It is an intergenerational issue, but this is ass-backwards of how most older people actually think. Young people think of real property as an investment, because they have time and aspirations of moving on to better things. Old people are at the end game. They got theirs. They are on fixed incomes. They are at or nearing the point in life when their quality of life will never again improve. They just want to hold onto it until they die, perhaps leaving their kids with some value after that point.
Sure, they could sell their bungalow in California for a fortune, retire cheaply to Montana, and pay their kids’ way through college off the remainder. But most people don’t do that. Most people hope to have both the bungalow and pay for their kids’ college, because they hope to continue the roughly the same lifestyle long after their kids are out of college. And besides, the value of real estate in California is so ridiculous, that even a modest decrease – which, as Cory points out, wouldn’t even happen – would mean you have only a slightly smaller fortune to take anywhere else. The only way a seller has to worry about property values going down is if he is stupid enough to try to spend his gains on another home in California.
In either case, the problem is not driven by people who treat their homes as investments, the problem is drive by people who treat their homes as homes.
All good points, but I’m not expecting a correction to come and devastate the wealthy. I’m expecting that the just plain folks who are sitting on a modest, but laughably overpriced $1.5 million bungalow to be gradually replaced with more rich people. By taking the hard line against any development, no matter how much demand there may be, just plain folks are pricing themselves out of their own homes and creating fantasy islands for wealthy people who can actually afford a coffee with croissant.
This argument has merit, but there’s a big hole in it: if it costs a builder about the same amount in labor and materials to build a 350k house as a 750k house, and the profit margin is much better on the 750k house, what’s the incentive to build a 350k house? So all the new houses are 750k houses, all the (formerly) 350k houses are now worth 750k, so your 350k set of folks has, in essence, zero options. They need options near public transportation, to get to their jobs w/o a car (which they cannot afford to get them to/from the nearest available 350k houses), so you’ll need something a lot like eminent domain to get such things built.
That is exactly what happens. Except development wouldn’t actually help their situation, either. development drives up to value of land even more than hoarding it does, because now all the land is now less limited and worth more. It has new options. And apartments will always be a more profitable use of the land than single-family homes. And an office/condo/hotel high rise is even more efficient. And the more people you can fit into an area, the more of a destination it becomes for even more people.
It’s not like you’re just trying to squeeze in a few more people into the same space and then your done. It’s not a sudden, limited-time boom that needs to be relieved. Most places don’t experience that kind of growth, and California probably never will. People are flooding in from all over, constantly, and will continue to do so.
At best (read: not actually possible) you can create a bland suburbia that has no interesting points (so no one goes there), far enough away from other interesting points (so no one wants to dock there in between going to those other interesting points), that the cost of living stays as modest as possible (i.e. is dominated by forces outside your community).
It’s a terrible plan, but all the plans are terrible in their own way so you may as well try to hold the line there. After all, you just have to hold out until you die, then your kids can live in whatever dystopia they prefer.
I don’t think I agree - your argument assumes that only new houses are amenable, which is…false. There’s nothing preventing older homes from being near busses/etc either, as a lot of those homes are built around existing infrastructure, and new ones won’t necessarily be. At the very least the transit argument is a draw.
Again, this isn’t arguing against building more middlerise apartments like the article indicated, it was a comment very specifically directed at the ‘why don’t they build cheaper houses’.
Yes. Although, from the developers perspective, if the market is really tight, that becomes a building with 8 $1M condos instead of one $1.5M home.
You need a robust number of them to actually drive the price down.
As someone else pointed out. When there’s not enough $750K homes available, the shoppers don’t really move down market to $400k-$500k homes. Instead the $400k-$500k homes move up market to “create” more $750K homes.
You need a dramatic increase in inventory to reverse this and create downward unit price.
Yup. The goal of this change, to create large numbers of denser housing sounds great.
I’m not sure if the politics and process are good or bad. But, the end goal sounds nice. Especially since, around mass transit feels like the best place to have denser housing.
That isn’t really an accurate statement. Jacobs was trying to stop a project that (typically for Robert Moses) prioritised the flow of cars over neighbourhoods where people could live. She was very supportive of additional well-designed and affordable urban housing so that the people who made the city work could live in the city. She didn’t like Le Corbusier-style high-rise projects but that’s not what’s being proposed here.
It also wouldn’t be accurate to compare the NIMBYism in this case to Jackie Onassis in re: Grand Central Terminal or other landmarks preservation efforts. For the most part the mass transit lines are already in place and either aren’t endangering historically significant buildings or have already taken them into account.
Also, I’m wondering if there are any provisions that a certain percentage of the new units be rentals rather than condos. If not this is only a partial solution at best.
Well, it depends on who you consider within the circle of eligible voters. What is the district (in the abstract sense) scale, and who are the stakeholders? I know with your libertarian leanings, scale is most likely to be as small and local as possible, preferably down to the individual, but one can imagine that if it is the interest of the entire state make certain moves, then a majority of voters could still have an interest that superseeds the hyperlocal inhabitants. There is also the issue of timing. Are the “settlers” i.e. those who stake their claim on the land first, the only stakeholders who have a say in how a community should be shaped?
