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>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job. Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am unconvinced. >One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities. This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any thing ‘good for the people “on the margins. Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine. But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking. I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland. It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people “on the margins”. In fact, most of those people were not even on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them. I should know. Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of where your theories have actually succeeded.

davidw 7y ago
I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good evidence of your own. There are a lot of ways to build more supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
  - davidw 7y ago
    > In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access. In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars. Same goes for housing. Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-filter/ https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...
    - allovernow 7y ago
      >In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.
      - smogcutter 7y ago
        Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error. [1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.pdf https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        The 100k mile thing came with the enhanced emission controls in the late 90s.
    - exterrestrial 7y ago
      You can’t compare cars to real estate and property. For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there. In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).
- jariel 7y ago
  While I don't doubt that building more homes brings prices down, the real reason housing is cheap in Montreal is because Montreal is poor, has lower immigration, little in the way of industry to attract migrants, language barriers, and it doesn't have a basis of Chinese ex-pats to anchor a lot of foreign buying which is a huge driver of prices in Toronto and Vancouver. Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.
darksaints 7y ago
Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare. And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.
- exterrestrial 7y ago
  As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.
  - darksaints 7y ago
    Before rent control passed, this was what was happening. https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falling-rents-i/ https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falli... > Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report. > Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346. When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.
api 7y ago
How much do you think rents would have gone up without more housing supply.
hannasanarion 7y ago
You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing market is not likely to happen any time soon. While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.
- marknutter 7y ago
  Hey look, a socialist calling capitalism the root cause of a problem in question. And oh wow, a call for revolution as well. Nice.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment shouldn't have been flamebaity, but not taking the bait is actually more important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- moultano 7y ago
  > You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be bought and traded with fluctuations of value and expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit potential.
    - 7y ago
matchbok 7y ago
Demonizing landlords is not the answer. They did not get us into this mess. It's a distraction. Prices are set by the market.
- ben_w 7y ago
  What happens when the market is prevented from increasing supply by property owners collectively setting rules that prevent sufficient further growth? I’m not saying this happened in California, but it’s what I think happened in the UK, where I am a landlord.
  - hodgesrm 7y ago
    In the California case it did happen but the "landlords" are owners of single family homes. Here's a typical example: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-failure-single-family-homes-suburbs-20190522-story.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-f...
  - matchbok 7y ago
    I agree, that's a problem. I would hope that most landlords are good actors, though. (heh)
- tmh79 7y ago
  In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.
  - nerfhammer 7y ago
    It's a distraction in that it may lead to bad intuitions about what to do, like trying to "punish" landlords in some way will somehow make up for something.
    - 7y ago
mlyle 7y ago
> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented at a lower price.
tathougies 7y ago
> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant. It literally benefits everyone > Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.
woah 7y ago
Wait.. so you are just opposed to people having somewhere to live? You’re saying that more apartments on the market makes prices higher? I don’t think I’m going to be able to follow the logic here. The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia. I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.
- exterrestrial 7y ago
  When investors buy property, they almost always intend to raise it’s value to increase their profit. That’s how this works. They very often tear down affordable units and build luxury ones, because the YIMBY policies peculiarly never take issue with that. Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.
throwaway34241 7y ago
I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for to be convinced but I'll try. First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise? With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it). I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall. I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways. For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched. For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1]. [1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
- exterrestrial 7y ago
  Citing Japan only further proves my point. Property values don’t appreciate the same in Japan because, and one reason is that they don’t have a finance industry that allows them to. Land owners cannot get rich by mere property appreciation like they can here. I definitely think we should imitate Japan more, but this isn’t simply a matter of “allowing more housing”. Acting like that’s all there is to it is disingenuous.

davidw 7y ago

I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good evidence of your own. There are a lot of ways to build more supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.

Spooky23 7y ago
Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
- davidw 7y ago
  > In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access. In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars. Same goes for housing. Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-filter/ https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...
  - allovernow 7y ago
    >In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.
    - smogcutter 7y ago
      Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error. [1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.pdf https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      The 100k mile thing came with the enhanced emission controls in the late 90s.
  - exterrestrial 7y ago
    You can’t compare cars to real estate and property. For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there. In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).
jariel 7y ago
While I don't doubt that building more homes brings prices down, the real reason housing is cheap in Montreal is because Montreal is poor, has lower immigration, little in the way of industry to attract migrants, language barriers, and it doesn't have a basis of Chinese ex-pats to anchor a lot of foreign buying which is a huge driver of prices in Toronto and Vancouver. Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.

darksaints 7y ago

Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare. And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.

exterrestrial 7y ago
As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.
- darksaints 7y ago
  Before rent control passed, this was what was happening. https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falling-rents-i/ https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falli... > Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report. > Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346. When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.

api 7y ago

How much do you think rents would have gone up without more housing supply.

hannasanarion 7y ago

You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing market is not likely to happen any time soon. While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.

marknutter 7y ago
Hey look, a socialist calling capitalism the root cause of a problem in question. And oh wow, a call for revolution as well. Nice.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment shouldn't have been flamebaity, but not taking the bait is actually more important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
moultano 7y ago
> You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be bought and traded with fluctuations of value and expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit potential.
  - 7y ago

matchbok 7y ago

Demonizing landlords is not the answer. They did not get us into this mess. It's a distraction. Prices are set by the market.

ben_w 7y ago
What happens when the market is prevented from increasing supply by property owners collectively setting rules that prevent sufficient further growth? I’m not saying this happened in California, but it’s what I think happened in the UK, where I am a landlord.
- hodgesrm 7y ago
  In the California case it did happen but the "landlords" are owners of single family homes. Here's a typical example: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-failure-single-family-homes-suburbs-20190522-story.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-f...
- matchbok 7y ago
  I agree, that's a problem. I would hope that most landlords are good actors, though. (heh)
tmh79 7y ago
In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.
- nerfhammer 7y ago
  It's a distraction in that it may lead to bad intuitions about what to do, like trying to "punish" landlords in some way will somehow make up for something.
  - 7y ago

mlyle 7y ago

> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented at a lower price.

tathougies 7y ago

> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant. It literally benefits everyone > Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.

woah 7y ago

Wait.. so you are just opposed to people having somewhere to live? You’re saying that more apartments on the market makes prices higher? I don’t think I’m going to be able to follow the logic here. The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia. I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.

exterrestrial 7y ago
When investors buy property, they almost always intend to raise it’s value to increase their profit. That’s how this works. They very often tear down affordable units and build luxury ones, because the YIMBY policies peculiarly never take issue with that. Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.

throwaway34241 7y ago

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for to be convinced but I'll try. First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise? With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it). I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall. I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways. For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched. For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1]. [1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

exterrestrial 7y ago
Citing Japan only further proves my point. Property values don’t appreciate the same in Japan because, and one reason is that they don’t have a finance industry that allows them to. Land owners cannot get rich by mere property appreciation like they can here. I definitely think we should imitate Japan more, but this isn’t simply a matter of “allowing more housing”. Acting like that’s all there is to it is disingenuous.