Nope. It's to make money for the developers.
> Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.
Gentrification is a result of shortage. When wealthier people are priced out of rich neighborhoods, the only place for them to go is poor neighborhoods. It just so happens that poor neighborhoods with the least amount of political power are the first ones to be redeveloped when there's a shortage of housing.
> And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.
Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.
You can still see a ton of development without that development actually being enough to reduce housing prices. Often there's not even enough development to meet the rate of growth in a given city.
Sure.
Let's look a simple condo case: Developer pays X for property. Developer spends Y to build a building. Developer sells N units for Z. To make money, NZ has to be greater than XY aka the total value of that parcel is now higher.
> Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.
Yeah, short-term, why was that parcel before the condo building worth less? Because there was less demand for what was there before than for what was there after it. Development increase short-term values by providing immediate units with nicer amenities or better condition or more size or whatever. Probably pretty uncontroversial.
But also development increases long-term values by continuing to grow long term demand. Development, residences, businesses, services - in the most successful cities, all that flow of money produces more and more demand and value over time. Not a lot of demand to live on an empty lot in the middle of nowhere where there's not a nice house and there's no nearby jobs...
So flip the causation: if there hadn't been development to allow all the people in [popular city of your choice] in the first place, it wouldn't be so popular and have such high demand today. That's not completely separate from geographical factors like rivers, but it's also got a lot to do with development - take, say, the land where a river meets a train line and compare it to the land downstream without the train.
This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have value, but the value of all other shoes are slightly less because there's now one more competitor for demand for all those other shoes.
With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).
Long term development is good for everybody's property values, in the exact opposite way that losing businesses and residents is bad for those property values. Phoenix vs Detroit, say.
"Demand" is a dynamic thing, it responds to changes in the built environment of a city, region, or nation. London didn't spring into being fully-formed and fully in-demand at today's levels. It found a virtuous (for property-owners financially) cycle of both increasing housing units and increasing population and demand for certain areas.
While there is obviously some amount of this whole thing where more housing allows more people to come to a city which can in some circumstances drum up more jobs or whatever, I think it's a significant oversimplification to say that more housing increases property values in the long run. Ceteris paribus, more housing depresses property values. It is possible for there to be a feedback cycle where more people in the area increase the overall prosperity -- and thus property values -- of the area, but I do not think that generally more housing is the most important factor there.
If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large complexes)
if the easiest way to make money is to rent houses in a captured market because the local regulations prevent the building of more housing, that's what they'll do. if the easiest way to make more money is to build more housing because the regulations allow for the building of housing, they'll do that too. the problem isn't the developers, they're where the housing comes from. the problem is that at every turn, there's people actively fighting against the buliding of more housing. all they're doing is making money off that situation.
For instance, suppose they build 100 apartments in the suburb of X. They know that for every $1k the price of housing in X drops, they lose $100k. So weirdly, they tend to leave housing vacant and sell it at a drip-feed so that they're always selling less houses than there are buyers - there is a huge difference between selling 3 apartments to 4 buyers, vs selling 4 apartments to 4 buyers. This particularly bad when there are few, large developers instead of lots of small developers, as the few large developers can collude to price-fix much easier.
Please don't interpret this as contradicting the fact that California needs to massively overhaul its zoning/construction permit system - the fact that it can take years to receive permission instead of weeks is a big reason for the price of housing (and raises capex requirements which results in fewer but larger developers, see previous paragraph). Ditto for all the zoning that mandates exclusively single-family homes, and other such pointless exclusionism.
But painting NIMBYism in such reductionist (and long-term economic-investment backward) as "development would make real estate investors and developers lose money" would just result in people fighting entirely the wrong battles with entirely the wrong message to actually have a chance at changing things in a useful way.
Seattle and NYC are both examples of places that funnel all development into a select few areas where the market for land is cornered.
Then, by some modern definition, you are a nazi and a bigot.
So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development."
Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.
The better off - and therefore more politically-connected - you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.)