters who do most of the voting about these things.
You can build single-family housing on vast swaths of land for landlord sharks to snap up and rent out. However, that results in a city of short-term inhabitants who aren't invested in taking care of the city and eventually the city is less desirable and the rentals dry up.
Or you can ban single-family housing rentals, build high-density housing for rentals, and reserve the single-family units for long-term residents who will upkeep the desirability of the city.
It has nothing to do with liberal or conservative policymakers and more to do with the sort of short-term thinking that "build more housing - there are no consequences" represents.
Building more housing reduces homelessness like building more highways reduces traffic.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/business/china-birth-rate...
For some reason liberal policymakers (or their constituents) either can't seem to get that in their head, or can't act on it. And instead cling to things like rent control, which "feel good" in the short run but end up doing the opposite of what was intended.
Sometimes I think that every policy (that isn't a "duh, of course" policy) should come with an expiration date. So that the people you wanted to help are specifically identified, and given a finite time to be helped -- and people who come after know that it's a one-time intervention and the system is what it is from now on. Then when the people you thought it would serve / benefit are gone, you are required to assess whether it worked as you thought, and it doesn't just go on autopilot forever. Now, whether the policymakers would respect that, or simply keep on extending it on public opinion, who knows.
It's just too easy for well-intentioned people to put in place rules they think will work, and go away for 10 years and discover it didn't, and then still do nothing to fix it.