I don’t think wealthy people are thinking too much about their property values when it comes to opposing building in their own neighborhoods. They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.
Sure but what GP said and what I think is a common perception is that wealthy people oppose development because they want the value of their house to grow in the same way that you would want the value of a stock to grow. I.e. so you can turn it into more money later. I don’t think they care so much about turning it into more money later, but more about the other factors I mentioned. Of course indirectly preserving or enhancing the other factors may result in also being able to turn it into more money later, but that is not usually the goal when opposing development around one’s primary residence IMO.
I don't think property value is the root of it. Rather, property value is the polite face they put on it, while their real concern is things like crime, whether it be petty vandalism and litter or more serious crime. It might not be fair for them to associate low income housing with crime, but I think this association is intuitively obvious to many if not most of the rich people living in exclusive neighborhoods.
Crime is a factor in many cases, sure. But then so is emergency access/egress. If there is a wildfire near this neighborhood, we only have two ways out, and over 900 homes to evacuate via those two ways. Consider the traffic jams that we saw during the Steiner Ranch fire years ago.
Now, make each one of those properties dual family housing, and suddenly you’ve got twice as many people to evacuate, but you haven’t upgraded the roads or any of the other utilities. And that’s very bad news. Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that the Austin city council has created.
Property values are certainly going to go down as they cram more and more housing into this space. But the cost will be in human lives when the wildfires do hit.
Can we prosecute our city council for manslaughter? Or even murder? How long do we have to wait for these deaths to occur, so that we can finally prosecute for them?
While there may be some material value to a property, as the saying goes: Location, location, location. In other words, it is the things like crime that ultimately define a property's value. That is why property value decline is of concern to property owners. It is all the same at the end of the day.
Almost all street-level crime (burglaries, robberies etc) is caused by degenerates (homeless, mentally ill, 'professional' criminals) and there's often a race component to it (even outside of the US).
You can't really talk about those things in polite company, so house prices are the euphemism used instead.
TBF you didn't say it - It appeared that way if you followed the logic at the time regarding the gp you responded to two posts up about keeping poors away.
Where did you ever see that? In particular for the actually wealthy? "Oh no, my house went from $10m to $9m, woe is me"? At most, it's a proxy for the above. As a not-so-wealthy, but well-to-do techie, for me the exclusion is absolutely about keeping poor people out. People are just too timid do admit it.
Now I do have to say as a semi-libertarian I support YIMBY, building up everything and making most zoning illegal. Sorta against my self-interest.
But at the same time, I strongly dislike US poor. It's almost an oxymoron that the more meritocratic the society, the better the sorting, and thus the worse an average non-immigrant poor people are. US, compared to most places, is pretty meritocratic. An average person at the same percentile poverty level in Russia (or, I bet, Mexico or China or Nigeria or whatever) is a much better human being than a corresponding non-immigrant in the US (any race). If the way to keep the latter out is to keep local property unaffordable, so be it. I don't really care about broad property values otherwise - I don't want to move and if I do I'd probably buy a similar house.. in fact given the transaction costs, cheaper housing may make moving cheaper.
I believe the US “poor” could be made to behave better if standards were raised (more and better policing). Nobody seems to have the stomach for that so coddling is the solution.
> social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.
Value doesn't only mean monetary value. Social prestige is one of the values too. And sometimes they are transferable. The invisible hand is not just about the literal money
Doesn't that seem to implicitly state that property values are precisely what they're thinking about when trying to keep the poors away? If the poors are able to move in then the value of the property must be inexpensive for them to be able to.
I've lived in two areas that this has happened, and will try to word it gently but honestly.
The neighborhood was nice, low traffic, never lock your doors(so to speak). In comes 'low income housing', ie jamming as many terrible apartment complexes as they could wherever they could.
Traffic shot way up, too much for the roads. Why would the developer care. Noise also shot up, constant noises of bass from cars at all hours. Lastly, crime shot up. I went from living almost in the middle of nowhere to having my car broken into twice in my own driveway.
Sorry all, I agree that housing is a crisis, but I no longer want dense housing anywhere near me.
You've explained the issue very well. I've tried to make similar points before. People look at a nice neighborhood and say "we should give more people this experience". But you can't - the low density is what makes it good.
I've also lived in an area that seemed to have reduced this problem by a huge factor. I lived in a community of 150 townhomes where 50% of them were Section 8 and the other 50% were privately-owned. Due to how the community was built, you could never tell which units were which.
I was able to have a 3bd/2.5ba 1,200sqft townhome for only $1,200/month. I think there was only 1 shooting in the 3 years I lived there. Yeah there was noise, but it was also a college town so that's unavoidable in the area.
It's an idea that I felt worked very well, and I really wish more cities would try it out for semi-dense housing solutions.
A community in North Charleston, SC named Horizon Village.
North Charleston (in general) is considered an unsafe area, but this community was built to battle the stigma against Section 8 housing that is very prevalent in the Charleston area. After I moved out they've continued to build out more privately-owned homes in the community. Back in 2018 rents were around $1,200 for a 3bd, but the privately-owned homes are now renting for over $3k for 3bd, and starting around $400k for sale. While the Section 8 housing is still operating as it normally does for the area with reduced costs.
It's helped to revitalize the area (take a look at Park Circle just north of the community), while ensuring that further gentrification and displacement doesn't occur like it did in the downtown Charleston Westside neighborhood.
I wish normal housing were more affordable instead.
Also, low-income housing sort of sucks. For example, in my area, some low-income apartments were recently constructed, but they do not have washer and dryer receptacles. It's not that they aren't included. You cannot even bring your own, because you won't have anything to hook them up to. Apparently, you are supposed to use the laundromat only.
But now that people with low income can live there, suddenly my complex no longer has to worry about those people, because the availability of the low-income apartments reduces the amount of people who would even consider living here. Suddenly, you're not losing potential customers by raising the price, because all the customers that you would have been losing are now all living in the low-income apartments instead.
That hurts people like me who have a higher standard of living (such as owning a washer and dryer) but still don't exactly make enough money to justify spending $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment (ours is currently around $1,800). I suppose I'm the customer they'd be losing by raising the price, but the risk to them is probably still far lower now.
Great points. I've often thought the most underserved group wrt housing are the working lower middle class. Which is weird, because that's how I grew up. We had tiny houses(5 of us in a house < 900sqft), but in decent blue collar neighborhoods where everyone was respectful and getting by.
That just doesn't exist much today. You either spend more than you can afford to live with upper middle class in a house two sizes too big, or you live in shared low income apartments. They just don't build small SFH neighborhoods anymore, apparently.
They 100% do, just not where most people want to live.
I know many midwest cities with newly built small houses. Maybe not <900 sq feet. But 3-4 family bedroom houses at around 1500 sq feet. These houses are basic and inexpensive. You won't get much land either but may get a neighborhood park.
that sounds great, if they're inexpensive to buy, the only land i'd really need is the land the house is on. my hope is one day we'll have enough money to consider such a thing, probably once we make 150k+ a year, but that doesn't seem so far out of reach at the moment, could happen some time in the next 6 months
there are other constraints of course (such as isp), but right now the biggest one is that we don't have millions to spend on a single bedroom.
This isn't difficult to understand. Nobody that I know actually thinks "I like this neighborhood, I hope poor people don't come".
1. When you save your whole life for a downpayment and buy a house, you want it to at least KEEP it's value, nobody wants to buy a house and lose money. That is common sense.
2. People generally move to areas they desire for reasons. They want to also keep this the same or improve. They don't want it to deteriorate.
So now we can debate what lowers values (nominal terms) and what causes areas to be undesirable and how they get there.
What I can think of: Increases in crime, Dropping maintenance/services, increased pollution, increased noise, increased traffic etc...
I think it's just most people don't really understand physics. If they get the concept of emergent effects, complexity and how free will vs no free will are basically indistinguishable to the humans, I doubt they would still agree with the same conclusion.
> The collective/societal solution is that we need to massively increase the density of these cities and improve their infrastructure, but that will in many places require going to war against the NIMBY obstructionists.
The Tokyo solution which we should all follow. It's the only way out of this mess
I am a steadfast exurban/ruralist at heart, but I agree that we need to increase city density and not expand the land footprint with urban sprawl. I prefer the Helsinki social housing solution. I think it is more intellectually honest to make it clear that the state takes the financial loss to bring housing costs down instead of completely forcing it onto the builder or the property owner.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but cities don't change because it is too costly to rip and replace in terms of dollars, disruption to parts of the city, transportation, etc. However, I do think that rip-and-replace is an important strategy for improving housing density in the city and correcting past mistakes.
I do worry about the impact of higher-density living. I think people will lose touch with the natural world. Being outdoors in wilder spaces will become a tourist experience rather than an appreciation and understanding of the wilder parts of the world.
It's just a matter of time. China is making ev like android phones. Other countries are also catching up. The high profit margin of Tesla cannot last forever
I'm just concerned about battery safety with Chinese EVs. I've seen more than a few video clips of Chinese EVs just spontaneously catching fire (not from an accident).
I would be more confident in owning a Chinese-made EV if it conforms to appropriate battery safety standards, and that those standards are enforced by USA regulations.
I'm sure at least half the problems with the Chinese EVs are the inadequate regulatory environment created by the PRC.
It's not a matter of time, cars and the car industry are treated as national security. Chinese EV cars will be even more tariffed in US and Europe in 2024/2025
Best shot yourself in the foot argument so far. Sony Entertainment is actually bringing the controller and the games to pc. The controller's unique features are also actually usable
Reading the Musk biography, it seems like they just had the right people who really knew the Chinese government try extra hard to convince them to grant the exception to Tesla.
I personally think its more than that. We have firms here in the US that tear down the Teslas, deeply analyze the cars and sell the reports to whoever will buy (essentially other car companies). The Chinese are snapping up all the Tesla reports and multiple firms that do this work are reporting that the Chinese only want Tesla, they are offered info on the other OEMs and they don't care at all.
It seems like the Chinese know that Tesla is their primary competition. We see it in their actions as well. When Tesla announced "giga castings" for their cars, the Chinese companies were the first to jump on that train as fast as possible. Everyone else was still debating wether or not if it was worth the cost.
> If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.
Taiwanese romanization is way better. It's much closer to English and more readable
Everything for inducing the demand and reducing the supply. The invisible hand of extracting values at all cost.