[plughs]

> In 2001 William Fischel of Harvard University proposed his “homevoter hypothesis”. The thinking runs that owner-occupiers have an incentive to resist development in their local area, since doing so helps preserve the value of their property.

This is a common sentiment that, I think, misses the point and makes a lot of the discussion around housing costs unproductive.

I'm a homeowner and I've seen the resistance to new construction. The concerns are often

* more traffic

* more students at schools that are already overcrowded

* more noise

* etc.

Also proposals to build more houses often are planned on property that is already occupied. In a nearby area they want to tear down an existing school, in other areas they want to take away open space that is used as walking/running/biking paths.

Now I'm not going to pretend that homeowners are otherwise pure and virtuous and not even slightly concerned about the price of their house. But that's rarely the only concern.

I don't say that to shut discussion down - maybe homeowners are still wrong to have these concerns. Maybe they just need to deal with more traffic and trust that the schools will address overcrowding as needed.

But that conversation never happens. It is _always_ greedy homeowners who worry only about their house price at the expense of everyone else. As long as the conversation is framed that way, I don't think it will ever move forward.

[lsc]

>* more traffic

Homeowners generally don't fight nearly as hard against new office buildings. The bay area, for example, wouldn't have a housing problem if we built apartments like we build offices, and our traffic problem would decrease.

The problem is that the home value model of homeowner motivation fits the data much better than any other model.

Show me a bay area "homeowners for better public transit" rally and maybe I'll change my mind.

[plughs]

The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.

No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.

[lsc]

>The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.

I think it's pretty similar to most other places that were built low density that now have high demand. We need to change the rules to allow high density, and we need public transit.

>No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.

I... kinda do? back in the days after the crash, I would rent industrial spaces as workshops for my business. I had 1/4 of an industrial condo down the way from the hacker dojo at one point. It was a lot of fun, and only possible 'cause there was a lot of space and it was cheap. I mean, yes, yes, I should have bought. but my point is just that having space is... pretty nice.

That, and at work I'm crammed into this open office; they allocate more space to my car in the parking lot than they allocate to me - I think we'd all enjoy a few more sqft.

[desert_boi]

San Francisco's problems have rippled out to places like Boise, ID and Reno, NV.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/business/economy/reno-gro...

Both of these cities (and metros) are low density (1,049.64 people per sq. km). They're filled with complaints about traffic and growth.

NIMBYs don't want to build up. In Boise, condos are almost exclusively limited to 6 stories, max. Three quarters of downtown is parking lots or roads.

Folks from outer burbs (Meridian and Eagle) don't want to lose parking, and transit is terrible. A bus runs the 5km between Downtown Boise and the airport every 40 minutes.

I think the housing crisis is uniquely painful in the States because of the weird confluence between investing and culture around urban cores, inner burbs, and outer burbs.

[davidw]

The Bay Area is where it's worst, but it's essentially the same problem there as it elsewhere. Also, what people do down there has a ripple effect everywhere else. Where I live in Bend, Oregon, we see a lot of people moving up from California who either 1) made out like bandits because of scarce housing, prop 13, etc... and can afford to sell out and live like kings because housing is "cheap" here (for them, not for the rest of us), or 2) can't hope to afford a home there, so move somewhere like here seeking that opportunity.

[0xffff2]

Funny to see Bend pop up, since I was just looking at houses there on Zillow today and I came away pretty shocked. I work in Silicon Valley but I already own a house in South Central Oregon because I'll never be able to afford one in California. The only problem is that it's rural enough that I can't get any kind of internet other than satellite.

I've been half-seriously looking at houses in Bend or Klamath Falls where I could work full-time remote, but there aren't a lot of houses that I could afford in Bend! It's nothing like the Bay Area, but the percentage of $1m+ houses was really surprising to me, and when you look at the price history, it's a very recent phenomenon.

[davidw]

Happy to talk to you about Bend if you're curious; my email is in my profile.

Bend is very different from K-falls, these days. And yeah, the prices here bounce around a lot - they were the fastest in the US going up before the previous bubble popped, then they cratered, now they're skyrocketing again. I'd consider waiting...

Whereabouts is your house? South central Oregon off the grid brings this story to mind: https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...

[0xffff2]

Yeah, I've spent a day in Bend here and there and lots of time in K-Falls since it's the nearest town to me and "different" barely even begins to capture it. Klamath county certainly has its charms, but a bastion of civilization it is not.

Thanks for the link! Haven't read the whole story in the link yet, but it's definitely not the first I've read about the Tableland. I'm halfway between Chiloquin and Sprague River so that's practically my back yard. The stories abound. I haven't decided just how true some of them are yet.

I'm just close enough to civilization to buy power from the grid, but nothing else. I'm going to wait at least a year or two to see if Musk's Starlink project delivers. If it lives up to its full potential I might be able to work from the boonies.

[parsnips]

Bend's layout also has some constraints as well with National Forest and BLM land surrounding it :-/ That and every Californian wants to pack into the West-side of town so prices get super wonky.

[davidw]

There's actually quite a bit of land available for Bend to sprawl - as well as build 'in' and up.

It's not just Californians - lots of people from Portland and Seattle too: https://twitter.com/EastSlopeEcon/status/1217860613247946752...

[TheCoelacanth]

Wouldn't the home value model predict support for public transit because public transit tends to increase nearby property values?

[lsc]

This model does depend on the idea that most homeowners think that public transit will bring poor people and/or crime and thus would lower property values. There are lots of examples of homeowners blocking transit and then complaining about traffic.

There's a lot of evidence for this in the '70s; this was super tied up with wanting an ethnically and economically homogeneous neighborhood. it explains a lot about where VTA goes (and why we have VTA in the south bay and not BART) The evidence for this is not as strong now.

[lsc]

>because public transit tends to increase nearby property values

Do you have references? my impression is the opposite.

Do you think having a bus stop out front would make the average suburbanite want to pay more or less for their house? My guess is quite a bit less, but I also don't have references to back up my impression.

(I mean, I think this is changing in the most urban areas. But I think that in the case of the homes of a majority of Americans, nearby transit lowers the sale value of a home rather than raising it.)

[Nasrudith]

If people were purely economically rational actors, maybe. If they own a home they already have adequate transportation for themselves 99% of the time (only exceptions I am aware of are aging suburban populace who can no longer drive) and often don't want to pay for what they don't need or believe the expense will be greater than the gain. Maybe if traffic reaches a critical mass such that transit becomes the quicker option and roads aren't remotely viable.

Second there is an all too common ugly undercurrent of bigotry viewing it as bringing "undesirables" that they worry will lower it or negatively effect their lifestyle.

[rcpt]

Offices don't bring in new voters.

[svachalek]

This is true to a point but I've also watched debates that go something like this:

Homeowners: This is going to overcrowd the schools!

School superintendent: Actually we've run the numbers, we have plenty of capacity and we welcome the additional tax revenue.

Political ads: This is going to overcrowd the schools!

Voters: This is going to overcrowd the schools!

I've never seen any ads saying "Protect our property values!" It's "always" about the schools, or the roads, or something else noble. I'm sure in many cases the concerns are legitimate but even when they're not, they're still the concerns.

[aidenn0]

There were about a half-dozen new homes that went up in my neighborhood last year. The odds of them having any measurable effect on property values are near zero, but lots of people complained because the houses were architecturally different from what was there, and above average square-footage for the neighborhood.

I've seen people spend 15 years tying up renovations for a church in the courts.

I heard of another case not too far from me where someone assaulted a neighbor because they didn't like the new (very modernist) front porch remodel.

I think a large fraction of NIMBYism is a reflexive pushback against any change to the area in which one lives.

[edit]

FWIW, I also have no doubt that there are investors who intentionally stoke those emotions to get favorable policies.

[Spellman]

Definitely what I've sen as well.

Plus, traffic could be dealt with by better planning so you didn't have to funnel everyone through 2 intersections to get to work every day. But people instead want to add more lanes because more people automatically means more traffic.

It's less the property values as much as "I liked it when I moved in and don't want more people moving in"

[davidw]

One of my favorite deeper dives into 'traffic':

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/16/everyone-knows...

Some key points:

A well connected grid is more robust to failure.

Allowing people to, say, open businesses near where people live lets everyone drive less - or maybe even walk or bike! But this is by and large no longer a 'done thing' with big american suburbs.

[plughs]

> School superintendent: Actually we've run the numbers, we have plenty of capacity and we welcome the additional tax revenue.

"we've run the numbers" is a poor response. Our local school has a playground covered with "temporaries" and a class size of 25-30 per teacher. School overcrowding is not a hypothetical concern.

Homeowners want their home prices to rise in the way anyone wants any investment's value to rise. But it doesn't mean they don't have other reasonable concerns.

[davidw]

> Homeowners want their home prices to rise in the way anyone wants any investment's value to rise. But it doesn't mean they don't have other reasonable concerns.

I'd like my car's value to rise by restricting people from bringing new cars to town too.

If you read the special report and associated opinion piece, a major point of it is that treating a home that you own as an 'investment' rather than something that you consume has been a colossal problem for many places.

[jbay808]

If a city of 1 million people 50 years ago could afford at the time to build a school fit for 1000 students, why couldn't that city afford to upgrade that school to comfortably fit 2000 students today when it has doubled in population density?

You'd need to hire more teachers, yes, but not more teachers per taxpayer...

[pchristensen]

You get hit several times by the same problem:

Land was much more available 50 years ago, cheaper, and less complex to develop (fewer teardowns, existing infrastructure, etc). A school district that has only developed 20 acre greenfield campuses will have to develop new expertise and capabilities to develop a tighter infill school, and it might cost 5x or more for the same capacity.

Decreased housing affordability means that the price of every employee is much higher, so you either stretch them farther or do without. This is fine for high margin industries like tech and finance; low margin industries either pay lower real wages or improve efficiency with systems. Two big industries where those do not apply are health and education, which have (not coincidentally) inflated at a higher rate than real estate. Lots of specialized labor that's not automatable - expensive.

Then, because school districts are of varying quality (real and perceived), and usually assigned by geographic districts, changing ANY boundaries, especially in high demand areas, can have real effects on property values (again, real and perceived). Enough people will vocally object to boundary changes, even if it means a new school, that it's an annoying headwind to any attempt to increase school capacity.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If the the schools are at capacity, you can't responsibly add more housing, but if you're not adding more housing, why would you add school capacity? Schools are possibly the most local of local interests, and it's easier for any given community to shunt the problem elsewhere, especially if their houses are increasing in value while they stall.

[jbay808]

I don't entirely disagree with you, but I don't think that this fully captures it. I'm not talking about a new school, I'm talking about making an existing school bigger. There's no reason that a schoolhouse has to be just two stories.

Replacing a 2-storey school building with a 4-storey school building should not require purchasing new land, so the cost of land shouldn't matter much. (The temporary school closure would be a problem, but not insurmountable - it happens). The boundaries would be unchanged. A 4 storey building might cost somewhat more than twice a 2-storey building, but that should be more than offset by the fact that in addition to the number of taxpayers having doubled, they've also gotten much wealthier over the last several decades, so there's plenty of funds available.

Each teacher would need a cost of living bonus to offset the higher price of the area, but that's equally the case in a high-price low-density neighbourhood as in a high-price high-density neighbourhood. If your 3000 taxpayers can afford to pay 100 teachers enough to live in an expensive low-density neighbourhood, then your 6000 taxpayers can afford to pay 200 teachers enough to live in that same neighbourhood when it has higher density. And if the added density reduces land values, as many complain it will, then it will only get more affordable per-teacher than it is now.

[zip1234]

Perhaps schools should just be built with temporaries? It seems like there are no schools that are ever the right size. They either close the 100m school that was built 10 years ago because they don't need it or they need 100m to build a new one.

[maxsilver]

> It seems like there are no schools that are ever the right size.

Maybe every city shouldn't be chasing constant huge growth? And that for cities that do chase constant huge growth, they should plan and build the infrastructure for it before inviting a bunch of people and property developers in?

We have lots of schools here that are the "right size". But that's in-part because we have ~0.3% population growth year-over-year, instead of say the 3.0+% YoY pop growth that somewhere like Seattle often sees. Population growth isn't a bad thing, but it should be built and planned for, not just dumped into a place and expected for everything to "just work out OK".

> Perhaps schools should just be temporaries

That's a really unsafe idea, for a whole host of reasons : https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/nyregion/pushing-to-rid-n...

[zip1234]

Schools don't need to be the crappy temporary trailers. However, do schools need fancy immense structures or can they just lease office space?

[pchristensen]

It's not a bad idea, but due to zoning, there's usually not office space near neighborhoods, and schools are usually the most durable and identifiable parts of a community. Just like people that own 2 cars take fewer Ubers, a school district that already owns and operates a bunch of real estate has an incentive to either expand it or use it more intensively vs taking on temporary obligations with unknown future budgetary consequences.

[homonculus1]

After they get rid of all their lunches, lockers, libraries, laboratories, music programs, theater programs, shop programs, and athletic programs. Also after finding a landlord willing to comingle enterprise tenants with hundreds of loud children, and superimposing a school zone over an office building through regulatory alchemy.

[gowld]

> a class size of 25-30 per teacher.

That has nothing to do with housing or school buildings and everything to do with teacher funding. A classroom with 30 kids can have 3 teachers if the district chooses, with no impact on housing issues.

[KoftaBob]

* more traffic

Which is why transit expansion should go hand in hand with increased density. When you allow more density near existing transit stations, it makes it more useful. SB50 is a proposal to do just that, and yet the NIMBYs who fear increased traffic are preventing that bill, which would improve traffic by focusing development on areas near transit.

* more students at schools that are already overcrowded

More housing built leads to more property tax revenue, which leads to more resources to expand schools and build new ones. If the existing property tax rate isn't keeping up with school expenses, then the property tax rate is too low. Conveniently, the NIMBYs who fear overcrowded and overburdened schools are also the ones who refuse to repeal Prop 13 that keeps property taxes too low.

See the pattern here? Property owners make these arguments as reasons against increased density, yet prevent the solutions from being implemented. When you really dig in, NIMBYs overarching interests are in keeping their property value high, and in feeling entitled to freezing their neighborhood to the exact feel it had when they moved in. All the other reasons they give are bullshit.

[casylum]

SB50 allows for 4 and 5 story apartment buildings near "high quality" bus routes. This is a not the same thing as just allowing development near transit stations. If you look at a map of LA almost everything qualifies for development.

https://urbanize.la/post/sb-50-could-bring-sweeping-changes-...

[ummonk]

You could at least read your own link before spreading FUD. The increased height limits only apply to the rail / ferry stops (i.e. the green areas). The bus routes and jobs-rich areas get density requirements waived (i.e. you can create one story condo-complex), and reduced parking limits, but there is no change to height limits in those blue areas.

[casylum]

Ah, yes I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

[helen___keller]

I think this topic could be generalized to say that

(a) People are scared of change, and particularly change that doesn't benefit them directly but offers potential risks (this is a rational outlook, of course)

(b) Our society tends to operate in a low-trust manner, with this trust level dropping by the year. Maybe once upon a time, communities would feel satisfied that if the schools get crammed, we can expand the school and hire teachers. That if the roads are crammed, we can build infrastructure to alleviate traffic. Nowadays people have no trust that our institutions can handle the rate at which infrastructure is needed.

Putting together (a) and (b), as an individual the most rational policy is one of change nothing. The neighborhood was already great, why are you trying to rock the boat? What if you ruin everything?

> But that conversation never happens. It is _always_ greedy homeowners who worry only about their house price at the expense of everyone else. As long as the conversation is framed that way, I don't think it will every move forward.

On HN maybe, every local forum or town-hall I've seen it's the other way around.

[plughs]

> On HN maybe, every local forum or town-hall I've seen it's the other way around.

You may be right! I spend too much time in HN and reddit, and no time at all in forums and town halls. Perhaps my view is warped.

[davidw]

If you go to a public hearing about, say, an apartment building being proposed, you find people absolutely frothing at the mouth with anger, and coming up with the most outlandish of reasons why it shouldn't happen. They also tend to insult and be rude to everyone there not on 'their side', from the public officials running things on down. It's a real eye opener if you've never been to one.

[trophycase]

This isn't entirely true. I went to one last week, for example. And the people there were justifiably upset that after the first meeting in which the developers were to take suggestions from the neighborhood, they had included none of their proposed suggestions. It was quite obvious that the development group had sent two people to present the project, grit their teeth as they took a beating from the neighborhood, then rush it through approval anyway. To me it felt like capitalists doing the bare minimum necessary.

[leetcrew]

> Now I'm not going to pretend that homeowners are otherwise pure and virtuous and not even slightly concerned about the price of their house. But that's rarely the only concern.

it can be hard to tell the difference. most changes that the owner of a detached home would oppose are intrinsically undesirable to this kind of person. because they're undesirable, they tend to devalue the affected properties.

I don't think it's wrong for homeowners to oppose things that they don't want in their neighborhood. presumably they bought the house because they liked the neighborhood the way it was. everyone is entitled to advocate for their own interests. the problem is when they get an outsized say in what actually happens.

[CalRobert]

Building homes near jobs should mean less traffic, not more. None, if you build them with walking, cycling, and transit in mind. The nimby's often seem to think that all those potential workers will just cease to exist instead of simply commuting from farther away.

[snickerbockers]

> Also proposals to build more houses often are planned on property that is already occupied. In a nearby area they want to tear down an existing school, in other areas they want to take away open space that is used as walking/running/biking paths.

You make it sound like there are roving gangs of housing developers walking the streets at night and knocking things down to put up houses. Nobody's trying to build housing on land they don't own.

>It is _always_ greedy homeowners who worry only about their house price at the expense of everyone else.

Maybe it's not just their house price, but when they're blocking housing because they don't want to have to share the roads with other people or because they're worried about noise somehow then it is selfish. They're preventing younger people from living and advancing their lives because they're afraid that they will somehow be inconvenienced by being in proximity to other people.

[bdauvergne]

You try to separate the price from the benefits of the neighborhood, but I think it's the same thing, home price reflect the inherent value of the good and of its environment. The question is : does the environment of the house belong to the homeowner or not ? This question is reflected in Ricardo's point of view on rent ; for Ricardo it should not, and the price of the naked land value should be heavily taxed, only the utility value should be yours.

[TrackerFF]

I live in a town that has seen an explosive influx of people that past 30 or so years, and RE prices have doubled in just 10 years.

A lot of developers want to build high-rises and blocks, because it makes more sense - but it's a constant fight. I've heard projects that have taken as much as 15 years, from start to first shovel in ground.

It's a fight because you're getting bombarded with complaints and protests, from the people that already own houses in the area. Usually it's something in the lines of:

- People will lose sunlight. Could be 5 mins of sunlight in the morning, but they don't care - they'll protest.

- New buildings don't match the aesthetics of the neighborhood

- Visual pollution (a bit more harsh than the above complaint)

- More traffic

etc.

These homeowners are 50-60 year olds that want to keep their suburb feel in the middle of a city. They want their large gardens.

Of course, because of these actions, their homes are now worth 10-20x of what they paid, 30 years ago.

[Gibbon1]

Having lived in the Bay Area for 50 years. I keep coming back to the observation that the 'just build more houses' crowd studiously ignores or is actively hostile to the need to build more transportation and other public infrastructure. And are loath to raise taxes fund more services. Developers in particular are utterly hostile.

Given that makes sense that home owners and local governments wouldn't be very keen on increasing density. There is basically nothing in it for them and a lot of negatives.