Why is this always framed as a problem caused by people looking for a place to live?
I moved to SF for a job. I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years. I'm not the one who decided to approve all those new office buildings. Yet I was the problem for renting an overpriced apartment from an SF native who bought in the 90s, and now pays less than $8K/yr in taxes on a place worth over $1M. And now I'm still the problem if I decide to leave?
I've lived in several US cities over the course of my life, and the only constant is that whoever you talk to, the problems are caused by the people who moved there after them.
I’d say that another constant is the belief that living in a place for a certain period of time confers a sense of ownership over a city, along with the right to decide who should and should not live there.
You obviously see that in states where Californians are moving, but you even see that in California against those who moved there recently for a job.
I know this is kind of the opposite of the (mostly joking) point I made that you replied to. But the thing I find bizarre is that people can't understand why other people oppose change in the place they live in. Most people choose places to live because they like those places. I think it's safe to say that the things they like extend beyond the four walls of the residence they buy or rent. They might like the walkability, or the views, or the diversity of the neighborhood, or the proximity to friends and family. All of these are things that are subject to change over time, and are more likely to change as the demographics of the town do. The shops you liked to walk to get priced out and replaced with Starbucks and Lululemon. The views get blocked by new buildings. The diversity goes away as people are priced out. The friends and family move because rent went up too much.
How can you possibly be surprised that people don't want the things they like about the place they live to change? This doesn't mean they "own" the city, but it does mean it's quite understandable for them to try to do things to prevent the change if they can. I'm not arguing that this is good, or even completely rational in all cases, but it's far from surprising.
> How can you possibly be surprised that people don't want the things they like about the place they live to change?
People can and should obviously get upset (or excited!) about specific changes. What I'm more surprised at is the idea that some people have that any change at all is unacceptable. It's not like the town that one loved sprung up into existence as is, it took change to get the parts that you like in the first place! No one has an affirmative right for their town to remain as-is from their favorite point in time, as that's just not how life works.
I'm specifically thinking of my time in Santa Monica, with the residents thinking that they should be able to keep their small town vibe despite living close to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. It struck me as neigh upon delusional to think that one can live near a major city and demand that the city halt expansion wherever it might be convenient to you. That's just not how humanity has ever worked, ever. Cities expand, live too close to them at your own peril.
Assuming that people are against any change at all seems like quite the strawman. Perhaps those people support building some change, perhaps they just want to ensure that public transit, utilities, road infrastructure can handle the added density.
Very few people are are against any new growth in cities. We could likely have a more productive discussion if we framed it around the optimal rate of growth of a city.
> Very few people are are against any new growth in cities.
It seems you’ve never met a NIMBY.
“No new people in my city” is actually a pretty surprisingly popular position. Usually these people are super pro growth, as long as that’s somewhere else.
Because it's quite xenophobic behavior, you say diversity but mean the diversity of people who you happen to like. It's rather easy to be tolerant if only things that you like apply. You can hear exactly the same things racists say about their small towns changing without all these sophisticated meaningless words.
Why should people living at some place even be concerned about diversity? I find your comment almost surreal - after relentless media campaigns, people really believe "diversity" should be their top priority in life?
Both of these comments are so viscerally true. I live most of the year in a very small town (as in, no home mail service) that's also a big tourist destination. It has all the usual tension between townies, second home owners, and tourists, but the thing that really shocked me when I moved here was how there is a sort of caste system among locals with a bunch of dimensions like how long you've lived there, if you own a shop in town, if you are on a town council, etc. Living here can be strange. On one hand, some of the people are extraordinarily friendly, while on the other, I've never felt more unwelcome in a place in my entire life.
We moved to Asheville a few months ago and noticed the same phenomenon. Combine low local wages with high incomes of people working remotely or buying a second home and you get a strange dynamic within the town.
Without taking an opinion on whether that "sense of ownership" is right or wrong, I would say that the response to gentrification is another example of the phenomena you are describing.
I live in one of those state Californians are moving to, and the hate for them is simply epic.
I keep thinking it would be amusing to give out bumper stickers that change in the rain -- with text to the effect of "STAY OUT", or "GO HOME", and a red circle/slash over an image of California. When it rains, the image of California changes to an image of Mexico.
The two most populous states in the US are California and Texas. One demonizes immigrants for moving in and destroying the local culture / way of life. The other, of course, is home to The Alamo.
I find it pretty ironic that in Idaho they would oppose a scenario that is aligned to “free market” principles and that Oregon would oppose immigration. I once took a job in Portland and had stuff thrown at my car because of the CA license plate along with screaming “go back to your own state.”
Opinions change very quickly once they involve people personally.
“When California sends people north to Oregon, they’re not sending their best and brightest. They’re drug dealers and smugglers. Some, I assume, are good people.” — my sixth generation Oregonian wife.
The NIMBY problem suggests that it's not so much your fault at all - the locals would have passed zoning laws preventing housing for you from being built, as they did in SF ("protect our views" and such) - but actually the fault of the locals for resisting density upgrades.
Imagine, in SimCity terms, if your Low-Density High-Wealth Residential citizens passed a ballot measure preventing you from building Medium-Density Residential zones, and you have the essential problem of SF and other regions in a nutshell.
People don't like density upgrades, and they fight against them tooth and nail. It's what we get for allowing density to be zoned locally, and it's something that other countries just don't even allow when it's bad enough that homelessness is a problem. "Your city block is being upgraded to a megatower, here's due payment for your home and you get first right of refusal on a free home in the megatower."
Be warned, though; once you become an established local, you are extremely vulnerable to falling prey to this exact behavior. I know several awesome people who finally made their wealth and bought a house in SF, and promptly turned into anti-density NIMBY folks - because they were afraid that they might not make a profit on their home, or because they liked their neighborhood, or whatever.
Now I want NIMBYs in city builder games randomly preventing the player from creating and/or upgrading zones. Chances are they will be treated like the nobles in Dwarf Fortress, that's forced to leave or killed off in spectacularly creative ways.
It's all fun and games until someone's home value is depressed by a zoning decision, and then your city goes bankrupt because they mob against you on SimCitter :)
"Due to your citizens refusing to approve tax levies for sewage system upgrades, your city has died of dysentery."
It is understandable that people are selfish but why society as a whole should pay for that? It is a relatively recent development, no more than a century, that people actually have such a power to derail urbanization while at the same time profiteer off of it. Society just pays [1] those people basically because they were born at the right time.
I'm pro density but the densification process really trips core parts of people's psyche. We're human beings.
It affects your _home_. You've lived in a place for 10 years and suddenly you have no privacy because a big block of units gets stood up looking right over you. Or they block your sunlight, build right up to the boundary, or your quiet leafy neighbourhood just isn't quiet anymore and that's after you lived next to a construction site for 6 months. These things can have impacts on people's relationships as well.
Of course the world changes, such is the price of progress, and _usually_ those affected can afford to wipe their tears with big stacks of cash.
But I don't think it's fair to characterise all NIMBYs as just greedy, a lot of people just want to live in the neighbourhood they thought they were buying into.
I agree, it's not a pure calculated greed but some sort of a "mental denial of change" coupled with the historically unusual legal powers. Immediate property appreciation is more like blinders, it is very hard to swim against "number go up". End result for society is still the same though.
'I like they way my lawn is and i don't like construction noises'
vs
'I can't get a job because it's too expensive to rent or buy where the jobs are, so i live in poverty'
(or i can't start family because i can only afford a room-share, or any number of other effects from NIMBYism)
Existing residents resisting change really aren't any more selfish than new residents demanding change. Both are championing changes that are in their self interest at the expense of the self interest to others.
Sure, and every oppressed person demands changes in their self interest at the expense of the oppressor. Now, I'm not trying to call people who want to live in HCOL city but don't have money oppressed but want to point out that this line of thinking is unhelpful. What matters is the outcome for the majority of people now and in the future, and based on that I don't see how rights of the existing residents to tell their neighbors what to do with their property in the world class cities make the world a better place. And research supports that conclusion.
> People are not better off without property rights.
Sure, but the problem at hand is they have more than property rights, they have rights to a neighbor's property, conversely my neighbors have rights to my property, and how's that fair under capitalism. Besides, there are other capitalist countries where zoning is not a local level affair and they don't seem to be marxist hell-holes as you imply.
> I guess you celebrate colonialism
I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone.
Of course people have more than property rights. Like access to clean drinking water, infrastructure, and so on. It's wrong to assume their rights should stop at the border of their property. Like if they have a water pipe to their house, other people shouldn't be allowed to cut off that pipe. (As a simple example).
You are talking about a kind of societal contract of society having to provide housing for people. Likewise, there are other societal contracts.
"I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone."
The argument "the economy depends on more people being born" doesn't really fly in a discussion of how more people cause problems (like needing a place to stay). I don't think most people are asking other people to have lots of children.
Even if you assume everybody should be provided with such a place, why in my backyard (or anybody else's)? Since you seem to have given up on the notion that people might deserve a nice place to stay in, why not just build ugly skyscrapers somewhere else (other than my backyard), and house people there? How about starting in your backyard?
It's understandable that people want control over property they don't own. Doesn't make it right though. And it doesn't make sense for the law to give them that control.
I think it makes sense to give people some rights. For example if you build a highway right in front of their house, it devalues their investment, and they could deserve compensation. Or make it a garbage dump. Are you really of the opinion the the government should be allowed to simply create a garbage dump in front of your house? What about a garbage dump in a poor black neighborhood, would you consider that OK?
It's possible there was a promise of "quiet surroundings and lovely views" when they bought the land from the government. So the government should stick to those promises.
You're debating a strawman. The argument is that NIMBYs oppose more housing in a place already zoned for housing. No one's talking about building a nuclear power plant next to a kindergarten.
Somewhat reminiscent of the GME short squeeze phenomenon. New entrants buy expensive homes, they go up in value because of nimbyism, more people buy homes at the higher prices because they saw the others return, and have to become nimbyist themselves in order to further constrain supply to see return. It just accelerates at each iteration as the next wave has to constrain supply more and more to break even.
No, it really doesn't. SF tried that with neighborhood commissions. It turns out that higher density housing is hideous to existing residents, regardless of the shell it's in.
It doesn't need to be. Vienna has quite a few of higher-density council housing buildings that are architecturally pleasing, one example is Alt-Erlaa [0].
> Why is this always framed as a problem caused by people looking for a place to live?
It would have been hard to win friends or votes if anti-housing people 50 years ago disclosed what segment of "people looking for a place to live" bothered them so much. It's no coincidence that this all starts around the 1968–1974 period: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
Why is it everyone else's problem to accommodate you?
>I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years.
California's population has increased 4x since 1950 vs 2x for the country as a whole, more so in SF. To say there is no new housing is just ignoring the (finally waning) population boom.
The tone suggests OP is entitled to more and that housing policy should change to benefit them over other residents. Its a common sentiment I see on HN that seems to suggest California should continue to bend to support new residents.
I have no problem with the people that move to California but the back pressure is bound to happen and native Californians seem despised for it.
Again, I don't mean to imply that anyone owes me anything. But as I said, I'm not the one who decided how much housing to build. And I'm not the one who decided how much rent to charge. Both of those decisions were made by "native" Californians (whatever that means). So all I'm objecting to is the notion that I (and other "transplants") the ones solely responsible for this mess.
I don't think the article frames it that way, really, if you look at the conclusion. I'd also highly recommend his book for an introduction to land use politics, centered around the bay area:
I can see that, but the headline[1] and much of the first half of the article[2] strongly imply it (imo).
[1] The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis
[2] Example: According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.
I moved to SF for a job. I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years. I'm not the one who decided to approve all those new office buildings. Yet I was the problem for renting an overpriced apartment from an SF native who bought in the 90s, and now pays less than $8K/yr in taxes on a place worth over $1M. And now I'm still the problem if I decide to leave?