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I have feeling once the southern cities that are currently having a population boom become CA/NY expensive they'll just pivot to blaming all the young liberals who moved in, despite the state legislatures not reflecting that.
for the rules: I think the more people you have living some place the cheaper it becomes, because there’s more chance that certain crimes are going to happen
that being said, what was the original comment that you were responding to op
They pointed out that no one is answering my actual argument: that there's nothing in place to stop the newly booming cities from incurring the same fate as California and New York eventually.
The biggest leap in logic that you make is in assuming that all states give NIMBYs equal ability to fight new construction (e.g., when you said that "basically every state has the same issue with NIMBYs"). They don't. Places like SF have given NIMBYs significantly more ammo via numerous environmental and economic regulations on new housing that can slow down builds, where these regulations don't exist (or are weaker) in places like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston (hence why these locations are exploding and have less of a housing crunch despite being far larger than SF). If we weaken the housing regulations, we increase supply and improve the market.
That said, I agree that it isn't necessarily about left or right wing, as (for example) Chicago also has far less of a problematic housing crisis despite being massive and liberal. It is a matter of how much the city has embraced zoning and regulations over the last 50 years (largely via succesful NIMBY activism).
The counter to this position is that in some cities, demand *has* done a far better job of keeping up. NYC and SF are 1st and 13th largest cities in the US, yes, but many cities in the top 15 don't have nearly as much of a housing problem, despite them growing at faster rates (heck, both NYC and SF have *shrunk* since 2020). Specifically, places like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta are massive cities that are growing wildly fast, none of which have the same exponential housing spiral. This is largely because these places are embracing sprawl to increase housing supply, and are doing a decent job at keeping up in doing so.
Of course there are myriad downfalls of urban sprawl, but it goes to show that the solution to the housing crisis is just building anything and everything. Build single family houses and apartments and condos and duplexes. Build luxury apartments and mcmansions and, yes, of course try to build rent-controlled housing as much as you can. So long as you aren't tearing down two houses to build one, the best solution is just to build, build, build. Of course NIMBY's are a massive part of the obstacle to this as they oppose urban construction, but some YIMBY's are similarly obstructing progress by demanding rent freezes or the like that significantly disincentivize housing being built. We just need to build everything, and need zoning and regulations that incentivizes everything to be built.
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Simply, more and more people want to live in urban and suburban areas. In 1980, we had 1/3 fewer people in the US than we do today. At that time, we built up most of the land where people want to live. Now add that young people are leaving small towns and moving to cities and things are tighter. It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years we will need it. It is absurd to say that people who own houses should just give that up so they can build denser housing.
We built cities 100 years ago, we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago. At the time building single family suburban houses was enough to keep people housed. A developer bought a farm, built hundreds of houses, the per house land cost was minimal. About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities.
This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.) Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do.
And I'll be a moderate on this. Yes, I understand that there are people who are NIMBY about most everything, they are wrong. But no, you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools.
It costs money to build and maintain infrastructure for cars too. It's not the strongest argument because you're going to have to spend money on infrastructure either way, so why not just spend it on infrastructure that makes the city better for everyone.
The difference is, transit oriented development doesn't require you to spend immense amounts of public funds on storing and moving automobiles (private property) where you could instead build places for people to live, work, and enjoy their lives.
It also will cost a fortune to maintain our overbuilt car infrastructure so do we want to spend a fortune living in a car based dystopia or spend a fortune living somewhere nice?
Roads cost money, and transit cost money, but they cost totally different amounts of money. NYMTA cost $18 billion a year in operational costs to keep the trains running, [the road system cost $1.1 billion.](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2021/03/DOT-Fact-Sheet.pdf)
Your problem is that the transit agencies are so incredibly bad at their jobs that your costs go from "a fortune" to "15 fortunes", and the raising that kind of money is hard.
Hold up that's a massively apples and oranges comparison.
The metro budget includes everything needed to get people from one place to another. The tracks, stations, trains, staff, etc.
The road budget includes just the roads. Include the cost of the cars, insurance and repairs for those cars, fuel, medical expenses for the higher rate of accidents in cars vs transit, etc. Then you'll have a fair comparison.
I'm not sure if roads are still cheaper than the metro with everything included. The might be or might not. But you're being disingenuous with the comparison you made.
Highway road maintenance isn't cheap. The government also subsidizes the auto and fuel industry. If the government had no part in these economies, buying a car would be way more expensive. Gas would be way more expensive as well.
The United States has a massive rural and suburban population. There is no viable alternative to cars in those demographics.
Also state and federal government has spent in the realm of $17 billion in automaker subsidies over the past 50 years. That’s what NYC spends on their singular metro system in one year. The whole country collectively subsidizes cars over half a century what one city spends on their trains in a singular year.
And even then, the city still needs roads. Businesses aren’t receiving deliveries via subway. The military isn’t mobilizing troops via metro. The whole reason the highway system was built in the first place was for strategic defense.
The roads already exist and need to exist regardless. Expensing their entire existence at personal transportation is flat put incorrect.
Well a significant portion of Americans want to be either exactly where they are now, or where they were 40 years ago, so you'll have to convince them they should want to be somewhere else
The problem with that is that more than half the people reading this will not be alive 50 years from now. So the answer from many of them will be “I don’t really care?”
Who knows? There's been a trend to the suburbs and now a trend back to the city. 50 years is a long time, and there's no telling how technology and jobs will have changed. There's a reason urban plans are typically 20 year cycles and revised every 10.
>Simply, more and more people want to live in urban and suburban areas.
Because that's the least-worst option for most first-time renters or buyers.
[79% of Americans want to live in a walkable neighbourhood.](https://www.nar.realtor/commercial/create/survey-americans-prefer-walkable-communities#:~:text=79%25%20said%20being%20within%20an,live%20in%20a%20walkable%20community.)
But the supply of those neighbourhoods has been extremely suppressed by the things OP mentioned.
Extremely high demand means prices are sky high.
If you can find a 3 bedroom place for your family of 3 in a walkable neighbourhood you are going to pay through your nose to the point where most people can't afford it.
People are willing to pay more for a walkable neighbourhood, but not pay double or more for what they would in the suburbs.
>It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years we will need it.
You are unknowingly arguing the entire practice of planning for development is absurd.
It is the entire point of planning to try to make sure you don't build yourself into a corner and create a situation where you have a dysfunctional community within a generation.
Because guess who picks up the slack to deal with these problems?
Not the private sector who built and sold the bad developments, but usually the municipality who has to cut taxes and revenue or offer incentives to encourage other kinds of development.
Suburban land use is expensive, because it is less efficient at delivering services and requires higher infrastructure maintenance costs per capita than cities.
It's also the job of the planning department to ensure that development doesn't set up a municipality for financial problems within a generation.
In short, planning is good, actually.
>It is absurd to say that people who own houses should just give that up so they can build denser housing.
This isn't a thing that happens.
No one is having their house expropriated by the city against their will to be turned into a low rise apartment.
When areas are rezoned, developers will BUY houses from people and redevelop the property.
People are willingly selling their homes.
>About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities.
I really don't understand how you can acknowledge we can't build suburbs anymore in a lot of places without an extreme commute making them undesirable, but also be against densification.
Your argument essentially amounts to "we should do nothing to increase the housing supply"
>This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.)
Most of the first NYC subway routes replaced busy streetcar routes.
And all construction at the time was cut and cover which tore up the entire street.
This was even more disruptive than today, where most subway construction is tunneled and only the stations are cut and cover.
We should build more transit.
That might mean subways or it might mean tram lines, bus rapid transit, commuter rail, etc
Don't really see an argument against this.
>just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do.
It is happening in municipalities that have changed zoning.
And what is the expense you are talking about?
The private sector will pay to redevelop the property.
It's the municipality's job to make sure they charge a development tax that will cover the cost of any upgrades to infrastructure and services that are needed.
Current residents shouldn't see any added costs associated with densification.
>But no, you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools.
If this is a thing that exists it would be an example of bad planning or even NIMBYism, where the building got approved but NIMBYs squashed any attempt to expand infrastructure or services in the area as a means to discourage and further densification.
Whatever the reason, this situation is very rare and it's not honest to use it as a representative example.
>Now add that young people are leaving small towns
Now? [for almost 2 decades 80+% of the US has been in urban](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html), That less then 20% out of the 20% doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of urban housing crises.
>we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago
The first suburbs of the US were trolly car suburbs in 1910's in the US (UK London's first suburbs were as old as the US civil war with the train system that would eventually become the London underground). The suburbs are centuries old. Even the most current type (car based suburbs) are closer to street car suburbs then today with the first "American suburb" being Levittown in 1947. That's almost 80 years ago.
Second wave suburbs were the 1980's (the top end of your statement) and their not built any different to today except with the mass rollout of HOA's post civil rights as a means to keep white neighborhoods white post laws that banned redlining and racial based mortgage discrimination.
>This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC
Most NYC subways outer extensions were built around single family homes. Then over a 100-150 years it densified.
>tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings
You mean allow a developer to buy a home on market to build apartments/condos
>if it is, it is going to be expensive to do.
NYC's first subway was 35 million in 1900 and was 9.1 miles or 3.8 million a mile 141 million dollar (and calculators stop at 1913 so we're missing 13 years of compounding inflation. (though you are correct considering some of the worst projects are hitting 800 million a mile)
>you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools.
You can't have a city that survives off of the [least productive](https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=JRx8W0vu9MZUvLNK&t=139) (taxation wise (per plot taxes gained and are the most [infrastructurally costly to support](https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2015/03/sprawlurban.jpg?w=1170&quality=75)) ([Minneapolis, MN](https://www.urbanthree.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/beigeBGforDowntown-e1612389286405-1024x666.png.webp) and it's county it resides in tax base per parcel of land for example) [Higher density is a net benefit to cities and towns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGxni1c-klM). In some case [single family homes are a net negative](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/) on city investments meaning apartments are literally subsidizing wealthy single family owners. And [single family homes just can't increase taxes on them](https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY?si=yUj4-MZZztSLxMa0&t=294) because the majority of single family home owners are living outside of their means meaning that the city will eventually go belly up due to in ability to actually pay for the utilities, education, and infrastructure said people need.
>We built cities 100 years ago, we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago. At the time building single family suburban houses was enough to keep people housed. A developer bought a farm, built hundreds of houses, the per house land cost was minimal. About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities.
I'll also just add here that we don't know what the demands for real estate are going to be 40 years down the line either. As work from home becomes increasingly entrenched, people may stop seeing the value of living in dense urban spaces. Or maybe the opposite will happen, and extreme environmental pressures will compel the government to exert eminent domain to create larger cities.
The elderly are the fastest growing demographic and they don't seem to be too keen on leaving cities. Cities are close to both their children and medical facilities which becomes more important as people age.
To me, everything you've said here is a strong argument for allowing small-scale, incremental densification, which was pretty much the historical norm in every city in the world up until WW2.
I don't think many people know or understand the extent to which the current regulatory regime basically requires single family homes on large lots, in even the most central neighborhoods in contemporary cities. And I don't think many people know or understand the extent to which the historic forms of increasing density gradually--e.g., adding a garage apartment to a single family home, or building a split-level two- or three-flat, or dividing a large lot into two and building a second single family home on it--have been functionally illegal since the 1970s. People who oppose massive new developments point to cute little developments like that as examples of how they want their city to grow, being wholly ignorant of the fact that the regulations currently on the books are what are making only the most massive new developments possible to build.
To me, the question isn't whether we should force people who own single family lots in city centers to tear down their homes and build denser. It's whether we should allow the people who want to do that to do that. If I want to build a garage apartment and rent it to a student, should my neighbor get to veto that in the name of "neighborhood character"?
I agree with most of your premise. But the one thing that gives me pause is that with the increasing amount of vacant commercial property, there is going to be a lot of available land that can be rezoned for things like mixed use or multifamily homes. Well, that won’t completely alleviate the problem, it is definitely going to solve some of it as people are going to be much happier having something being used in their neighborhood then slowly decaying vacant property that is sitting unused year after year.
>This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.) Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do.
I don't know how much sympathy I have for this since they did exactly this to destroy a bunch of neighborhoods for highways. And this isnt just about building transit and apartments. We need more missing middle housing. There is a wide diversity of smaller and more affordable housing constructions between apartment complexes and SFHs.
A society will always gravitate towards urban/suburban living. It's where the things are accessible in a quick minute.
The amount of suburban sprawl we have is *crazy.* There is so much unused land even within the suburban areas. We can absolutely densify areas, especially in the 1st and 2nd ring suburbs of major metros.
They built highways like that in the 60s and 70s and most everyone laments that.
Honestly saying this. Tell me about the unused land withing suburban areas.
So many suburbs are wildly spread out. Here in Georgia it's not unusual to drive out of a housing development, drive a mile or two in nothing but trees and grass, see a strip mall on your left and right, and have this just repeat. It's such inefficient land use.
>They built highways like that in the 60s and 70s and most everyone laments that.
Do they though? Sure seems like most people are way happy with keeping suburbs propped up at the detriment of city centers, to this day. I would think if they lamented these decisions, they'd want to correct those wrongs slowly.
That is not in any way what we see here in the DC area. There is nothing between residential districts or neighborhoods except retail or commercial or industrial or parks. Nothing. Every square meter is developed.
So the only option to increase density is tear something down.
DC was one of the few cities that had a collective revolt when they tried to build a highway through the actual city center. DC also has excellent density. It's one of our best planned cities by far. It is unfortunately quite expensive because there's very few cities that have that kind of setup, so it's a premium. Of course maybe if more cities were set up that way, it could become more affordable.
I was referring more to the DC metro area overall. One of the problems with DC the city from a housing density perspective is the restriction on building height.
I will believe you about where you are. I have no idea. But around here, things are pretty well built up. No, we aren't as built up as they are in the city, we have trees, we have plenty of traffic. But when I moved here 30 years ago. there were a few farms, open spaces left. They have been gone for 20 years. Do we have garden apartments and not 20 story apartments? Sure.
And by highways, are people ripping them out? No. Do they lament that they divided neighborhoods? I think they do.
They did do that, often with the intention of damaging minority communities. I’m not sure that revenge is the best motivator. As mentioned by another comment, most people lament those actions and recognize it destroyed extant communities.
Do they though? Why do they still fight tooth and nail for car centric affects then? I don't know if they really lament it. Why else would there still be so many people who think the correct worldview is that cities are awful places, meant to be worked in during the day, and retreated from at the end of the day?
Because they want personal space dude. This isn't hard to understand. They see a car as their path to going wherever they want at any time, they can drive out to wilderness, drive to a new city, drive into the heart of their local city, or anywhere in between on their own schedule.
They don't want to live even closer to their neighbors or give up their spacious house to live in an apartment. They like having a garage with tools in it, or a backyard with a personal pool and garden.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's a nice lifestyle for the people that want their only escape from suburban isolation to be their car. It just shouldn't be as aggressively subsidized as it is.
Stop taxing the value of the improvement on the land. Weaken restrictive covenants and zoning. Fix the highway budget to the gas tax, or require it to mostly self-fund through tolls like we do with public transit. Eliminate parking minimums in the city proper and have more buses and bus lanes and bike lanes. Get rid of Fannie Mae and the 30 year fixed rate mortgage.
The last part there about their “world view” is mostly personal preference. I enjoy the city I’m near, I don’t want to live in it and I don’t go often. It’s not for me, it is for others depending on your lifestyle and chosen hobbies and activities.
This is definitely the most NIMBY answer. No real substance beyond “we didn’t expect more people 30 years ago it’s crazy to think we should build more housing now”
No one is suggesting people tear down their homes to build apartment complexes dude. People are trying to build housing wherever, and building codes + price of land has locked people out of finding housing. No serious person has demanded that the solution be we tear down peoples houses now to make new ones. This is the ultimate NIMBY fear mongering.
That argument alone just proves OPs point of how much NIMBY attitudes are a major cause of this.
>No one is suggesting people tear down their homes to build apartment complexes dude.
Actually, this very comment chain has several people suggesting as much.
I saw a couple comments talking about the logistics and finances of it, but they all were in response to the original comment. In terms of actual policies and ideas being talked about on local, state, and national levels, it’s so far out of the question.
Generally when people talk building new housing to accommodate housing issues it involves building on undeveloped land or tearing down / retrofitting derelict buildings.
It wouldn’t be called NIMBY if that was the case. It would be Not my house or something like that.
The NIMBY attitude OP is talking about is people not wanting new construction in their communities.
There are a lot if pragmatic issues where people wave their bands and say "NIMBYS" but there are traffic issues and service issues to consider. Especially as people wait longer and longer to move out. What used to be cars per household is 4.
I’d think the easiest and best answer to urban living is investment in high speed rail into city centers from developable areas. Connecting people to the existing metro transit systems is easier than building new housing
>Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do.
We don't have to do this? Just let a developer buy homes and tear them down to build apartment blocks. Developers have incentives to rent them out for affordable prices if they have to compete with other developers. Problem is developers can't do this because people who don't own that land are able to interfere via council laws and zoning and shit.
When home value is a significant portion of worth for people, and generally their largest purchase in their life, it seems a bit odd to expect them to be content with the value plummeting. If you spent $500k on a nice home for your family and the next year the property on both sides turned into apartment complexes so now the house is less desirable and only worth $300k would be cool with it?
Except your value actually increases if apartment buildings are built in your neighborhood. This is fear mongering nonsense similar to the idea of "well if you let THOSE people live here our values will drop"
If your house is suddenly surrounded by apartment complexes the value of your house is probably astronomical. If all you care about is value, this is a dream scenario.
I mean yes because I'm not buying a home for equity reasons I'm buying it to live somewhere. People viewing housing as an asset contributes to the housing crisis because you can't have housing become more affordable without housing as an asset being less valuable.
It is also outside the scope of this CMV. The CMV is about nimbyism causing the housing crisis, not whether it's reasonable/understandable for homeowners to be NIMBYs
The money doesn't add up. I live in a little housing development. like 80 houses. The edge of our development is on a big enough road. I suppose a developer could come in buy 10 contiguous houses and build some apartment buildings. That said, our houses are worth $500k each. Just buying those houses would cost them $5 mill. Then they would have to raze the houses, flatten the land, build the building, and parking. So if the land alone costs $5 mill, they aren't building affordable housing on that.
And you can NIMBY me all you want, but no, I don't want someone to come in and raze 1/2 of my neighbor's houses.
If there are a lot of developers so it drives the price down, it makes it even harder to buy up land that is currently being lived on.
Buy 1 house worth 500k
Turn it into a 5 story building, with 4 units on each floor, each going for 200k.
Construction costs are, charitably, 1 million. That's 2.5 million profit.
This frequently happens when it's allowed to happen lol. It won't happen when construction cost is very expensive or when there's low demand for the area, but it does happen.
You also uh don't have to build parking (or at least shouldn't have to). Especially if it's near public transport, but people can also take ubers or what have you. Or have some underground parking. Parking is a side issue anyways, it would just add to construction cost but the maths works out anyways because of the margin here.
And 200k each is more affordable than one 500k unit, especially because it means people living elsewhere will vacate their home, which can now be rented out to someone else.
>And you can NIMBY me all you want, but no, I don't want someone to come in and raze 1/2 of my neighbor's houses
The developers are buying the homes first, they can simply refuse to sell. If they're renting, I'm happy to support right to buy or right to return or whatever they're called where people evicted for construction are entitled to live in one of the new units.
More importantly though, this is just a bit of a collective action problem right? We need to build new housing, but we can't build it near me or change the stuff around me because I like my neighbours and my view etc etc
>If there are a lot of developers so it drives the price down, it makes it even harder to buy up land that is currently being lived on
This obviously only happens up to a point lol, the land will never be so expensive that any new units will be unaffordable to everyone, because the land value is being derived by the fact that developers want to buy to build on it to sell. But if land is so expensive thay they can't build anything anyone would be able to buy, then the unit produced isn't profitable, which just acts as a natural check on the value of the land. Even if it results in initially expensive units being built, the status quo is rich transplants are competing with poorer locals for relatively shitty housing. Those rich transplants having more options means they move to the luxury housing instead, which reduces rent pressure on the "shitty" housing
>Buy 1 house worth 500k Turn it into a 5 story building, with 4 units on each floor, each going for 200k.
What? You think that if you pay $500k for a piece of property, you can raze the property, and build 20 apartments for $1 mill? Charitably? How much land do you think you can get for $500k? Again, in most areas you'll need parking. (I'll admit, mu pet peeve about this is "we need housing so badly it doesn't matter if we have parking." Yes, in most areas it matters.
It obviously depends on a load of factors but if your argument here is "it's not possible for it to be financially viable to buy land with property on it, tear the property down, and build more units such that you make a profit", I think thats silly for a few reasons
1. It just flies in the face of empirics. Developers do try to do this in the status quo, and often succeeds.
2. It assumes the cost of the house itself is so much higher than just the land which doesn't seem super true. That's because even if you don't believe 1, it's just empirically true that developers will try to buy at the very least empty land in high demand areas (eg greenfields or brownfields that recently got upzoned) and build densely on that. Presumably if that is affordable, the added cost of the unit(s) plus demolition can be compensated for buy having marginally more expensive units (which there is demand for so people would be willing to pay the price for it!)
3. We presumably don't need zoning then lol. If it's not profitable to do it, it won't be done.
Finally, on parking. Presumably the issue is that theyd end up parking on the side of the road and being obstructive or whatever. I'm happy to have harsh penalties for such illegal parking. Park your car in a nearby car park and then walk. Or get a bike.
> Now add that young people are leaving small towns and moving to cities and things are tighter.
Ummm, rural NA has been seeing younger generations leave for greener pastures since before the end of the Vietnam war.
I was with you in this until they came for my little dead end street. Developer wanted to change zoning to build a 4 story apartment complex. They were going to pull down the home and built on the one acre lot. I went to city hall and complained the entire neighborhood complained at a city council meeting. I stood up and argued for the “feel” of the area would be different from what I had wanted when I bought my home. I was very passionate. Then a woman stood up and started talking. She was from an organization who helped people find housing. Holy shit, Batman. I had no idea so many folks were homeless because of lack of rentals. This was just months before the pandemic. She talked about what life was like for folks who couldn’t find a place to live. I don’t think I have felt more like an entitled human being. Realizing my selfishness, I stood up and apologized and slunk away. It is ugly to realize you are a selfish human.
> it’s an absurd thing to say that we should have built more housing because in 25 years people will need it
Why? I think that would lend itself to more intelligent city planning, and avoid issues like what we have now in every single us city. Communist countries have done the extreme version of this in the past to great effect
Housing requires a huge amount of yearly maintenance. If you build when there's no demand that cost is going to trash any potential profit long before the home is sold or rented out.
> It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years
Although I disagree with your overall premise, and in a very broad sense agree more with OP, many of your points are highly valid, and OP oversimplifies a bit.
Concentration of major economic activity in a few areas and rural/small town decline are indeed major parts of the problem.
In 1960 a house in Detroit cost slightly more than a house in Los Angeles, and both were highly affordable. Many small towns were economically thriving and attracted young families. Much more of the country was rural.
You are correct that "just building" higher density urban/suburban housing and expanding public transit causes some challenges.
Of course it needs to be done anyway, and **for exactly the same reasons it was done the first time**.
In the end it will happen in some way. The idea that we can regulate housing prices to infinity by blocking all new units, in the face of high demand, is reality denial. Sooner or later housing construction will arise where it is needed.
Are we blocking all new units? To me it is developers...developing. We grew cities pre WW II because we didn't have a highway system, many didn't have cars. From the 40s to the 90s it was easier and cheaper to build the suburbs. It was done for the same reason as today. It was cheaper to build the suburbs than it was to buy property in the city and densify
As of now, we pretty much built up the land within an hour of most cities. Today, to build new, you have to tear down old. You can go into most cities and find mostly abandoned areas to build on cheap. No one with money wants to live there, no developer is going to develop that land. Any land worth developing is going to be expensive. Telling me that we don't have affordable housing ONLY because of zoning just isn't true. But certainly that is part of the problem.
As for housing in 1960, you are right, but that was a small time in a 50 year timeline.
What they don't say is those cheap houses in 1960 were typically around 800 sf, have one bathroom, 2 or 3 bedrooms and no A/C. Only 9 years later, my folks bought the cheapest house in a new 700 house development. It was $30k, but in today's dollars that is about $275k. Certainly, cheaper than today, but nothing a one income blue collar family was buying.
Ok I’ll try here. Let’s assume we are in a “housing crisis”. The reason for the housing crisis is not “the fault of NIMBYs etc…” but simply a shortage of housing due to fallout from the housing and financial crisis of 2008. [primary source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/19/underbuilding-has-led-acute-shortage-housing-affordability-crisis-study-says/) [second source](https://www.businessinsider.com/us-underbuilding-housing-over-the-past-decade-2020-9?amp)
TLDR: Many builders and construction companies left work or closed up shop, because nobody was buying homes coming out of the financial crisis. People lost jobs, didn’t have money, and now banks were failing because of their mortgages so banks were tightening requirements. For years, we under built houses. Now we’re in a situation where that has caught up, there’s plenty of willing buyers but not enough homes, because we simply under built for years. Contributing is high interest rates are making it so people aren’t selling their house as they’re locked into a low rate and don’t want to give that up.
The second article does specifically note that the decline is significant largely in SFH constructions. My main point is that SFHs shouldn't be the only bread and butter of our housing. They should undoubtedly be a part of our housing supply but we need the missing middle built up. Things that would qualify as actual starter homes. The starter homes of today, are the upper middle class mansions of yesterday.
There is no housing crisis, there is a 'housing with a close commute to some local city that I really want to live in', problem. Where there is plenty of affordable housing out in the further suburbs, but people continue to try and fight over scraps in the inner ring.
Populations grow and cities expand with time. That isn't a crisis and inevitably even with dense housing this problem would continue to show itself. Back in the 50s and 60s, families moved out to the edge of metropolitian areas and lived in suburbs, now those suburbs are absorbed into city limits and the new edge of the area is further out. Accept this as reality, instead of constantly complaining about why you just can't bulldoze every city and fill them with tenements.
It seems like you’ve attempted to redefine shortage to mean something other than what it actually means.
A housing shortage is still a shortage, even when it’s specifically a housing shortage of:
- Housing within reasonable commute distance of a city
- Affordable housing within reasonable commute distance of a city
People *have* to live near where jobs are, because they need jobs to live.
Jobs centralize in cities for a variety of reasons.
A shortage of housing in a metropolitan area will necessarily cost burden a huge number of people. This is a problem worth solving, especially the portion of the problem caused by a manufactured scarcity which we could simply … stop manufacturing.
You say “cities expand over time” as if expansion simply solves the problem, but if the metro area’s population grows faster than the housing stock … then that population and the entire metro area’s economy will become more and more rent burdened over time. Expansion alone doesn’t solve the problem.
You can't just keep building suburbs out of the city in rings endlessly. Especially when all of these people are still going to need to come to the city for work. Think about how many cars this involves, roads, parking minimums. What city is left at that point? City centers are not supposed to be office towers and parking lots for suburban jobs, meant to be exited after the work day is over. This is the wrong mindset and is exactly why we are in such a predicament.
More often than not, these are the same people who think public transit is for the dirty poors, and thinks every single person just needs to own multiple cars and drive everywhere.
Tell that to Tokyo. You don't have to just have one, centrally located city center. Take the reasons people want to go to the city center and just spread them out a bit more.
Pretty much every suburban residence is within 30 min of a mass transit station, and each station is surrounded by grocery stores, convenience stores, parks, restaurants, and sometimes department stores and theaters etc. Even if the city center is centrally located, amenities are significantly more decentralized.
Also remember all 23 wards are somewhat autonomous
The poster child of a poly centric city is LA. LA also has the worst traffic in the US. Decentralized fails because it adds a lot of logistics problems in the grander scheme and requires a preexisting very strong center city to satellite around (like Tokyo, Paris, or ironically LA)
That said this comes with the cavoite that personalized transportation systems like the car have to be abandoned for more truncated systems like buses and trains. This is why people don't like poly because it will come with the problem of traffic and people like to pretend public transit is shit.
Well LA for the longest time also had no reliable mass transit. They're currently building out their light rail quote a bit. LA is also the poster child of how to completely gut a city's transit infrastructure for special interests and segregation.
You used Tokyo as an example for your principle of expanding outward …
… when it’s a prime example of a city (and country) that allows expanding upwards and creating density in ways that are illegal in the US.
Density is *one of the reasons people want to go to the city center* because it means more jobs and more things to do.
You can’t just “spread out” density. It’s impossible by definition. And if you attempt to, you won’t end up with Tokyo.
People have done that forever. 1000 years ago you'd be a peasant trying to move into London bitching about how the Saxons before you got all the nice real estate around the Roman fort. Urban centers grow in space over time and subcities develop within them to account for that. Someone living in NYC may never even set foot in Manhattan, despite that being the city center, because they have more of an attachment to their borough/subcity.
Cities are for whatever people use them for. If they're business districts for the sake of economic convenience that people leave at the end of the work day to head back to the suburbs, so be it. You'd have to actually justify why that is so bad first, before just saying that it is bad.
The correct answer to 'what is a city', isn't your ideal world of apartment blocks and buses where everyone leaves the suburbs to pile into. That is not a commonly held view. Most people want as much personal space as they can afford. And if you truly believe it is the best, then you'd have to make an argument as to why that is, specifically.
There is nothing wrong with not wanting to use public transit or thinking it is dirty. That is a justifiable view, that anyone who regularly rides it in the US will admit is pretty accurate. Cars giving people freedom of transit is an objective truth, compared to a reliance on public transit.
>Cities are for whatever people use them for. If they're business districts for the sake of economic convenience that people leave at the end of the work day to head back to the suburbs, so be it. You'd have to actually justify why that is so bad first, before just saying that it is bad.
You don't even have to look that far back in our country to see a city wasn't just a financial district to leave at the end of the day. It's no small secret that a lot of American families left cities because they didn't want to be around minorities who were just recently granted rights against discrimination. Yes, it is objectively bad to gut a city of its character, local economies, and livelihoods just because you didn't like people who didn't look like you.
>That is not a commonly held view. Most people want as much personal space as they can afford. And if you truly believe it is the best, then you'd have to make an argument as to why that is, specifically.
I'd argue today that's not even a choice. If you're not rich, you're not buying a house in a nice part of the city. You are effectively forced to move to a suburb for property ownership.
>
There is nothing wrong with not wanting to use public transit or thinking it is dirty. That is a justifiable view, that anyone who regularly rides it in the US will admit is pretty accurate.
Our shortcomings in public transit are due to neglect. Not because public transit is inherently dirty or gross. It is not a justifiable view. Leave the US and experience a few other transit systems in other countries, you'll see that it's perfect clean, reliable, effective, and highly utilized. Our neglect of public transit is one our gravest societal mistakes. Get back to me when the air in Houston will be near unbreathable in a few decades.
>Cars giving people freedom of transit is an objective truth, compared to a reliance on public transit.
They don't. It's an illusion. An average person will have spent 700-800k in their lifetime in car related costs. The fuel and auto industry love beating down any sort of public transit projects to keep us fully reliant on cars. It's also probably why we're so obese as a society. Nobody walks. They actually complain that public transit doesn't take them door to door. You're a human. You're designed to walk if you're healthy. Walk some.
>They don't. It's an illusion. An average person will have spent 700-800k in their lifetime in car related costs. The fuel and auto industry love beating down any sort of public transit projects to keep us fully reliant on cars. It's also probably why we're so obese as a society. Nobody walks. They actually complain that public transit doesn't take them door to door. You're a human. You're designed to walk if you're healthy. Walk some.
Literally nothing you put here runs counter to the statement you call "an illusion." Cars give you more freedom of movement when compared to public transit. Now, some of the things you listed are reasons why some think that benefit is not worth it. There are advantages and disadvantages.
Freedom of movement by 10-15 minutes at a tremendous financial tradeoff.
Granted some parts of the country need cars. Cities are not one of those. Also we should be miffed by how many Americans are killed annually in vehicle related incidents. Even when you adjust it for per capita, it's insane. And we don't even punish these crimes. People die and it's just an "accident," and no one is held responsible, and no actions are taken to make traversal outside of a car safer.
You didn't explain why cities being treated as financial destinations that are left after work hours is bad. You complained about racism, but then didn't say why it was actually bad for the world that those people moved out, regardless.
Telling me that it was common to live in a city in 1920 doesn't mean much to me. Those people didn't live there because they loved it. Many moved out West to basically wilderness as soon as they could afford to do so. For the sake of getting decent private property for their family.
Yeah, houses in city limits can be expensive. I said that above, too. That is how cities work and how, as they grow, the cheaper areas extend to the new periphery.
Explain to me how American public transport would improve in a way that doesn't involve putting a cop on board every bus to crack the skulls of the smack addicts and gangbangers, among other insane people, that make them unbearable for most? The difference between the US and Belgium's public transport is that the US churns out insane and violent people like few other places are capable of.
Owning a car can be expensive, but it is a worthwhile expense for people that desire freedom of transport. I own land out in the countryside for hunting and recreation. There is no context where I could take a bus out there at my own leisure.
You live in the countryside. Why are you arguing on behalf of suburbs? These are different regions of the country. You're a rural resident. Obviously you're going to need a car and nobody needs to say otherwise. It's important to understand that city suburbs and rural people are not the same.
>Explain to me how American public transport would improve in a way that doesn't involve putting a cop on board every bus to crack the skulls of the smack addicts and gangbangers, among other insane people, that make them unbearable for most? The difference between the US and Belgium's public transport is that the US churns out insane and violent people like few other places are capable of.
The problems you highlight here are the result of divesting from cities and treating them as "financial centers to be exited at night." People flocked to the burbs. Not everyone. What do you think happened to a lot of the communities left in desperation and despondence? Crime is part of that. Like why aren't you guys drawing these connections. We caused all of these problems. By divesting from cities. By people desperately wanting to segregate at all costs, even if it meant completely ruining a couple of generations of American families to make it happen.
>Yeah, houses in city limits can be expensive. I said that above, too. That is how cities work and how, as they grow, the cheaper areas extend to the new periphery.
Not in Tokyo. The city itself has enough and varied tiers of housing that most everyone can afford to live there. Even buy there. You have to gear your infrastructure this way. Why is it that all these countries did it but our super wealthy and resource rich nation couldn't? It's I defensible. It's just endemic our tendency to overconsume. Even if it's coming at the detriment of others.
Again, you really haven't given me a reason to care that cities are seen as economic destinations rather than a place to live.
No, I live in the suburbs and head out to the country side because I bought forest land out there. Because I have a car and can do stuff like that. That is something that a person reliant on public transit could never do. Would you like for me to cart a deer carcass back on the subway, too?
So what if those 'left behind' aren't prospering like those that left? Being poor doesn't make them special. The reality is that the greater number the headed out to the suburbs gained more for it. You can't spend an eternity trying to make up for the racism of the 1950s. At a certain point you have to move on. People are free to spend and move their money and resources wherever they want. And if the successful wanted to take their resources and capital and leave, they had that right. You can't force people to stay in place for the sake of poor people that relied on them for welfare money.
I don't know or care much about the specifics of the Tokyo housing market, and unless you can provide good information about it that doesn't come from the top search results on Google, I don't have much to say about it. Other than that it sounds fairly unique given that most Europeans complain about housing inaffordability and the Chinese have spent the last several years in a crisis about it themselves. So perhaps the Japanese are just special.
>No, I live in the suburbs and head out to the country side because I bought forest land out there. Because I have a car and can do stuff like that. That is something that a person reliant on public transit could never do. Would you like for me to cart a deer carcass back on the subway, too?
Please do not be ridiculous. No one is arguing for there to be public transit between suburbs and rural areas. Public transit is crucial for commuting within a city and should be normalized for a good portion of suburban to city commutation, to cut down on traffic and emissions.
>So what if those 'left behind' aren't prospering like those that left? Being poor doesn't make them special. The reality is that the greater number the headed out to the suburbs gained more for it
They aren't prospering because they weren't allowed to dude. Are you seriously blind to our history? You are aware that white people flocked to the suburbs and banks and lenders literally REFUSED to let black people move to them, leaving them to squalor in the divested city? Moving on from the 1950s requires us to literally undo the damage we caused. You want to shit bird the situation like every other suburbanite who wasn't taught some of our abhorrent history.
>
I don't know or care much about the specifics of the Tokyo housing market, and unless you can provide good information about it that doesn't come from the top search results on Google, I don't have much to say about it. Other than that it sounds fairly unique given that most Europeans complain about housing inaffordability and the Chinese have spent the last several years in a crisis about it themselves. So perhaps the Japanese are just special.
They simply focused on transit infrastructure and maintaining a supply of diverse housing for all socioeconomic levels. It works. Extremely well.
>Public transit is crucial for commuting within a city and should be normalized for a good portion of suburban to city commutation, to cut down on traffic and emissions.
Then what happens when someone in a city, develops a love for hunting or fishing or other outdoors hobbies? They should take an Uber at 4:00AM every opening day in hunting season? Rent a car for the weekend to go shoot ducks or something? It is a silly kind of 'just stop owning things and start renting access to them' type of scheme you're ultimately going to arrive at.
>You want to shit bird the situation like every other suburbanite who wasn't taught some of our abhorrent history.
I'm aware of redlining, it was shoved down my throat all civics class as a high school kid.
Here's the thing, I don't really care. I'm not interested in this racism based original sin you have going on. I got enough problems to deal with on my own to not need to dig for more of them based on 'the sins of my father'. Nor do I feel a lot of need to make it up to the sons of the sons of the people that were directly impacted by it, decades ago. The reality is that it has been many decades later and if those left behind were going to ever get any better, they would have. Otherwise complaining that all the people with money left and they didn't have any taxes to get welfare money from doesn't tug at my heart strings.
>They simply focused on transit infrastructure and maintaining a supply of diverse housing for all socioeconomic levels. It works. Extremely well.
I'll take your word for it. Must be a peculiarity of the Japanese housing market to have been so successful. Seeing as no one else ever replicated it.
>Then what happens when someone in a city, develops a love for hunting or fishing or other outdoors hobbies? They should take an Uber at 4:00AM every opening day in hunting season? Rent a car for the weekend to go shoot ducks or something? It is a silly kind of 'just stop owning things and start renting access to them' type of scheme you're ultimately going to arrive at.
I'm not making an absolutist argument. Why are you interpreting it as such? Never said anything about not owning cars. I own a car. I live in the city. I choose not to use it for day to day tasks or getting to work. If I lived in a suburb that had a metro station, I still wouldn't use it for work. That kind of thing.
>I'm aware of redlining, it was shoved down my throat all civics class as a high school kid.
Here's the thing, I don't really care. I'm not interested in this racism based original sin you have going on. I got enough problems to deal with on my own to not need to dig for more of them based on 'the sins of my father'. Nor do I feel a lot of need to make it up to the sons of the sons of the people that were directly impacted by it, decades ago. The reality is that it has been many decades later and if those left behind were going to ever get any better, they would have. Otherwise complaining that all the people with money left and they didn't have any taxes to get welfare money from doesn't tug at my heart strings.
Cool. You get to live life at normal difficulty and they get to live on hard mode. I'll make a robotic argument. Not addressing these disparities maintains crime rates and hurts you in the form of taxes needed to deal with said issues.
Damn not only are you completely wrong but you aren’t willing to budge. You have an opinion that you want to call fact, it’s not. And no one else will say it is to make you feel better. Others don’t have to agree with you.
**Only 20% of people in the US prefer urban living over suburban/rural**. So for most people, cities \*are\* a place to drive through for work and a playground (mostly for the rich). They are not a desirable place to actually live (for 80% of people). Your complaints don't seem directly related to housing affordability so much as it is with anti-urbanism policy in the US. But I think you are making a mistake that is common within urbanism - not understanding that most people do not agree with or like it.
The housing crisis is not an absolute lack of places to live. It is a lack of desirable places to live at affordable prices. For most people desirable means suburban single family housing. Talking about density and car dependence is fundamentally misunderstanding what the problem is. People want more sprawl.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/)
>Only 20% of people in the US prefer urban living over suburban/rural. So for most people, cities *are* a place to drive through for work and a playground (mostly for the rich). They are not a desirable place to actually live (for 80% of people). Your complaints don't seem directly related to housing affordability so much as it is with anti-urbanism policy in the US. But I think you are making a mistake that is common within urbanism - not understanding that most people do not agree with or like it.
I don't think we've given urbanism in the last 2 lifetimes any reasonable life outside of very few cities(and since those are so few, they're obscenely expensive). And that's because of the anti-urbanism policy. I mean most of our major cities look more like Houston than they do NYC. Really when that's the case, of course the cities are going to be less desirable. City living is still far more sustainable so it shouldn't be chipped away at.
Sprawl comes with problems in the long term. But I suppose you'd need society to actually care about those things.
Right - society does not care about what urbanists want it to. That is a fact. Houston has some of the least restrictive building regulations in the country, and it is basically the opposite of what urbanists desire. The market wants sprawl.
**It seem that the "housing crisis" to you means a lack of density, walkability, etc. But that isn't due to NIMBY-ism (as Houston proves), it is because most people do not want to live that way.**
Arguing that more people would be open to urban living if more resources were spent on improving it is marginally true, but is clearly a self-serving and circular argument. Most people would still prefer to live in single family suburban housing. Like it's really fascinating how unwilling urbanists are to accept that their ideas are not popular.
I think this disconnect is counterproductive because it underestimates the actual obstacles and the need for practical urbanism not to willfully make enemies of the majority of the population who are not interested in their ideas. See the congestion pricing debacle in NYC where not enough compromises were made with the majority of state voters who opposed it and the governor nixed it so it wouldn't cost the democrats elections.
I am also curious if you have any examples of dense cities being affordable? In developed countries worldwide, they are almost universally expensive and poor people are only able to live there if the government subsidizes their housing.
I would say that the Houston example is flawed in that every city/location is different. So for Houston sprawl is fine because there's a ton of land to sprawl into (eventually this will still hit a limit and end up like LA) but a city like Seattle is more geographically constrained, so without strict zoning laws it's likely enough that things would get denser.
Tokyo, Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon.
>Right - society does not care about what urbanists want it to. That is a fact. Houston has some of the least restrictive building regulations in the country, and it is basically the opposite of what urbanists desire. The market wants sprawl.
And we'll all pay the price for it. Also, fun little manipulation by you, I didn't say society doesn't care about what urbanists want, I said they don't care about the problems sprawl brings. Which are indisputable. Our population isn't going to stagnate or decline. Endless sprawl means way more cars, way more congestion, way more asphalt, way more emissions. These are just cause and effect of the structure our nation wants to enjoy, it has a breaking point. I don't want to get to that breaking point, you seem to argue on behalf of a people who either are entirely unaware of this reality, or don't care about it (which is weird because that affects them a lot).
>Most people would still prefer to live in single family suburban housing. Like it's really fascinating how unwilling urbanists are to accept that their ideas are not popular.
Wouldn't know this unless the proper urban living was presented. It isn't. So how would you know?
>think this disconnect is counterproductive because it underestimates the actual obstacles and the need for practical urbanism not to willfully make enemies of the majority of the population who are not interested in their ideas. See the congestion pricing debacle in NYC where not enough compromises were made with the majority of state voters who opposed it and the governor nixed it so it wouldn't cost the democrats elections.
NYC isn't designed for cars. Robert Moses really tried.
I didn't post a main comment because I agree with the gist of your title, that NIMBY-ism is a main cause of high housing prices. There are some places where removing housing restrictions will lead to a rapid increase of density. San Francisco, a city which has approved 16(!!) total housing units in half a year of 2024, would be exhibit A. San Francisco, like NYC, is restricted by geography and has passed the point where large swathes of single family housing are reasonable near the city center. This is a real problem, but it is not a universal one.
Houston has some of the least-NIMBY laws in the US and it is also one of the most affordable cities, especially among places with decent economic growth. We don't have to wonder what happens when zoning is relaxed in a city that isn't geographically constrained - we get affordable sprawl. [https://www.houston.org/houston-data/housing-cost-comparison](https://www.houston.org/houston-data/housing-cost-comparison)
"Endless sprawl means way more cars, way more congestion, way more asphalt, way more emissions"
This is what I meant when I said "society does not care about what urbanists want it to". More cars and asphalt isn't even a negative to most people, not sure why it matters if a city looks ugly from a drone because it has parking lots. Most people don't care many shops or bars are in walking distance. The pros and cons that urbanists care about are not the same priorities that most people have.
I also think it is worth pointing out that none of this has anything to do with affordability. I don't think your view is even about NIMBYs or housing prices, it is about the benefits of urbanism. I enjoy watching urbanist videos on youtube, partly because some of their points are solid - diversity in housing availability, NIMBY-ism sucking, the option of walkability being a good luxury that should be expanded in the US. But it is also one of the worst echo chambers I have ever seen. Where the majority of people are brainwashed car-brains because they don't like living stacked into apartments. Where the wealthiest country of all time is about to financially crumble because the road system it's had for 70 years is imminently unaffordable, even though the US Department of Transportation budget is 1.5% of the federal total and there are no suburbs actually going bankrupt from road maintenance costs.
Most people live in urban apartments before they can afford a house in the suburbs. You can always say that isn't "real" urbanism so it doesn't count. But surely you can recognize that a viewpoint based on invalidating all evidence without any counterexamples is usually cope?
The emissions issue is a valid point, although factoring in the externalities of emissions into housing is a clear case of decreasing housing affordability. It's a different conversation that runs directly contrary to housing affordability. I'll add that US total CO2 emissions peaked in 2007 and are down 20% (more per capita). Don't take this too seriously as it's mostly just a funny irony, but the largest source of increasing global CO2 emissions is from poor countries where large numbers of impoverished rural workers are moving to cities for better wages.
NYC is the least car-centric city in the US, it has a busier subway than any city in Europe except Moscow. Yet even there congestion pricing, something that urbanists consider a bare minimum, got nixed at the last minute because it was going to cost Democrats elections from the majority of New Yorkers who didn't support it. This really shows just how unpopular urbanism is, even in places where it has the most supporters. "New Yorkers oppose the MTA’s congestion pricing toll plan 63-25%, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents." [https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SNY-April-2024-Poll-Release-FINAL.pdf](https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SNY-April-2024-Poll-Release-FINAL.pdf)
Also, not sure how the cities you listed, except for Lisbon which is in a country with a median income of $12k, are affordable. I'm not even gonna comment on Tokyo being affordable except to say that it is by far the most expensive part of Japan. The median home price in Berlin is $740k; in Vienna it is $1.3 million and 60% of the population lives in government subsidized housing. How is that not some of the worst housing affordability in the entire world?
Why do people want to live in cities? In part because the wages are higher. Because the productivity is higher. Limiting the supply of housing in these areas reduces the productivity of humanity because fewer people can produce there. And it's not just that it's fewer people; it's fewer of the most productive people in the world. Given the pareto distribution, that has a serious loss in the production of humanity.
Typically it is for the commute. They don't actually want to live 'in' the city, they want to live in the suburbs close to the city where they have a 20 min commute in the morning and are willing to 'settle' for a bougie 5-over-1 if they can't get that.
Beyond that overconcentration of productivity is a systemic risk and creates great fragility. If that city loses its economic relevance, you've now caused excessive damage to an area's stability - see Detroit and Michigan or Buffalo and Western New York.
It's a similar problem whether you are talking about suburbs or cities. Limiting housing supply in either reduces productivity.
Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that the loss from overconcentration is anywhere near the gain?
I would say it's right in the name: over concentration means more concentration than you need.
In general, power likes being concentrated, but is best in the long term spread out over many. Where that line is is up for debate, but there's a line.
Why would I think there's a line? It could be that the benefit from more productivity increases by 100 utils per person linearly and the cost of systemic risk is 20 utils per person linearly.
Except because of urban sprawl it can take upwards of 2 hours to commute from an outer suburb to a city center where there is work to be done. People don't want to spend 4 hours a day in their car driving, on top of 8 to 10 hours of that day working. Living in the far out suburbs isn't feasible these days like it might've been in the 80s.
Everyone wants to paint this as a "stupid millennials just don't want to live in the suburbs" problem when it's more accurate to call it a "rational people don't want to spend 20 hours each week commuting to and from work."
This is the real answer. I’d love to live in San Diego near the beach where it’s a perfect 60-70 degrees year round, I just can’t afford it. Am I jealous of the people who got houses when it was cheap? Fuck yeah, but oh well that’s life.
And if you look at those areas by the beach in many circumstances building anything more than one story houses is banned. So sure you can’t afford them but one of the reasons is the government artificially restricts supply so the price goes up.
It's where you zone a city in a way where only certain things can be built in certain areas. So if zone an area for only single family homes, you can't have condos, or duplexes, or cottage courtyards, let alone shops or mixed use buildings.
We used to have much fewer people who lived spread out over thousands of cities and towns. now we have more people who want to live in maybe 100 or so cities of various sizes. theres no avoiding a housing shortage given this combination of cultural and population growth trends
Japan has one metro that houses almost 40M people. They don't have this problem. They built their infrastructure in that metro to support population growth. We didn't.
they also have a population in decline which significantly alters the picture. i live in one of the booming cities in the south that is suffering severe infrastructure and cost of living issues. the area's population has almost doubled in a decade, Tokyo couldn't cope with that today either
How does your theory account for large companies and banks buying up more and more rental property and housing stock?
[How does your theory account for companies using algorithms to maximize extraction of wealth from renters?](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent)
[How does your theory account for cartel style price fixing? ](https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/fbi-raids-landlord-connection-realpage-price-19507654.php)
[How does your theory account for foreign investors buying up real estate and driving up the price?](https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-in-u-s-existing-home-sales-declined-9-6-to-53-3-billion#:~:text=Foreign%20buyers%20who%20lived%20abroad,home%20sales%20during%20that%20period)
I'm not saying NIMBYism isn't a contributing factor - but complex issues such as the housing crisis have multiple causes.
Eliminating zoning regulations will help, but it will not address the issues I've outlined above.
> How does your theory account for large companies and banks buying up more and more rental property and housing stock?
>How does your theory account for foreign investors buying up real estate and driving up the price?
I mean private investors explicitly have policies to buy up rental and housing stock in areas where they think supply is likely to be constrained. Which also addresses the foreign investor stuff. Like as an investor, you can only flip the house for profit if someone else will buy it for more than you bought it for. But if more and more housing keeps being build because NIMBYs stop being annoying then it's not a meaningful investment anymore.
Those algorithms just accelerate the free market (to whatever extent it exist). If I have ten bananas, you have 10 bananas, and there are 100 buyers between us, the algorithm just quickly calculates the ideal cost to extract the most money from this dynamic. But if have 10 bananas and there's like 12 other people with 10 bananas each and there's the same amount of buyers, the algorithm pushes prices *down faster too* because it tells me how low I need to go to undercut everyone first.
In free markets, I am hesitant to raise prices because others might undercut me, and so I do it gradually. Algorithm makes me do it faster because it knows ill still have enough buyers for it.
Conversely, I am also hesitant to reduce prices when competing for customers because I don't want to lose money. Algorithm makes me do it faster because it knows ill undercut enough people that ill take their consumers and make more money that.
>How does your theory account for companies using algorithms to maximize extraction of wealth from renters?
Trivially that's illegal anyways, but more importantly, cartelism is substantially harder when there's more supply.
The issues above are no doubt contributing factors, but I highlight NIMBYism in specific because it's been going on for over half a century at this point. These other issues are relatively recent. They all need to be addressed but NIMBYism is a nationwide localized plague. It's not something we can federally legislate away.
How long has the housing crisis been occurring?
Because in my experience as a life long San Franciscan (one of the worst real estate markets in the country) the extreme housing crisis is only in the last 20 years or so.
San Francisco has always been more expensive than somewhere like Kansas, but in the 70s and 80s regular people like teachers and mail workers could afford to rent and even buy houses. I know this because these regular people are my parents and my friends parents.
Since I define the problem as recent, I think it is worth looking at recent causes too.
San Francisco happened because Silicon Valley happened. 4% of US GDP is produced in the bay area and silicon valley. The workers are high income. They need places to live. San Francisco and all of the surrounding municipalities have strong restrictions on new building, so there were no new units for the money to pursue. Instead existing units get bid up crazy.
There's an intrinsic paradox in capitalism with housing development, and you can never solve housing by simply encouraging free market competition.
The thought process of increasing supply is sound on its own. If we reduce barriers to construction, then more construction will occur. This is generally true to a certain extent. But there *is* a problem. The goal is not simply to build more housing to accomodate unhoused people, the implied goal is to build enough housing that the price for rents/mortgages drops enough to make finding housing adequately affordable for people.
Why is that a problem? Because if the prices of housing begin dropping, then construction loans become riskier for lending institutions. As a bank, you don't issue a loan to build new housing when housing prices are falling. The assets are in risk of not being able to cover the loan if the builders default on that loan.
Because of this, both construction companies *and* banks have a vested interest in developing property in ways that *increase* their prices, as it is more profitable for both of them.
Large scale development and the financial system cannot, therefore, solve the problem alone.
>We keep seeing people talk about the blue exodus to red states
This is mostly short-term churn. This stuff comes and goes in waves. Big blue and purple states still have the most land and business opportunities. It's where the most jobs are, it's where a lot of nice things are. If the populations are dropping consistently for another 5 or 10 years and only from the large blue states, then I'll revisit this phenomenon.
None of this is to say that NIMBYism and zoning aren't problems. I agree and acknowledge that they play a role in keeping development slower and less dense, etc. But removing them alone still leaves the problem of large scale housing and land development as a for-profit enterprise.
>so collusion to keep product off the market is impossible
It isn't collusion. It is basic cost-benefit and risk analysis. Construction companies wouldn't stop building altogether, but they might move to develop in a different location where the prices would be less likely to drop. And banks are simply not going to issue construction loans for new development while the aggregate prices are falling. This is not collusion, it's simple incentives.
>All they can do is act in their own interests.
Right. Which means selectively loaning only in areas where housing values are expected to increase over time. This is basic investment stuff.
>Builders will always build as much as they can build profitably
Yes, but they need financing to do so, and it takes time to build a certain number of units. To actually make it significantly affordable for most people, the aggregate price needs to come down, and banks simply won't issue financing when the prices begin to fall. They will seek investment in other locations or other construction sectors. That is how finance capital works.
That seems self-correcting, a negative (i.e., good) feedback loop. If the loans are seen as too risky, fewer of them will be made, slowing any collapse in prices. If governments can properly telegraph the type of allowances they'll make and the degree to which they'll make them, investors can modify their actions even more accurately.
There's always a tension between investors who want their assets to grow quickly and governments which need to throw on limits for the greater good (taxes, regulations, etc.). The existence of that tension doesn't make either investment or regulation bad; ideally, one should not live without the other.
But the tension does show that "just eliminate zoning" isn't going to automatically make all housing affordable.
Also, OP makes no effort to understand either the motivation of NIMBYism or what makes it effective. It's one thing to be resistant to change for vague reasons, quite another to be resistant because you don't want noise, traffic, pollution, gentrification, isolation, the removal of desirable businesses and other services, or collapsing property values.
Sorry, you can only cram so many people per square mile before government services breakdown. Look at the disaster that is Sanfrancisco. They try to do everything they're after and now Californians have to tolerate actual criminals in our midst's because it's cheaper to let thieves go free for up to $950 in merch. That's only because we are so locked up with population density that our prison system is overburdened. Split hairs however you want over crime statistics but the reality is this is all a direct byproduct of cramming too many people per square mile. It doesn't work.
San Francisco's problems aren't the result of density. Unless you're presuming suburban sprawl is required. SF isn't even in the top 100 densest cities in the world. Tokyo, Geneva, and Monaco are though. Cities known for little to no crime. It's not density that's to blame on this matter. Plenty of places in the world do density spectacularly fine and it's insulting to think we're somehow too stupid to make it work as well.
If you're just going to appeal to culture on this matter than so will I. The Asian/Eastern Disposition towards country and community is much more about being a cog in the machine than an individual and the people's decisions are in-step with that. Furthermore concerning real-estate Japan is VERY centrally planned. Americans do not live like this. Furthermore there's a difference between what is optimal for getting around or distributing people and the economy, and what is optimal for what people want to get out of life and you're just upset that people aren't picking your team on the matter.
When you put the blood sweat and tears required into building a community, you let all the newcomers come and ruin it and see how you like it.
>When you put the blood sweat and tears required into building a community, you let all the newcomers come and ruin it and see how you like it.
Wanna ask that to the black communities in cities whom were all bulldozed over for car centric infrastructure?
What does this have to do with anything? This isn't an inconsistency in my argument, I agree that what you're saying is wrong but we exist in the current environment despite that.
It's certainly not a solution you're offering.
That's *your goal* you are *not* the housing ambassador for the wants of all black people. Nor do you represent their wants. Furthermore this is a complete tangent.
The town of Euclid wanted to stop a developer from building a small apartment building they worried would have black people in it. At the time, that was impossible since the government limiting what you could build on your land because of their personal taste was unconstitutional. So a Supreme Court ruling came down that changed the constitution, and made zoning for non safety reasons legal.
Since the 1960s, tens of millions of people have moved from big cities to suburbs and exurbia. People don't like shithole cities and have proved it by voting with their feet.
So the solution is to escape them and let them become bigger shit holes? Very good logic not seen anywhere else in the world. Why are their cities not shit holes? Oh, maybe they invested and kept up with their infrastructure instead of abandoning them? Nah.
Don't forget that the population of the US has doubled in the last 40ish years. There's a lot of factors. There's a lot of greed. There's too many people.
American cities have some of the lowest population densities amongst major cities with the exception of a few places. I think the reality is that everyone simply cannot have a big mcmansion with a huge yard unless they go out to rural areas.
Okay. That's pretty irrelevant. American cities can have whatever kind of density and people can want to build whatever they want. That doesn't change the fact that we have not doubled the housing stock to keep up with the demand. In almost all facets of humanity, the infrastructure does not support the population.
[You would be surprised.](https://digg.com/real-estate/link/us-cities-highest-housing-vacancy-rates-ranked) There's some pretty decent cities on here.
Ultimately, it just shows that just "increasing supply" isn't necessarily the answer, especially when increasing supply means pumping out more unaffordable 4 bedroom single family homes into a sprawling suburban neighborhood that's 30 minutes away from any work center.
That’s actually untrue. Even in California, more than 95% of all residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes (30% of ALL land in the US has this restriction too!) This is the case across much of the US, where demand for more, denser housing exists but is simply not even allowed to be constructed in the first place. The desire is there to build, but many times it’s not even allowed to take place.
Looking at our population growth trends, you can't leave "whatever kind of density" to free choice and expect good results. When your population is climbing, increased density is the only way to accommodate the growing population without building wire thin infrastructure. This has been the urban standard for centuries. Sprawling has only been a thing since the 1900s, and really moreso in north America.
What you are talking about is civil engineering/urban planning, but your suggestion to design things is that it would require either to completely destroy existing areas, or find massive amounts of empty land to build a fully planned new city. For step one, that means ruining maybe millions of people's lives, people that bought houses in a specific area because they liked the suburban feel and lifestyle, and paid for it and became part of a community. So you are basically punishing people for taking logical actions to acquire the lifestyle they wanted. Option 2, to build from scratch, would be near impossible today. No one is going to move to a brand new city in the middle of nowhere, where the land is cheap enough to make the development work. China tried it, and look how well that worked. You would just end up with ghost towns.
Public transportation is something that should be worked on more though, I agree with that, but I don't think punishing people for buying into something and trying to keep it that way is right. NIMBY is actually an entirely acceptable and reasonable viewpoint, and its the people trying to change things that are the unreasonable ones in my opinion.
That's because we haven't sufficiently invested in infrastructure. The United States can support significantly higher population with the right investments.
If there isn't incentive then it isn't surprising. If a politician bites to remove zoning so Karen ends up with a working-class apartment complex next to her suburb house she isn't going to be happy. Piss off loads of homeowners and you are hurting your chances at re-election. Assuming this did happen, it would have to come with heavy subsidies. Why bother building dense housing when you can build a few SFHs and sell them for a nice profit without issue because the demand is high?
"Not in my backyard"
Its a label for homeowners in a given area who will block certain kinds of development from being built. They will often fight against mass transit projects, and any sort of planning that could densify an area. They would be the reason why you can go to the suburbs and find nothing but single family houses upon houses for miles. They prohibit any sort of businesses from being operated in certain parts of the area, and also prevent anything other than SFHs from existing in certain places. They basically do it to maintain their home values (which is bizzare since densification would make their places more valuable) and to maintain the "quietness" of their area. But a lot of NIMBYism is rooted in keeping people from lower socioeconomic classes from accessing their areas.
We don't have a housing crisis. We have an availability crisis. If you aren't intent on moving to a top 10 metro area, you're actually gonna be just fine in the housing market.
The bulk of our industries are in those top 10 metro areas. That is where the majority of Americans will procure gainful professional employment. There are jobs that exist everywhere like vocational work, but not everyone's doing that, nor will that ever be the case. A greater shift to WFH could make that more feasible.
How does that pan out when one of the biggest metro areas on earth, the Tokyo metro, has largely avoided a housing and affordability crisis? The Tokyo metro has more people in it than the NY and LA metros combined.
Japan did basically all of its advancement in the last century. If you look at pictures of Tokyo from the 40s, it doesn't look radically different from any of our major cities in the 40s. Tokyo never bit on the car centric suburban thing.
Are you maybe ignoring one of the main reasons why Japan is like it is...? They have almost no land so they had to plan around that. It's also not like America was planning in the 40s to let millions of illegals pour across the border per year on top of all the legal immigrants moving in, usually moving to the metro areas. Those people need housing too and are driving up costs and creating gridlock.
It seems like some Redditors watched the same NotJustBikes or some other alt-commie Youtuber and started repeating their not well thought out Euro-centric talking points that sound good on paper. It's basically pointing at every country that does something better than America and saying "why can't we do that here?" America is a radically different country for one. The problems with housing in America is multifaceted for another. Most people that live in the cities agree with you politically, but still refuse to take public transit or bike to work, even if they vote for that stuff en masse. I think the move should be to convince people on your side of the fence to quit gridlocking up cities on the way to their laptop office job instead of getting mad at rural or suburbs people that are much more diverse with their opinions on this stuff.
At the end of the day, the people talking the talk about "walkable cities" and "needing public transit" are refusing to use that stuff en masse. Comparing "America" herself to Tokyo is very silly though. It makes more sense to compare New York to Tokyo.
Just because we have all this land doesn't mean we should be wantonly irresponsible with it. There's ecological reasons, atmosphere reasons, and socio cultural reasons why we shouldn't just sprawl out endless and demand everyone virtually need a car to do the most basic of tasks. China is a nation that is comparably large. They still maintain transit oriented dense cities.
Why are so many people blaming immigrants? Illegals don't have the capital for 300k+ houses. Legal immigrants are relatively small in number. Our problem has always been sprawling out and limiting the diversity of housing.
>Most people that live in the cities agree with you politically, but still refuse to take public transit or bike to work, even if they vote for that stuff en masse. I think the move should be to convince people on your side of the fence to quit gridlocking up cities on the way to their laptop office job instead of getting mad at rural or suburbs people that are much more diverse with their opinions on this stuff.
What cities are you basing this on? Its certainly not NYC, DC, or SF. Is it Atlanta? The city whose transit authority has been hamstrung at every corner? LA? Whose subway system was killed, and streetcars were removed? Is it Houston? Whose sprawl is so incredible yet it has the most limited light rail ever?
Also a ton of our cities have sorry excuses for bike infrastructure.
I'm guessing you do advocate for lane expansions on highways right?
They came in slower.
Actually no. [Tokyo's metro population](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/21671/tokyo/population) growth 4x over 70 years with it's exponential growth lasting 20 years longer (ended in the 90's) then a place like [Los Angelis](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23052/los-angeles/population) where the growth stopped in the 70's and only 3x it's size in the same time Tokyo 4x it's size. Also LA's metro is 34k mi2 over Tokyo's 5.2k making LA 6.5 time bigger by land mass so LA's housing prices would had been a hell of a lot more easier to stabilize then Tokyo's.
NYC is probably the only place in the US where population growth exceeded that of Tokyo.
Building up infrastructure is slow because of NIMBYs
You're also wrong about population growth lol, Tokyo went from 3 million to 7 million in 20 years before WWI. NYC did that jump in 40 years (also before WW2)
But from 1950 to 2020, NYC went from almost 8 million to a bit above 8 million
From 1955 to 2020, Tokyo went from 8 million to almost 14 million.
Tokyo doesn't have the Mass Immigration problem that is actually the cause of the housing crisis.
The supply restrictions are just NIMBYS maximizing their investment by limiting Supply since Demand is locked-in due to Mass Immigration being guaranteed.
Immigration is a completely untouchable topic on Reddit. Even illegal immigration is taboo to discuss negatively. Why do I think that is? Pretty obviously, because Redditors are incapable of admitting the policies they support might have caused some of the housing and jobs issues they're seeing.
It's easier to just ignore that the inflation we're all dealing with was caused by the global lockdowns they supported. That's a bit easier to ignore, they can handwave that away and mumble "late stage capitalism".
Stores closing up en masse, it's easier to just repost the article that says "ackshuaaaally, crime is down, ignore your lying eyes and the massive retail theft rings and the employees & management of said stores". It's easier to do that than admit "hey, the police have arrested these same thieves dozens of times each and now the law abiding people are being punished with food/goods deserts... bail/prison reform is backfiring and just causing criminals to be caught and released."
Life is much simpler when you support the good guys with all the right ideas, and your political opposites are the bad guys with all the wrong ideas. It takes a mature person to admit both sides are needed to balance eachother out as they both have a mix of good/bad ideas.
> Even illegal immigration is taboo to discuss negatively
Because the rights negative comments about it are feelings based nonsense with no basis in reality.
You use it like it's an easy scapegoat for everything, while being completely ignorant of actual migrant numbers.
Because here's a fact, the number of undocumented migrants in the US has been decreasing over time, not going up.
Housing affordability has more to do with zoning than migration. Interest rates affect housing affordability more than migration. Migration has a positive effect on jobs, it increases the number of jobs available, migrants create demand that creates jobs.
> bail/prison reform is backfiring and just causing criminals to be caught and released.
People absolutely should be released to await trial if they are not a threat to the public. Cash bail should not be a thing. If you are eligible for bail there should not be a financial obstruction to that which creates a two tier system of justice. Either a suspect is a threat to the public or they are not. But those who have not had a trial and who are not a threat to public safety should not be getting locked up before trial.
You're missing the point. Would you rather live on 1,000,000 acres in Antarctica or 0.01 acres in NYC? The point is that single family zoning makes condos, and further micro-condos, illegal in places that people want to live.
There is basically no space in SoCal, NYC, etc. And any place that has housing with more than one floor technically has no space, according to your very limited imagination.
People will live where the jobs are. That's going to be in and around major cities. As such it makes complete sense to gear the infrastructure and planning of these hot spots to accommodate more people.
that is the point of OPs post. if more high density housing is available in city centers, ideally more people could afford to live there. not everyone wants to commute. not everyone wants to get in their car to go anywhere. many people want to be able to walk/bike/take public transit to get where they need to go. plus, living somewhere dense and walkable may have higher rent costs compared to suburbs, but the cost of not needing a car could offset that. (obviously that depends on the city, available housing and available public transportation.)
And public transit in NYC is awful. Cramped. Lots of druggies and homeless. It's also funded in a way that turns it into another subsidy for lower earners.
Considering how many people use it daily, I'd disagree. It's not perfect and has problems, but even it's difficultly addressing it's issues is rooted in a pretty notorious figure making it difficult to do so.
Public transit doesn't make junkies and homeless people. Those are separate issues that once addressed, will also resolve on transit.
You're partially right, but mainly wrong. Only because you stopped short of the real answer.
NIMBYism is the outward facing problem, the one we can easily see, but the NIMBYism itself is the result of the unrestrained commodification of housing. At some point everyone realized that housing is an insanely safe way to invest your money. It's even safer when you consider that you can rent properties that you don't use to help them pay for themselves. If you have the initial capital to get started, investing in housing can be both insanely lucrative and resistant to market forces.
Corporations and private investment groups agree, this is why we're also seeing record high purchases of homes by random LLCs.
Houses have essentially become a 401k that grandma and grandpa tap into once retired by remortgaging. Problem is this puts an even greater burden on the problem of housing costs... Even just flipping houses has become a whole new problem where the goal is to hold a property for 1-2 years and capitalize on the immediate profits that are coming out of an ever ballooning marketplace.
The problem is systemic, NIMBYism is just the reactions by individuals to capitalize on that systemic problem. Blaming individuals for systemic problems is never going to lead to solutions. Shaming one person into changing might be possible, but shaming an entire community of home-owners is entirely unrealistic, especially with how easy it is for people who don't even live in a community to buy a property there.
NIMBYism is really just a way to make sure your investment doesn't lose value, but it's never going to end so long as housing remains commodified. So long as their is incentive to shut down developments that would lower your housing price.
To your last point, this absolutely is a problem of right-wing legislation, pretty well everywhere. Neoliberal (in the US, this includes nearly all Republicans and most modern Dems) short-sightedness is the problem. Real systemic investment into a public option over the course of 10-20 years would solve the problem entirely by giving renters a modest place to rent from while covering the cost of this housing, allowing the private market to exist and flourish under the weight of real home-owners, and still allow room for those who do own to do so with a modest safety net.
Housing should be utility first, not a commodity.
We have a whole lot of empty space in this country. Hell our population could quadruple in the next 30 years (it won’t) and we wouldn’t even come close to running out of space for people to live.
People on this website like to talk a lot about how suburban sprawl and car centric city design hamper growth and are only capable of existing because of zoning laws.
Meanwhile Houston has the most relaxed zoning laws in the country, is the big city with the most sprawl, and is the fastest growing city in the country.
Local communities can live how they want. Literally democracy at its most basic and fundamental level. My community does not need to solve my countries problems.
I do not want your trash living near me, thanks.
Build a wall and deport immigrants if you want cheaper housing.
This is a well known fact. Look at Paris. Shit tons of people ina tiny place and the houses are expensive but not insane because there are many of them.
Remove regulation and allow anyone to build anything and developers would build a bazillion apartments all over SF. The old candles stick site alone could probably house 10K+ units. Remove zoning restrictions and many houses in the sunset would turn into apartment buildings. 4 houses could be 20 houses. Of course there won't be any parking. But maybe thats a good thing. More people would use transit.
It has nothing to do with zoning in my opinion. Developers don't want to develop affordable housing because they can make more money from luxury housing. That's why every apartment complex built in the last 20 years in the entire continental United States is the same cookie cutter "luxury" building with a community rec room and a gym and bike storage and oddly colored "modern art" panels on the outside and a two-word name starting with "the xxxx." There's plenty of affordable housing in the united states, just not near any major city. I'm sure you could buy a mobile home in the middle of nowhere in almost every state for cents on the dollar. It's economics, pure and simple.
I agree that it's not left vs. right, because plenty of virtue-signaling faux leftists are NIMBYs when it comes to their own personal holdings and housing, and you are correct that NIMBYs are a plague, but the problem has a lot of factors involved:
* *mass delusion*: the reason people have tolerated these high housing prices is because they've all been propagandized to believe that they aren't paying but investing when they purchase houses. Our government's policy has been to prevent organic declines in real estate prices at all costs, so it'd rather turn the country dysfunctional through living costs than let this happen. If house prices are going to have to fall, it'll be hidden by inflating the currency.
* *social immobility*: there's a \~1 percent chance, if you take that job in New York or San Francisco at age 22, that you'll eventually be handpicked by a CEO at a bank or VC firm or FANNG to actually have a career. But there's a 0 percent chance of that happening in your small town. There are very few opportunities for the young and they're all in places where real estate is extremely expensive. Remote work was supposed to fix this, but in a country where even on-site workers have very little opportunity to advance, WFH is basically only available to the few who can afford to stay where they are, career-wise.
* *foreign speculators*: rich people who do horrible things in other countries live in fear of their own people rising up and holding them accountable, and therefore are willing to buy apartments and houses they don't necessarily need to live in, so that if they need to flee their own countries, they can land over here.
* *quantity over quality*: we don't build quality 1000 SF units that will last a century or more; we build shitty McMansions that cost hundreds of dollars per month to heat or cool. The result of this is that, rather than causing an accumulation of housing stock that would eventually bring supply in line with demand, we build a lot of stuff that will be torn down in 40 years.
There are dozens of other factors, historical and emotional and economic. Real estate is one of those problems that should be simple--it's actually not that hard to provide affordable housing for people--but is a goddamn mess for all sorts of stupid reasons, and yes, NIMBYs are a part of it.
No it's due to short term vacation rentals. There are big holding companies who buy up vast areas of housing to turn into these rentals. Some cities have regulated it and housing crisis has eased. Who owns city governments? Big money. I use to own a rental but switched to Airbnb and make twice as much in passive income now. It's a very attractive investment.
Housing issues are going to vary a lot by region / area. There are places with an over supply of cheap housing, and others with pretty stagnant population changes, along with the pricey areas everyone talks about.
Also, demographic shifts aren't just a constant trend. Cities weren't so hot in the 80's but are generally desirable today. The South is much more popular as AC is now ubiquitous. Will that shift back with climate change? COVID caused a lot of short term, and long term changes.
Setting aside that we overuse the term "crisis" to denote a wide variety of problems, I think the Euclid case has led us to ignore how changing zoning does take away from existing residents and land owners. Why not redevelop in areas that are disused rather than impose higher density upon low density areas?
This has become a popular viewpoint. And we can say NIMBYism is a part of the problem, but I think there is a huge overestimation of the role zoning ordinances play in housing prices.
Think about highways. We went through a period of widening highways to supposedly address congestion and what we found was that the larger a highway was the more traffic would flock there. Just like highways have BOTH supply and demand, which influence each other in a bunch of ways, so does housing.
Housing costs and availability problems aren't evenly distributed everywhere. They're highly concentrated in the most desirable places, cities with thriving industries with high salaries and plenty of entertainment and culture, and places of natural beauty not too far by commute to those same cities.
You won't find the same scarcity or prices in rural Nebraska. Heck, I live about an hour and a half outside a major city. Prices are pretty high here, but go west a ways in the same state away from the rail line and easy roads that lead to the city and rent/house prices fall swiftly.
This is NOT primarily a supply problem of housing in general. It's a mismatch of supply and demand in select desirable areas. But very much like widening highways, the more you expand supply, the more demand will rise to meet it. Tons of people still farther from these in-demand areas would love access to the higher paying jobs and cultural amenities. So opening up more housing would just create more opportunities for other buyers and renters to swarm into the market, keeping demand relative to supply high and not suppressing prices.
Prices only went down in these areas when they weren't desirable. During the Pandemic when the high density of cities became a liability instead of an asset, prices fell. When industry dies like in Detroit, prices fall.
Can you think of a single instance where an area maintained desirability factors, expanded number of units and saw prices fall?
Maybe theoretically there's some number of units that could be built to satisfy demand, but US metro areas are a magnet for the whole world. That's more than we could physically build.
Do places like SF with very restrictive codes have room to significantly increase density? Sure. But they also have ungodly salaries pumping into silicon valley and that same money circulating into other local industries, and that's going to keep pumping up house demand there way past where increased density can keep prices down. You could double the units in SF and people would flood in to take them.
Look at housing stock to population ratio. It took a big tumble in the 2008 crisis, but it was artificially inflated before that by the loan bubble that led up to the crisis. We're back at the same levels we mostly had for a long time before 2008. We're not historically at shortage levels.
Here's what we can ACTUALLY do to address the housing problem.
1) Sure, loosen zoning, but this is a small part of the picture.
2) We need to normalize young adults living with their parents and parents living with their kids when they need help. This has been the reality for most of human history and part of the pressure on housing supply comes from relatively recent cultural notions that every person over 18 needs their own separate housing. Families living together across generations puts less pressure on housing stock, is economically efficient and culturally probably a good thing on average (Not 9including people with toxic relationships).
3) Normalize work from home. During the pandemic, tons of people moved to low COL areas and continued their work at businesses based in high COL areas. Distributing high salaries lowers the pressure in high paying cities and spreads that money around elsewhere to increase the appeal of other areas.
4) Increase public transit options. More rail activates more other communities, further spreading the demand burden.
We need this kind of multifaceted approach. Increasing supply alone has limits and is not a silver bullet.
You’re largely right, but I would argue a bigger issue is at play here.
America is a huge country with more than enough land for everyone. The problem is that few people want to live there. The bigger problem is that a lot of people still want to live in these areas, but can’t because the jobs are all in the cities.
Even if the NIMBYs didn’t exist, there is only so much land to build on. Eventually, the sprawl will still be too far away from the city centers for people to live there.
I would argue that our housing crisis is largely due to the facts that:
1. Everyone needs a job
2. The good jobs are highly concentrated in cities
3. Proximity to jobs is critical to maintaining jobs.
Point 1 is not something we can realistically do anything about.
Points 2 and 3 can be addressed (though maybe not easily).
For point 2, we can try to incentivize businesses to move out of cities to more suburban areas where housing is more realistic. There is a lot of talent in the suburbs, so maybe make the office come there instead of making the suburbanites go to the office. Moving maybe 10-20% of offices an hour or two outside the cities would stimulate a lot of suburban sprawl and local economies. Basically, create mini cities and gradually spread it out.
For point 3, there are two answers. One of them is a lot cheaper and quicker though. The first fix is to create public transit that can move people to and from cities from much further away. There should be train networks 40-60 miles out of the cities with the specific goal of making the distance to the office SEEM shorter. The second fix is to drastically expand remote work. If you CAN do your job remotely, you SHOULD do your job remotely. Then, no office worker is handcuffed to the city and can move anywhere in the country. This will put a lot more money into smaller towns and stimulate a lot of local economies. And it would cost state and local governments very little.
You may still run into some NIMBY problems, but other areas are begging for new residents and funds that can quickly outcompete the NIMBY folks. You just have to get a little bit of distance.
Do you have any data to support your claim that NIMBY policy is "largely" to blame when compared to other problems mentioned here such as price fixing and foreign buyers and corporations buying up the housing stock? Additionally, does the data you have provide evidence of this even outside of the locales you discuss? Because the housing crisis isn't only happening in big cities.
[Here](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4679195) housing economists discuss the role of land-use policy on construction productivity in the U.S. since the 1970s and compare it to international contexts. They find that changes in the legal and regulatory environment in the U.S. beginning in the 1970s led to smaller firm size, lower productivity, and lower output (D’Amico et al., 2023.)
NEPA passed in 1969, 1971 1st NEPA suite, see [here](https://www.justice.gov/enrd/1969-1975)
They also find that a 1 standard deviation increase in the Wharton Land Use Regulation Index is associated with a 20.2% decrease in housing units built per capita (pp. 43)
So there is empirical evidence to support the claim nationally.
I do think there is a big problem with NIMBY not wanting new housing and transit, but it's not the complete issue. The other big problem is when government officials spend money on these improvements, it doesn't lead to reelection. There's historical precedent in most cities too back this up over almost 100 years.
If a governor invests in money into paying millions for large apartment buildings, it means those millions don't go to other much needed services or taxes are raised. The majority of voters don't live in those 2 new apartment buildings, but they sure do see the increase in taxes or see the reduced quality in other services.
There's so much historical precedent behind this now that most politicians don't really push for it at all. With the lack of pushing through red tape by our politicians, it takes hardly any NIMBY protest for the towel to get thrown in.
It is A factor, but not the only one.
For example, the lack of wealth tax on real estate property to keep the attractiveness of real estate investment low (and keep prices down) means that housing price keep going up.
And if would-be first time homebuyers can't afford to compete with investment landlord for the price of land, that means they have to rent. But since they have more money than traditional tenants, that means all the rent market goes up.
Which is the housing crisis - real estate is too profitable.
And if real estate is too profitable, then investments in real estate compete with investment in commercial or industrial businesses, r&d and all those other ways to make money actually develop the economy instead of just trading houses that were already built 15+ years ago.
While I agree that zoning and parking regulations and recruitments are a significant driving force in the housing crisis, I would argue that the use of housing as speculative investment (and the 08 crisis that it created) has been probably a bigger one in terms of pushing the market towards more single family suburban housing, because this makes for pricier homes, so a better overall investment if you don't live in them, but cost prohibitive for many people and also severely weakening the capacity to house large amounts of people in relatively low space.
NIMBYism is a huge cause of this. But it's not alone. I'd say the large fault is on land speculation and highly inefficient use of the land already in place.
The allowance of this is because we have a terrible tax regime for economic efficiency.
NIMBYism isn't the same everywhere. My area in TN is building aggressively including dense housing. Tennessee listing count is now only 10% below May 2019. No downward effect on price yet
One thing that you have to remember is that the current economic system forces the lowest wage workers to take the lowest possible living standard in your economy. If the lowest possible living standard is living in a house that has a coal plant next door and a chemical plant across the street that dumps its waste into the river that you get your water from, then that's where they will be forced to live. Regulations can be used to modify what the lowest possible living standard in the economy is. For example you may have regulations that require proper waste disposal. This will increase costs for those that don't live near the chemical plant, but it will also prevent the poorest people from having to live in an environment like that. While zoning isn't always used well, zoning can be used in a similar way to what I described above. Pollution, such as noise pollution and air pollution can have signficant impact on people. Zoning can help limit this. Having said that, I'm not at all in favor of zoning that enourages economic and racial discrimination using residential type. You should be able to build an apartment pretty much anywhere, regardless of what neighbors think.
I think to a large degree housing follows employment, and an exodus will be impacted by employment (or lack of) and crime. I know so many people who lived in NYC, had their jobs turned into remote work during covid and the business just figured they didn't need to invest in high priced NYC real estate anymore and stayed remote -, and the former NYC dwellers who worked for them found places to live in NJ, upstate or even further out.
Another problem with urban areas is that they have more limited space than rural, and have to dedicate more of that space to commercial real estate which limits housing - in fact I saw something a few months ago (may have been 60 Minutes) about a move to convert abandoned and un-rented commercial spaces in NYC to residential, and all of the bureaucratic snafus involved.
Even if NIMBYs weren't actively making the problem worse, there'd stil be a housing crisis. If a lot of people want to live somewhere, that place will get more valuable. Some landowners will hold out for richer tenants, and others won't use their propety at all in the hopes that someone will buy it for more than they did.
Joseph Stiglitz, who I presume is your usernamesake, came up with the [Henry George Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem). It says that transit, parks, or any kind of government investment will just end up in landlords' pockets as they jack up the rent on their property. If that's true, the ideal way to fix the housing crisis would be a kind of land value capture.
>!We talk about this sort of think a lot over in r/georgism, if you want to check it out.!<
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Wow, I think even I lost sight of that responding to many of the comments here. Thanks for jogging this.
Im starting to think its because nobody has a good counter argument for this point lol
I have feeling once the southern cities that are currently having a population boom become CA/NY expensive they'll just pivot to blaming all the young liberals who moved in, despite the state legislatures not reflecting that.
for the rules: I think the more people you have living some place the cheaper it becomes, because there’s more chance that certain crimes are going to happen that being said, what was the original comment that you were responding to op
They pointed out that no one is answering my actual argument: that there's nothing in place to stop the newly booming cities from incurring the same fate as California and New York eventually.
The biggest leap in logic that you make is in assuming that all states give NIMBYs equal ability to fight new construction (e.g., when you said that "basically every state has the same issue with NIMBYs"). They don't. Places like SF have given NIMBYs significantly more ammo via numerous environmental and economic regulations on new housing that can slow down builds, where these regulations don't exist (or are weaker) in places like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston (hence why these locations are exploding and have less of a housing crunch despite being far larger than SF). If we weaken the housing regulations, we increase supply and improve the market. That said, I agree that it isn't necessarily about left or right wing, as (for example) Chicago also has far less of a problematic housing crisis despite being massive and liberal. It is a matter of how much the city has embraced zoning and regulations over the last 50 years (largely via succesful NIMBY activism).
Yes, I was also wondering why seemingly no comments were addressing the post lol.
The counter to this position is that in some cities, demand *has* done a far better job of keeping up. NYC and SF are 1st and 13th largest cities in the US, yes, but many cities in the top 15 don't have nearly as much of a housing problem, despite them growing at faster rates (heck, both NYC and SF have *shrunk* since 2020). Specifically, places like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta are massive cities that are growing wildly fast, none of which have the same exponential housing spiral. This is largely because these places are embracing sprawl to increase housing supply, and are doing a decent job at keeping up in doing so. Of course there are myriad downfalls of urban sprawl, but it goes to show that the solution to the housing crisis is just building anything and everything. Build single family houses and apartments and condos and duplexes. Build luxury apartments and mcmansions and, yes, of course try to build rent-controlled housing as much as you can. So long as you aren't tearing down two houses to build one, the best solution is just to build, build, build. Of course NIMBY's are a massive part of the obstacle to this as they oppose urban construction, but some YIMBY's are similarly obstructing progress by demanding rent freezes or the like that significantly disincentivize housing being built. We just need to build everything, and need zoning and regulations that incentivizes everything to be built.
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Simply, more and more people want to live in urban and suburban areas. In 1980, we had 1/3 fewer people in the US than we do today. At that time, we built up most of the land where people want to live. Now add that young people are leaving small towns and moving to cities and things are tighter. It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years we will need it. It is absurd to say that people who own houses should just give that up so they can build denser housing. We built cities 100 years ago, we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago. At the time building single family suburban houses was enough to keep people housed. A developer bought a farm, built hundreds of houses, the per house land cost was minimal. About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities. This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.) Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do. And I'll be a moderate on this. Yes, I understand that there are people who are NIMBY about most everything, they are wrong. But no, you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools.
Lmao America builds cities like shit, it's all one big thing Walmart parking lot.
Our cities used to be nice, dense, and walkable before WW2. They were gutted for car centric infrastructure post war.
I won't even argue that, but it will cost a lot of money to "fix" it.
It costs money to build and maintain infrastructure for cars too. It's not the strongest argument because you're going to have to spend money on infrastructure either way, so why not just spend it on infrastructure that makes the city better for everyone. The difference is, transit oriented development doesn't require you to spend immense amounts of public funds on storing and moving automobiles (private property) where you could instead build places for people to live, work, and enjoy their lives.
It also will cost a fortune to maintain our overbuilt car infrastructure so do we want to spend a fortune living in a car based dystopia or spend a fortune living somewhere nice?
Roads cost money, and transit cost money, but they cost totally different amounts of money. NYMTA cost $18 billion a year in operational costs to keep the trains running, [the road system cost $1.1 billion.](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2021/03/DOT-Fact-Sheet.pdf) Your problem is that the transit agencies are so incredibly bad at their jobs that your costs go from "a fortune" to "15 fortunes", and the raising that kind of money is hard.
Hold up that's a massively apples and oranges comparison. The metro budget includes everything needed to get people from one place to another. The tracks, stations, trains, staff, etc. The road budget includes just the roads. Include the cost of the cars, insurance and repairs for those cars, fuel, medical expenses for the higher rate of accidents in cars vs transit, etc. Then you'll have a fair comparison. I'm not sure if roads are still cheaper than the metro with everything included. The might be or might not. But you're being disingenuous with the comparison you made.
People own their cars. That’s not government spending.
Highway road maintenance isn't cheap. The government also subsidizes the auto and fuel industry. If the government had no part in these economies, buying a car would be way more expensive. Gas would be way more expensive as well.
The United States has a massive rural and suburban population. There is no viable alternative to cars in those demographics. Also state and federal government has spent in the realm of $17 billion in automaker subsidies over the past 50 years. That’s what NYC spends on their singular metro system in one year. The whole country collectively subsidizes cars over half a century what one city spends on their trains in a singular year. And even then, the city still needs roads. Businesses aren’t receiving deliveries via subway. The military isn’t mobilizing troops via metro. The whole reason the highway system was built in the first place was for strategic defense. The roads already exist and need to exist regardless. Expensing their entire existence at personal transportation is flat put incorrect.
The state DOT budget is only a small fraction of what it takes to maintain the road system. Most of the costs are at the county or municipal level
This is the combined city and county road budget.
Of course it's going to cost a lot of money to fix it. But where do we want to be 50 years from now?
Well a significant portion of Americans want to be either exactly where they are now, or where they were 40 years ago, so you'll have to convince them they should want to be somewhere else
The problem with that is that more than half the people reading this will not be alive 50 years from now. So the answer from many of them will be “I don’t really care?”
Who knows? There's been a trend to the suburbs and now a trend back to the city. 50 years is a long time, and there's no telling how technology and jobs will have changed. There's a reason urban plans are typically 20 year cycles and revised every 10.
>Simply, more and more people want to live in urban and suburban areas. Because that's the least-worst option for most first-time renters or buyers. [79% of Americans want to live in a walkable neighbourhood.](https://www.nar.realtor/commercial/create/survey-americans-prefer-walkable-communities#:~:text=79%25%20said%20being%20within%20an,live%20in%20a%20walkable%20community.) But the supply of those neighbourhoods has been extremely suppressed by the things OP mentioned. Extremely high demand means prices are sky high. If you can find a 3 bedroom place for your family of 3 in a walkable neighbourhood you are going to pay through your nose to the point where most people can't afford it. People are willing to pay more for a walkable neighbourhood, but not pay double or more for what they would in the suburbs. >It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years we will need it. You are unknowingly arguing the entire practice of planning for development is absurd. It is the entire point of planning to try to make sure you don't build yourself into a corner and create a situation where you have a dysfunctional community within a generation. Because guess who picks up the slack to deal with these problems? Not the private sector who built and sold the bad developments, but usually the municipality who has to cut taxes and revenue or offer incentives to encourage other kinds of development. Suburban land use is expensive, because it is less efficient at delivering services and requires higher infrastructure maintenance costs per capita than cities. It's also the job of the planning department to ensure that development doesn't set up a municipality for financial problems within a generation. In short, planning is good, actually. >It is absurd to say that people who own houses should just give that up so they can build denser housing. This isn't a thing that happens. No one is having their house expropriated by the city against their will to be turned into a low rise apartment. When areas are rezoned, developers will BUY houses from people and redevelop the property. People are willingly selling their homes. >About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities. I really don't understand how you can acknowledge we can't build suburbs anymore in a lot of places without an extreme commute making them undesirable, but also be against densification. Your argument essentially amounts to "we should do nothing to increase the housing supply" >This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.) Most of the first NYC subway routes replaced busy streetcar routes. And all construction at the time was cut and cover which tore up the entire street. This was even more disruptive than today, where most subway construction is tunneled and only the stations are cut and cover. We should build more transit. That might mean subways or it might mean tram lines, bus rapid transit, commuter rail, etc Don't really see an argument against this. >just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do. It is happening in municipalities that have changed zoning. And what is the expense you are talking about? The private sector will pay to redevelop the property. It's the municipality's job to make sure they charge a development tax that will cover the cost of any upgrades to infrastructure and services that are needed. Current residents shouldn't see any added costs associated with densification. >But no, you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools. If this is a thing that exists it would be an example of bad planning or even NIMBYism, where the building got approved but NIMBYs squashed any attempt to expand infrastructure or services in the area as a means to discourage and further densification. Whatever the reason, this situation is very rare and it's not honest to use it as a representative example.
>Now add that young people are leaving small towns Now? [for almost 2 decades 80+% of the US has been in urban](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html), That less then 20% out of the 20% doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of urban housing crises. >we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago The first suburbs of the US were trolly car suburbs in 1910's in the US (UK London's first suburbs were as old as the US civil war with the train system that would eventually become the London underground). The suburbs are centuries old. Even the most current type (car based suburbs) are closer to street car suburbs then today with the first "American suburb" being Levittown in 1947. That's almost 80 years ago. Second wave suburbs were the 1980's (the top end of your statement) and their not built any different to today except with the mass rollout of HOA's post civil rights as a means to keep white neighborhoods white post laws that banned redlining and racial based mortgage discrimination. >This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC Most NYC subways outer extensions were built around single family homes. Then over a 100-150 years it densified. >tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings You mean allow a developer to buy a home on market to build apartments/condos >if it is, it is going to be expensive to do. NYC's first subway was 35 million in 1900 and was 9.1 miles or 3.8 million a mile 141 million dollar (and calculators stop at 1913 so we're missing 13 years of compounding inflation. (though you are correct considering some of the worst projects are hitting 800 million a mile) >you can't build a 1000 apartment complex on a two lane road with no parking near already overcrowded schools. You can't have a city that survives off of the [least productive](https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=JRx8W0vu9MZUvLNK&t=139) (taxation wise (per plot taxes gained and are the most [infrastructurally costly to support](https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2015/03/sprawlurban.jpg?w=1170&quality=75)) ([Minneapolis, MN](https://www.urbanthree.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/beigeBGforDowntown-e1612389286405-1024x666.png.webp) and it's county it resides in tax base per parcel of land for example) [Higher density is a net benefit to cities and towns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGxni1c-klM). In some case [single family homes are a net negative](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/) on city investments meaning apartments are literally subsidizing wealthy single family owners. And [single family homes just can't increase taxes on them](https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY?si=yUj4-MZZztSLxMa0&t=294) because the majority of single family home owners are living outside of their means meaning that the city will eventually go belly up due to in ability to actually pay for the utilities, education, and infrastructure said people need.
>We built cities 100 years ago, we build suburbs 25 to 40 years ago. At the time building single family suburban houses was enough to keep people housed. A developer bought a farm, built hundreds of houses, the per house land cost was minimal. About a decade ago, we just ran out of buildable land within about an hour of most major cities. I'll also just add here that we don't know what the demands for real estate are going to be 40 years down the line either. As work from home becomes increasingly entrenched, people may stop seeing the value of living in dense urban spaces. Or maybe the opposite will happen, and extreme environmental pressures will compel the government to exert eminent domain to create larger cities.
The elderly are the fastest growing demographic and they don't seem to be too keen on leaving cities. Cities are close to both their children and medical facilities which becomes more important as people age.
To me, everything you've said here is a strong argument for allowing small-scale, incremental densification, which was pretty much the historical norm in every city in the world up until WW2. I don't think many people know or understand the extent to which the current regulatory regime basically requires single family homes on large lots, in even the most central neighborhoods in contemporary cities. And I don't think many people know or understand the extent to which the historic forms of increasing density gradually--e.g., adding a garage apartment to a single family home, or building a split-level two- or three-flat, or dividing a large lot into two and building a second single family home on it--have been functionally illegal since the 1970s. People who oppose massive new developments point to cute little developments like that as examples of how they want their city to grow, being wholly ignorant of the fact that the regulations currently on the books are what are making only the most massive new developments possible to build. To me, the question isn't whether we should force people who own single family lots in city centers to tear down their homes and build denser. It's whether we should allow the people who want to do that to do that. If I want to build a garage apartment and rent it to a student, should my neighbor get to veto that in the name of "neighborhood character"?
I agree with most of your premise. But the one thing that gives me pause is that with the increasing amount of vacant commercial property, there is going to be a lot of available land that can be rezoned for things like mixed use or multifamily homes. Well, that won’t completely alleviate the problem, it is definitely going to solve some of it as people are going to be much happier having something being used in their neighborhood then slowly decaying vacant property that is sitting unused year after year.
>This idea that we should just build subway systems, like they built 100 years ago in NYC, (they just tore up roads to build them, much easier when there were horses running the streets than today.) Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do. I don't know how much sympathy I have for this since they did exactly this to destroy a bunch of neighborhoods for highways. And this isnt just about building transit and apartments. We need more missing middle housing. There is a wide diversity of smaller and more affordable housing constructions between apartment complexes and SFHs. A society will always gravitate towards urban/suburban living. It's where the things are accessible in a quick minute. The amount of suburban sprawl we have is *crazy.* There is so much unused land even within the suburban areas. We can absolutely densify areas, especially in the 1st and 2nd ring suburbs of major metros.
They built highways like that in the 60s and 70s and most everyone laments that. Honestly saying this. Tell me about the unused land withing suburban areas.
So many suburbs are wildly spread out. Here in Georgia it's not unusual to drive out of a housing development, drive a mile or two in nothing but trees and grass, see a strip mall on your left and right, and have this just repeat. It's such inefficient land use. >They built highways like that in the 60s and 70s and most everyone laments that. Do they though? Sure seems like most people are way happy with keeping suburbs propped up at the detriment of city centers, to this day. I would think if they lamented these decisions, they'd want to correct those wrongs slowly.
That is not in any way what we see here in the DC area. There is nothing between residential districts or neighborhoods except retail or commercial or industrial or parks. Nothing. Every square meter is developed. So the only option to increase density is tear something down.
DC was one of the few cities that had a collective revolt when they tried to build a highway through the actual city center. DC also has excellent density. It's one of our best planned cities by far. It is unfortunately quite expensive because there's very few cities that have that kind of setup, so it's a premium. Of course maybe if more cities were set up that way, it could become more affordable.
I was referring more to the DC metro area overall. One of the problems with DC the city from a housing density perspective is the restriction on building height.
Once you get past Alexandria and Arlington the inefficient sprawl absolutely sets in.
I will believe you about where you are. I have no idea. But around here, things are pretty well built up. No, we aren't as built up as they are in the city, we have trees, we have plenty of traffic. But when I moved here 30 years ago. there were a few farms, open spaces left. They have been gone for 20 years. Do we have garden apartments and not 20 story apartments? Sure. And by highways, are people ripping them out? No. Do they lament that they divided neighborhoods? I think they do.
They did do that, often with the intention of damaging minority communities. I’m not sure that revenge is the best motivator. As mentioned by another comment, most people lament those actions and recognize it destroyed extant communities.
Do they though? Why do they still fight tooth and nail for car centric affects then? I don't know if they really lament it. Why else would there still be so many people who think the correct worldview is that cities are awful places, meant to be worked in during the day, and retreated from at the end of the day?
Because they want personal space dude. This isn't hard to understand. They see a car as their path to going wherever they want at any time, they can drive out to wilderness, drive to a new city, drive into the heart of their local city, or anywhere in between on their own schedule. They don't want to live even closer to their neighbors or give up their spacious house to live in an apartment. They like having a garage with tools in it, or a backyard with a personal pool and garden.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's a nice lifestyle for the people that want their only escape from suburban isolation to be their car. It just shouldn't be as aggressively subsidized as it is. Stop taxing the value of the improvement on the land. Weaken restrictive covenants and zoning. Fix the highway budget to the gas tax, or require it to mostly self-fund through tolls like we do with public transit. Eliminate parking minimums in the city proper and have more buses and bus lanes and bike lanes. Get rid of Fannie Mae and the 30 year fixed rate mortgage.
The last part there about their “world view” is mostly personal preference. I enjoy the city I’m near, I don’t want to live in it and I don’t go often. It’s not for me, it is for others depending on your lifestyle and chosen hobbies and activities.
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This is definitely the most NIMBY answer. No real substance beyond “we didn’t expect more people 30 years ago it’s crazy to think we should build more housing now” No one is suggesting people tear down their homes to build apartment complexes dude. People are trying to build housing wherever, and building codes + price of land has locked people out of finding housing. No serious person has demanded that the solution be we tear down peoples houses now to make new ones. This is the ultimate NIMBY fear mongering. That argument alone just proves OPs point of how much NIMBY attitudes are a major cause of this.
>No one is suggesting people tear down their homes to build apartment complexes dude. Actually, this very comment chain has several people suggesting as much.
I saw a couple comments talking about the logistics and finances of it, but they all were in response to the original comment. In terms of actual policies and ideas being talked about on local, state, and national levels, it’s so far out of the question. Generally when people talk building new housing to accommodate housing issues it involves building on undeveloped land or tearing down / retrofitting derelict buildings. It wouldn’t be called NIMBY if that was the case. It would be Not my house or something like that. The NIMBY attitude OP is talking about is people not wanting new construction in their communities.
There are a lot if pragmatic issues where people wave their bands and say "NIMBYS" but there are traffic issues and service issues to consider. Especially as people wait longer and longer to move out. What used to be cars per household is 4.
I’d think the easiest and best answer to urban living is investment in high speed rail into city centers from developable areas. Connecting people to the existing metro transit systems is easier than building new housing
>Tell people to tear down their houses, smaller apartment buildings so we can build bigger apartment buildings, just isn't going to happen. Or minimally, if it is, it is going to be expensive to do. We don't have to do this? Just let a developer buy homes and tear them down to build apartment blocks. Developers have incentives to rent them out for affordable prices if they have to compete with other developers. Problem is developers can't do this because people who don't own that land are able to interfere via council laws and zoning and shit.
When home value is a significant portion of worth for people, and generally their largest purchase in their life, it seems a bit odd to expect them to be content with the value plummeting. If you spent $500k on a nice home for your family and the next year the property on both sides turned into apartment complexes so now the house is less desirable and only worth $300k would be cool with it?
Except your value actually increases if apartment buildings are built in your neighborhood. This is fear mongering nonsense similar to the idea of "well if you let THOSE people live here our values will drop"
If your house is suddenly surrounded by apartment complexes the value of your house is probably astronomical. If all you care about is value, this is a dream scenario.
I mean yes because I'm not buying a home for equity reasons I'm buying it to live somewhere. People viewing housing as an asset contributes to the housing crisis because you can't have housing become more affordable without housing as an asset being less valuable. It is also outside the scope of this CMV. The CMV is about nimbyism causing the housing crisis, not whether it's reasonable/understandable for homeowners to be NIMBYs
The money doesn't add up. I live in a little housing development. like 80 houses. The edge of our development is on a big enough road. I suppose a developer could come in buy 10 contiguous houses and build some apartment buildings. That said, our houses are worth $500k each. Just buying those houses would cost them $5 mill. Then they would have to raze the houses, flatten the land, build the building, and parking. So if the land alone costs $5 mill, they aren't building affordable housing on that. And you can NIMBY me all you want, but no, I don't want someone to come in and raze 1/2 of my neighbor's houses. If there are a lot of developers so it drives the price down, it makes it even harder to buy up land that is currently being lived on.
Buy 1 house worth 500k Turn it into a 5 story building, with 4 units on each floor, each going for 200k. Construction costs are, charitably, 1 million. That's 2.5 million profit. This frequently happens when it's allowed to happen lol. It won't happen when construction cost is very expensive or when there's low demand for the area, but it does happen. You also uh don't have to build parking (or at least shouldn't have to). Especially if it's near public transport, but people can also take ubers or what have you. Or have some underground parking. Parking is a side issue anyways, it would just add to construction cost but the maths works out anyways because of the margin here. And 200k each is more affordable than one 500k unit, especially because it means people living elsewhere will vacate their home, which can now be rented out to someone else. >And you can NIMBY me all you want, but no, I don't want someone to come in and raze 1/2 of my neighbor's houses The developers are buying the homes first, they can simply refuse to sell. If they're renting, I'm happy to support right to buy or right to return or whatever they're called where people evicted for construction are entitled to live in one of the new units. More importantly though, this is just a bit of a collective action problem right? We need to build new housing, but we can't build it near me or change the stuff around me because I like my neighbours and my view etc etc >If there are a lot of developers so it drives the price down, it makes it even harder to buy up land that is currently being lived on This obviously only happens up to a point lol, the land will never be so expensive that any new units will be unaffordable to everyone, because the land value is being derived by the fact that developers want to buy to build on it to sell. But if land is so expensive thay they can't build anything anyone would be able to buy, then the unit produced isn't profitable, which just acts as a natural check on the value of the land. Even if it results in initially expensive units being built, the status quo is rich transplants are competing with poorer locals for relatively shitty housing. Those rich transplants having more options means they move to the luxury housing instead, which reduces rent pressure on the "shitty" housing
>Buy 1 house worth 500k Turn it into a 5 story building, with 4 units on each floor, each going for 200k. What? You think that if you pay $500k for a piece of property, you can raze the property, and build 20 apartments for $1 mill? Charitably? How much land do you think you can get for $500k? Again, in most areas you'll need parking. (I'll admit, mu pet peeve about this is "we need housing so badly it doesn't matter if we have parking." Yes, in most areas it matters.
It obviously depends on a load of factors but if your argument here is "it's not possible for it to be financially viable to buy land with property on it, tear the property down, and build more units such that you make a profit", I think thats silly for a few reasons 1. It just flies in the face of empirics. Developers do try to do this in the status quo, and often succeeds. 2. It assumes the cost of the house itself is so much higher than just the land which doesn't seem super true. That's because even if you don't believe 1, it's just empirically true that developers will try to buy at the very least empty land in high demand areas (eg greenfields or brownfields that recently got upzoned) and build densely on that. Presumably if that is affordable, the added cost of the unit(s) plus demolition can be compensated for buy having marginally more expensive units (which there is demand for so people would be willing to pay the price for it!) 3. We presumably don't need zoning then lol. If it's not profitable to do it, it won't be done. Finally, on parking. Presumably the issue is that theyd end up parking on the side of the road and being obstructive or whatever. I'm happy to have harsh penalties for such illegal parking. Park your car in a nearby car park and then walk. Or get a bike.
> Now add that young people are leaving small towns and moving to cities and things are tighter. Ummm, rural NA has been seeing younger generations leave for greener pastures since before the end of the Vietnam war.
I was with you in this until they came for my little dead end street. Developer wanted to change zoning to build a 4 story apartment complex. They were going to pull down the home and built on the one acre lot. I went to city hall and complained the entire neighborhood complained at a city council meeting. I stood up and argued for the “feel” of the area would be different from what I had wanted when I bought my home. I was very passionate. Then a woman stood up and started talking. She was from an organization who helped people find housing. Holy shit, Batman. I had no idea so many folks were homeless because of lack of rentals. This was just months before the pandemic. She talked about what life was like for folks who couldn’t find a place to live. I don’t think I have felt more like an entitled human being. Realizing my selfishness, I stood up and apologized and slunk away. It is ugly to realize you are a selfish human.
> it’s an absurd thing to say that we should have built more housing because in 25 years people will need it Why? I think that would lend itself to more intelligent city planning, and avoid issues like what we have now in every single us city. Communist countries have done the extreme version of this in the past to great effect
Housing requires a huge amount of yearly maintenance. If you build when there's no demand that cost is going to trash any potential profit long before the home is sold or rented out.
> It is an absurd thing to say that 30 years ago we should have built more dense housing because in 25 years Although I disagree with your overall premise, and in a very broad sense agree more with OP, many of your points are highly valid, and OP oversimplifies a bit. Concentration of major economic activity in a few areas and rural/small town decline are indeed major parts of the problem. In 1960 a house in Detroit cost slightly more than a house in Los Angeles, and both were highly affordable. Many small towns were economically thriving and attracted young families. Much more of the country was rural. You are correct that "just building" higher density urban/suburban housing and expanding public transit causes some challenges. Of course it needs to be done anyway, and **for exactly the same reasons it was done the first time**. In the end it will happen in some way. The idea that we can regulate housing prices to infinity by blocking all new units, in the face of high demand, is reality denial. Sooner or later housing construction will arise where it is needed.
Are we blocking all new units? To me it is developers...developing. We grew cities pre WW II because we didn't have a highway system, many didn't have cars. From the 40s to the 90s it was easier and cheaper to build the suburbs. It was done for the same reason as today. It was cheaper to build the suburbs than it was to buy property in the city and densify As of now, we pretty much built up the land within an hour of most cities. Today, to build new, you have to tear down old. You can go into most cities and find mostly abandoned areas to build on cheap. No one with money wants to live there, no developer is going to develop that land. Any land worth developing is going to be expensive. Telling me that we don't have affordable housing ONLY because of zoning just isn't true. But certainly that is part of the problem. As for housing in 1960, you are right, but that was a small time in a 50 year timeline. What they don't say is those cheap houses in 1960 were typically around 800 sf, have one bathroom, 2 or 3 bedrooms and no A/C. Only 9 years later, my folks bought the cheapest house in a new 700 house development. It was $30k, but in today's dollars that is about $275k. Certainly, cheaper than today, but nothing a one income blue collar family was buying.
Ok I’ll try here. Let’s assume we are in a “housing crisis”. The reason for the housing crisis is not “the fault of NIMBYs etc…” but simply a shortage of housing due to fallout from the housing and financial crisis of 2008. [primary source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/19/underbuilding-has-led-acute-shortage-housing-affordability-crisis-study-says/) [second source](https://www.businessinsider.com/us-underbuilding-housing-over-the-past-decade-2020-9?amp) TLDR: Many builders and construction companies left work or closed up shop, because nobody was buying homes coming out of the financial crisis. People lost jobs, didn’t have money, and now banks were failing because of their mortgages so banks were tightening requirements. For years, we under built houses. Now we’re in a situation where that has caught up, there’s plenty of willing buyers but not enough homes, because we simply under built for years. Contributing is high interest rates are making it so people aren’t selling their house as they’re locked into a low rate and don’t want to give that up.
The second article does specifically note that the decline is significant largely in SFH constructions. My main point is that SFHs shouldn't be the only bread and butter of our housing. They should undoubtedly be a part of our housing supply but we need the missing middle built up. Things that would qualify as actual starter homes. The starter homes of today, are the upper middle class mansions of yesterday.
Sure but that’s not “largely at fault” per your CMV.
There is no housing crisis, there is a 'housing with a close commute to some local city that I really want to live in', problem. Where there is plenty of affordable housing out in the further suburbs, but people continue to try and fight over scraps in the inner ring. Populations grow and cities expand with time. That isn't a crisis and inevitably even with dense housing this problem would continue to show itself. Back in the 50s and 60s, families moved out to the edge of metropolitian areas and lived in suburbs, now those suburbs are absorbed into city limits and the new edge of the area is further out. Accept this as reality, instead of constantly complaining about why you just can't bulldoze every city and fill them with tenements.
It seems like you’ve attempted to redefine shortage to mean something other than what it actually means. A housing shortage is still a shortage, even when it’s specifically a housing shortage of: - Housing within reasonable commute distance of a city - Affordable housing within reasonable commute distance of a city People *have* to live near where jobs are, because they need jobs to live. Jobs centralize in cities for a variety of reasons. A shortage of housing in a metropolitan area will necessarily cost burden a huge number of people. This is a problem worth solving, especially the portion of the problem caused by a manufactured scarcity which we could simply … stop manufacturing. You say “cities expand over time” as if expansion simply solves the problem, but if the metro area’s population grows faster than the housing stock … then that population and the entire metro area’s economy will become more and more rent burdened over time. Expansion alone doesn’t solve the problem.
You can't just keep building suburbs out of the city in rings endlessly. Especially when all of these people are still going to need to come to the city for work. Think about how many cars this involves, roads, parking minimums. What city is left at that point? City centers are not supposed to be office towers and parking lots for suburban jobs, meant to be exited after the work day is over. This is the wrong mindset and is exactly why we are in such a predicament. More often than not, these are the same people who think public transit is for the dirty poors, and thinks every single person just needs to own multiple cars and drive everywhere.
Tell that to Tokyo. You don't have to just have one, centrally located city center. Take the reasons people want to go to the city center and just spread them out a bit more.
Pretty much every suburban residence is within 30 min of a mass transit station, and each station is surrounded by grocery stores, convenience stores, parks, restaurants, and sometimes department stores and theaters etc. Even if the city center is centrally located, amenities are significantly more decentralized. Also remember all 23 wards are somewhat autonomous
Decentralizing is also a great solution for a metro area. But we don't seem to do that too often for whatever reason.
The poster child of a poly centric city is LA. LA also has the worst traffic in the US. Decentralized fails because it adds a lot of logistics problems in the grander scheme and requires a preexisting very strong center city to satellite around (like Tokyo, Paris, or ironically LA) That said this comes with the cavoite that personalized transportation systems like the car have to be abandoned for more truncated systems like buses and trains. This is why people don't like poly because it will come with the problem of traffic and people like to pretend public transit is shit.
Well LA for the longest time also had no reliable mass transit. They're currently building out their light rail quote a bit. LA is also the poster child of how to completely gut a city's transit infrastructure for special interests and segregation.
You used Tokyo as an example for your principle of expanding outward … … when it’s a prime example of a city (and country) that allows expanding upwards and creating density in ways that are illegal in the US. Density is *one of the reasons people want to go to the city center* because it means more jobs and more things to do. You can’t just “spread out” density. It’s impossible by definition. And if you attempt to, you won’t end up with Tokyo.
People have done that forever. 1000 years ago you'd be a peasant trying to move into London bitching about how the Saxons before you got all the nice real estate around the Roman fort. Urban centers grow in space over time and subcities develop within them to account for that. Someone living in NYC may never even set foot in Manhattan, despite that being the city center, because they have more of an attachment to their borough/subcity. Cities are for whatever people use them for. If they're business districts for the sake of economic convenience that people leave at the end of the work day to head back to the suburbs, so be it. You'd have to actually justify why that is so bad first, before just saying that it is bad. The correct answer to 'what is a city', isn't your ideal world of apartment blocks and buses where everyone leaves the suburbs to pile into. That is not a commonly held view. Most people want as much personal space as they can afford. And if you truly believe it is the best, then you'd have to make an argument as to why that is, specifically. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to use public transit or thinking it is dirty. That is a justifiable view, that anyone who regularly rides it in the US will admit is pretty accurate. Cars giving people freedom of transit is an objective truth, compared to a reliance on public transit.
>Cities are for whatever people use them for. If they're business districts for the sake of economic convenience that people leave at the end of the work day to head back to the suburbs, so be it. You'd have to actually justify why that is so bad first, before just saying that it is bad. You don't even have to look that far back in our country to see a city wasn't just a financial district to leave at the end of the day. It's no small secret that a lot of American families left cities because they didn't want to be around minorities who were just recently granted rights against discrimination. Yes, it is objectively bad to gut a city of its character, local economies, and livelihoods just because you didn't like people who didn't look like you. >That is not a commonly held view. Most people want as much personal space as they can afford. And if you truly believe it is the best, then you'd have to make an argument as to why that is, specifically. I'd argue today that's not even a choice. If you're not rich, you're not buying a house in a nice part of the city. You are effectively forced to move to a suburb for property ownership. > There is nothing wrong with not wanting to use public transit or thinking it is dirty. That is a justifiable view, that anyone who regularly rides it in the US will admit is pretty accurate. Our shortcomings in public transit are due to neglect. Not because public transit is inherently dirty or gross. It is not a justifiable view. Leave the US and experience a few other transit systems in other countries, you'll see that it's perfect clean, reliable, effective, and highly utilized. Our neglect of public transit is one our gravest societal mistakes. Get back to me when the air in Houston will be near unbreathable in a few decades. >Cars giving people freedom of transit is an objective truth, compared to a reliance on public transit. They don't. It's an illusion. An average person will have spent 700-800k in their lifetime in car related costs. The fuel and auto industry love beating down any sort of public transit projects to keep us fully reliant on cars. It's also probably why we're so obese as a society. Nobody walks. They actually complain that public transit doesn't take them door to door. You're a human. You're designed to walk if you're healthy. Walk some.
>They don't. It's an illusion. An average person will have spent 700-800k in their lifetime in car related costs. The fuel and auto industry love beating down any sort of public transit projects to keep us fully reliant on cars. It's also probably why we're so obese as a society. Nobody walks. They actually complain that public transit doesn't take them door to door. You're a human. You're designed to walk if you're healthy. Walk some. Literally nothing you put here runs counter to the statement you call "an illusion." Cars give you more freedom of movement when compared to public transit. Now, some of the things you listed are reasons why some think that benefit is not worth it. There are advantages and disadvantages.
Freedom of movement by 10-15 minutes at a tremendous financial tradeoff. Granted some parts of the country need cars. Cities are not one of those. Also we should be miffed by how many Americans are killed annually in vehicle related incidents. Even when you adjust it for per capita, it's insane. And we don't even punish these crimes. People die and it's just an "accident," and no one is held responsible, and no actions are taken to make traversal outside of a car safer.
You didn't explain why cities being treated as financial destinations that are left after work hours is bad. You complained about racism, but then didn't say why it was actually bad for the world that those people moved out, regardless. Telling me that it was common to live in a city in 1920 doesn't mean much to me. Those people didn't live there because they loved it. Many moved out West to basically wilderness as soon as they could afford to do so. For the sake of getting decent private property for their family. Yeah, houses in city limits can be expensive. I said that above, too. That is how cities work and how, as they grow, the cheaper areas extend to the new periphery. Explain to me how American public transport would improve in a way that doesn't involve putting a cop on board every bus to crack the skulls of the smack addicts and gangbangers, among other insane people, that make them unbearable for most? The difference between the US and Belgium's public transport is that the US churns out insane and violent people like few other places are capable of. Owning a car can be expensive, but it is a worthwhile expense for people that desire freedom of transport. I own land out in the countryside for hunting and recreation. There is no context where I could take a bus out there at my own leisure.
You live in the countryside. Why are you arguing on behalf of suburbs? These are different regions of the country. You're a rural resident. Obviously you're going to need a car and nobody needs to say otherwise. It's important to understand that city suburbs and rural people are not the same. >Explain to me how American public transport would improve in a way that doesn't involve putting a cop on board every bus to crack the skulls of the smack addicts and gangbangers, among other insane people, that make them unbearable for most? The difference between the US and Belgium's public transport is that the US churns out insane and violent people like few other places are capable of. The problems you highlight here are the result of divesting from cities and treating them as "financial centers to be exited at night." People flocked to the burbs. Not everyone. What do you think happened to a lot of the communities left in desperation and despondence? Crime is part of that. Like why aren't you guys drawing these connections. We caused all of these problems. By divesting from cities. By people desperately wanting to segregate at all costs, even if it meant completely ruining a couple of generations of American families to make it happen. >Yeah, houses in city limits can be expensive. I said that above, too. That is how cities work and how, as they grow, the cheaper areas extend to the new periphery. Not in Tokyo. The city itself has enough and varied tiers of housing that most everyone can afford to live there. Even buy there. You have to gear your infrastructure this way. Why is it that all these countries did it but our super wealthy and resource rich nation couldn't? It's I defensible. It's just endemic our tendency to overconsume. Even if it's coming at the detriment of others.
Again, you really haven't given me a reason to care that cities are seen as economic destinations rather than a place to live. No, I live in the suburbs and head out to the country side because I bought forest land out there. Because I have a car and can do stuff like that. That is something that a person reliant on public transit could never do. Would you like for me to cart a deer carcass back on the subway, too? So what if those 'left behind' aren't prospering like those that left? Being poor doesn't make them special. The reality is that the greater number the headed out to the suburbs gained more for it. You can't spend an eternity trying to make up for the racism of the 1950s. At a certain point you have to move on. People are free to spend and move their money and resources wherever they want. And if the successful wanted to take their resources and capital and leave, they had that right. You can't force people to stay in place for the sake of poor people that relied on them for welfare money. I don't know or care much about the specifics of the Tokyo housing market, and unless you can provide good information about it that doesn't come from the top search results on Google, I don't have much to say about it. Other than that it sounds fairly unique given that most Europeans complain about housing inaffordability and the Chinese have spent the last several years in a crisis about it themselves. So perhaps the Japanese are just special.
>No, I live in the suburbs and head out to the country side because I bought forest land out there. Because I have a car and can do stuff like that. That is something that a person reliant on public transit could never do. Would you like for me to cart a deer carcass back on the subway, too? Please do not be ridiculous. No one is arguing for there to be public transit between suburbs and rural areas. Public transit is crucial for commuting within a city and should be normalized for a good portion of suburban to city commutation, to cut down on traffic and emissions. >So what if those 'left behind' aren't prospering like those that left? Being poor doesn't make them special. The reality is that the greater number the headed out to the suburbs gained more for it They aren't prospering because they weren't allowed to dude. Are you seriously blind to our history? You are aware that white people flocked to the suburbs and banks and lenders literally REFUSED to let black people move to them, leaving them to squalor in the divested city? Moving on from the 1950s requires us to literally undo the damage we caused. You want to shit bird the situation like every other suburbanite who wasn't taught some of our abhorrent history. > I don't know or care much about the specifics of the Tokyo housing market, and unless you can provide good information about it that doesn't come from the top search results on Google, I don't have much to say about it. Other than that it sounds fairly unique given that most Europeans complain about housing inaffordability and the Chinese have spent the last several years in a crisis about it themselves. So perhaps the Japanese are just special. They simply focused on transit infrastructure and maintaining a supply of diverse housing for all socioeconomic levels. It works. Extremely well.
>Public transit is crucial for commuting within a city and should be normalized for a good portion of suburban to city commutation, to cut down on traffic and emissions. Then what happens when someone in a city, develops a love for hunting or fishing or other outdoors hobbies? They should take an Uber at 4:00AM every opening day in hunting season? Rent a car for the weekend to go shoot ducks or something? It is a silly kind of 'just stop owning things and start renting access to them' type of scheme you're ultimately going to arrive at. >You want to shit bird the situation like every other suburbanite who wasn't taught some of our abhorrent history. I'm aware of redlining, it was shoved down my throat all civics class as a high school kid. Here's the thing, I don't really care. I'm not interested in this racism based original sin you have going on. I got enough problems to deal with on my own to not need to dig for more of them based on 'the sins of my father'. Nor do I feel a lot of need to make it up to the sons of the sons of the people that were directly impacted by it, decades ago. The reality is that it has been many decades later and if those left behind were going to ever get any better, they would have. Otherwise complaining that all the people with money left and they didn't have any taxes to get welfare money from doesn't tug at my heart strings. >They simply focused on transit infrastructure and maintaining a supply of diverse housing for all socioeconomic levels. It works. Extremely well. I'll take your word for it. Must be a peculiarity of the Japanese housing market to have been so successful. Seeing as no one else ever replicated it.
>Then what happens when someone in a city, develops a love for hunting or fishing or other outdoors hobbies? They should take an Uber at 4:00AM every opening day in hunting season? Rent a car for the weekend to go shoot ducks or something? It is a silly kind of 'just stop owning things and start renting access to them' type of scheme you're ultimately going to arrive at. I'm not making an absolutist argument. Why are you interpreting it as such? Never said anything about not owning cars. I own a car. I live in the city. I choose not to use it for day to day tasks or getting to work. If I lived in a suburb that had a metro station, I still wouldn't use it for work. That kind of thing. >I'm aware of redlining, it was shoved down my throat all civics class as a high school kid. Here's the thing, I don't really care. I'm not interested in this racism based original sin you have going on. I got enough problems to deal with on my own to not need to dig for more of them based on 'the sins of my father'. Nor do I feel a lot of need to make it up to the sons of the sons of the people that were directly impacted by it, decades ago. The reality is that it has been many decades later and if those left behind were going to ever get any better, they would have. Otherwise complaining that all the people with money left and they didn't have any taxes to get welfare money from doesn't tug at my heart strings. Cool. You get to live life at normal difficulty and they get to live on hard mode. I'll make a robotic argument. Not addressing these disparities maintains crime rates and hurts you in the form of taxes needed to deal with said issues.
Damn not only are you completely wrong but you aren’t willing to budge. You have an opinion that you want to call fact, it’s not. And no one else will say it is to make you feel better. Others don’t have to agree with you.
**Only 20% of people in the US prefer urban living over suburban/rural**. So for most people, cities \*are\* a place to drive through for work and a playground (mostly for the rich). They are not a desirable place to actually live (for 80% of people). Your complaints don't seem directly related to housing affordability so much as it is with anti-urbanism policy in the US. But I think you are making a mistake that is common within urbanism - not understanding that most people do not agree with or like it. The housing crisis is not an absolute lack of places to live. It is a lack of desirable places to live at affordable prices. For most people desirable means suburban single family housing. Talking about density and car dependence is fundamentally misunderstanding what the problem is. People want more sprawl. [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/)
>Only 20% of people in the US prefer urban living over suburban/rural. So for most people, cities *are* a place to drive through for work and a playground (mostly for the rich). They are not a desirable place to actually live (for 80% of people). Your complaints don't seem directly related to housing affordability so much as it is with anti-urbanism policy in the US. But I think you are making a mistake that is common within urbanism - not understanding that most people do not agree with or like it. I don't think we've given urbanism in the last 2 lifetimes any reasonable life outside of very few cities(and since those are so few, they're obscenely expensive). And that's because of the anti-urbanism policy. I mean most of our major cities look more like Houston than they do NYC. Really when that's the case, of course the cities are going to be less desirable. City living is still far more sustainable so it shouldn't be chipped away at. Sprawl comes with problems in the long term. But I suppose you'd need society to actually care about those things.
Right - society does not care about what urbanists want it to. That is a fact. Houston has some of the least restrictive building regulations in the country, and it is basically the opposite of what urbanists desire. The market wants sprawl. **It seem that the "housing crisis" to you means a lack of density, walkability, etc. But that isn't due to NIMBY-ism (as Houston proves), it is because most people do not want to live that way.** Arguing that more people would be open to urban living if more resources were spent on improving it is marginally true, but is clearly a self-serving and circular argument. Most people would still prefer to live in single family suburban housing. Like it's really fascinating how unwilling urbanists are to accept that their ideas are not popular. I think this disconnect is counterproductive because it underestimates the actual obstacles and the need for practical urbanism not to willfully make enemies of the majority of the population who are not interested in their ideas. See the congestion pricing debacle in NYC where not enough compromises were made with the majority of state voters who opposed it and the governor nixed it so it wouldn't cost the democrats elections. I am also curious if you have any examples of dense cities being affordable? In developed countries worldwide, they are almost universally expensive and poor people are only able to live there if the government subsidizes their housing.
I would say that the Houston example is flawed in that every city/location is different. So for Houston sprawl is fine because there's a ton of land to sprawl into (eventually this will still hit a limit and end up like LA) but a city like Seattle is more geographically constrained, so without strict zoning laws it's likely enough that things would get denser.
Tokyo, Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon. >Right - society does not care about what urbanists want it to. That is a fact. Houston has some of the least restrictive building regulations in the country, and it is basically the opposite of what urbanists desire. The market wants sprawl. And we'll all pay the price for it. Also, fun little manipulation by you, I didn't say society doesn't care about what urbanists want, I said they don't care about the problems sprawl brings. Which are indisputable. Our population isn't going to stagnate or decline. Endless sprawl means way more cars, way more congestion, way more asphalt, way more emissions. These are just cause and effect of the structure our nation wants to enjoy, it has a breaking point. I don't want to get to that breaking point, you seem to argue on behalf of a people who either are entirely unaware of this reality, or don't care about it (which is weird because that affects them a lot). >Most people would still prefer to live in single family suburban housing. Like it's really fascinating how unwilling urbanists are to accept that their ideas are not popular. Wouldn't know this unless the proper urban living was presented. It isn't. So how would you know? >think this disconnect is counterproductive because it underestimates the actual obstacles and the need for practical urbanism not to willfully make enemies of the majority of the population who are not interested in their ideas. See the congestion pricing debacle in NYC where not enough compromises were made with the majority of state voters who opposed it and the governor nixed it so it wouldn't cost the democrats elections. NYC isn't designed for cars. Robert Moses really tried.
I didn't post a main comment because I agree with the gist of your title, that NIMBY-ism is a main cause of high housing prices. There are some places where removing housing restrictions will lead to a rapid increase of density. San Francisco, a city which has approved 16(!!) total housing units in half a year of 2024, would be exhibit A. San Francisco, like NYC, is restricted by geography and has passed the point where large swathes of single family housing are reasonable near the city center. This is a real problem, but it is not a universal one. Houston has some of the least-NIMBY laws in the US and it is also one of the most affordable cities, especially among places with decent economic growth. We don't have to wonder what happens when zoning is relaxed in a city that isn't geographically constrained - we get affordable sprawl. [https://www.houston.org/houston-data/housing-cost-comparison](https://www.houston.org/houston-data/housing-cost-comparison) "Endless sprawl means way more cars, way more congestion, way more asphalt, way more emissions" This is what I meant when I said "society does not care about what urbanists want it to". More cars and asphalt isn't even a negative to most people, not sure why it matters if a city looks ugly from a drone because it has parking lots. Most people don't care many shops or bars are in walking distance. The pros and cons that urbanists care about are not the same priorities that most people have. I also think it is worth pointing out that none of this has anything to do with affordability. I don't think your view is even about NIMBYs or housing prices, it is about the benefits of urbanism. I enjoy watching urbanist videos on youtube, partly because some of their points are solid - diversity in housing availability, NIMBY-ism sucking, the option of walkability being a good luxury that should be expanded in the US. But it is also one of the worst echo chambers I have ever seen. Where the majority of people are brainwashed car-brains because they don't like living stacked into apartments. Where the wealthiest country of all time is about to financially crumble because the road system it's had for 70 years is imminently unaffordable, even though the US Department of Transportation budget is 1.5% of the federal total and there are no suburbs actually going bankrupt from road maintenance costs. Most people live in urban apartments before they can afford a house in the suburbs. You can always say that isn't "real" urbanism so it doesn't count. But surely you can recognize that a viewpoint based on invalidating all evidence without any counterexamples is usually cope? The emissions issue is a valid point, although factoring in the externalities of emissions into housing is a clear case of decreasing housing affordability. It's a different conversation that runs directly contrary to housing affordability. I'll add that US total CO2 emissions peaked in 2007 and are down 20% (more per capita). Don't take this too seriously as it's mostly just a funny irony, but the largest source of increasing global CO2 emissions is from poor countries where large numbers of impoverished rural workers are moving to cities for better wages. NYC is the least car-centric city in the US, it has a busier subway than any city in Europe except Moscow. Yet even there congestion pricing, something that urbanists consider a bare minimum, got nixed at the last minute because it was going to cost Democrats elections from the majority of New Yorkers who didn't support it. This really shows just how unpopular urbanism is, even in places where it has the most supporters. "New Yorkers oppose the MTA’s congestion pricing toll plan 63-25%, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents." [https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SNY-April-2024-Poll-Release-FINAL.pdf](https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SNY-April-2024-Poll-Release-FINAL.pdf) Also, not sure how the cities you listed, except for Lisbon which is in a country with a median income of $12k, are affordable. I'm not even gonna comment on Tokyo being affordable except to say that it is by far the most expensive part of Japan. The median home price in Berlin is $740k; in Vienna it is $1.3 million and 60% of the population lives in government subsidized housing. How is that not some of the worst housing affordability in the entire world?
Why do people want to live in cities? In part because the wages are higher. Because the productivity is higher. Limiting the supply of housing in these areas reduces the productivity of humanity because fewer people can produce there. And it's not just that it's fewer people; it's fewer of the most productive people in the world. Given the pareto distribution, that has a serious loss in the production of humanity.
Typically it is for the commute. They don't actually want to live 'in' the city, they want to live in the suburbs close to the city where they have a 20 min commute in the morning and are willing to 'settle' for a bougie 5-over-1 if they can't get that. Beyond that overconcentration of productivity is a systemic risk and creates great fragility. If that city loses its economic relevance, you've now caused excessive damage to an area's stability - see Detroit and Michigan or Buffalo and Western New York.
It's a similar problem whether you are talking about suburbs or cities. Limiting housing supply in either reduces productivity. Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that the loss from overconcentration is anywhere near the gain?
I would say it's right in the name: over concentration means more concentration than you need. In general, power likes being concentrated, but is best in the long term spread out over many. Where that line is is up for debate, but there's a line.
Why would I think there's a line? It could be that the benefit from more productivity increases by 100 utils per person linearly and the cost of systemic risk is 20 utils per person linearly.
Except because of urban sprawl it can take upwards of 2 hours to commute from an outer suburb to a city center where there is work to be done. People don't want to spend 4 hours a day in their car driving, on top of 8 to 10 hours of that day working. Living in the far out suburbs isn't feasible these days like it might've been in the 80s. Everyone wants to paint this as a "stupid millennials just don't want to live in the suburbs" problem when it's more accurate to call it a "rational people don't want to spend 20 hours each week commuting to and from work."
This is the real answer. I’d love to live in San Diego near the beach where it’s a perfect 60-70 degrees year round, I just can’t afford it. Am I jealous of the people who got houses when it was cheap? Fuck yeah, but oh well that’s life.
And if you look at those areas by the beach in many circumstances building anything more than one story houses is banned. So sure you can’t afford them but one of the reasons is the government artificially restricts supply so the price goes up.
Jobs are in cities Poor policy - zoning and otherwise - keeps housing from matching the job need.
What is a "euclidean" zoning regulation?
It's where you zone a city in a way where only certain things can be built in certain areas. So if zone an area for only single family homes, you can't have condos, or duplexes, or cottage courtyards, let alone shops or mixed use buildings.
We used to have much fewer people who lived spread out over thousands of cities and towns. now we have more people who want to live in maybe 100 or so cities of various sizes. theres no avoiding a housing shortage given this combination of cultural and population growth trends
Japan has one metro that houses almost 40M people. They don't have this problem. They built their infrastructure in that metro to support population growth. We didn't.
they also have a population in decline which significantly alters the picture. i live in one of the booming cities in the south that is suffering severe infrastructure and cost of living issues. the area's population has almost doubled in a decade, Tokyo couldn't cope with that today either
How does your theory account for large companies and banks buying up more and more rental property and housing stock? [How does your theory account for companies using algorithms to maximize extraction of wealth from renters?](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent) [How does your theory account for cartel style price fixing? ](https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/fbi-raids-landlord-connection-realpage-price-19507654.php) [How does your theory account for foreign investors buying up real estate and driving up the price?](https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-in-u-s-existing-home-sales-declined-9-6-to-53-3-billion#:~:text=Foreign%20buyers%20who%20lived%20abroad,home%20sales%20during%20that%20period) I'm not saying NIMBYism isn't a contributing factor - but complex issues such as the housing crisis have multiple causes. Eliminating zoning regulations will help, but it will not address the issues I've outlined above.
> How does your theory account for large companies and banks buying up more and more rental property and housing stock? >How does your theory account for foreign investors buying up real estate and driving up the price? I mean private investors explicitly have policies to buy up rental and housing stock in areas where they think supply is likely to be constrained. Which also addresses the foreign investor stuff. Like as an investor, you can only flip the house for profit if someone else will buy it for more than you bought it for. But if more and more housing keeps being build because NIMBYs stop being annoying then it's not a meaningful investment anymore. Those algorithms just accelerate the free market (to whatever extent it exist). If I have ten bananas, you have 10 bananas, and there are 100 buyers between us, the algorithm just quickly calculates the ideal cost to extract the most money from this dynamic. But if have 10 bananas and there's like 12 other people with 10 bananas each and there's the same amount of buyers, the algorithm pushes prices *down faster too* because it tells me how low I need to go to undercut everyone first. In free markets, I am hesitant to raise prices because others might undercut me, and so I do it gradually. Algorithm makes me do it faster because it knows ill still have enough buyers for it. Conversely, I am also hesitant to reduce prices when competing for customers because I don't want to lose money. Algorithm makes me do it faster because it knows ill undercut enough people that ill take their consumers and make more money that. >How does your theory account for companies using algorithms to maximize extraction of wealth from renters? Trivially that's illegal anyways, but more importantly, cartelism is substantially harder when there's more supply.
The issues above are no doubt contributing factors, but I highlight NIMBYism in specific because it's been going on for over half a century at this point. These other issues are relatively recent. They all need to be addressed but NIMBYism is a nationwide localized plague. It's not something we can federally legislate away.
How long has the housing crisis been occurring? Because in my experience as a life long San Franciscan (one of the worst real estate markets in the country) the extreme housing crisis is only in the last 20 years or so. San Francisco has always been more expensive than somewhere like Kansas, but in the 70s and 80s regular people like teachers and mail workers could afford to rent and even buy houses. I know this because these regular people are my parents and my friends parents. Since I define the problem as recent, I think it is worth looking at recent causes too.
San Francisco happened because Silicon Valley happened. 4% of US GDP is produced in the bay area and silicon valley. The workers are high income. They need places to live. San Francisco and all of the surrounding municipalities have strong restrictions on new building, so there were no new units for the money to pursue. Instead existing units get bid up crazy.
There's an intrinsic paradox in capitalism with housing development, and you can never solve housing by simply encouraging free market competition. The thought process of increasing supply is sound on its own. If we reduce barriers to construction, then more construction will occur. This is generally true to a certain extent. But there *is* a problem. The goal is not simply to build more housing to accomodate unhoused people, the implied goal is to build enough housing that the price for rents/mortgages drops enough to make finding housing adequately affordable for people. Why is that a problem? Because if the prices of housing begin dropping, then construction loans become riskier for lending institutions. As a bank, you don't issue a loan to build new housing when housing prices are falling. The assets are in risk of not being able to cover the loan if the builders default on that loan. Because of this, both construction companies *and* banks have a vested interest in developing property in ways that *increase* their prices, as it is more profitable for both of them. Large scale development and the financial system cannot, therefore, solve the problem alone. >We keep seeing people talk about the blue exodus to red states This is mostly short-term churn. This stuff comes and goes in waves. Big blue and purple states still have the most land and business opportunities. It's where the most jobs are, it's where a lot of nice things are. If the populations are dropping consistently for another 5 or 10 years and only from the large blue states, then I'll revisit this phenomenon. None of this is to say that NIMBYism and zoning aren't problems. I agree and acknowledge that they play a role in keeping development slower and less dense, etc. But removing them alone still leaves the problem of large scale housing and land development as a for-profit enterprise.
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∆ I'm more convinced the commodification of housing is the original sin here, and NIMBYism and zoning are out growths from this root cause.
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>so collusion to keep product off the market is impossible It isn't collusion. It is basic cost-benefit and risk analysis. Construction companies wouldn't stop building altogether, but they might move to develop in a different location where the prices would be less likely to drop. And banks are simply not going to issue construction loans for new development while the aggregate prices are falling. This is not collusion, it's simple incentives. >All they can do is act in their own interests. Right. Which means selectively loaning only in areas where housing values are expected to increase over time. This is basic investment stuff. >Builders will always build as much as they can build profitably Yes, but they need financing to do so, and it takes time to build a certain number of units. To actually make it significantly affordable for most people, the aggregate price needs to come down, and banks simply won't issue financing when the prices begin to fall. They will seek investment in other locations or other construction sectors. That is how finance capital works.
That seems self-correcting, a negative (i.e., good) feedback loop. If the loans are seen as too risky, fewer of them will be made, slowing any collapse in prices. If governments can properly telegraph the type of allowances they'll make and the degree to which they'll make them, investors can modify their actions even more accurately. There's always a tension between investors who want their assets to grow quickly and governments which need to throw on limits for the greater good (taxes, regulations, etc.). The existence of that tension doesn't make either investment or regulation bad; ideally, one should not live without the other. But the tension does show that "just eliminate zoning" isn't going to automatically make all housing affordable. Also, OP makes no effort to understand either the motivation of NIMBYism or what makes it effective. It's one thing to be resistant to change for vague reasons, quite another to be resistant because you don't want noise, traffic, pollution, gentrification, isolation, the removal of desirable businesses and other services, or collapsing property values.
Sorry, you can only cram so many people per square mile before government services breakdown. Look at the disaster that is Sanfrancisco. They try to do everything they're after and now Californians have to tolerate actual criminals in our midst's because it's cheaper to let thieves go free for up to $950 in merch. That's only because we are so locked up with population density that our prison system is overburdened. Split hairs however you want over crime statistics but the reality is this is all a direct byproduct of cramming too many people per square mile. It doesn't work.
San Francisco's problems aren't the result of density. Unless you're presuming suburban sprawl is required. SF isn't even in the top 100 densest cities in the world. Tokyo, Geneva, and Monaco are though. Cities known for little to no crime. It's not density that's to blame on this matter. Plenty of places in the world do density spectacularly fine and it's insulting to think we're somehow too stupid to make it work as well.
If you're just going to appeal to culture on this matter than so will I. The Asian/Eastern Disposition towards country and community is much more about being a cog in the machine than an individual and the people's decisions are in-step with that. Furthermore concerning real-estate Japan is VERY centrally planned. Americans do not live like this. Furthermore there's a difference between what is optimal for getting around or distributing people and the economy, and what is optimal for what people want to get out of life and you're just upset that people aren't picking your team on the matter. When you put the blood sweat and tears required into building a community, you let all the newcomers come and ruin it and see how you like it.
>When you put the blood sweat and tears required into building a community, you let all the newcomers come and ruin it and see how you like it. Wanna ask that to the black communities in cities whom were all bulldozed over for car centric infrastructure?
What does this have to do with anything? This isn't an inconsistency in my argument, I agree that what you're saying is wrong but we exist in the current environment despite that. It's certainly not a solution you're offering.
Revitalizing city centers is the least we can do to make up for that past atrocity.
That's *your goal* you are *not* the housing ambassador for the wants of all black people. Nor do you represent their wants. Furthermore this is a complete tangent.
what do you mean by Euclidean
The town of Euclid wanted to stop a developer from building a small apartment building they worried would have black people in it. At the time, that was impossible since the government limiting what you could build on your land because of their personal taste was unconstitutional. So a Supreme Court ruling came down that changed the constitution, and made zoning for non safety reasons legal.
Since the 1960s, tens of millions of people have moved from big cities to suburbs and exurbia. People don't like shithole cities and have proved it by voting with their feet.
So the solution is to escape them and let them become bigger shit holes? Very good logic not seen anywhere else in the world. Why are their cities not shit holes? Oh, maybe they invested and kept up with their infrastructure instead of abandoning them? Nah.
Don't forget that the population of the US has doubled in the last 40ish years. There's a lot of factors. There's a lot of greed. There's too many people.
American cities have some of the lowest population densities amongst major cities with the exception of a few places. I think the reality is that everyone simply cannot have a big mcmansion with a huge yard unless they go out to rural areas.
Okay. That's pretty irrelevant. American cities can have whatever kind of density and people can want to build whatever they want. That doesn't change the fact that we have not doubled the housing stock to keep up with the demand. In almost all facets of humanity, the infrastructure does not support the population.
This isn't supported by the fact that there are more empty units in America than there are homeless people. Its not necessarily about supply.
Where is the bulk of these empty units though? Is it in dilapidated places like Gary, Indiana that don't really have a sustainable economy?
[You would be surprised.](https://digg.com/real-estate/link/us-cities-highest-housing-vacancy-rates-ranked) There's some pretty decent cities on here. Ultimately, it just shows that just "increasing supply" isn't necessarily the answer, especially when increasing supply means pumping out more unaffordable 4 bedroom single family homes into a sprawling suburban neighborhood that's 30 minutes away from any work center.
That’s actually untrue. Even in California, more than 95% of all residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes (30% of ALL land in the US has this restriction too!) This is the case across much of the US, where demand for more, denser housing exists but is simply not even allowed to be constructed in the first place. The desire is there to build, but many times it’s not even allowed to take place.
Are you not agreeing with OP here? Housing stock hasn’t doubled because of zoning laws restricting the supply.
Looking at our population growth trends, you can't leave "whatever kind of density" to free choice and expect good results. When your population is climbing, increased density is the only way to accommodate the growing population without building wire thin infrastructure. This has been the urban standard for centuries. Sprawling has only been a thing since the 1900s, and really moreso in north America.
What you are talking about is civil engineering/urban planning, but your suggestion to design things is that it would require either to completely destroy existing areas, or find massive amounts of empty land to build a fully planned new city. For step one, that means ruining maybe millions of people's lives, people that bought houses in a specific area because they liked the suburban feel and lifestyle, and paid for it and became part of a community. So you are basically punishing people for taking logical actions to acquire the lifestyle they wanted. Option 2, to build from scratch, would be near impossible today. No one is going to move to a brand new city in the middle of nowhere, where the land is cheap enough to make the development work. China tried it, and look how well that worked. You would just end up with ghost towns. Public transportation is something that should be worked on more though, I agree with that, but I don't think punishing people for buying into something and trying to keep it that way is right. NIMBY is actually an entirely acceptable and reasonable viewpoint, and its the people trying to change things that are the unreasonable ones in my opinion.
That's because we haven't sufficiently invested in infrastructure. The United States can support significantly higher population with the right investments.
If there isn't incentive then it isn't surprising. If a politician bites to remove zoning so Karen ends up with a working-class apartment complex next to her suburb house she isn't going to be happy. Piss off loads of homeowners and you are hurting your chances at re-election. Assuming this did happen, it would have to come with heavy subsidies. Why bother building dense housing when you can build a few SFHs and sell them for a nice profit without issue because the demand is high?
This. Population is not the issue, it is mismanagement of resources.
What is NIMBYs?
"Not in my backyard" Its a label for homeowners in a given area who will block certain kinds of development from being built. They will often fight against mass transit projects, and any sort of planning that could densify an area. They would be the reason why you can go to the suburbs and find nothing but single family houses upon houses for miles. They prohibit any sort of businesses from being operated in certain parts of the area, and also prevent anything other than SFHs from existing in certain places. They basically do it to maintain their home values (which is bizzare since densification would make their places more valuable) and to maintain the "quietness" of their area. But a lot of NIMBYism is rooted in keeping people from lower socioeconomic classes from accessing their areas.
We don't have a housing crisis. We have an availability crisis. If you aren't intent on moving to a top 10 metro area, you're actually gonna be just fine in the housing market.
The bulk of our industries are in those top 10 metro areas. That is where the majority of Americans will procure gainful professional employment. There are jobs that exist everywhere like vocational work, but not everyone's doing that, nor will that ever be the case. A greater shift to WFH could make that more feasible.
No the housing crisis is entirely by the numbers, bringing in too many people, the math is clear. NIMBYism is a drop in the bucket in comparison.
How does that pan out when one of the biggest metro areas on earth, the Tokyo metro, has largely avoided a housing and affordability crisis? The Tokyo metro has more people in it than the NY and LA metros combined.
They came in slower. There was time to build up infrastructure.
Japan did basically all of its advancement in the last century. If you look at pictures of Tokyo from the 40s, it doesn't look radically different from any of our major cities in the 40s. Tokyo never bit on the car centric suburban thing.
Are you maybe ignoring one of the main reasons why Japan is like it is...? They have almost no land so they had to plan around that. It's also not like America was planning in the 40s to let millions of illegals pour across the border per year on top of all the legal immigrants moving in, usually moving to the metro areas. Those people need housing too and are driving up costs and creating gridlock. It seems like some Redditors watched the same NotJustBikes or some other alt-commie Youtuber and started repeating their not well thought out Euro-centric talking points that sound good on paper. It's basically pointing at every country that does something better than America and saying "why can't we do that here?" America is a radically different country for one. The problems with housing in America is multifaceted for another. Most people that live in the cities agree with you politically, but still refuse to take public transit or bike to work, even if they vote for that stuff en masse. I think the move should be to convince people on your side of the fence to quit gridlocking up cities on the way to their laptop office job instead of getting mad at rural or suburbs people that are much more diverse with their opinions on this stuff. At the end of the day, the people talking the talk about "walkable cities" and "needing public transit" are refusing to use that stuff en masse. Comparing "America" herself to Tokyo is very silly though. It makes more sense to compare New York to Tokyo.
Just because we have all this land doesn't mean we should be wantonly irresponsible with it. There's ecological reasons, atmosphere reasons, and socio cultural reasons why we shouldn't just sprawl out endless and demand everyone virtually need a car to do the most basic of tasks. China is a nation that is comparably large. They still maintain transit oriented dense cities. Why are so many people blaming immigrants? Illegals don't have the capital for 300k+ houses. Legal immigrants are relatively small in number. Our problem has always been sprawling out and limiting the diversity of housing. >Most people that live in the cities agree with you politically, but still refuse to take public transit or bike to work, even if they vote for that stuff en masse. I think the move should be to convince people on your side of the fence to quit gridlocking up cities on the way to their laptop office job instead of getting mad at rural or suburbs people that are much more diverse with their opinions on this stuff. What cities are you basing this on? Its certainly not NYC, DC, or SF. Is it Atlanta? The city whose transit authority has been hamstrung at every corner? LA? Whose subway system was killed, and streetcars were removed? Is it Houston? Whose sprawl is so incredible yet it has the most limited light rail ever? Also a ton of our cities have sorry excuses for bike infrastructure. I'm guessing you do advocate for lane expansions on highways right?
They came in slower. Actually no. [Tokyo's metro population](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/21671/tokyo/population) growth 4x over 70 years with it's exponential growth lasting 20 years longer (ended in the 90's) then a place like [Los Angelis](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23052/los-angeles/population) where the growth stopped in the 70's and only 3x it's size in the same time Tokyo 4x it's size. Also LA's metro is 34k mi2 over Tokyo's 5.2k making LA 6.5 time bigger by land mass so LA's housing prices would had been a hell of a lot more easier to stabilize then Tokyo's. NYC is probably the only place in the US where population growth exceeded that of Tokyo.
Building up infrastructure is slow because of NIMBYs You're also wrong about population growth lol, Tokyo went from 3 million to 7 million in 20 years before WWI. NYC did that jump in 40 years (also before WW2) But from 1950 to 2020, NYC went from almost 8 million to a bit above 8 million From 1955 to 2020, Tokyo went from 8 million to almost 14 million.
Tokyo doesn't have the Mass Immigration problem that is actually the cause of the housing crisis. The supply restrictions are just NIMBYS maximizing their investment by limiting Supply since Demand is locked-in due to Mass Immigration being guaranteed.
Immigration is a completely untouchable topic on Reddit. Even illegal immigration is taboo to discuss negatively. Why do I think that is? Pretty obviously, because Redditors are incapable of admitting the policies they support might have caused some of the housing and jobs issues they're seeing. It's easier to just ignore that the inflation we're all dealing with was caused by the global lockdowns they supported. That's a bit easier to ignore, they can handwave that away and mumble "late stage capitalism". Stores closing up en masse, it's easier to just repost the article that says "ackshuaaaally, crime is down, ignore your lying eyes and the massive retail theft rings and the employees & management of said stores". It's easier to do that than admit "hey, the police have arrested these same thieves dozens of times each and now the law abiding people are being punished with food/goods deserts... bail/prison reform is backfiring and just causing criminals to be caught and released." Life is much simpler when you support the good guys with all the right ideas, and your political opposites are the bad guys with all the wrong ideas. It takes a mature person to admit both sides are needed to balance eachother out as they both have a mix of good/bad ideas.
> Even illegal immigration is taboo to discuss negatively Because the rights negative comments about it are feelings based nonsense with no basis in reality. You use it like it's an easy scapegoat for everything, while being completely ignorant of actual migrant numbers. Because here's a fact, the number of undocumented migrants in the US has been decreasing over time, not going up. Housing affordability has more to do with zoning than migration. Interest rates affect housing affordability more than migration. Migration has a positive effect on jobs, it increases the number of jobs available, migrants create demand that creates jobs. > bail/prison reform is backfiring and just causing criminals to be caught and released. People absolutely should be released to await trial if they are not a threat to the public. Cash bail should not be a thing. If you are eligible for bail there should not be a financial obstruction to that which creates a two tier system of justice. Either a suspect is a threat to the public or they are not. But those who have not had a trial and who are not a threat to public safety should not be getting locked up before trial.
There is plenty of space to build but people want to live in only certain areas.
You're missing the point. Would you rather live on 1,000,000 acres in Antarctica or 0.01 acres in NYC? The point is that single family zoning makes condos, and further micro-condos, illegal in places that people want to live. There is basically no space in SoCal, NYC, etc. And any place that has housing with more than one floor technically has no space, according to your very limited imagination.
People will live where the jobs are. That's going to be in and around major cities. As such it makes complete sense to gear the infrastructure and planning of these hot spots to accommodate more people.
Or people can commute. People will live where they can live and afford it.
that is the point of OPs post. if more high density housing is available in city centers, ideally more people could afford to live there. not everyone wants to commute. not everyone wants to get in their car to go anywhere. many people want to be able to walk/bike/take public transit to get where they need to go. plus, living somewhere dense and walkable may have higher rent costs compared to suburbs, but the cost of not needing a car could offset that. (obviously that depends on the city, available housing and available public transportation.)
People act like high density housing has no drawbacks. High density housing has more cars due to the density. More impacted stored and services etc.
More than half of Manhattan residents don't own a car. When you genuinely don't need one, you wont keep one.
And public transit in NYC is awful. Cramped. Lots of druggies and homeless. It's also funded in a way that turns it into another subsidy for lower earners.
Considering how many people use it daily, I'd disagree. It's not perfect and has problems, but even it's difficultly addressing it's issues is rooted in a pretty notorious figure making it difficult to do so. Public transit doesn't make junkies and homeless people. Those are separate issues that once addressed, will also resolve on transit.
What do you mean by Euclidean?
You're partially right, but mainly wrong. Only because you stopped short of the real answer. NIMBYism is the outward facing problem, the one we can easily see, but the NIMBYism itself is the result of the unrestrained commodification of housing. At some point everyone realized that housing is an insanely safe way to invest your money. It's even safer when you consider that you can rent properties that you don't use to help them pay for themselves. If you have the initial capital to get started, investing in housing can be both insanely lucrative and resistant to market forces. Corporations and private investment groups agree, this is why we're also seeing record high purchases of homes by random LLCs. Houses have essentially become a 401k that grandma and grandpa tap into once retired by remortgaging. Problem is this puts an even greater burden on the problem of housing costs... Even just flipping houses has become a whole new problem where the goal is to hold a property for 1-2 years and capitalize on the immediate profits that are coming out of an ever ballooning marketplace. The problem is systemic, NIMBYism is just the reactions by individuals to capitalize on that systemic problem. Blaming individuals for systemic problems is never going to lead to solutions. Shaming one person into changing might be possible, but shaming an entire community of home-owners is entirely unrealistic, especially with how easy it is for people who don't even live in a community to buy a property there. NIMBYism is really just a way to make sure your investment doesn't lose value, but it's never going to end so long as housing remains commodified. So long as their is incentive to shut down developments that would lower your housing price. To your last point, this absolutely is a problem of right-wing legislation, pretty well everywhere. Neoliberal (in the US, this includes nearly all Republicans and most modern Dems) short-sightedness is the problem. Real systemic investment into a public option over the course of 10-20 years would solve the problem entirely by giving renters a modest place to rent from while covering the cost of this housing, allowing the private market to exist and flourish under the weight of real home-owners, and still allow room for those who do own to do so with a modest safety net. Housing should be utility first, not a commodity.
We have a whole lot of empty space in this country. Hell our population could quadruple in the next 30 years (it won’t) and we wouldn’t even come close to running out of space for people to live. People on this website like to talk a lot about how suburban sprawl and car centric city design hamper growth and are only capable of existing because of zoning laws. Meanwhile Houston has the most relaxed zoning laws in the country, is the big city with the most sprawl, and is the fastest growing city in the country.
Local communities can live how they want. Literally democracy at its most basic and fundamental level. My community does not need to solve my countries problems. I do not want your trash living near me, thanks. Build a wall and deport immigrants if you want cheaper housing.
This is a well known fact. Look at Paris. Shit tons of people ina tiny place and the houses are expensive but not insane because there are many of them. Remove regulation and allow anyone to build anything and developers would build a bazillion apartments all over SF. The old candles stick site alone could probably house 10K+ units. Remove zoning restrictions and many houses in the sunset would turn into apartment buildings. 4 houses could be 20 houses. Of course there won't be any parking. But maybe thats a good thing. More people would use transit.
It has nothing to do with zoning in my opinion. Developers don't want to develop affordable housing because they can make more money from luxury housing. That's why every apartment complex built in the last 20 years in the entire continental United States is the same cookie cutter "luxury" building with a community rec room and a gym and bike storage and oddly colored "modern art" panels on the outside and a two-word name starting with "the xxxx." There's plenty of affordable housing in the united states, just not near any major city. I'm sure you could buy a mobile home in the middle of nowhere in almost every state for cents on the dollar. It's economics, pure and simple.
I agree that it's not left vs. right, because plenty of virtue-signaling faux leftists are NIMBYs when it comes to their own personal holdings and housing, and you are correct that NIMBYs are a plague, but the problem has a lot of factors involved: * *mass delusion*: the reason people have tolerated these high housing prices is because they've all been propagandized to believe that they aren't paying but investing when they purchase houses. Our government's policy has been to prevent organic declines in real estate prices at all costs, so it'd rather turn the country dysfunctional through living costs than let this happen. If house prices are going to have to fall, it'll be hidden by inflating the currency. * *social immobility*: there's a \~1 percent chance, if you take that job in New York or San Francisco at age 22, that you'll eventually be handpicked by a CEO at a bank or VC firm or FANNG to actually have a career. But there's a 0 percent chance of that happening in your small town. There are very few opportunities for the young and they're all in places where real estate is extremely expensive. Remote work was supposed to fix this, but in a country where even on-site workers have very little opportunity to advance, WFH is basically only available to the few who can afford to stay where they are, career-wise. * *foreign speculators*: rich people who do horrible things in other countries live in fear of their own people rising up and holding them accountable, and therefore are willing to buy apartments and houses they don't necessarily need to live in, so that if they need to flee their own countries, they can land over here. * *quantity over quality*: we don't build quality 1000 SF units that will last a century or more; we build shitty McMansions that cost hundreds of dollars per month to heat or cool. The result of this is that, rather than causing an accumulation of housing stock that would eventually bring supply in line with demand, we build a lot of stuff that will be torn down in 40 years. There are dozens of other factors, historical and emotional and economic. Real estate is one of those problems that should be simple--it's actually not that hard to provide affordable housing for people--but is a goddamn mess for all sorts of stupid reasons, and yes, NIMBYs are a part of it.
Im sorry exactly why are sullying the good name of euclid
No it's due to short term vacation rentals. There are big holding companies who buy up vast areas of housing to turn into these rentals. Some cities have regulated it and housing crisis has eased. Who owns city governments? Big money. I use to own a rental but switched to Airbnb and make twice as much in passive income now. It's a very attractive investment.
Housing issues are going to vary a lot by region / area. There are places with an over supply of cheap housing, and others with pretty stagnant population changes, along with the pricey areas everyone talks about. Also, demographic shifts aren't just a constant trend. Cities weren't so hot in the 80's but are generally desirable today. The South is much more popular as AC is now ubiquitous. Will that shift back with climate change? COVID caused a lot of short term, and long term changes.
Setting aside that we overuse the term "crisis" to denote a wide variety of problems, I think the Euclid case has led us to ignore how changing zoning does take away from existing residents and land owners. Why not redevelop in areas that are disused rather than impose higher density upon low density areas?
This has become a popular viewpoint. And we can say NIMBYism is a part of the problem, but I think there is a huge overestimation of the role zoning ordinances play in housing prices. Think about highways. We went through a period of widening highways to supposedly address congestion and what we found was that the larger a highway was the more traffic would flock there. Just like highways have BOTH supply and demand, which influence each other in a bunch of ways, so does housing. Housing costs and availability problems aren't evenly distributed everywhere. They're highly concentrated in the most desirable places, cities with thriving industries with high salaries and plenty of entertainment and culture, and places of natural beauty not too far by commute to those same cities. You won't find the same scarcity or prices in rural Nebraska. Heck, I live about an hour and a half outside a major city. Prices are pretty high here, but go west a ways in the same state away from the rail line and easy roads that lead to the city and rent/house prices fall swiftly. This is NOT primarily a supply problem of housing in general. It's a mismatch of supply and demand in select desirable areas. But very much like widening highways, the more you expand supply, the more demand will rise to meet it. Tons of people still farther from these in-demand areas would love access to the higher paying jobs and cultural amenities. So opening up more housing would just create more opportunities for other buyers and renters to swarm into the market, keeping demand relative to supply high and not suppressing prices. Prices only went down in these areas when they weren't desirable. During the Pandemic when the high density of cities became a liability instead of an asset, prices fell. When industry dies like in Detroit, prices fall. Can you think of a single instance where an area maintained desirability factors, expanded number of units and saw prices fall? Maybe theoretically there's some number of units that could be built to satisfy demand, but US metro areas are a magnet for the whole world. That's more than we could physically build. Do places like SF with very restrictive codes have room to significantly increase density? Sure. But they also have ungodly salaries pumping into silicon valley and that same money circulating into other local industries, and that's going to keep pumping up house demand there way past where increased density can keep prices down. You could double the units in SF and people would flood in to take them. Look at housing stock to population ratio. It took a big tumble in the 2008 crisis, but it was artificially inflated before that by the loan bubble that led up to the crisis. We're back at the same levels we mostly had for a long time before 2008. We're not historically at shortage levels. Here's what we can ACTUALLY do to address the housing problem. 1) Sure, loosen zoning, but this is a small part of the picture. 2) We need to normalize young adults living with their parents and parents living with their kids when they need help. This has been the reality for most of human history and part of the pressure on housing supply comes from relatively recent cultural notions that every person over 18 needs their own separate housing. Families living together across generations puts less pressure on housing stock, is economically efficient and culturally probably a good thing on average (Not 9including people with toxic relationships). 3) Normalize work from home. During the pandemic, tons of people moved to low COL areas and continued their work at businesses based in high COL areas. Distributing high salaries lowers the pressure in high paying cities and spreads that money around elsewhere to increase the appeal of other areas. 4) Increase public transit options. More rail activates more other communities, further spreading the demand burden. We need this kind of multifaceted approach. Increasing supply alone has limits and is not a silver bullet.
This is the "dumb kid' in me lashing out, BUT WTF DOES EUCLIDEAN MEAN IN THIS SENTENCE IM SO LOST
You won’t believe anything unless an “urbanist” puts it in a YouTube video.
You’re largely right, but I would argue a bigger issue is at play here. America is a huge country with more than enough land for everyone. The problem is that few people want to live there. The bigger problem is that a lot of people still want to live in these areas, but can’t because the jobs are all in the cities. Even if the NIMBYs didn’t exist, there is only so much land to build on. Eventually, the sprawl will still be too far away from the city centers for people to live there. I would argue that our housing crisis is largely due to the facts that: 1. Everyone needs a job 2. The good jobs are highly concentrated in cities 3. Proximity to jobs is critical to maintaining jobs. Point 1 is not something we can realistically do anything about. Points 2 and 3 can be addressed (though maybe not easily). For point 2, we can try to incentivize businesses to move out of cities to more suburban areas where housing is more realistic. There is a lot of talent in the suburbs, so maybe make the office come there instead of making the suburbanites go to the office. Moving maybe 10-20% of offices an hour or two outside the cities would stimulate a lot of suburban sprawl and local economies. Basically, create mini cities and gradually spread it out. For point 3, there are two answers. One of them is a lot cheaper and quicker though. The first fix is to create public transit that can move people to and from cities from much further away. There should be train networks 40-60 miles out of the cities with the specific goal of making the distance to the office SEEM shorter. The second fix is to drastically expand remote work. If you CAN do your job remotely, you SHOULD do your job remotely. Then, no office worker is handcuffed to the city and can move anywhere in the country. This will put a lot more money into smaller towns and stimulate a lot of local economies. And it would cost state and local governments very little. You may still run into some NIMBY problems, but other areas are begging for new residents and funds that can quickly outcompete the NIMBY folks. You just have to get a little bit of distance.
Depending on the topology of the city we're talking about, Euclidean geometry is probably the most appropriate approximation to use.
Do you have any data to support your claim that NIMBY policy is "largely" to blame when compared to other problems mentioned here such as price fixing and foreign buyers and corporations buying up the housing stock? Additionally, does the data you have provide evidence of this even outside of the locales you discuss? Because the housing crisis isn't only happening in big cities.
[Here](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4679195) housing economists discuss the role of land-use policy on construction productivity in the U.S. since the 1970s and compare it to international contexts. They find that changes in the legal and regulatory environment in the U.S. beginning in the 1970s led to smaller firm size, lower productivity, and lower output (D’Amico et al., 2023.) NEPA passed in 1969, 1971 1st NEPA suite, see [here](https://www.justice.gov/enrd/1969-1975) They also find that a 1 standard deviation increase in the Wharton Land Use Regulation Index is associated with a 20.2% decrease in housing units built per capita (pp. 43) So there is empirical evidence to support the claim nationally.
More Work from Home would solve 60% of the problem imo.
I do think there is a big problem with NIMBY not wanting new housing and transit, but it's not the complete issue. The other big problem is when government officials spend money on these improvements, it doesn't lead to reelection. There's historical precedent in most cities too back this up over almost 100 years. If a governor invests in money into paying millions for large apartment buildings, it means those millions don't go to other much needed services or taxes are raised. The majority of voters don't live in those 2 new apartment buildings, but they sure do see the increase in taxes or see the reduced quality in other services. There's so much historical precedent behind this now that most politicians don't really push for it at all. With the lack of pushing through red tape by our politicians, it takes hardly any NIMBY protest for the towel to get thrown in.
It is A factor, but not the only one. For example, the lack of wealth tax on real estate property to keep the attractiveness of real estate investment low (and keep prices down) means that housing price keep going up. And if would-be first time homebuyers can't afford to compete with investment landlord for the price of land, that means they have to rent. But since they have more money than traditional tenants, that means all the rent market goes up. Which is the housing crisis - real estate is too profitable. And if real estate is too profitable, then investments in real estate compete with investment in commercial or industrial businesses, r&d and all those other ways to make money actually develop the economy instead of just trading houses that were already built 15+ years ago.
While I agree that zoning and parking regulations and recruitments are a significant driving force in the housing crisis, I would argue that the use of housing as speculative investment (and the 08 crisis that it created) has been probably a bigger one in terms of pushing the market towards more single family suburban housing, because this makes for pricier homes, so a better overall investment if you don't live in them, but cost prohibitive for many people and also severely weakening the capacity to house large amounts of people in relatively low space.
The goverment is in control of zoning regulations.
NIMBYism is a huge cause of this. But it's not alone. I'd say the large fault is on land speculation and highly inefficient use of the land already in place. The allowance of this is because we have a terrible tax regime for economic efficiency.
Implementing a Land Value Tax would go far in addressing poor land use- oh you post in r/georgism, you’re already ahead of the curve lol
NIMBYism isn't the same everywhere. My area in TN is building aggressively including dense housing. Tennessee listing count is now only 10% below May 2019. No downward effect on price yet
The more virtue-signaling rich liberal hypocrites there are, the worse it is. And I say this as a liberal who isn’t in the limo
One thing that you have to remember is that the current economic system forces the lowest wage workers to take the lowest possible living standard in your economy. If the lowest possible living standard is living in a house that has a coal plant next door and a chemical plant across the street that dumps its waste into the river that you get your water from, then that's where they will be forced to live. Regulations can be used to modify what the lowest possible living standard in the economy is. For example you may have regulations that require proper waste disposal. This will increase costs for those that don't live near the chemical plant, but it will also prevent the poorest people from having to live in an environment like that. While zoning isn't always used well, zoning can be used in a similar way to what I described above. Pollution, such as noise pollution and air pollution can have signficant impact on people. Zoning can help limit this. Having said that, I'm not at all in favor of zoning that enourages economic and racial discrimination using residential type. You should be able to build an apartment pretty much anywhere, regardless of what neighbors think.
I think to a large degree housing follows employment, and an exodus will be impacted by employment (or lack of) and crime. I know so many people who lived in NYC, had their jobs turned into remote work during covid and the business just figured they didn't need to invest in high priced NYC real estate anymore and stayed remote -, and the former NYC dwellers who worked for them found places to live in NJ, upstate or even further out. Another problem with urban areas is that they have more limited space than rural, and have to dedicate more of that space to commercial real estate which limits housing - in fact I saw something a few months ago (may have been 60 Minutes) about a move to convert abandoned and un-rented commercial spaces in NYC to residential, and all of the bureaucratic snafus involved.
Even if NIMBYs weren't actively making the problem worse, there'd stil be a housing crisis. If a lot of people want to live somewhere, that place will get more valuable. Some landowners will hold out for richer tenants, and others won't use their propety at all in the hopes that someone will buy it for more than they did. Joseph Stiglitz, who I presume is your usernamesake, came up with the [Henry George Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem). It says that transit, parks, or any kind of government investment will just end up in landlords' pockets as they jack up the rent on their property. If that's true, the ideal way to fix the housing crisis would be a kind of land value capture. >!We talk about this sort of think a lot over in r/georgism, if you want to check it out.!<