Well, I would be pretty angry if someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to my normal house, since I bought it on the impression I would not have that as a neighbor
If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive and restricted by zoning. Your land value would skyrocket by allowing apartment buildings and you could take a huge pay day and move somewhere farther out from the city. You shouldn't get to halt US GDP growth in its tracks because you want to dictate what your neighbors do with their property.
In practice, people are pushed out of their homes because they can't afford to live in the neighborhood full of high rise apartments anymore, and they then struggle to make a living (much less find another place to live). It's funny that the GDP itself is prized over the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of an economy with a high GDP.
If such people are homeowners (after all, it is homeowners who are the one complaining about this on zoning boards), they’ll become fantastically wealthy in such a scenario. They have nothing really to complain about except a wealth tax (of course, by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY).
That's unless the government uses eminent domain to give your home to a developer as "slum clearance"
Then, you're turned into a renter against your will, and also, everyone else needs to find new housing at the same time, so even before the new luxury units go up, the rent skyrockets.
Poor people with expensive homes can't defend their ownership. That takes paying expensive lawyers
More nominal wealth that reduces actual physical wealth (by slowing the improvement of land via adding denser housing) is not a good outcome. It’s just redistribution of wealth from newcomers or renters to existing homeowners.
If the demand exists to build high rises then those people would already be pushed out at an ever faster rate. If you take a plot of land that previously had 4 units on it and turn it into a high rise with 100 units, then you can fit 96 higher income people onto that plot of land. In the scenario where you don't build that high rise, those 96 higher income people simply go into the existing housing stock and push those people out anyway. You can think of a high rise as a sponge soaking up demand. In our hypothetical with the high rise, the existing neighborhood's housing stock is in less demand (and cheaper) because all the wealthier people moved into the high rise.
Why are the higher income people wanting to live in the worse accommodations in the high rise?
If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses.
It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one
Living in a newly built high rise in more attractive to some people than a decades old house that might not be in the best shape. You can't "redirect demand", that's just not how the world works. When a bunch of jobs are centered in a city, then people will move to that city to work. You need to have a solution that can accommodate the population growth. Just telling people to go away is xenophobic and denies the reality of the situation.
I think you might be missing the point, which is that the entire scenario should not be happening. If people are getting priced out of their houses, or people are building high-rises that inconvenience people, that needs to be solved, not ignored "because GDP". Making people's lives worse or uprooting them in service of general economic gain isn't a good strategy. I mean, we certainly have used that rationale in the past (genocide of the American Indian comes to mind) but it's probably not in the best interests of the nation.
High rises are built because people want to move to places with better opportunity. Should we simply not allow anyone to move to places with high opportunity? Are people who were born in rural areas or small towns not allowed to seek a better life in a big city because some people already live there? If you think people people should be allowed to move to places with better opportunity, then you need a solution on how to house a growing urban population, and that solution is building denser and taller high rises and housing of all types. You seem to view the people moving into the high rises as some sort of evil gentrifier trying to make other people lives hell, but they simple want to live in a more prosperous location. How is your argument any different than American anti-immigration people saying no one can immigrate to the US because "its full". Simply put, you need to build more housing in places where people want to live and unless you want endless urban sprawl of low density houses then you need to build high rises where demand supports it.
I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but I genuinely don't see a solution where you allow people to move to areas of high opportunity without building more high rises (or just denser housing in general).
On the one hand, there's people with money who want to move to a new area. They have plenty of cash and resources, and they want to move primarily out of a lifestyle desire.
On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax increase). They may not have good credit, not qualify for a loan, or even have any savings. They may already be stretched to the limit in terms of transportation to a job, or rely on their neighbors for child care. If they were a homeowner, it may have been the last vestige of generational wealth in their family, and they may simply have no money for rent or a new home. If they can rent, it'll certainly be much more than they were paying before, which may have just been their property tax. And if they are one of the millions of Americans whose parents brought them to this country in search of migrant work, they might not even have a birth certificate or social security number, or perhaps have difficulty speaking English.
For many disadvantaged Americans, being forced out of your home due to gentrification can leave you homeless, jobless, and broke, with no lifeline. No extended family to give you money or support, no savings to cushion rebooting your whole life. This has been a reality for decades, and I'm still surprised when people don't realize how much of a risk to human life there is here.
So.... if the question is "When will you let people build high rises and gentrify out poor people?", my answer would be: "When those same people who want to build high rises are forced to reconcile with the people whose lives they might destroy." If you want to gentrify a neighborhood, it should be a requirement that every single person who will be negatively affected by that move should be supported such that their lives won't end up in shambles just so a developer can get rich and some hipsters can have an expensive loft.
It's a choice between giving rich people a cozy pad, or letting poor people continue to have a livelihood and home. I just don't see that being much of a choice.
Building new housing isn't about "giving rich people a cozy pad" its about allowing millions of people from geographically disadvantaged areas live in high opportunity areas. I grew up in a small farm town 3 hours from the nearest city so I'm just supposed to live there the rest of my life? I'm not allowed to move to a city cause I got a good job offer? Sorry but your attempts to dehumanize new arrivals isn't going to convince many people, what about the millions of immigrants who come to this country, are they just banned from living in areas with jobs under your scenario because some people already live there? You're still not providing a solution to this problem, you've just ignored it.
You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.
Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.
Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.
So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.
I think you are missing the point. When you say "priced out of their home" what you actually mean is that they have become so fabulously wealthy that they can no longer "afford" a 1% tax on that massive wealth. And even that is just a made up fabricated story, because nearly everywhere has abatement programs to delay taxes or decrease taxes for those who can't afford to pay their property taxes.
Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.
This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.
The land became valuable because they are there and have done a good job maintaining their community. It's collective action of the community that has made it a good place to be.
Maintaining the community is what ensures that value remains. The rea question is why all these other people aren't willing to go build a valuable community
I'm talking about poor people who can no longer afford to live in their home or apartment due to gentrification. I don't know who you're talking about.
>It's funny that the GDP itself is prized over the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of an economy with a high GDP.
The GDP isn't a magical number that rises by making people suffer. It rises because NIMBYs are unable to force others to struggle by keeping them out of their economically advantageous land.
I’m just asking about the mechanisms that force people out of their homes in US. Nothing more.
Here in the U.K. taxes etc don’t increase with property value, and eminent domain isn’t frequently used. So I lack the context to understand why increasing property values mean people are forced to leave, especially when I look around London and see thousands of people who bought their council homes 50 years ago, and are now living in properties that are worth many orders of magnitude more than what they bought them for. Notably, none of them have been forced out.
As for renters, well the mechanism is obvious, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.
Imagine 2 empty parcels of land in downtown Manhattan, one can have a giant skyscraper of any height built on it and the other has to be a single family home. The parcel of land with no restrictions is going to be worth exponentially more because you can built a massively profitable structure on it, the other one is so regulated that it isn't worth any where near as much. The more profit you could derive from a parcel of land the more its worth. Now I used an extreme example just to get my point across but the same principle holds on a small scale. If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed, someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium. Since in our hypothetical someone had just built an apartment building next to your house, the value of the land is already high, simply allow your parcel of land to allow more structures would cause it to rise in value.
On the infrastructure side, its a much better deal for you as well, the combined value of all the property taxes from the apartment buildings will be way more than if that lot had remained a house. Since the road, water, sewer and electric lines are already in place nothing new has to be built. You benefit from all those property taxes coming in from the apartment building while the liabilities to the government have barely increased. The local government can use this new surplus of taxes to build new amenities for you.
For traffic, sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere. Once you have enough people in a place you could open small shops so they can hang out around the building rather than drive everywhere.
Let's not imagine an unlikely scenario. None of this is likely true for US' cities.
> someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium.
This is still a far future.
> If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed
It's still better for you that only demand exists, but not supply.
To be honest, I doubt nimbyists are even interested to move. They just want their neighborhood to stay relatively the same (quiet, fewer people, safe, less crowded).
Either way we look at it, this kind of points are likely cons, not pros.
> sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere.
I laughed a little, assuming this is a US city.
Again, I don't own a house, so it's not that I agree or disagree with nimby. But I can understand why nimby hates new buildings next to their houses. It's just a lot more cons than pros.
I don't think one would be worth more than the other.
Extraordinarily wealthy people are going to be willing to pay a premium for a nice house in Manhattan, and extremely wealthy people are exponentially wealthier than moderately wealthy people, so you cant get that back in volume.
Yes it sucks for that guy, with one of best opening scenes of any cinema we cannot help feel bad for that guy. However economically it is bad for that city/country that he does not move.
We can of course choose to say we want quality of life over economic comforts modern economy offers, until our holiday shopping is stuck in the ports because of viewshed(!) regulations.
The cold truth is if only very rich do that it won't affect much, if however everyone also starts, the economy will suffer and eventually as a result of that quality of life will also drop, everything becomes expensive and industry/jobs go to places that don't restrict as much.
Look at Healthcare in U.S. for stark example, insurance(tied to employment!) or proper care is a luxury is out of reach of for many people, that on average citizens here actually may be getting poorer care than many other countries with poorer per capita GDP . The best in world research or care is possible in the U.S. what is the use if people cannot afford it ?
> If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive
or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.
If a developer is stupid to overbuild, then let them take that risk and that loss. We don't have to zone away risk. As for money laundering, you're using an example of one Trump Tower out of millions of apartments buildings to say it's "more likely" that every apartment building built is just used for money laundering. That's just silly.
As for structural safety, no one is arguing to reduce building codes or safety regulations so that's just a straw man argument. If an apartment building is built unsafe then the government should have done a better job inspecting and enforcing/expanding their regulations, it's not really an argument to not build.
That’s ridiculous. I can understand concerns about a dump yard or a concert venue or an industrial plant coming next to a residential suburban house but concerns about an apartment ? There will be legitimate concerns like increased traffic, increased enrollments in school district etc. which need to be solved but not stopping an apartment coming up altogether.
Also it’s unfair to ask the outside world around your house to be frozen in time because you bought a house at a period of time and setting which you liked.
Then you're stuck with an apartment complex you cant afford, and people who live there still have to drive 20min to get to amenities.
Source: I spent a hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon every day on the school bus, because development of apartments outpaced development of schools in my community.
Also, 20min to drive out to parks, because development of apartments outpaced development of parks and play fields and gyms.
Its just as unfair to force people to move because you don't like the way their community already is
You should have bought a considerable amount of land next to your property too then. Just like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure no one would complain about that since, you know, it'd be yours and not someone else's.
I'm not here to defend unnecessary zoning restrictions, but your argument here is that the right to not be affected by the externalities of someone else's decisions should be limited to the uber-wealthy?.
It's completely reasonable to believe that a given person should be capable of quiet enjoyment of their property without having to purchase everything remotely close to it.
If you want to live in a very desirable area and you also want to have very few neighbors, you should have to pay for that luxury. Right now that luxury is effectively subsidized for a few people who are “grandfathered in”, thanks to the market distortion created by zoning.
If a lot of people want to be in an area, but you want an area with fewer people, why should your single vote override everybody else's desires? Simply move elsewhere, as nobody has the right to interfere with the free association of others.
If I'm making a software product in a specific product area, do I get to keep out other people from ever making that product?
If a ship sinks at sea, and there's a deserted island nearby, does the first passenger on the ship that arrives on the island get to claim it and prevent anybody else from stepping onto the island? Do all those other people on the ship get a vote on who can step onto the island even if they were not there first?
Does owning a piece of property give you the right to veto a particular person purchasing the neighboring property because you don't want then next door?
We as a society have set up a bunch of rules as for how much control people get when they "purchase" property. It's not a single thing, it's actually a bundle of rights, and we have chosen a particular bundle, and that bundle can be changed, and has changed, over time. Zoning is a century old invention.
The idea that a single land owner in an area can block the sale of land to others is considered ridiculous by most. But how much more ridiculous is it then saying that somebody else can't build apartments on their land, particularly in areas where lack of housing has caused massive homelessness and and skyrocketing of housing prices.
