Everyone is a NIMBY in their own way, it's just a difference of how much annoyance you are willing to tolerate. Most people wouldn't want a noisy factory or a smelly dairy next door, for example, but those things have to be somewhere.
Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
Now imagine you spent a lot of money for your house. A housing company proposes changes to the neighborhood that will reduce the value of your house by 20%. In other words, you will be working and paying for years on a portion of your house that no longer has value. Are you happy? Well, maybe you can handle it because you're rich.
So these are the kinds of things that go through the minds of NIMBYs.
I think it would mean that either you rent (but someone else is still an owner and has to deal with the situation) or you don't care much about the property value (which means, in other words, you are rich).
Or it means I'm not planning to sell for a very very long time and thus appreciate the tax break a lower appraisal gives me. The same logic applies if I am a landlord--as long as the rent and thus cash flow stays the same, I don't particularly care about what some appraiser says the property is worth.
Anyways, it seems to me that restrictions on construction are a lazy owner's way to maintain property values. After all, there is no better way to add value to and capture the revenue from my house than to add another 2 stories to it and rent it out. I do own the land underneath it, after all.
Funny you mention Ellison. That's pretty much what he's doing on Lānaʻi, though less the giant skyscraper and more the idea of remaking the island for his own purposes.
How strange is it to be Larry Ellison? Actually, all parties in that dispute are weird. Dude expects the world to freeze around him (who knew that redwoods would grow), so he offers to double the landowner's investment, giving them an $8 million dollar profit...and they don't accept.
Know what I'd do with $8 million dollars in real estate profit? Retire immediately.
>Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
I have trees now!? Flowers? Luxury! My current apartment doesn't get enough sun to grow plants that need sun. And we pay $2200/month for a two-bedroom apartment here.
Wow $2200 for a 2 bed? Luxury! That's how much you'll pay for a studio here in Mission, SF... if you're lucky. (and I wish this were a Four Yorkshiremen reference[1]. No!)
No, I'm pointing out that the hypotheticals used to make NIMBY sound sensible apply very, very rarely, and also presume that the supposed beneficiaries of NIMBY have a higher initial, pre-urban-density standard of living than we actually do.
I think you need to read the third paragraph, which is the more common case (although the other two paragraphs were based on real-life experience, too).
I own because I want to live where I am, but I might eventually want to move. If someone builds something that lowers my home's value by 25%, then that's a good chunk of change that I won't be able to repay on the loan if I were to want to sell. I didn't buy because it's an investment, but it acts like one anyhow, whether I like it or not. I'd prefer it if someone else's actions don't essentially shackle me to where I am.
TL;DR: it's because home equity is used as a savings account, and it's the primary or sometimes only means whereby most members of the middle class can accumulate significant savings.
Therefore any land use changes that might negatively impact home values threaten peoples' savings, and alternately any land use changes that positive impact home values can be profitable to existing homeowners.
It's a very simple, deeply perverse incentive structure. It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
Realistically, in areas where housing cost and shit is a big problem, prices will always go up even if you build a skyscraper in my backyard.
My personal issue and why we've fought against some developments in the past, is because city noise/animal/traffic/blah blah rules are just not being enforced. At all. So if I ever want to be able to sleep (not sleep in. Just sleep at all...like at 4 in the morning or whatever), I had to buy a place that was totally overpriced, and in a totally sub-optimal location, just so I'd have tolerable neighbors.
Then someone decided to build a rental-only land-locked high rise where the only possible access point is through my development's parking lot. And said high rise, even though it is in my backyard, is technically in a different city, so when there's neighbor issues, it gets really complicated.
If it was in my Canadian hometown, it honestly wouldn't matter: some asshole decides to throw a party at 3 in the morning or play hockey in my yard, I call the cops on them, 10 minutes later problem is over. Here? They'll just laugh at me and tell me to grow a thicker skin.
So the only thing I -can- do is prevent it from happening in the first place. If it was like in other countries I lived? Knock yourself out, build away!
> It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
This is only true in the absence of periodic appraisals to recalculate property taxes. In states where that is the norm, homeowners are incentivized to allow other homeowners to prevent their properties from appreciating, so long as they're not planning to sell in the immediate future. This has its own drawbacks (mostly longtime, fixed-income homeowners who are forced out due to onerous property taxes), but it's a much healthier dynamic than what states like California, where property taxes are capped, have.
Property tax caps can be a good thing in inexpensive areas. Indianapolis instituted a property tax cap almost a decade ago when some unscrupulous politicians used the appraisal office to gain tax revenue by artificially raising everyone's valuation. I suppose the same thing could happen in California, but at least you have the potential to sell your house for a profit there.
It appears that you are getting down voted. I can only assume its because people don't like taxes, of any type, in general or that they don't understand what you mean by land taxes. Perhaps if you elaborated on land taxes then people would understand that "property" taxes should be determined by the value of the land being occupied and not include the value of what it is being used for (the tax amount shouldn't be more if its a 10 story high rise vs. a parking lot). Land is a fixed asset. If someone owned an entire block in San Francisco that was just surface parking they should pay the same amount of [land] tax as the owner of the lot across the street that has a multi-million dollar high rise housing complex. The nuances of various land tax plans can be interesting. One being that EVERYONE (human) that lives in a city/state/country gets an allowance based on the amount of land in that city/state/country divided by the number of people living in that city/state/country (and even perhaps multiplied by days living/residing divided by 365).
Yes, you could use the proceeds of a land tax to eg pay for a universal basic income.
You can also use some proceeds to pay for infrastructure development (of any kind). If done well, then the additional infrastructure will raise land values enough to pay for itself in higher taxes.
Hmmmmmm... As someone with family in Boston and who plans to return there, I really want a some way to invest 20% of my IRA contributions in the Boston housing market until I can actually afford to buy a house there and move back.
I wonder if I can help someone else hedge against the market going down.
Slightly related, they have housing cooperative in Germany, especially the East. You can own a share, and get much reduced rent in return, in any of the cooperatives apartments and houses in the city. Depending on how well they do, they might also pay a dividend, but mostly the owners of the cooperative are also the renters, so generally they rather keep the rent down than make a profit.
I know old people who `paid' for their shares by working on building sites for these very houses in the 50s and 60s.
I do like it, too. However, my policy recommendation differs from the author: use a land tax to cut down land valuations.
One goal is of course to allow substituting capital for land (ie higher houses) to make housing cheaper. There's a reinforcing cycle: less NIMBYs, leads less restriction on that substitution, leads to less NIMBYs as per the paper.
One way to look at the problem is that something thought to handle externalities creates a bigger externality itself.
If zoning laws could be priced somehow so that when they become a cost they had to change or reduce it might help.
Zoning laws in places without expensive real estate like, say, much of the US midwest probably makes things better for people. In SF or in this example in MA and other really popular places they make things worse.
Perhaps some economist has tried to calculate the price of NIMBY, zoning law externalities. Anyone know of someone who has tried?
I really doubt that zoning laws improve quality of life for people in your average randomly selected town. Zoning laws give us things like parking requirements which drive down density and force everyone to drive. Then there's frontage requirements, setbacks, bans on multifamily and commercial construction.
One way we could price zoning laws is through their impact on buildable space. As long as we raise taxes on the beneficiaries, everything'll come out in the wash, right?
>I really doubt that zoning laws improve quality of life for people in your average randomly selected town. Zoning laws give us things like parking requirements which drive down density and force everyone to drive.
If you do drive, though, you are not going to appreciate new development which makes it impossible to park when you get home from work.
Not everyone hates living in places where people drive.
If people want a guaranteed place to park, they should build a parking space on their own property. There is no reason that public space should be given away to people for the purpose of parking.
The issue is when there is some limited quantity of shared parking and some choose to free-ride on that shared space rather than dedicating parking on their own property.
I have a handful of friends who left Russia in the early 90s and the pictures they paint of the USSR are highly unflattering in this regard. One, the daughter of Lenin Prize winner, grew up in a cramped two bedroom apartment. My guess is that things were much worse down the social totem pole.
Things have, for better or worse, changed pretty dramatically, at least from my experiences. I've been in Russia with my partner for about 3 years now, and we've lived in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and for a brief time, in Pereslavl.
While the apartments aren't huge by comparison to most houses in the US, they are pretty comfortable, though the quality will vary depending on the particular building and region you live in. Most of the buildings appear to be the same that were built during the USSR, it's just the internals were remodeled with more modern amenities.
It can take a little getting used to, living in somewhat cramped quarters, but for me anyways, I've always had fairly small places to live growing up, whether it was living in a 3 bedroom with 6 people in college, my cheapo first apartment, I guess it's more just something you get used to. Even now, my partner and I live with her mom/aunt in a 3 bedroom apartment in SPB and, aside from occasionally stumbling across each other in the kitchen and funny battles for the bathroom, we get by just fine.
heh, meant it sarcastically. Both where I live now and growing up, I've been in situations where it's 1 bathroom for 5 and 4 people respectively, and a queue forming in your own home for the toilet just gets silly, even if it's frustrating.
Well, part of the Communist marketing brand is that everyone equally gets a cramped two bedroom apartment, so it'd be useful to get hard evidence one way or another.
From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
That sounds more like capitalism, which says that you might someday earn a one-bedroom condo, if you're innovative enough to start a company and get a good exit.
No, capitalism is realizing that Zillow.com can find you a host of cheap properties in minutes, and HomeDepot.com or Tumbleweed.com can put a house on it cheap. ...while you start a company.
You're dodging my actual point, which the other replier definitely understood.
Once Upon a Time, we Westerners looked at Communism and laughed. We justified our system (democracy for the state, capitalism for the economy) by pointing out all the obvious material benefits we reaped from it:
* A class structure that looked more like a Gaussian curve than an exponential distribution, with greater actually-existing, de-facto equality than the Communist countries
* Workers' rights and the free formation of unions
* Public infrastructure, parks, and transit
* Cheap, acceptable housing for families, leading to widespread owner-occupancy becoming the norm, something rarely seen in civilized human history
* Ever-climbing life expectancies at birth, thanks to rigorous public health, sanitation, and disease control measures
In contrast, the Eastern Bloc promised that Real Soon Now, actually-existing socialism would be transformed into Full Communism, and people could have nice things. All they had to do was make a few sacrifices today to defeat the fascist capitalists and experience great rewards tomorrow!
Whereas nowadays, the spectrum of jam-promises has shifted. Nowadays, the capitalist West promises its people, "Jam tomorrow, for the deserving", while most of the Second and Third World have switched to promising, "Jam never, it was always a lie meant to lead you away from God and Putin."
We can still kinda say we've got the cheap, widespread consumer goods, but not so much the rest of it.
In the actual apartment isn't so hot either. I've stayed in my wife's childhood home a couple of times, and it's like two concrete shipping-container-sized boxes set side by side, with a tenth story balcony.
This shortage is man-made.