- cross-posted to:
- justtaxland
- yimby
- cross-posted to:
- justtaxland
- yimby
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Whenever someone says they aim to make it “easier to build houses”, I feel they just mean they’ll remove certain standards. Not the “must have this many parking spaces” standards which we can do without, the “do we really need a fire ladder?” standards. And then the house is sold at the same price(+inflation) than before because the cost cut all goes to the builder, not the buyer.
If you assume the building company is exploiting every change in regulation (they do like money after all), small changes do nothing and you readily adopt more extreme views (and if you’re racists you blame the people with neither money nor power, but that’s expected of them).
It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they’re given.
I’ve never met a person actually making that argument, though. I’m certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it’s primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:
The YIMBY movement (short for “yes in my back yard”) is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]
As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]
The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]
The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]
This has that twitter style ‘make up a dude to get mad at’ vibe to it.
Who tf is saying “execute landlords” maoist style but also “deport immigrants”
My U.S.S.R. refugee/immigrant next door neighbor that owns a few houses she rents out. She’s not the brightest bulb.
She’s the problem
The problem is that people say the latter as if it’s a solution on its own without also doing the former.
To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.” But there are plenty of people who think that you can build housing, in an environment where rich landowners have the ability to buy up and hoard everything you build, and don’t comprehend that this in no way solves the problem.
When you say “doing the former” what specifically do mean?
Empirically, building more housing does lower the cost of rent. See Austin for an example. But yeah there is more that could be done for sure.
I need you to learn about the California city of Berkeley, where it is illegal to build more housing because it might cast too much shade and disrupt your neighbor’s hobbyist tomato garden.
You probably read that and thought I was exaggerating for effect. I am not.
You need to read my comment again, a little more carefully this time.
RE: Immigrants
Trump & Co are not making this argument in good faith. They don’t actually believe that immigrants are taking the jobs and houses, and their insane proposed solution is not actually intended to make anything better. Trump is a fascist trying to win power through demagoguery, and their focus is to find pain points of negative feelings they can amplify to turn people angry and create division.
A big part of this is “othering,” finding someone they can turn into the bad guys so they have someone to beat up and blame for all our problems. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the blacks, the Muslims the Mexicans. It doesn’t matter who, as long as they can find a way to tap into hate and bigotry, and funnel that into a shared anger towards anyone. Any group that is “foreign” and new can and has been the “other” we hate.
In the real world, a solution to housing shortage is as simple as it would be without immigrants. Populations have been growing for centuries, and we simply build more and upwards to provide housing for everyone. Since people are working, their productivity allows them to pay for their housing. This is not particularly complicated. When population growth happens fast, we simply need to manage this process more intently.
We are currently in a weird situation because of population shifts, increase in costs of housing (like variability in lumber costs and high interest rates), and the weird period of excess wealth that we were left in due to the pandemic economic chaos.
The real solution is by no means simply finding an “other” group to blame, hate, and throw into the ocean. The real solution is to put more effort to advance our housing development slightly faster than it would do so normally under regular population growth.
What Harris is doing makes simple sense. She proposes to give incentives to house builders to build more, and to give incentives to families to be able to buy more easily than corporations. There’s more than can be done, but this approach is economics-sound and will definitely work well enough while other optimizations are pursued.
Trump’s idea of removing 10 million immigrants is not only deeply imbecilic, it’s also designed as a catastrophe on the economy, and it’s suicidal. You can’t shift large segments of the population without an economic impact. Immigrants of all walks of life are part of the economy, contribute to productivity and pay taxes. In various sectors they are a key source of labor supply where we would otherwise not have enough people to perform jobs. It is estimated that there are about 5 million undocumented immigrants GROWING OUR FOOD in the US. If your plan is to kill Americans by famine, kicking out the people that grow and make the food will work a treat.
I also have thoughts on how to slow down corporate ownership of housing, but there’s no need to get into that since this post is already long. Harris already has the right direction by putting strong economic incentives on the things that we want to see more of. And that’s a starting path towards even more improvements in the near future. But it requires having people with functioning brains and good ideas in gov.
I don’t think you live where I live. Because where I live there is just no room to build many more houses without demolishing other houses first. There is a lot of discussion about moving away from single-family houses and increasing the density of living space. I don’t see how this would be solved by making it easier to build.
ETA: Just to be clear, I absolutely am not advocating for deporting immigrants.
Do some reading about "the missing middle." In many cases the sort of medium-density housing like row houses or duplex/triplex/quadruplex designs that offer more comfort and privacy than a massive apartment complex but are more affordable than single family houses on large lots are explicitly regulated against in American cities, and local codes need to change in order to allow the sort of humane-but-cost-effective housing that will make a dent in the affordability crisis. Problem is, though, that existing homeowners see denser housing as a threat, both to the value of their own properties, and to the comfortable social homogeneity of their neighborhoods. At some level you need to have the power to force these developments through over the objections of the neighbors, undemocratic as that is, or else the problem never gets solved.
The ones who find social homogeneity “comfortable” are the boomer bigots in power. That is one of the main obstacles to progress in this despicable & irrational inequality: removing the churchy racist fucks from office.
In truth, NIMBYism is a gigantic problem even (especially!) in places where people profess to hold liberal and/or progressive values. It’s a massive contributor to the housing crisis in California, for instance… and the attitude is not limited to Boomers, who are reaching the age now where they’re as likely to be entering assisted living homes as they are to be stubbornly holding on to a house in the 'burbs that’s appreciated 1000% since they bought it. GenX and even those us Millennials who are fortunate enough to own can be and often are just as guilty of NIMBYism as the old folks.
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Thank you for the clarification in your “ETA”.
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Evolving the (sub)urban planning directive beyond “single-family houses” while also "increasing the density of living space” is “making it easier to build”, TBH. 😅
- I realised afterwards that I said nothing about executing landlords. I’m also not in favour, in case anyone was wondering.
- Hm, I guess it comes down to what is meant by “make it easier”.
The only way to reduce the proportion of single-family houses around here seems to be by adding rules and restrictions. Adding more rules is usually not what people mean when they say “make it easier”. But I get your point.
One example is allowing the construction of ADUs. Throwing a small apartment on top of a garage is an extremely common addition these days that requires minimal waste.
Similarly even without ADUs, many homes in my neighborhood just outside of Boston have been remodeled from single family 5 beds to 2/3 family condos without being completely demolished. This was largely made possible by eliminating rules and regulations like the parking requirements for houses near public transit and loosening restrictions on conversions themselves by reducing restrictions for setbacks and similar rules. My own home is a condo conversion and it’s the only reason we could afford to own here.
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If housing is expensive where you live, and most of the land is tied up in single-family homes, what’s stopping people from just converting their homes into plexes, or straight-up selling to someone who will turn a couple single-family lots into an apartment complex that houses hundreds?
If you’re anywhere in North America, chances are it’s literally illegal to do so, because of restrictive zoning and other NIMBY land use policies that make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most.
So the solution, then, is to make it legal and easy to build housing so people don’t have to fight over scraps.
If you’re anywhere in North America
I am not and every argument in this thread seems to assume I am and argues with some rules in the US or Canada. This was exactly my point. The situation seems to be wildly different than my experience.
I only mention North America because the US and Canada are the only two countries I have lived in, and thus have the most intimate knowledge of how their urban land use policies work.
But even outside of North America, many places have some form of restrictive land use policy. In the UK, I know they have the council system, where there’s a local council that has veto power over every single development. It may not be the same form as North American zoning, but the net effect on making it de facto illegal to build enough housing.
I’m also aware of many other European countries having strict land use policies that make it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to build denser housing, hence why many European cities (cough cough Amsterdam) have ludicrous housing crises.
Japan is perhaps the most notable exception that I’m aware of. In the 1980s and 1990s, they had the mother of all real estate bubbles burst, which devastated their economy, and the lesson they learned was they needed to make it easier to build housing to avoid a similar thing ever again occurring. They made land use policies uniform and quite permissive at the national level, allowing people to build most housing by right in most locations. The result? Tokyo, despite being the most populous metro area in the world, is actually remarkably affordable, even to minimum wage earners.
Again, this is more of the “off-load to oppressed middle-class (ie. everyone non-corpo/5%) to ‘solve’ w/o lasting foundational change to build from”… See: recycling program, education system, etc.
This is a short video about how one law makes it more difficult to build denser housing in the US and Canada: https://youtu.be/iRdwXQb7CfM?si=fLJ6qcVIOzHEFOvU
Who is getting mad at the second part but not the first?
People who realize that not all places that need more affordable housing have space to build more housing, and that prices are inflated because of landlords and companies buying up the limited property. Like in cities.
Different situations, different priorities.
Are these being discussed as one or the other things? Why can’t we have both, where applicable?
Edit: Er… I only just now noticed the “deport immigrants” part of the top panel. 😨 I want everything but that one.
NIMBYs whose main complaint about short-term rentals is the (admittedly significant) nuisance factor of having a “party house” next door… but also don’t want a duplex or other multifamily housing arrangement across the street, where it might bring The Poors into the neighborhood and drive down their property values.
Fact is, though, that most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and their financial situation only works out if they think of their house as an eternally-appreciating asset that they can continually leverage to pay off other debts. If the line ever stops going up, they’re fucked. I hate NIMBYism, but we’ve made our society into such a hypercapitalist hellscape that on some level it’s hard to blame people for it.
Even taking you at your word, just building more houses wouldn’t solve the problem unless the other existing issues are solved first. There are already more than enough houses, several times more unoccupied houses than there are homeless people in fact. If you just make it easier to build more, those new houses will just end up in the same situation as the existing lot: bought up by corporate groups as investments, held ransom by landlords, and generally NOT made available to consumers who want to buy a home.
So yeah. You’re gonna see some pushback if you’re only making that second argument, all that will do is make the investor class richer without solving any problems.
True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason – they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there’s no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn’t as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don’t have them – housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it’s not doing any good.
Plus, it’s just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.
The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.
Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly – much less gleefully – take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?
At this point, I’m half-convinced this “vacancy truth” rhetoric the person you’re responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.
I’m assuming that most of the people making these arguments (at least on Lemmy) are coming from the “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” point of view where they presuppose some sort of command economy scenario, with housing being a basic right provided by the state and work being an optional thing you can do if you want to.
Which is all well and good, but we’re not in that society right now, and the suffering of the unhoused isn’t something that just goes on hold while we wait for the proletariat to rise up. There are solutions that we can implement now that will make things better, which work better than, I dunno, then the government eminent-domaining every derelict property in East Waynesvilleboro, Pennsyltucky, and shipping homeless people there en masse, away from family members and support systems.
Because ð issue isn’t a lack of housing, ð issue is speculation sucking up ð available housing and consequently raising costs for everyone.
Ðere are more empty units ðan ðere are unhoused people, and it is all down to speculators artificially driving up ð price to keep ðeir rent checks up.
I am curious about your use of the thorn
They feel an impulsive need to be more special than all the other posters, and it’s the only way they can get attention.
I like ð letter and decided to start using it for my own amusement. Were I possessed of less fucks to give for how annoying prescriptivists would get about it, I’d actually start using a whole entire orþography I have developed.
