Yimby housing bills are wildly unpopular in the state (CA), a new poll shows
48hills.org
48hills.org
I don't think most people understand that if market-rate housing isn't built en masse, and there's just 'affordable housing' allowed, the result will be mostly insanely expensive housing for the vast majority and a small token effort at affordable housing. End result? Millions of people paying ~50% of their income in rent.
But I don't know for sure. Someone should research this... but they would need to be very skeptical and probing, not just taking people's statements at face value.
That's not to say that literally every single neighborhood would benefit from upzoning, but the areas most in need of upzoning do have this property.
Yet homeowners oppose it. This suggests that their arguments against zoning are sincere. People genuinely do not want more density in their neighborhoods. It's not entirely a cynical ploy to boost home values.
I can't imagine locking in the price and paying homeowners the current value of their land.
I'm happy for them. That's all well and good, but when you buy a plot of land you buy that land, you don't get controlling interest in the whole neighborhood.
These shenanigans are starting to get cracked down upon at the state level, because of course local fiefdoms are going to craft self-serving policies. In aggregate, however, they ultimately strangle the economic potential of the state. There's a great writeup of how the state of California is bringing discipline to the (lack of) statewide housing development here[1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/nqpc91/lets_tal...
>> People genuinely do not want more density in their neighborhoods
There's an old saying, tax something, get less of it. Often used to support some atavistic conservative position, it nonetheless seems relevant here.
1. We want more affordable housing.
2. The cost of land is a major problem.
3. So, tax the land value mostly out of existence and don't tax the improvements at all.
This is not my idea, it's based on economic ideas over a century old, although I wouldn't go so far as to say the only tax should be land value. Just maybe see if specifically real estate and its taxes could be unfucked in this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
This is almost too perfect:
"One day in 1871 George went for a horseback ride and stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay. He later wrote of the revelation that he had:
I asked a passing teamster, for want of something better to say, what land was worth there. He pointed to some cows grazing so far off that they looked like mice, and said, "I don't know exactly, but there is a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre." Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege"
https://ips-dc.org/report-towering-excess/
I think the 61% of people who want affordable housing and homeless housing recognize these failures, which is why they want a more direct solution.
[1]: https://www.boston.gov/departments/assessing/filing-property...
Also, the flip side of the argument is that not building lots of housing doesn't necessarily mean that people aren't going to move there. If you have a bunch of housing that is "not for existing Bostonians" as the page says, and it's getting rented/sold, one common reason is that your city is an attractive employment location for high-paying jobs (for Boston I'd guess tech and biotech) and so people are moving in. Not building new housing for those people doesn't immediately make your city unattractive; it just means that this crowd of people with high-paying jobs will take over your existing housing stock because they can outbid "existing Bostonians."
I'll fight for YIMBY policy til the bitter end, but unless there's a cultural shift back towards the idea of stronger property freedoms wrt real estate, I don't see us making strides against housing costs. A lot of the modern zoning code was built to protect us from urban woes that literally do not exist anymore in this country - preventing things like noisy polluting factories next to apartment buildings in the middle of a city. We exported the factories to China and kept the zoning code as a cudgel to prevent dense housing.
The "urban woes" that suburban zoning laws were passed to prevent were minorities, not factories. The roots of zoning and NIMBY attitudes are racial segregation.[0]
> "With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances."
Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/272/365
This is all plainly nonsense. These judges don't like apartment buildings. Great. Good for them. I don't like disco or onions. But they invented a constitutional justification for their distaste from thin air and that's modern zoning.
> ...in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.
Ironically it's the low density that's parasitizing the city because the infrastructure maintenance is far more costly than what the low density residential tax base can support.
Man I'd just move if I lived somewhere like that. In fact, I did. There's infrastructure, dense housing, etc. I can select exactly what I want in the "affordability, amenities, commute" triangle and am supper happy with what I have. I also pretty much just walked in and filled out the application for my current apartment. There are condos around here that I can afford and I'm thinking about buying one soon. The trip to my parent's isn't too too long so I still visit them (and they visit me) a few times a month.
Let the NIMBYs have their crappy low density neighborhoods with half their neighbors living on their lawns. Don't be the man raging against the machine.
I'm of two minds.
#1 Any progress has to done on the down low.
Consider our history. Advocacy for fairness, justice, balance always triggers a massive backlash.
Meanwhile, massive decades long investment strategy created a rich ecosystem for deeply unpopular policy agenda has resulted in a nearly complete takeover of our government and society.
Don't storm the castle. Rock, paper, scissors. There's got to be 100s of small wins which cement a lasting victory.
Neither Rome or our liberal democracy were toppled in a day. The attacks were tiny, incremental, seemingly insignificant at the time.
What are the administrative, procedural, non-threatening pro-YIMBY reforms which can be rolled out over decades, peicemeal, scattered across the land?
#2 Settle for Pyrrhic victories
Opportunity for large scale, durable reforms are rare. Maybe every 20 to 40 years. And the effort consumes the coalition advocating the reform.
As said above, any amount of progress triggers a massive reactionary backlash.
Further, the reform coalition was only held together by the shared goal. Once attained, the coalition will dissolve (or worse). Whereas the coalition of reactionaries is evergreen; their individual motivations don't matter so long as they agree on "No".
So go for broke. Maybe someone like Gov Newsom is willing to burn whatever goodwill and political capital they've accumulated in one final glorious battle to cement their legacy.
This is the strategy of the pro-housing coalition in the California legislature and it’s starting to pay off. San Francisco’s state senator Scott Wiener is a crucial player in that coalition. The fact that NIMBY outlets like 48hills are targeting him personally is a sign that he is delivering.
Housing is like this.
Basically nobody wants a bunch of new housing in their neighborhood. But society can't function if people aren't allowed to build housing. Furthermore, the rights of property holders are fundamentally abridged when they're prohibited by their neighbors from making full use of their land. The right to build housing on your own private property, therefore, can't be subject to a vote. (And, frankly, this right is outlined in the U.S. Constitution, but it's been eroded by comically bad SCOTUS decisions like Euclid v. Ambler.)
I'm a YIMBY, not because I want a bunch of new housing my neighborhood. I don't! I'm a YIMBY because I don't think my opinion about the new housing in my neighborhood is relevant, the same way I don't think I should be able to muzzle people who say things I don't like.
My position is deeply unpopular, but it's correct. And that's the whole point. That's ironically why property rights need constitutional protection. If you let people vote away their neighbor's property rights, they'll do it every time.
But who am I to tell them they are not allowed to do these things? What would be next, they would tell me I'm not allowed to grill in my backyard? I'm hardly a libertarian but it amazes me that of all the absurd "rights" people fight for in this country, the right to use, develop, and maintain your house and property as you wish isn't one of them.
We should try for the opposite, to make housing as affordable as possible (via the free market).
The main ways to do this are abolish:
zoning,
minimum parking restrictions,
minimum unit size,
Eliminate free street parking,
Eliminate mortgage interest tax deduction and anything else designed to favor ownership over renting.
Then, after we do that:
- start building large rotating space habitats, so we can start building effectively infinite living space, and fit a trillion humans in our local area of the solar system.
Even assuming there's no increase in traffic, or any other negative side effects, you still lose tons of money as your home would appreciate at a lower rate with more housing being built.
I personally think California is too far gone