[wronglebowski]

“Local opposition” and NIMBYism is the primary reason we have a housing shortage, it’s a rampant problem across the US. The few grumpy old folks that show up to local planning meetings shouldn’t hold us back as a nation. Until we can find a way to get over that hump I’m not sure how we'll move forward in many aspects.

[rescripting]

Except at least housing provides benefits to the local community.

A data centre provides almost no jobs (except during construction), and draws a significant amount of resources (electricity, water, noise pollution).

Why should any community want something that only enriches Amazon taking up vast swaths of land in their backyard?

[alright2565]

> significant amount of resources

Most importantly, location!

Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.

There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.

[epistasis]

A great solution to this is a land value tax. How do you actually determine if the data center is not the best use for a parcel? If it can compete with other uses of land based on the land value. A land value tax makes the data center, or any other use, pay the community for exactly what it's taking away from the community.

[alright2565]

I agree, and I was considering mentioning a LVT in my comment.

I think it would have been pointless though, because LVT doesn't stand a chance: Conservatives would hear "tax" and immediately say "no", and progressives would be unhappy that their elderly mom wouldn't be able to live alone in their 6-bedroom childhood home.

[wronglebowski]

Housing doesn’t benefit the local community(from most NIMBY perspectives). It makes housing more affordable lowering their property values, creates the need for more infrastructure and creates change in their environment.

The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.

[bitmasher9]

It benefits local business by having more customers and benefits local government by having a wider tax base.

Maybe it doesn’t benefit some individuals, but the community improves.

[nothercastle]

Many times it’s just unplanned uncontrolled growth. It causes issues that aren’t mitigated and generally makes life worse for existing residents. NIMBY is strong because residents know that their politicians are corrupted and incompetent. Politicians will get kick backs and infrastructure will never get extended sufficiently to support. Theoretically we all benefit from increased density due to reduced infrastructure costs and shared resources, in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings. Similar to how larger companies cost savings from size is offset by internal inefficiency and friction.

[epistasis]

I think the history of the 20th century shows that "planned growth" is in many ways far inferior to unplanned growth.

All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.

> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!

[nothercastle]

Look at how any large American city is managed. Especially west coast ones that have recently grown. The city government is complete dysfunctional and dispite having significantly more revenue than neighboring smaller cities they piss it all away and produce much worse results than neighboring smaller cities. Seattle and Portland are good examples.

[supplied_demand]

At the same time, the most densely populated large cities are also among the most expensive.

[sorcerer-mar]

That's because the community benefits so much from density. People want to live there because the density has created fantastic amenities and jobs, ergo prices go up.

[dymk]

Depends what you count as an expense and where collected taxes flow. Rural living is artificially cheap by being subsidized by its more “expensive” dense living counterpart.

[jmclnx]

It is not just "grumpy old folks", almost everyone who own property, no matter the age fights development.

Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.

[reliabilityguy]

Statistically speaking, the homeowners in the US are not young.

[runako]

Statistically speaking, Americans are not young.

[aegypti]

The “YIMBY” movement is completely dominated by 20-40yo middle class professionals in my experience.

[nothercastle]

Who own nothing and are renting everything. They also think they don’t pay property taxes hence they vote for every tax increase

[aegypti]

YIMBY is a supply side movement laser focused on regulatory barriers, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tax measure mentioned in relation to it.

Plenty of tax breaks though.

[epistasis]

YIMBYs are on the forefront of attacking Proposition 13 in California, and YIMBYs are also driving a resurgence of Georgism to use land value taxes to address fundamental inequity.

YIMBYs also regularly support work on non-regulatory barriers, such as the rent increase caps in California (ABA1482), and have even supported social housing bills in California.

There's also lots of talk of transfer taxes amongst YIMBYs, see for example: https://cayimby.org/blog/if-you-tax-the-things-you-want-less...

There are two types of discussions about YIMBYs: 1) that by far-leftists that see the battle as ideological and about regulation/deregulation and trickle-down housing vs. revolution, and 2) the actual YIMBY activism on the ground which is all about more housing and making housing less of a financial and emotional burden for renters.

[maratc]

Every time I read about a purported "housing shortage" I'm reminded that there are about 140 million housing units in the US[0], with an average of 5.5 rooms per unit[1], or about 700 million rooms, all that for 350 million of population, or about 2 rooms per person.

This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...

[1] https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...

[jeffbee]

Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?

[maratc]

If I'm reading myself right, I'm suggesting that there's no need to "the solution to housing shortage," since -- with more than 2 rooms per person on average -- it's not a problem to begin with. The problem frequently called "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.

[epistasis]

How are those rooms distributed? It's not like they are individually moving parts.

People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.

> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.

Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.

This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.

The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.

[maratc]

> willful deception to prevent action on the cause.

I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.

I've checked Zillow though.

There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.

The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.

"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.

[daveguy]

Surely most people can recognize the difference between NIMBY of a noisy wasteful cover for Bitcoin mining operation compared to the NIMBY of not wanting "the poors" nearby or the ability to retain high rent charges on hoarded housing. Housing shortage NIMBY and "don't put an industrial facility in my backyard" are really very different things.

[this15testing]

most ycombinator folks can't seem to distinguish things outside the software realm. Maybe if all these super ultra mega smart engineers and developers could focus on utilizing existing hardware more efficient we wouldn't need to constantly build these energy sinks.

[pif]

Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.

Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.

[sorcerer-mar]

> Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.

Huh? There are housing shortages in plenty of low-density places.