[clickety_clack]

An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.

[InsideOutSanta]

This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?

[xg15]

Not an American, so maybe I'm underestimating the insanity of US zoning laws, but I always thought "residental ares" means "no businesses". Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.

But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.

[watwut]

> Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.

I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?

[hollerith]

"this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices"

[xg15]

Well, ok, but then how are property prices artificially driven up by planning restrictions?

Is this just about not allowing more compact housing like condos or high-rises?

[beerandt]

The key to understanding all of this is that a huge set of Americans 'want' to pay more as an exclusionary benefit.

With section 8 (fed housing welfare) rules, any multifamily structure has a better than not chance of becoming slum housing in a time frame less than the average span of homeownership.

Which is both about property values and not wanting to live in/near section 8 residents.

"Planning" and zoning aren't the problem, they're the enforcement mechanism. (Since police and other public enforcement of quality of life issues has been all but neutered in the name of equity/civil-rights/whatever.)

Same reason for the seemingly inexplicable popularity of HOAs that everyone seems to hate.

High prices are one of many resultant 'enforcement' prongs.

[DroneBetter]

also just as importantly (or moreso for cases of individual rooms used for social/hobbyist clubs like this) would be 'empty building taxes' to prevent the eventuality of landlords preferring to rent out fewer properties over reducing the cost of vacant ones because * housing is necessary for survival so people cannot afford to baulk at the prices of artificial scarcity, making the optimal price effectively arbitrarily high without regulation * landlords are generally not infinitesimal entities in a vacuum, and generally stand to lose existing customers who are still on the expensive contracts if they cheapen their unoccupied offerings although such a solution would just move the problem one layer further up (stop building properties to have them be vacant) and the solution is land tax

[derektank]

Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades

[occz]

Municipalities have far-reaching power in deciding what gets built where. Getting things built can take quite a long time.

[cousin_it]

Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.

[em-bee]

segregating poor people into their own area is a sure way to make them stay poor. i believe there is evidence that the best way to help people out of poverty is to let them live in mixed areas where they have a chance to associate with people who are better off than them. i believe the primary reason is that even if you work hard to improve your life, as long as everyone around you remains poor then you are limited or are self limiting in how much you can actually achieve.

[rjsw]

Pay UBI only at the level needed to live in the place with no jobs and cheap housing.

[bluGill]

> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.

Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)

[cousin_it]

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.

Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

[bluGill]

I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.

[amanaplanacanal]

Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.

Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.

[xg15]

Well, how about the freedom to invade a country you don't like? Or how about that country's freedom to invade your country?

One person's freedom always ends at the point where another person's begins. That's not exactly a new observation.

[eszed]

> if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air

Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?

[lelanthran]

Why VAT? It's a regressive tax that hurts poor people more than rich people.

[TeMPOraL]

Not in this case, it doesn't - at least per the other articles in this series.

[xg15]

> Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.

> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?

[danaris]

I mean, this is a very good philosophy to have.

The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).

And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.

[cogman10]

The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.

Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.

Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.

All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.

Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.

The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.

[cousin_it]

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

[cogman10]

I disagree.

I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.

It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.

[inigyou]

Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.

[hakfoo]

Isn't the solution just to take the market out of real estate?

At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement."

There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time.

If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)

[bluGill]

People regularly have conflicting incentives.

[bluGill]

I do not disagree.

[AndrewKemendo]

You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem

“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman

[cogman10]

Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.

I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.

Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.

[AndrewKemendo]

>Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.

That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party

The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members

Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office

>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.

Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement

Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money

[xg15]

I mean, one of the main takeaways from the article was that "there is a market for X" is something fundamentally different and sometimes even the opposite of "X is a good thing".