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NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonab

• BenFranklin100 6mo ago
  It’s going to take a SCOTUS decision overturning Ambler vs Euclid in my opinion. We certainly will not see zoning reform until the Boomers die.
  • terminalshort 6mo ago
    Hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the boomers will never die. Gen X will become the new boomers, and then the millennials after them. Individual people die, but interests stay the same.
    • TimorousBestie 6mo ago
      Yeah, but the inverted pyramid demographics can’t last forever.
    • BenFranklin100 6mo ago
      There’s a lot of truth here, but two countervailing points: first younger generations own homes than Boomers at equivalent ages; second Boomers are particularly blind to the effects of zoning and strongly oppose development due to see firsthand the effects of 1950s urban redevelopment. They also love cars. Us younger generations will have seen firsthand the negative effects of zoning, we do not possess a visceral opposition to development, and there is much greater appreciation of walkable neighborhoods.
  • ttul 6mo ago
    Case in point: my parents. Built a house in 1988 and they still live there. Two people in 3500 square feet. Four bathrooms and five bedrooms. Meanwhile, you need a family income of 3x the median to rent a townhouse 1/3rd the size nearby. This is beyond ridiculous and it’s totally unsustainable.
• lurk2 6mo ago
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  • armada651 6mo ago
    > If NIMBYs were primary motivated by making money the prudent thing to do would be to support unrestricted zoning and then develop or sell the lot. That is highly dependent on what exactly is being built next to your home. Sure, if it's more luxury housing then it'll probably drive the value of your home up. If it's low-income housing then it probably won't. And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former. > you can take out loans against the value of the equity but this isn’t particularly common. It's because it's an investment, you're going to get the return once you finally sell your home. Only in a pinch if someone needs a large amount of money to start a business or pay for an emergency will they mortgage their house.
    • KPGv2 6mo ago
      > It's because it's an investment The home you live in isn't an investment; it's a store of wealth. Many lives were ruined by thinking your primary home is an investment.
    • zozbot234 6mo ago
      > And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former. You just need to wait. The luxury housing that gets built today becomes low-income housing as it ages. There's no short-circuiting that process the way the incentives are set up, but you can drive down prices across the board by building more, even more luxury housing.
• adrianN 6mo ago
  I'm not sure why new housing devalues old housing. In my mind, higher density generally makes an area more desirable (e.g. because higher density enables more jobs, better infrastructure) and raises the value. Imagine as an extreme example and existing house in the middle of nowhere around which a metropolis is developed. Surely the value of the house, or at least the land it is built on, goes up, even though it loses its "cabin in the woods" appeal.
  • paxys 6mo ago
    You think if there were modern highrises in Menlo Park a tiny 2BR shack next door would still sell for $2M? It’s a supply and demand issue, nothing more.
    • rconti 6mo ago
      A tiny 2BDR shack next door that is worth $3M because of the 6000sqft lot it sits on _absolutely_ goes up in value when density increases.
      • some_random 6mo ago
        It's not worth $3M because of the lot it sits on.
        • kevstev 6mo ago
          What is your mental model for this then? If the "2BR shack" can be built from scratch for 300k, and the value for the lot + shack is $3M, then the land value is $2.7M. Most expensive real estate is land value, not actual structure value.
          • some_random 6mo ago
            I see what you're saying, my point is that the principle thing driving it's value isn't the land nor the shack, it's the regulatory framework of the area.
• jmyeet 6mo ago
  Fundamentally as a society we need to stop treating housing as an investment. It is and should be a utility. Suring property prices is a relatively new phenomenon (as in, post-WW2). The true origins of NIMBYism, at least in the US, is (you guessed it) racism. Long before segregation ended, and long after, there was economic segregation. Redlining [1], HOAs [2], the post-WW2 GI Bill [3], where highways were built [4][5], etc. In fact this is a good rule of thumb: if you're ever confused why something is the way it is in the US, your first guess should pretty much always be "because racism". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [2]: https://www.furman.edu/fu/placing-furman/what-are-racially-restrictive-covenants-and-why-do-they-matter/ https://www.furman.edu/fu/placing-furman/what-are-racially-r... [3]: https://www.history.com/articles/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits https://www.history.com/articles/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans... [4]: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [5]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
  • aqme28 6mo ago
    Yes. A lot of people are happy when housing prices rise, because it benefits them. But higher housing prices are worse for us as a society. Similarly, higher gas prices benefit the gas industry but we shouldn't let that dictate policy. : unfortunately, we somewhat do.
  • gustavus 6mo ago
    https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
• danavar 6mo ago
  >For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism. But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings account.
  • sharkjacobs 6mo ago
    I'm not from Texas or California but it doesn't intuitively feel true to me that Texans are better at investing and saving for retirement. According to the first relevant search result I can find https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-retirement-savings-by-state/ https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-retirement-savings-by-st... the retirement savings per dollar of median annual income in California is $1.44 and in Texas is $1.17 Do you think that's wrong? Or do you think it's a misleading statistic and doesn't contradict your belief?
    • hunterpayne 6mo ago
      It all depends on how those things are calculated. Are you including home value in retirement savings or not?
    • danavar 6mo ago
      I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development. I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth. As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more. So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally. But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc. While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house. So yeah it’s just different. Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage
• rconti 6mo ago
  I've never seen the evidence where density increases drive down existing land/home values.
  • chii 6mo ago
    in fact, density increases the value, because the original plot can now be resold at a higher price for a hi-rise.
  • bps4484 6mo ago
    it's not that density per se drives down existing costs, but density almost always brings more housing stock to the market (unless they are simultanously tearing down housing elsewhere) and housing stock drives down the cost of housing, which is the point of the original article. So if we take it as an assumption that density increases housing stock, there is lots of evidence that density drives down prices of existing land/home values.
    • zozbot234 6mo ago
      Density is not going to drive down cost for the same kind of housing. A SFH is not the same as a smaller home on a denser plot, much less an apartment block in a high rise. So the SFH owner who pursues increased density does indeed benefit.
      • cylemons 6mo ago
        Even from a quality of life perspective, imagine having an SFH in city center that is within walking distance to shops, job, activities etc.
    • HeyImAlex 6mo ago
      It seems like it would drive down housing prices, but (given limited zoning) drive up land prices?
      • buzzy_hacker 6mo ago
• raybb 6mo ago
  A paper came out about this recently: The City as an Anti- Growth Machine. > Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This paper argues that under financialized capitalism, the dynamics have inverted: asset appreciation now outweighs productive investment, and urban land is increasingly treated as a speculative asset. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70145 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70145
• zozbot234 6mo ago
  > For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and probably where they keep majority of their wealth. If you allow for increases in density, that house (actually the land beneath it, but still.) becomes more valuable as it's redeveloped. So that American homeowner does benefit, by unlocking the upside of "evil gentrification" (or actually, density increase).
  • aurareturn 6mo ago
    That can only happen if the higher density coincides with equal economic growth in the neighborhood. Otherwise, the higher density could result in a negative home valuation trend. Given the above uncertainty, and higher density could result in more traffic, noise, crime, nymbys are likely taking the correction position for wealth preservation and quality of life.
    • zozbot234 6mo ago
      "Traffic" doesn't come from higher density, it comes from zoning bans on mixed-use neighborhoods which force people to drive everywhere. The "crime" argument is especially silly: why assume that higher density only ever attracts criminals? Usually, having more people around is a positive.
      • ambicapter 6mo ago
        You can assume higher density has "more crime" because the increase in people means if you want to keep the same absolute rate of crimes (which is the only thing people ever notice--every violent or sexual crime will be repeated in the news), you have to correspondingly increase the efficiency of crime-fighting, and American police aren't up to the task, even if they were motivated to do so.
        • deleted 6mo ago
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• ctdinjeu2 6mo ago
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• ctdinjeu2 6mo ago
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• dan-robertson 6mo ago
  I think there are a big range of opinions people have. There are some hardcore housing resisters whose opinions get a lot of sway because of the way processes work (public consultations, activism, etc). Lots of people are a bit sceptical because of pretty legitimate reasons – noise, traffic, disruption, aesthetics. I think there probably are balances where people could generally be happier with new construction and that opinion could be clear enough to overrule those who would never be happy with it. Things like: - ways of having locals vote on new development with small enough constituencies that they can be paid off (ie some of the gains that would have gone to developers or other positive externalities can be captured by those who are more effected) with lower taxes or new roads or parks or whatever - making residents vote instead of having consultations will lead to less bias in favour of the most obnoxious - allowing apartment blocks to vote to accept offers of redevelopment (eg you get a newer apartment; more apartments are added to the block and sold to fund the redevelopment) - having architectural standards that locals are happy with for new buildings - allow streets to vote to upzone themselves (I don’t love this as it’s basically prisoners dilemma – if your street does it, land value increases and you gain; if every street does it land value only increases a bit but now you are upzoned) I basically think that there are developments that can be broadly appealing and we are in a bad local minimum in lots of places of having bigger governments trying to push development on unwilling smaller governments/groups
  • KolibriFly 6mo ago
    Yet I'm not sure it comes from more localized decision-making. It might actually come from making the rules clearer and less discretionary
• dkarl 6mo ago
  Anecdotally, what we found in Austin was a combination of two factors: First, awareness of the futility and selfishness of "growth elsewhere" as a solution is much higher in younger people — and by younger, I mean currently under fifty. Generational turnover in Austin had been eating away at the NIMBY majority, and conversations about housing in Austin have long been polarized more by age than by left/right political sentiment. There's a caricature, with a strong vein of truth, of the old Austin leftist who has Mao's little red book on their shelves and thinks apartment buildings are an abomination, and Austinites of that generation are experiencing mortality. At the same time, younger people are adopting more and more urbanist mindsets compared to their parents. However, I think a much much bigger factor was the influx of younger people, especially young people with experience of larger cities, diluting the votes of the older NIMBYs. Austin has been shaped by growth for half a century, but its "discovery" in the 2000s and very brief status as a darling of coastal hipsters (remember that term?) has had a lasting effect on Austin's popularity and its demographics. It's been twenty years since it was the "it" place for Brooklynites to visit, but in that twenty years, it's had a lot of exposure for young urban dwellers, and some of them discovered they liked it and moved here, bringing their comfort with dense living and their appreciation that growth can bring a lot of positives. Personally, every homeowner I know in Austin has seen their houses depreciate significantly this decade, and I don't think it changed a single person's mind about Austin's housing policy. People who opposed the reforms are bitter about the outcome, and people who supported the reforms say it sucks for us personally, but it's what we set out to accomplish, and we're glad that it worked.
  • keyboard_slap 6mo ago
    Texas' high property taxes play an important role. Owners are incentivized to permit new development to satisfy demand and keep their taxes low.
    • dkarl 6mo ago
      People see lower property taxes as a silver lining for short-term swings in the market, but I don't know anybody who thinks this is a short-term swing that they can ride out. Nobody is happy about their property values going down long term. It exposes them to the risk of a big loss if they're forced to sell because of events in their life.