[throwaway984393]

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.

[Robotbeat]

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).

[8note]

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

[pessimizer]

> they’ll become fantastically wealthy in such a scenario

If they leave immediately, rather than struggling to pay their massively increased property taxes, then mortgaging their house to keep up...

> by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY

...which apparently is a good outcome?

[Robotbeat]

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.

[spothedog1]

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.

[8note]

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

[spothedog1]

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.

[throwaway984393]

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.

[spothedog1]

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).

[throwaway984393]

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.

[spothedog1]

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.

[epistasis]

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.

[8note]

They did create the weath though.

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

[throwaway984393]

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.

[Aunche]

>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.

[8note]

The economic advantage of that land is that the nimbys are there.

Similar land is all over the place

[avianlyric]

Out of interest what the mechanism that results in people being priced out of houses they own?

[8note]

Everything else becoming more expensive, including taxes.

Eminent domain is another.

Why not worry about renters though? Are they not people?

[avianlyric]

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.