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Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

inpractice.yimbyaction.org

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Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#191

Post by orange_joe »

vondur wrote: post #176
orange_joe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the extremely unpopular but logical next step in managing change would be to induce development by increasing property taxes. Basically compel people to move and sell their land to developers who build up the land.

So, what if it were you in that position? What if your income was reduced and now the Government increases the property tax so you can no longer afford to pay for it? And let's add in the Government has a large tax on capital gains, which will kick in if you sell that property, and now you can't afford a new property somewhere else?

1. I’m being descriptive not prescriptive. property taxes being used to drive urbanization and development is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth.

2. Your issue with what I said seems very dependent on something you chose to “add in” — Why am I being asked to defend something I never said?

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#192

Post by grumpy-de-sre »

scoofy wrote: post #184
grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young. It's going to take a good while before the balance of power can be shifted. Democracy has the longterm tools for sure, just not for another twenty years or so. Hopefully over time yimby can take hold in some pockets and gradually expand out from those strongholds.

>On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young. The point is numbers of voters. There are more young voters now than older voters, this is why we are seeing things change at the state level. Now that many millennials are in there 40's with no real shot at home-ownership it's starting to freak people out. Which is why we will continue to see the YIMBY and Strong Towns movements,…

I'm not sure how much acceleration we're seeing, do we have numbers on this? Or are voters just becoming disenfranchised?

Acceleration is great hope/source of optimism.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#193

Post by RickS »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #91
nimish wrote: post #7

Old people are 'aging in place' instead of cultivating the new generation and it really, really shows

I'm not sure if democracy has the tools to adequately deal with this tbh, at-least in the short-to-medium term. I really hope we can find a way to make voters actually believe an abundant future is possible, and that it'll benefit them and their families. It's the biggest difference I see in societies like China, there's this pervasive optimism about technology, progress and abundance (~700 million people have first…

This is the china of "let it rot"[1] and a housing market so f'd that people felt pressure to buy and pay for houses that didn't even exist yet, leading to a massive mortgage boycott[2] in protest of all the resultant shenanigans? They're already failing to keep up the growth[3], their population pyramid projections are pretty bleak going forward.

I agree with you re the need to convince modern western voters of an (actual) abundant future, but china seems like they're not doing so hot either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mortgage_boycott

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#194

Post by seryoiupfurds »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #174
e40 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.* This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the ed…

> This is a big problem in a lot of places Where is your evidence of this "big problem"? No state allows what you describe. This being some sort of widespread problem is a myth that's been running around for decades after Pacific Heights which was part of Hollywood cashing in on white fright in the late 80's early 90's. For example, in super-liberal Massachusetts: if you are one day late with your rent, the landlord…

> Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.

The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.

For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.

Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#195

Post by amanaplanacanal »

PaulHoule wrote: post #141
tormeh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real. The Republicans would absolutely ruin any such institution the moment they'd get the chance. Better to keep health care private and instead socialize insurance. A hollowing-out of insurance is far easier to reverse than a hollowing-out of hospitals and clinics. An NHS led by an openly antagonistic government is not long for this world. Look at what the Trump admin is doing to other government services.…

They’ve been saying they want to repeal Obamacare since Obamacare and they haven’t been able to do it.

It's better for them to run on it than to actually do it.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#196

Post by alwa »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #40
avidiax wrote: post #9

I think the author has it quite backwards, at least as it comes to housing. Politicians are beholden to the members of their district, not would-be members. Sure, more affordable housing would benefit many people, but it wouldn't benefit the members of the district, particularly the wealthy and powerful, since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as pe…

> Since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as perceived by voters) Wrong!! Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in. They own the land and the land will appreciate in value (unless your house as a shit location, but then you area poor-ass republican anyways, statistically spea…

Does this preserve the land values of currently-economical exurban plots? It seems like some of this kind of policymaking, explicitly or not, involves the metro region as a whole, no? Would these putative land value increases accrue to individual property owners or to the developers that have the capital to build MFDs and rent them out?

I’m not sure how helpful a mental model of “shit location [of] poor-ass republicans” is: last I checked those suburban and exurban landholdings contribute a fair chunk to the state and county property tax bases. Though I’ll grant that I don’t know the nuances, and I don’t know how to think about how to tease out the housing component of urban-dwellers’ land-tax-related contributions, as distinct from those buildings’ commercial functions.

Anyway, your “shit” “poor-asses” certainly are able to muster political opposition to measures that devalue them, even if they are “poor-ass” relative to their, uh, “betters” like you. In fact, your “shit” “poor”s who have accepted an iffy location in order to invest in a home they can afford… those might be even more sensitive to losses affecting their life’s biggest investment, and more likely to think of it as the anchor of their financial security.

For that matter casually condescending attitudes like the one you display here seem to have a lot to do with those constituencies’ political potency, and their reflexive opposition to YIMBY sorts of ideas…

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#197

Post by kelipso »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #147
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why? Do you think declaring their preferred pronouns helped liberal politicians? Who did it ultimately help? Probably the Trump campaign. Also, "defund the police" is easily the stupidest political slogan ever. It's bewildering. Did no one think "Reform the police" was a winner? And yet liberal politicians lapped it up.

I dare you to find a Democratic candidate saying "defund the police" any time in 2024. Bet you can't find any.

People have memories.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#198

Post by legitster »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #174
e40 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.* This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the ed…

> This is a big problem in a lot of places Where is your evidence of this "big problem"? No state allows what you describe. This being some sort of widespread problem is a myth that's been running around for decades after Pacific Heights which was part of Hollywood cashing in on white fright in the late 80's early 90's. For example, in super-liberal Massachusetts: if you are one day late with your rent, the landlord…

Eviction proceedings suck. It takes at least 6 months and you don't get rent in that time even if you have a slam dunk case. Imagine if you took out a home loan to build an ADU and lost the equivalent of half a year of payments on it.

The risk of legal costs are basically passed along in the cost of rent. And bigger corporate landlords are naturally going to have a bigger advantage because they can pool their risks.

The point isn't that there are bad landlords. It's that you are creating a treadmill. The more you add tenant protections, the more costs you add to housing. And the more incentives you give landlords to screen tenants and otherwise behave badly.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#199

Post by throw4847285 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #88
legitster wrote: post #46

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it…

As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York. I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but…

I've been a renter since I was born, and I have rented from both mom and pop landlords and bigger corporations, and I can tell you that whether or not the "small landlords" were good people or not, our financial interests were diametrically opposed. If I did not live in cities with good tenant protections, there would be no incentive whatsoever for the people who owned the place where I lived from providing basic services such as repairs and advance notice of rent increases. Many did not anyway.

What is often forgotten in these cases is that being a landlord is not an identity, but a choice. It's hard not to feel like the housing market is basically a cartel run by small homeowners across the country conspiring to make home ownership as inaccessible as possible in order to make the value of their property as high as possible. I would love to purchase a home, but even 10 years of a software engineering salary are not enough for that in NYC. And so I will continue to rent, and I will continue to advocate for expanded tenants rights.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#200

Post by asoneth »

thegrim33 wrote: post #98

I can not follow the linked article at all. It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad". The summary, the best I can tell, is "big government bad, that's why we need to empower big government even more, so that it has the power to fix the things that big government did"? We gave control over housing to big government, which did things the author doesn't like, so now the…

It seems that the author is arguing for specific government policies they consider smarter than current government policies.

> It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".

With respect, perhaps you are trying to fit the article into a pre-existing worldview that divides political positions into pro-big-government and anti-big-government? At least, I have heard people espouse this perspective before and it always struck me as odd -- do you think there is a correlation between the size of a government and its quality?

There exist well-run countries with higher levels of government spending (e.g. Scandinavian countries) and lower levels of government spending (e.g. Switzerland, Singapore).

And there exist poorly-run countries with higher government spending (Greece, Brazil) and lower government spending (Hati, Somalia).

Similarly, some large companies are run well and others poorly, and some small companies are run well and others poorly. Scale confers advantages and disadvantages but doesn't seem inherently bad.

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