Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbyt | Hacker News Reader

Can anybody explain to me why NIMBY is the common explanation for high rent in SF, but in other cities with high rent have tons of development? There's tons of development in NYC, London, but prices are higher than ever.

To me, NIMBY-hating seems to benefit the land developer far more than the renter.

View on HN

You need to re evaluate your priors WRT “london, nyc are building a lot of housing”. The rate of housing supply growth in both of those cities is near historic lows and below the rate needed to support natural population growth (residents having kids, kids moving to their own place), and your reference frame for judgement is likely comparing to 2008-2013 where there was little construction anywhere due to the financial crises.

At a broad level, housing prices rise because the rate of office space growth/job growth exceeds the rate of housing supply growth. All of the cities you have listed have created far more jobs than housing units in the past 25 years, and office supply growth is probably most of the construction you perceive. Tokyo is the best example of a city that has balanced job growth with residential supply, and it is one of the most affordable mega cities.

There's also the effect that in places where people are most likely to complain about new development you both have less development but you're more likely to hear online about that development.

Different cities different problems. Manhattan is expensive because its covered in tall buildings (minus central park) and more or less 'full'. SF on the other hand, and even more so the bay area in general, has massive amount of open space (parking lots, land preserves, etc.) in addition to large amounts of detached single family homes. Specifically in the bay area, greasing the political and regulatory wheels is so onerous that upscaling these homes and parking lots is expensive, so comparatively few dwellings are built relative to demand (see: Manhattan-esque pricing at some fraction of the density).

Manhattan is nowhere near full. There are huge swaths of the city that don't have tall buildings due to overly restrictive building codes. #UpzoneTheWestVillage

I’ve previously been told (I’m not sure if it entirely true or not - it was by a west village resident!) that the west village has ground unsuitable for high rise construction.

There are issues with building the kind of skyscrapers you see in the FiDi or Midtown, but there is till plenty of room to grow. Huge chunks of the West Village have buildings of only 4-5 stories when it's definitely possible to build 3-4x higher.

The west village isn't primed for tall buildings (they can certainly be taller than they currently are) and is much denser than most people think it is, since the brownstones are often multifamily. But more than anything else, streets are much narrower there than other parts of Manhattan. I'd argue that the east village is more adequate for upzoning than the west village even though the east village is taller.

I agree with your EV vs WV comparison. I just like the highlight the WV because it's such a rich person enclave with a community board that way way overdesignates buildings as "historic" as a way to stifle development.

Manhattan is expensive because of wealth inequality. Every year you see a huge number of neighboring apartments get merged together to have a single bigger unit, where huge numbers of people still can never afford to live there.

I'd also point out that Manhattan would still be a very expensive place to live even with lower real estate prices, as a huge number of the buildings have very high maintenance costs.

There is development in NYC but there could be exponentially more except for the very strong NIMBY movement here. Most of the new development is occuring in Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, where there isn't as much organized resistance from old rich people. Chicago built multiples of NYC in terms of buildings over 40 stories in the past decade. NYC has at least equal demand (probably far greater) for tall buildings, yet much of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan are filled with four story buildings.

This is what happens when you try to build in SF. Note demand 3.

https://plaza16.org/visiondemands/

yeah that seems like an untenable demand...

NYC does not have a ton of construction going on, on a rate basis. They permitted fewer units per existing unit than SF and LA did last year.

"Tons" of development is not a couple thousand apartments here and there.

"Tons" of development would instead be 100 thousand housing units.

The places that you mentioned are not building a hundred thousand housing units.

Californians like to pretend Prop 13 never happened, because homeowners don't want to pay property taxes. The alternative is to blame a lack of housing stock.

"Tons of development" is relative. The cities that have the greatest increases in rent are the ones that have added lots of jobs/people, but haven't increased housing production to match[0].

[0] http://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/report-growth-in-nycs...

Those other cities are not nearly as bad as San Francisco; and have far more affordable rents and far more pockets of affordability than San Francisco or the Bay Area.

Does building alone help solve rents? No, but that's kind of the point of the article. NIMBYism just makes it much worse than having less NIMBYism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com