Yep. A town can become desirable after its residents carefully built its character and reputation, then suddenly apartment/condo developers want in.

Usually the town was made "desirable" by residents there from ~1890-1940, and the current NIMBY's are leeching off that. In most cases the desirable part was bulldozed in the 50's-70's to make parking for the suburbanites. Portland, OR had streets that could make you think you were in Budapest before they were demolished in the 40's

Are you suggesting that the problem with housing is that we are producing too much of it?

No, I'm suggesting that one problem with housing is wealthy real estate developers who have undue political influence.

I wish they had more influence, then they’d be able to build more and prices would go down.

I'm all for building more housing, as long as it comes with the necessary infrastructure - schools, roads, parking, public transportation, etc. Where I live, developers seem to get government approval to build in locations where they can rake in a lot of money at high prices without having to worry about such things.

(In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is apparently a hip idea these days.)

It's been hip since drivers started showing up and killing people. The less parking the better.

Right. Let's just go back to agrarian times when people rode horses to get around.

Indeed, that is the only alternative and the favoured option for those trying to make it safe for their kids to bike to school. Though I prefer mules myself.

Let me guess. You already own a home?

Your own example seems to show that the culprit lies with local governance, not developers, wouldn’t you agree?

No. Let's not pretend that it's OK for developers to try to obtain undue influence over government officials.

There’s a puzzling contradiction between your claim that developers are the problem, on one hand, and then your own anecdote on the other, not to mention the article that very convincingly debunks the idea that housing shortage is the fault of developers. I must be missing something, because frankly this isn’t making any sense.

I'm not saying that developers are the cause of the housing shortage.

I'm saying that developers are eager to build housing and sometimes are able to cut corners via undue influence over public officials. That leads to more housing (good), but it also erodes the quality of life for residents (bad).

It's really not that hard to understand.

Money is politics, at least since Citizens United. Depending on your locality, for much longer.

This is not the problem. We should not castigate people who want to build homes and earn a rightful profit from that endeavor. The problem is the undemocratic process that is the town hearing. It is unreasonable to expect working families and young adults to attend week day, day time hearings to state their position on the construction of new homes or anything else for that matter. The atrocities of urban renewal by Robert Moses and his followers in the 50s and 60s which wrecked many urban and black urban communities, many of which still haven’t recovered, led us into this mess. The antidote was that all movements towards progress must be debated by citizens (mostly seniors as they are the only ones with the luxury of time) in a hearing format. The citizens able to participate are most likely not going to live long enough to see the results of their positions anyways. It’s a disaster.

You want to let rich outsiders make decisions about what happens to a community instead of the people who live there, because... town hearings are undemocratic. All those annoying old people are just going to die anyway, so it's really best to ignore them.

I think I've heard everything now.

All these old people are going to die now so their incentives don’t really align with people from other demographics. This is factually true, same with how people that have more wealth generally have different incentives than poor people.

The casual ageism in this thread is disappointing. I hope you live long enough to see it from the other side.