Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis

I think this is mostly a caricature. Certainly there are people who don't understand the economics, but I think there are very few people who are saying "no more housing". However, what housing do we build and for whom? Who gets to live there and who profits? We're in this broken system where:

- local politicians do some amount of lip service to the need for affordable or below-market housing, and then roll back requirements for affordable unit percentages

- projects that get approved often find some way to reneg on their initial claims about how much of a project will be affordable, or do weird shenanigans like arrange to get their affordable units put in some other building, possibly in a different neighborhood. We have big affordable projects landing in Treasure Island (there's no public transit to speak of, the soil is toxic, and it's a food desert). I don't have the receipts on this, but I've been told some of the affordable units on Treasure Island were to let buildings on Yerba Buena meet their requirements without actually having BMR units in the building. Cuz rich people don't want to use the same elevator as non-rich people?

- a bunch of the "affordable" units don't make any financial sense and are effectively inaccessible, e.g. b/c the HOA fees mean that someone who meets the income requirements can't cover the mortgage + HOA + taxes.

- we have, depending on estimates, >52k vacant units in the city, including many luxury condos, which I think makes people reasonably skeptical about the efficacy of "trickle-down" housing making stuff accessible to people at the lower end of the market.

... so a new building might need to have 12% affordable units (they'll round down) which they'll try to put in the worst place they can find, and people who meet the income requirements to buy them may not even be able to actually afford them.

Meanwhile, Parcel K in Hayes Valley, despite having been designated for affordable housing for literally decades, has seen no development and many who have historically claimed the YIMBY label advocate against building housing there, because the people who can already afford the neighborhood prefer it as an open space.

In that context, I think most new residential buildings are extremely ineffective as a response to the housing affordability crisis. If they're not good at housing people who can't already get housing, what are they good at? I guess in some years they make money, which is, after all, what they were designed for. A progressive stance of wanting to build housing that more directly meets the greatest need, rather than more luxury units that rich people no longer want to buy, seems totally appropriate.

Also, when the price of market-rate vacant condos drops below the per-unit construction cost for affordable units (which I've heard is often > 1M), the city should have some mechanism to buy them at market rate and convert them to BMRs.

> This is definitely a HCOL area, and my rent, which I think is substantially under market value

But that’s exactly it, right? Because it’s under market value they don’t get enough revenue to do things like proper sound isolation. I live in a modern apartment where there is no rent control, and I have none of these problems.

And I think the rent you pay will pay for mortgage somewhere else because the relative income is low in that area. How much more do you have to pay to get a mortgage in a similar area?

This is an extreme (and common) example of black-and-white vitriol on this topic. The reality is that it is very reasonable to highly desire a "neighborhood that is walkable and quiet and close to everything, where they have space to park their car and play with their kids in the yard", and often a person's dream is not even that whole set of features. This desire is especially reasonable if you have committed a lot of your life choices to achieving that dream. The dream is strong in part because this lifestyle was within reasonable reach across many parts of the country for so many decades that it became synonymous with the very name of our nation. On the spectrum of things a person can want, this is definitely not on the "selfish seeming" end where baser things like fame, wealth, and power reside. Just because it is becoming less and less attainable doesn't mean a typical human will suddenly switch to, "oh well, I won't fight for that dream any more then." Multiply that fighting spirit by ten for people who have already finally won the dream and see it being taken away. It will take a very long time for that cultural transition to finish, assuming we keep going in this direction. Economic pragmatism can only inform the human spirit so much.

That's one half of what you said. The other is how we feel about other people. You can chase or attain the dream and vote in a way that preserves the qualities of your community that you fought for, and still have sympathy for others who don't have that kind of community. There is no cognitive dissonance there. Critically, it's important here to understand that there is a difference between, on the one hand, new people wanting to live somewhere because of the current distribution of job opportunities, regardless of how much more dense it must become for more people to live there, and, on the other hand, simply needing quality housing, which is both a much more impactful and much more fixable problem.

Like you (almost) said, for the vast majority of the people you are criticizing, it has nothing to do with home value. People want to live and die in neighborly, safe, clean communities with what feels historically to an American like a "little bit" of room to exist, and not be forced out of their homes by large increases in tax. People really, really want those things. And that's a reasonable thing for a human to fight for, even if it's becoming less and less attainable as the image of the future continues to develop. I.e. you're letting the shitty situation provoke you into harshly antagonizing reasonable people.

Many states (like WA) are on the budget system for property taxes: your assessed value effects your share of the taxes, but the overall property tax take is fixed. So if the property market booms or crashes, the amount collected is still the same. Playing around with freezing/capping assessments will only change how the tax burden is distributed (well, if it freezes for everyone then nothing really changes).

WA also pools property tax revenue for schools, which means richer western Washington districts subsidize poorer easter Washington districts. People still move around to be in the better school districts, however, since the advantages of those schools go beyond funding.

> Virtually every affluent residential neighborhood in Houston has strict private deed restrictions — and, remarkably many of those deed restrictions can be enforced by the city. ...

> Some neighborhoods are in effect using historic districts as a zoning substitute. ...

> Several years ago, the city also created a process by which residents and neighborhoods could petition for a minimum lot size or minimum building line, or setback from the street. ...

Or from https://therealdeal.com/texas/2023/03/16/dont-say-the-z-word...

> This lack of zoning has resulted in Houston using other legal and governance mechanisms, such as ordinances, a building code and deed restrictions to impose rules that function as a form of de facto zoning.