[guitarbill]

> Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing.

Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Much regulation exists to prevent people from being injured or killed, or for other legitimate reasons. Let's at least start by acknowledging that. (Of course petty bureaucrats and regulation do exist.)

> The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far.

How is this obvious? By the fact there is not enough housing where people want to live, and too much housing in other less desirable places? In the Western world in general? In Canada? In the US? In specific areas of the US/Canada?

> If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong.

Unable... or unwilling? There's a difference between affordable housing and available housing. And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. For example, allowing developers to pay a one-time fine if they don't provide any affordable options in a new huge apartment block is probably a poor strategy.

I'm all for making things better. The "too much regulation" thing is just a bit too facile of an argument. In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.

[TulliusCicero]

> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance.

"Too much housing"? What does that even mean?

Having a lot of housing is good, it means lower prices, and tenants have more power than landlords. Plus, realistically, developers will stop building if there's a total flood, since a flood will lower prices and thus profits.

> In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.

Okay, two things:

1. There's actually very few places with non-strict housing regulation overall. Most places will at least have strict zoning around mandatory detached single family homes on large lots for most of their residential land.

2. People want to move where there are jobs. So even if some random rural counties actually do have almost no housing regulations, no one's gonna move there because surprise surprise, people need income. If you look at places with strong economies, it's rare to find a place with minimal regulation; even Houston isn't quite as unregulated as its reputation suggests.

[bryanlarsen]

> "Too much housing"? What does that even mean?

It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China.

Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring.

It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.

[TulliusCicero]

That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things.

The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.

[bryanlarsen]

And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building.

And they did.

Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building.

P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.

[TulliusCicero]

It's definitely harder to analyze building for people actually buying homes vs renting, simply because buying property is susceptible to bubbles in a way that doesn't happen for people renting. People don't go irrationally beyond their means for rentals in the hope that the rental will appreciate in value in the long run and they'll be able to "hold onto it", because it's a rental.

Something similar happened to Spain recently, where there was a huge building bubble before (real estate was an insane % of the economy IIRC) and now they're not building enough.

[HDThoreaun]

You have misunderstood china's housing crisis. Its a financial crisis caused by mismanagement by the central government, not an oversupply of housing. The problem is that there are extremely limited investment opportunities in China because most companies are owned by the government. Without the ability to invest in equities the chinese turned to real estate creating a bubble, prices were completely divorced from utility. North america does not have a bubble, prices are high because supply is limited and people want houses, not because buyers think it is an amazing investment.

[bryanlarsen]

2008 was also about financial mismanagement.

[HDThoreaun]

Exactly, neither was because of "too much housing"

[bryanlarsen]

Which is what my original comment said. When a comment says "people say X", it's a statement saying "people are wrong".

[rangestransform]

> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too.

Why? People need to move, and a certain amount of transiently vacant units is necessary for migration to not disrupt local prices too much.

[guitarbill]

Sure, absolutely. But we've also seen that landlords/owners are sometimes happy to keep units vacant. Or just use RealPage. How many vacant units are required? And where?

For what it's worth, I agree housing is nutty. But few desirable places have solved it. Not in the US, not in Canada, not in Europe. The "just build more" argument seems a bit simplistic. In an ideal world, it works. But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.

[TulliusCicero]

> How many vacant units are required?

7% vacancy rate is about the historical average for the US I think. Around there or a bit higher would probably be healthy.

> And where?

Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.

But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.

> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.

???

I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.

[guitarbill]

> Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.

> But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.

Relax. I said no such thing.

>> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.

> ???

> I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.

I'm just going to quote this for posterity, noting that you cut off "In an ideal world, it works." on purpose. Let's keep things civil, and not try to misrepresent.

[TulliusCicero]

I'm not misrepresenting anything. That you're apparently confused as to why rural villages are dying while major cities are very expensive is just baffling.

It's not even really related to it being hard to build, since even if it was easy and there was abundant housing, you'd still expect major cities to be at least somewhat more expensive than rural villages, and it being hard to build housing somewhere isn't why the rural villages are dying.

> Relax. I said no such thing.

Then what was the point of asking "and where?" Especially since "where demand is high" was already explained. What further answer were you looking for?

[TulliusCicero]

> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money.

Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe.

Rather, the problems tend to be:

* Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).

* Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with.

* Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits.

There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want.

Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in.

> How is this obvious?

It's obvious at both a macro and micro level.

At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand.

At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming.

California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing

> A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here.

> ...

> Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing.

They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development.

> Unable... or unwilling?

Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough.

And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it.

I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.

[tristor]

> "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).

As somebody who has spent a lot of money to live in a high-value area, not because of an investment in the property, but to avoid having my family exposed to inappropriate behaviors, yes let's keep out of the poors.

Affordable housing doesn't mean it needs to be in the same gated community as expensive housing, or in the same condo building. Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.

My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is. I don't want my children exposed to public drug usage, petty crime, violence, and other ills that perpetuate any place where the people reside who lack the mental stability, intelligence, or self-control to hold down a professional job. I don't want them seeing this behavior, and I don't want them being pulled into dangerous situations because of the people who are in the community around them. I pay a lot to ensure that doesn't happen, including the choice of school and where we live.

I say all this as someone who grew up in a poor family in a bad area and spent my entire life escaping and staying out so I can raise a family in a better circumstance.

[TulliusCicero]

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.

Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.

And let's be clear, calling it economic segregation isn't an exaggeration. The zoning that the US typically has is a form of gated community living enforced by the government. It's designed to separate where people live by class, and people like this poster are entirely for it.

Also:

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill

It is, actually, because it tends to limit social mobility.

People having enormous advantages or disadvantages because of their starting social class is less than great for society. Obviously we can't really eliminate all of that sort of thing, but we definitely don't want the government explicitly pursuing policies to encourage social stratification.

[tristor]

Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up. If there's no way to escape the ills of humanity, it means you're stuck in a situation where the next generation cannot be assured of a better life. The aspiration of the American Dream is very much about escaping all the antisocial behaviors which dominate the lower class and having a prosperous life where you can raise a family that has a better life than you yourself had.

It's segregation by dollars, not by any immutable characteristic, and I do not see that as morally wrong in any way.

I will not sacrifice my children on the altar of economic mobility. I dragged myself out of poverty to make a better life for my family, and others can do the same. The US has some of the highest economic mobility of any society in the world, partly because we segregate based on dollars rather than on immutable characteristics.

If that makes me a NIMBY, so be it.

[TulliusCicero]

> Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up.

Yes, we can see that here. It's unfortunate that you've taken that position.

> It's segregation by dollars

The government intentionally separating people by socioeconomic class for something as fundamental as where you live -- which also controls which school your kids go to -- is fundamentally wrong.

And the biggest reason why some schools are so shit is precisely because of economic segregation. Concentrating the most impoverished means concentrating people with the most social problems too.

[tristor]

> Yes, we can see that here. It's unfortunate that you've taken that position.

I am not taking that position at all. I don't know what your position is, but you've implied in your replies to me that you /do/ take this position, however.

Forcing my kids to go to school with lower class children is not going to make the world a better place, it's going to force my children to be exposed to violence, drug use, promiscuity, and reduce their relative aspirations. When I was growing up, the school I went to had almost nobody from its graduating class that made it out and built a decent living. Many folks scrape by working menial retail and service jobs well into their 40s, and consider that a win because they weren't part of the much larger cohort that ended up dead, in jail, or in other dire circumstances which was the expected outcome in the community I came from. Those folks who scrape by considered themselves successful because they're alive, without any felony convictions or addictions to hard drugs, the bar of their relative aspirations is significantly lowered by the circumstances they grew up around.

I didn't drag myself out of that situation in order to see my children put back into it, because you think that averaging out the results of the students is an improvement by dragging down my kids to make up for the difference. I struggled to ensure I could build a family that had a better life than I did, and I don't see anything problematic about that at all. Taking that away on some spurious beliefs that this will enrich the lives of the very same people who are actively engaging in antisocial behaviors is ludicrous, and it's exactly the type of authoritarian leftist nonsense that Americans by-and-large reject wholesale that has helped make this the country with the greatest social and economic mobility and the highest levels of overall prosperity.

[MisterTea]

> Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.

Yeah lets go around accusing people of being segregationists because they worked hard to make a better life. Jerk.

[TulliusCicero]

You seem to be very confused. The person I responded to literally called their own position segregation:

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill

They also said their position was classist:

> My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is.

Maybe the real jerk is the person who didn't read the replies and threw out insults anyway?

In any case, it is literally segregation, just by economics instead of by race. Why am I a jerk for accurately labeling something? If you call people in favor of separate schools by race pro-segregation, does that make you a jerk for "accusing people of being segregationists"?

[MisterTea]

This isn't some racist ideology we're talking about. My overall takeaway from the GP isn't that they are in favor of IMPOSING segregation but that people naturally self segregate according to social strata which influences behavior.

Seeing how the GP escaped poverty I can understand their take - they put in the effort to escape while their peers did not. Their peers stay angry and frustrated which leads to taking it out on people around them creating a dangerous and unhealthy environment. So it's hard to look back and care about them when they seemingly don't care about themselves or worse, actively make things worse for others. So of course you're going to stay far away from them and prefer they stay far the hell away from you.

[HDThoreaun]

What do you mean accuse? OP said themselves that they are pro segregation. " Economic segregation is not a net societal ill"

[nativeit]

It doesn’t seem incredibly classist. It is incredibly classist. I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but there are all sorts of other -isms that are necessarily involved in class discrimination. Thanks for wearing your cursed opinions on your sleeve anyway.