The people who would've ended up in new housing don't just disappear into the ether; they end up living in some further out suburb, where they contribute to encroaching on nature, and where they have longer, more energy-intensive commutes.
To be an environmentalist and a NIMBY is a contradiction in terms. The bay area, unfortunately, is chock full of hypocrites of this sort.
Here's a quote: In many metro areas, household emissions in the suburbs are roughly double those of city households.
Cough San Francisco Sierra Club Cough
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2017/05/31/san-franc...
They're fighting to preserve a.... car garage. http://thebaycitybeacon.com/32740/282282/a/the-sierra-club-f...
http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/June-2017/Dealing-with-the-Sp...
Apart from the anti-housing issues that you outlined, the city loses out on new property tax revenue that would be levied at the current market rate.
Staying in office is always the #1 goal.
They seem to think gentrification / "YIMBYism" is "good" because it "invests in" or "cleans up" the neighborhood, not realizing that all the poorer people they "cleaned up" don't disappear -- they too end up living in some further out area, with all the same problems that causes.
Edit: This isn't an anti-construction argument. This is a pro-appropriate-construction argument. Not just any new building works towards a solution. Not just any units actually help the supply side of this problem.
Like many in this debate, you seem to think that preventing housing construction prevents population change. But it only preserves the size of the population, not the composition
There is more than enough demand already to unseat every long-time renter by outbidding them at lease renewal time, and this is happening. No developer intervention required.
It doesn't preserve size, either. Existing units can be occupied more densely, units not intended (or legally permitted) for residential use can be occupied, and population can grow that isn't housed.
Not at all. That's a claim you've invented entirely on your own, not something I said.
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My claim is that YIMBYism is often an attempt to replicate the housing problems seen in places like Berkley, not an attempt to fix them. YIMBYism is often an attempt to inflate property just like NIMBYism is.
If 1,000 people are slowly dying of thirst in the desert, and PepsiCo offers to build a Pepsi distribution plant in your desert, some people will say "no" and some will say "yes", and neither will be addressing the water shortage problem because Pepsi isn't water.
That's essentially how housing works today. No one builds housing for residents, which is the problem. If you oppose the construction of buildings that are not housing for residents (like say, luxury condos), you get slandered with a "NIMBY" label, despite being pro-housing, because the construction makes the existing problem worse (the act of constructing that luxury condo will inflate all nearby property values too, displacing more people than the new building itself will hold)
Sure, it's possible to build too many luxury condos and depress prices in that market segment, while not building enough of something else, but we certainly don't have that problem now.
They need a way to stay housed as nonresidents move in.
If you can choose a swanky new building in Berkeley, then you don't need to commandeer housing that someone is already living in.
The real progressive solution here would be to use taxation for the government to build its own more affordable housing, housing that is mixed-income, mixed-use, etc. But, that can easily happen in parallel with private development.
Other countries like Singapore and Austria manage to have government-built/run housing that works fine. I don't think there's anything fundamentally stopping the US from doing it competently, the high-level design was just really bad before. You don't want to concentrate only very low income people (aka the people with the most social problems and the least social/political capital) in big towers in the middle of nowhere, that's a recipe for disaster.
If there are problems with cash transfer programs --- for instance, that only certain homes end up eligible due to paperwork requirements, or under-market payments --- it seems much easier to fix those than to turn the government itself into a landlord for millions of people. Tenant/landlord relations are themselves a kind of marketplace, and central planning handles those poorly.
Rent-seeking (in the economic sense). IIRC, any kind of direct cash transfer (or even subsidized loan) has been known to result in price increases for everyone. See, e.g., college tuitions. (Disclaimer: I haven't looked into the data myself and am relying on recall of things I've read in the past.)
Local YIMBY groups like East Bay Forward, YIMBY Action and SF BARF support the construction of both market rate and below market rate. They have on occasion opposed increases in the BMR requirements for new housing, but that was out of concern that the new requirements were so high that substantially less housing would be built and the absolute number of BMR numbers would in fact be lower. While not conclusive, some early indications suggest this concern was warranted [2].
[1] http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345 [2] https://medium.com/@LocalPolitics/the-25-inclusionary-rate-i...