No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.
[0] https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-polic...
Does anyone not think that broken down cars growing literal trees in them, broken glass, and garbage in people's yards are not blight? That's what I find just a mile from here where there are duplexes and apartment buildings.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but the benefits likely outweigh the drawbacks.
FWIW, the most the township would do is setup a radar trailer (zero enforcement) and new stop signs were not allowed for traffic control purposes. I never got them to add one for safety purposes either, even though a speeder clobbered a mailbox one house up from the school bus stop.
Neighborhoods change. What was once farm land and a few houses becomes suburban. What was once suburban becomes medium density. What was once medium density becomes dense city core. That's how cities have always worked. As the value of the land changes existing owners cash out and developers infill or rebuild. As density grows the justification (and budget) for city services like subways and parks grows.
Excessively restrictive zoning cuts off that natural process after the farmland-to-suburb step.
In free market terms if you cared so much about what your neighbor does with their own property you should have bought an interest in that property. Who are you to tell someone else they can't build a bigger building on property they own?
In reality there are few true free markets and externalities exist but in property rights terms zoning is a rather large government imposition to benefit other landowners often without any compensation to the owners who want to build. In an ideal world people who want to keep single family zoning should be paying land value fees to their neighbors who want to build density to compensate for the restriction. You couldn't possibly make such a scheme work in the real world though.
Because it turns out there are pesky uncontrollable externalities that keep popping up. Like, you can't buy some random lot in suburbia and turn it into a nuclear waste dump or a trash incinerator site, no matter what you pay the neighbors, because of regulations like zoning.
1. Massively increased rent, if he is renting 2. Massively increased cost of local goods and services and change in who those services cater to 3. Predatory tactics by real estate developers targeting lower income individuals in the community, if he owns the property 4. Loss of friends/community due to cohort being forced to leave by 1-3
1. Rent increase
2. Consumption price increase
3. Big real estate will use thugs and trickery to force people to sell
4. More people in the community leads to less friends
Increased housing supply almost universally decreased housing prices.
If you don't want renter Grandpa to be forced out, build more
> This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners
Nothing is happening “at the expense of the homeowners.” The homeowners are the ones getting rich.
If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.
Nope[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Roughly its monthly payment => a third of 90-110% of AMI.
(Or if you retire to a country with a lower cost-of-living and no housing bubble, buying a similarly-sized house there for lower than the original purchase-price of your home in the US. Which is exactly how every retiree you see in e.g. Thailand lives like they do: they're not living off a pension; they're living off the "nest egg" they naturally accumulated by holding a house in the West for 20+ years before selling it to move there.)
You've never heard of a HELOC?
The person with a $1.8M property holds a very valuable illiquid asset. They cannot convert the value to cash trivially (they could perhaps take out a home equity credit or remortgage the house). Effectively none of the value of asset is available to them to meet any other needs, and will only be fully realized when the house (their home) is sold.
The person who can pay the mortgage on a $1.8M property has substantial income and/or cash reserves, which are liquid assets and thus distinctly different from the property owned by the previously discussed person. They may not have a net worth of $1.8M but they are much more easily able to shift financial resources aound to meet their needs.
But there are situations where the HELOC will either be hard to get. For example, you may own the house outright but have very very low income. Or the bank may not be willing to view the land in the same light as potential developers.
"House rich, cash poor" is generally convertible into "have mortgage, and cash", but it is still a distinct condition from "Income rich, have mortgage", especially for low income folks.
Im a homeowner and this is just ludicrous. Rich? Please. This kind of added drama makes me discount everything you say.
https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmemb...
Many of those vilified "high-paying tech jobs" are young and have school-age kids. I am one of them (well, except I'm not that young), and almost all my friends in the SV area are the same. I go to work and half of the team have a kid or two.
It's not tech workers pushing out parents: they want to be parents and settle down. It's old grandmas in three bedroom single houses refusing to move out.
> The school board had cited declining enrollment, funding issues and voters’ rejection of a parcel tax as reasons for closing the two schools.
I'm very intrigued that the Cupertino voters rejected a parcel tax, I've seen so many of those in my town and they all pass. They typically go something like "shall the City of Cupertino collect a parcel tax at rate XYZ for the next ZZZ years to replace aging air conditioning and plumbing and other aging building facilities?".
Ratified November 5, 1996
Date effective November 6, 1996; 26 years agoPeople follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)
Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?
There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.
So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?
Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?
negative density tax is the way.
unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.
I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.
Who's paying for that? And why?
Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.
We used up all the good places.
Probably very difficult to get this right.
I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of.
Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.
Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.
Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.
The point is that we have to make a trade-off between free internal migration and NIMBY. If you mix those two ideas together, you get misery. In deciding which is worth prioritizing, perhaps you should consider that free internal migration is a literal bedrock principle of the American state, dating back prior to the Constitution, enshrined legally in the Constitution, on which huge quantities of American legal and economic life have been built for the last 250 years, whereas NIMBY is an ad-hoc political coalition of wealthy homeowners and crotchety neighborhood activists who'd rather no one new get to live in their city.
Assuming they are renters, how does that happen? Increase in housing will decrease rents, so even if their current apartment / house gets replaced with a bigger one they can just rent something in the same neighborhood? Unless the only reason they can still afford to live in said neighborhood is because of rent control.
Having rent control plus very strict zoning laws is the most asinine housing policy. It basically means that after a new neighborhood has been built you just freeze its state eternally - only allowing new people in when one family dies and their kids or some friends move in. The privilege to live in a neighborhood isn't then determined by wealth but by kinship - a harmful form of socialism that calcifies communities.
How would net migration in push out existing residents? This makes no sense.
>This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
This is true. I would say 1% of the population shares your subjective view, while 99% don't. Literally the OVERALL majority wants cheaper houses while 1% are worried about their rich enclaves having crime go up and getting messier.
Yeah as a minority of the population YOU would love to have your imitation-of-the-country-side suburbia stay the same and have good nature and all that but keep in mind it exists because an UNFAIR advantage to a small minority of rich people: YOU.
The overall quality of your living standards must go down if you want to be fair. The luxuries you fight to preserve is a literal crime against humanity. This is the only way. But keep in mind if you own a home it's not like you LOSE any part of your home. It's just your neighborhood becomes more populated, that's the main difference.
What you are painting as the cause is actually the effect.
But I did nothing wrong. The people who actively prevent Boston from building more housing are the reason my presence here is at someone else's expense.
> Its (Los Altos) zoning prohibits multifamily housing, whether apartments, townhomes or condos, along with commercial stores and shops in the entirety of its city limits.
The asymmetry of how cities/neighborhoods interact with each other is what creates the need for interventions like this. Some cities are more than happy to open up commercial and office spaces without allowing additional housing, eating up all the tax revenue, all the while pushing the burden of housing and other infrastructure on others. Meanwhile cities like Los Altos make any commercial development not possible in their neighborhood but will have its residents happily go to other neighborhoods to fulfill their need of a $7 artisanal coffee. Cities like Oakland will try to push high density housing in areas that don’t really add any value, simply because these are rich neighborhoods and you get election votes for doing it, meanwhile, plenty of medium/low income neighborhoods would benefit more from new high density housing with commercial space and the infrastructure upgrades that come from it. There’s all kinds of selfish interests and there needs to be a check on them.
My cousins and I grew up in a band from Monterey to Sacramento. Our parents all still live in the homes they had decades ago. But None of our generation live in northern California any more, except for my sister who bought in Sacramento during the recession (she had a state job which made it a lot easier to get a mortgage!)
I think that's bad. I'd like to be able to afford to live in norcal. I moved away from California for multiple reasons but one of them was affordability.
Also, I hate traffic too! It's a good thing I am not a car! Ideally we could build places like culdesac.com or bloommerwede.nl and allow people to live completely car free.
And no, in my view, "communities" do not have rights.
I find it odd how people can be pro-immigration and anti-migration. Keeping people out of your community is similar to keeping people out of your country.
> It enriches homeowners at the expense of other's misery.
This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?