[energy123]

For people who don't want to live in density, the counter intuitive thing is that it'll be easier to buy a single detached house if you allow more condos, especially 2/3 bedroom units, because there will be less competition. It's the pigeon hole principle.

[kuboble]

But this is exactly the issue.

It's not the wannabe home owners who are protesting but the current home owners who are rightly afraid that it will immensely reduce value of their homes.

[nradov]

That's a common misconception. The most active NIMBYs have lived in their homes for years and intend to die there. They don't intend to ever sell and aren't particularly concerned with property values per se. What they do care about are quality of life issues: noise, traffic, privacy, parking, crime, litter, etc. The more neighbors you have, the greater the risk that some of them will be antisocial assholes who let their pit bulls run loose and have screaming arguments late at night (which I have experienced in person). This may seem selfish but if you want to promote more housing development then you need to understand their concerns.

[tptacek]

That may be true in some places, but in the Village of Oak Park, where I live, it's definitely not. Places like Oak Park --- wealthy inner-ring suburbs of major American cities --- are defined by their school systems. Those schools drive property taxes, which ratchet down affordability. Housing is dominated by SFZ lots, and the houses built on those lots are rational acquisitions only for families of school-aged children, most of whom will sell when their youngest graduate.

If long-term homeowners want to age in place in their houses in Elgin and Buffalo Grove, free from the distractions of density and traffic, I don't have a problem with that. But inner-ring suburbs like Oak Park and Evanston exist primarily to divert school funding from the broader metro area into wealthy enclaves; they create, in effect, de facto private school systems. Homeowners there have no moral standing to resist density.

[HDThoreaun]

I know you dont want to hear this but the other person you responded to is right. The problem here is that Illinois uses property taxes to fund schools when basically every other blue state uses a more equitable income tax based funding method. We need to vote for a fairer funding system.

[tptacek]

I don't care. The phenomenon repeats itself in states/MSAs with different school funding formulae, but obviously I agree that Illinois school funding is problematic; the Jesuits pounded that into me with "Savage Inequalities" back in the 1990s. I'm working within the system I am in, and I have no patience for people who resist immediate reform in the ostensible service of some greater future reform.

[nradov]

I don't understand why people keep harping on about morality. No one cares. What matters are votes.

As for where you live, Illinois in general is particularly badly governed among US states. The entire state is a corrupt fiscal train wreck and serves mainly as an example of what not to do. Some other states have mechanisms to roughly equalize school district funding independent from local property taxes. My advice is to move.

[tptacek]

No. The states you prefer resolve this problem not by convincing people to vote against their interests, but by denying individual homeowners the right to vote down new housing. I would welcome that approach too, but in the meantime, I work within the system I have. And, sorry, but I'm really not interested in your take on where I should live.

[nradov]

Suit yourself, but when the captain has steered the ship into an iceberg it's smarter to jump into a lifeboat instead of going down with the ship. The math doesn't work for Illinois any more. They have unsustainable public debt and employee pension obligations, a declining population, and no more room to raise taxes. Minor tweaks to state housing development policy or school district funding formulas won't prevent the inevitable drastic austerity program that's going to hit when the state becomes unable to pay its bills.

Other US states have their share of problems but overall Illinois is in the worst fiscal shape.

[davidw]

Here's a specific hearing that I attended where exactly that dynamic played out

https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

A room full of angry, wealthy, older people who showed up at 11AM on a weekday to stop homes for people who doubtless earn less than they do. And in that case, they were successful, sadly.

[xnx]

I'm conflicted. Who should be allowed to say what gets built in an area: the neighbors, the neighborhood, the city, the county, the state, the federal government?

[davidw]

The property owner, unless what's being built is really smelly, loud, or dangerous. With perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.

I think this take on it is pretty good: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines

[xnx]

I agree that a property owner should be able to do what they want as long as excess noise, smells, or shadow doesn't leave their property. I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.

[dragonwriter]

> I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.

It's the other way around; HOA's are largely an outgrowth of the real estate industry stepping in to solve the problem of how racial discrimination in housing could be made formalized and still publicly enforced through the courts when explicit racial discrimination by local governments in racial zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917; starting with racial restrictions, other busybody terms started getting adding to property covenants.

[dragonwriter]

> ith perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.

HOA's entire point is to using leveraging property covenants to create viral contracts attached to property that leverage contract to create a basis or public enforcement, that's the hammer behind any of their private enforcement, without which they would have no effect. "Voluntary...HOA type thing" is an oxymoron.

[HDThoreaun]

The actual answer is the state in the US. What it should be probably doesnt matter because its not changing anytime soon

[euroderf]

I thought zoning was supposed to provide predictability, stability. So if you buy a house in an area zoned for denser stuff, don't whine when a building starts to go up.

[tptacek]

No, mostly what zoning was intended to do was to keep Black families (and, before that, Chinese families) out of white suburbs. The documentation on this point is extensive and convincing. That effect is less deliberate, overt, and intensive today than it was in, say, 1964. But "we've always done it this way" is a uniquely weak argument when it comes to single-family zoning.

(The problem, throughout most of America, is lack of multifamily zoning; it's not as much that people own single-family houses near multifamily lots, because their grandparents generally took care of that problem in the late 1940s when most major metro areas got rezoned to eliminate those multifamily lots).

[rayiner]

Just the state.

[xnx]

Would it reduce the value of their homes? My property would be a lot more if it were legal to tear it down and put up a 10 unit apartment building.

I think the complaint is more than they don't want their neighbors houses replaced by apartment buildings.

[energy123]

It would, but I believe the cause and effect is roundabout.

The first thing to go down will be rental yields, because those are more directly and immediately impacted by real market forces (number of renters versus available housing stock on the rental market), instead of speculation or the wealth effect or chasing a store of value, which are factors that drive the price of housing ownership but don't drive rents.

After rental yields decline, housing as an asset class will be less lucrative and higher risk compared to the cost of capital, which then causes an unwind as investors move to other asset classes.

[xnx]

It's weird, because some areas with the highest density also have the highest rents (e.g. New York City).

[Panzer04]

Its interesting to consider the effects. Assuming you must live in a house, you actually lose nothing in a devaluation.

If you own outright, all houses being cheaper means you can buy exactly as much house as you already owned if you sold.

If you don't own, houses being cheaper lets you buy more house.

Houses being cheaper relative to everything else means that if you sold your house you can buy less of other stuff with that money, but given you need a home anyway you've not actually lost anything in a fundamental sense. It's probably a bit too abstract to convince people to look at it this way though, and realistically you are losing value relative to everything but housing.

It's overall just a short-term mindset, sadly. Most people derive the majority of their income from things unrelated to property, so cheaper property lets them buy more house than otherwise regardless.

[energy123]

Your comment didn't deserve to be downvoted. This might not be the primary factor behind local opposition, but it is a factor in why it's difficult for state or federal politicians to enact real reform, even something like amending tax policy. Two thirds of the population don't see the housing crisis as a crisis, for them it's either a housing bonanza, or it's something that they don't want to see happen but are afraid of being personally injured if it's fixed due to their leverage being multiple times their annual income.