I think often it's more complex than that. If prices are high enough in LA, it might actually be a case of "I got mine, screw everyone else" mentality, but I think much more often is more nuanced. People work hard to afford s home, and how do you explain to someone that saved for five plus years to afford a home that because of a new housing policy, it's possible their home could drop quite a bit in value, and not just because of normal cyclical market forces (meaning it could take decades to reach the same real value, if ever)?
It's a hard decision to support legislation or policies that may may hurt double digit percentages of your populace, just because of bad timing on their part.
At the same time, the need for cheaper housing is real. It's just not as simple as rich vs poor.
People were (and many still are) convinced that if black people move in next door, that the value of their house would fall. So they created policies, and acted, both formally and informally, to prevent that. These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified. Maybe one day we'll view exclusionary zoning in the same way.
Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does: at a certain point, people become less enthusiastic about investing in new housing, so it's a much smoother curve that, realistically, is probably not going to crash prices.
In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value.
> ... These days most people regard that as horrible and in no way justified.
Sure, but does that mean the family of five that was finally able to afford a home last year after scraping for years should pay for that? They could even be in the same demographic as the original victims of those exclusionary policies.
> Furthermore, if housing is expensive, adding to the supply won't crater the price like the economy going bust does
I'm not so sure, depending on how it's handled. Housing is a free market, and as such it's subject not just to supply and demand, but people's expectations of supply and demand. If I just bought a house and policies were announced that I thought might not just stagnate my house value, but actually reduce it over time, inflation-be-damned, I would be mightily tempted to sell if I had options. Get enough people doing that, and you might have a run-away market drop. The people who mainly benefit from that are those that are poised to take advantage of the situation on short notice (those with money available already and can take advantage of the eventual rebound).
There are obviously ways you could crater the housing market in an area on purpose through policy, so it's not out of the question it could happen accidentally. I'm mainly arguing for people to see both sides and try to prevent that, and soften any blow and be prepared to counter a market that looks to be behaving irrationally.
> In the end, though, you can't have both housing that's affordable, and also treat housing like some kind of investment that's supposed to keep growing and growing in value.
I agree. I just think it's a complex situation that requires nuanced policy and constant attention, and isn't as simple as "build more houses" implies.
I would encourage you to attend some planning hearings, city council meetings, and so on before asserting that. Because it really, really isn't. Look at a zoning map of your city.
I mean the buying and selling of existing houses, not the building of new houses. Those comments are primarily with respect to what could happen to the housing market for existing homes in a city that implements large changes housing policy.
If you believed in principles of free market you wouldn't start by explaining how bad it is for person X that their investment dropped in value.
They made a bet, they lost it.
Someone else made a different bet and won.
That's how free market works. People are free to make bets and they loose or win based on how right they were.
Trying to enact policies that mess with market forces because you want to protect that person who lost the bet is the opposite of free market and also a bad economic policy.
> California’s high housing costs are crimping economic productivity, increasing poverty rates, lowering homeownership, increasing crowding and lengthening commute time
This is the cost of protecting the investment of your hypothetical family not paying "unfair" prices.
Not to mention that your hypothetical scenario wouldn't happen if we had reasonable zoning policies to begin with.
The only reason price of a house could significantly go down due to new construction is that we allowed to prices to go up 10x in the past.
If we were building enough to meet the demand, everyone would be paying roughly the same price and price increases would roughly match inflation, not exceed it by miles.
I kind of get his point though: what if all this is pushed to the breaking point, and things snap suddenly?
First of all, I just don't think that will happen. Regulations aren't changing quickly, houses aren't that fast to build, and if prices start to go down, building is going to slow down too.
Second of all, if "the dam breaks", it's only because of years and years of doing the wrong thing, so yeah, it still sucks for whoever gets caught out, but the longer you put off fixing things, the worse it's going to be.
> If you believed in principles of free market you wouldn't start by explaining how bad it is for person X that their investment dropped in value.
Houses are bought and sold on a free market. Houses are so much more than just an investment to the majority of people that purchase them. If you disagree with that, fine. Feel free to work towards changing many decades, if not centuries, of culture.
> They made a bet, they lost it.
There many are reasons why the government, whether it be local, state or federal might not want to punish people that tried to set down roots to establish stability just because other people decided that was a good market to play in, even if the latter group's thinking has infected the former to some degree.
> That's how free market works. People are free to make bets and they loose or win based on how right they were.
Yes. The problem here is that while a free market is agreed upon by many people to be an effective way to make sure the housing market is somewhat fair, it's also a very dangerous way to allow a very important resource to be handled if there are no controls. Would you argue that bread and meat should be allowed to reach 1000% or more the current price in a short period, or should the government step in to stabilize the market because these are essentials for many people? What about electricity? Housing isn't quite on the same level, but it's important and is not some abstract fungible product to the majority of people.
> Trying to enact policies that mess with market forces because you want to protect that person who lost the bet is the opposite of free market and also a bad economic policy.
No, providing stabilizing controls to markets is not bad economic policy. If you think so, perhaps we should abolish the Federal Reserve, and just let the market do what it wants? How bad can it get? Geez, why did we even start the Fed anyway...
> If we were building enough to meet the demand, everyone would be paying roughly the same price and price increases would roughly match inflation, not exceed it by miles.
Then let's do that, and let's look to make sure we're actually doing that by tracking demand, and prices, and trying to make sure we make informed decisions.
Has a single thing I've said lead to you believe I'm not for that? Because I'm pretty sure I've advocated for exactly that type of thing in every comment.
> Even IF people bought a lifetime worth of food or electricity, I still wouldn't care. A 90% decrease in costs for food and electricity would STILL save 10s of thousands of lives every year.
And yet the "saving lives" portion of this comparison only works with food, and a select other few items. Do I really have to explain why making a comparison between items and using a feature that only exists within the compared to situation makes for a poor comparison?
Are you saving millions, or even hundreds, of lives by dropping house prices immediately in a locale instead of looking for policies that both create housing (hopefully affordable) while also trying to reduce the most egregious losses from the middle class?
To be clear, again, I'm not against allowing house prices to drop, and I'm not against building more housing. I'm for a considered approach that tries to reduce extreme negative impact for people who would also have a hard time dealing with a large drop in their home price? Because I'm having a hard time understanding why people are so averse to trying to find a best possible option instead of just doing the thing that immediately just sounds like the simple thing to do.
Feel free to have the last comment. On this topic, I think I'm done telling people over and over again how they've ignored the actual point of my argument only to have them double down.
> because of a new housing policy, it's possible their home could drop quite a bit in value
Is that even true though? If an area can become more densely zoned because of higher demand, isn't your property more valuable now? I could probably sell my house with 1-acre plot (I don't have one, just hypothetically) for a lot more if a condo developer were allowed to build on it.
No, what I elaborate is a policy level decision to reduce extreme negative impact to one group of people while providing benefit to another. You know, the regular push and pull of government where when it's running well officials try to balance aspects of what they are doing so that the overall impact is both a net positive while also reduce extreme spikes of negativity (and positivity, unless those people were really having it bad!) for any particular group.
I'm honestly surprised how a comment that essentially says "hey, it's actually a bit more complicated than the caricature often put forth for a solution and paying attention to that and reducing negative outcomes is worthwhile" is seen as so contentious.
Those are all real risks of homeownership that we can't just handwave away with misguided NIMBY legislation. The first step is coming to grips with the reality that homeownership isn't a magical risk-free investment.
We do, but clearly the balance right now is far too much in the favour of the naked self interest of shameless home owners. I mean a place to live is not a luxury, it's up there with food and water.
And if you're starving and there is free food one block over you go and eat there.
There is plenty of very cheap land to live in. The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now.
The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it.
Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
"Whatever reason" is because the quality of life in an urban area is much higher than in a rural "cheap" area. Jobs are centered in urban areas, you can eliminate a huge commute by living close to work, clawing back hours of your life. For those who are unable to afford a car the rich transit options available in urban areas are life lines to school, work, a community. Cheaper areas can be massive voids where go to the grocery store or post office is a 30 minutes round trip car ride.
>And if you're starving and there is free food one block over you go and eat there.
Well most people generally want to do better than that, surprisingly enough.
> The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now
People want a better quality of life, is that not obvious? Not only that but its better for the environment as well. You don't need a car in London, but you definitely do in suburbia.
>The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it.
It becomes exponentially more expensive as you get further away from the city? I don't think that's true, and I don't know what the relevance is to the discussion anyway.
>Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
What context? You've provided none. Home owners aren't the problem, home owners who seek to deny people affordable housing are the problem. It's selfishness, plain and simple.
Most people who are starving will eat rats if given the chance. What you're complaining about isn't a human right, it's bells and whistles on top of a luxury. There are plenty of places that you can afford to buy a house. As you've said you don't want to do it because it isn't as nice.
So you've gone from necessities to Veblen goods. This is as daft as expecting the government to build gold toilets for everyone because the quality of toilets is so much higher when they are gold.
As for your point in suburbia: it's easy enough to build a high-rise anywhere. They aren't being build because people don't want them.
As someone who lives in the center of a large city: no. It's not the work commute. It's everything else.
Having a coffee shop at the bottom of my lift. Having 4 super markets within walking distance. Having 200+ restaurants to pick from. Museums when I get bored, book shops, theaters, cinemas, meetups, hacker spaces the list goes on.
Having to commute for an hour would give me enough time to wake up. My previous job was 5 minutes walking from where I lived, my current one is 8. I take a detour through a park to make it 30 so I can drink a coffee before I get in.
That people are complaining that they can't afford that and making it into an issue on the same level as getting food and drink is ridiculous.
Housing prices are a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. The way to address it is by cutting demand. Build up infrastructure in rural areas so I can actually get decent internet, that bridges don't feel like they will fall down if I drive over them too quickly. Change the regulations so only livable units are built in cities. Change the requirements that non-citizens can't own more than 50% of a dwelling. There is a huge number of tweaks that could solve the housing affordability problem.
A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life, either by increased crime, or just by increased congestion, increased noise, decreased property values, and possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture.
To minimize these concerns in the way you do seems non-productive and can only lead to more polarization.
These types of initiatives stem from Agenda 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 proponents that, while advocating many admirable things, tend to completely ignore the feelings of the populations they are intent on engineering a radically different future for.
I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes.
If you're worried infill will cause cultural degradation, then perhaps your culture is not well suited to centralisation. That is, not suited to city living. Why else use Tokyo as an example of the success of infill? Japan is famous for it's low (petty at least) crime rate
The point of decreased property values is even mentioned in the article as desirable and here you are saying it isn't. The objective here is to make housing affordable, not the preservation of wealth centres.
. . . It wasn't, though? He could easily be talking about Midwesterners moving there, too. He never brought up race, and thinking "Increased crime rates!? Demographic shifts by [Anything can go here, try "Neoconservatives" or "Neoliberals" or "Social Conservatives" or "Fiscally Conservative Liberals"]??!? HE MUST BE THINKING ABOUT [RACE]!"
I wasn't calling it "explicitly racist", I was calling it "vaguely racist" because, while we all new what they were implying, They didn't come out and say it. Ergo "vaguely racist".
Nobody is talking about "neoconservative demographic shifts" causing problems in cities in this article. The demographic referred to is "poor people".
But please continue being intentionally obtuse for the purpose of calling me a racist.
> I wasn't calling it "explicitly racist", I was calling it "vaguely racist" because, while we all new what they were implying, They didn't come out and say it. Ergo "vaguely racist".
You're saying that "poor people" can't include Caucasians and Asians, then?
Midwesterners are quite notable for being both neoconservatives and poor, along with (generally) being majority-white. He could have easily been referring to them. What made you associate "Poor people" and "Racist"? Poor people are a demographic.
They very much are - Reagan's loved and Cheney even moreso in the Midwest. Both of which are notable neocons. [0]
And economically, they're on average more poor than a lot of areas. See "County Level Poverty." [1] And if you're comparing wages between the two, Midwesterners make significantly less on average than those on the West Coast.
Although I was moreout giving an example and sticking with it for the sake of the main argument to begin with.
Is that bad? If someone lives in a community that is 90% their race, with their neighbors listening to their kind of music, engaging in their kind of activities, going to the same kind of events, not wanting to become a 10% minority? It would be like a Chinese person not wanting to move to India or vice versa.
Your critics are correct that you have failed in your attempt to read my mind. You should not have needed to, so let me be more clear.
Demographic shifts forced on an area by an unelected bureaucracy are almost guaranteed to be detrimental to the lifestyle the residents enjoyed prior to the shift. Whether that is gentrification pushing up property tax, low income housing pushing up crime rate, large influx of practitioners of non-tolerant religions who verbally and physically assault resident women dressed to western standards, or even large influx of young western professionals who don't respect the religion that was previously dominant in the area before.
Neighborhoods are a sum of their parts, and those who choose to live in them, choose them because they like them the way they are.
Overriding the wishes of those people to push your own agenda can be necessary for a city, perhaps, but should never be dismissive to the point of blaming and shaming the original residents to assuage your own guilt.
> A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to [lead to] possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture.
Gentrification sure sounds like an instance of that, and I've been hearing about techies pushing out hippies and artists for about as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. The fear of cultural change in SF is a constant enough thread in SF that a knee-jerk reaction that it's racial seems like an uncharitable reading.
If you look at any crime heat map of a city, you will note, hopefully with no surprise, that crime rate is inversely proportional to income distribution. If low income housing enters an area, the crime will go up. You may be fine with that, but you have to imagine that the already established residents of that area might not wish their crime rate to increase. Calling those concerns selfish is just name calling.
Yeah, You'll notice I called what you said racist, specifically because your statement didn't tie what you were saying to income, but instead to "demographics".
> I am saddened that the dream we all shared of allowing small towns to once again flourish, because knowledge workers could be located anywhere on the planet, are being quickly forgotten in favor of ultra-dense citiscapes.
It was always a futile dream, mostly propagated by people who themselves enjoy small towns and certainly not "shared by all". It turns out that many knowledge workers actually like big cities for the leisure options, health services, people and neighbourhood diversity, much bigger selection of potential life partners, and high availability of jobs.
Circular? Remote workers means, there aren't more jobs just because you're in a city. As for neighborhoods, an expanding cityscape of just more apartment blocks means no neighborhoods at all.
As for leisure options, a beach shared by 1M other people is not much of an option. Living in Colorado has orders of magnitude more leisure options for instance.
Isn’t that why Colorado cities are some of the hottest markets to be in right now? I’ve heard a lot of complaining from people in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, etc.
> A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to lower your quality of life
Speak for yourself. My quality of life has been very positively correlated with population density. It's why I'm settling down on the east side of San Francisco, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new development there.
I assume you are talking about Japan and Israels immigration restrictions. I support their right to them, personally, but I know there are many Americans who riot and march because those countries restrict their immigration so carefully.
No, I was thinking of an American politician who has been in the news quite a bit, who is a big opponent of immigration. He really represents the values of his NIMBY supporters.
