401–410 of 418 posts
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Severely limiting the property rights of anyone owning land there doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable
It's not a severe limitation to tell someone that everyone who lives in an area agreed to something that they'll have to adhere to if they want to live there also.
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Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work. [1]: https://youtu.be/…
Posting a video from a highly biased source is not very convincing. Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.
Their framing also highlights the important financial difference between children and sewers, though: the former get less expensive and more productive over time, and the latter do the opposite, which is how the problems happen.
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A law negating a covenant everyone entered into willingly and freely does kinda alter the deal after its made. I do wholeheartedly agree that removing zoning restrictions doesn't impinge on anyone's liberty though.
> and freely If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?
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Posting a video from a highly biased source is not very convincing. Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.
Look, the people making this argument all come from a fairly aligned political unit. If you start hearing this perspective from a broad coalition of ideologically diverse groups, it would mean the thesis has become consensus. I agree with you that the guy's tone is not great, so here's a slightly different framing: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/17/sprawl-is-... (strong towns' emphasis is on ending fe…
Fiscal soundness at the local level should not be a political issue, but IMO the progressive left has turned it into one by attacking anyone and everyone who isn't in rigid alignment with every element of their housing agenda, which includes some pretty radical (and largely undesirable) changes for most Americans. And then of course when people balk at these undesirable changes, they're called racist, selfish, or both.
I don't agree that you can really claim one part of town is subsidizing others based on the analysis from firms like urban3. Sure, if you stuck 10 businesses on a plot of land where only 1 exists now and those businesses all thrive, tax revenue would be higher for that plot of land. Is there demand for 10 more businesses in your city or town, times every drive thru fast food joint or Starbucks? Is it actually a problem that businesses are paying more in taxes than they consume in services, which lets residents pay less than they consume? Would those businesses be there if their owners couldn't live in the type of housing they wanted in the city? There are so many intertwined issues that seem impossible to decouple to me, in addition to the obvious issue that the school system is the primary consumer of tax revenue in almost every area and the taxes paid by parents don't come close to covering that expense.
It's also not a coincidence that they picked an economically depressed area with a fairly high crime rate for this analysis. If they looked at a city with residents who made the median household income for the US, or even above it, I suspect you'd see a very different picture (though the larger point is still worth considering and largely valid).
I do agree completely that the federal and state governments are just setting these places up for failure (and future rounds of external funding), but I don't see YIMBYs talking about that. They just seem to be angry that people are living more comfortably than they would like in lower density housing instead of embracing the urban lifestyle they are so passionate about, and want to force everyone to align to their vision not for fiscal stability, but for ideological reasons.
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You're forgetting the most important one. Having a bunch of your money tied up in an illiquid asset that is subject to all manner of government micromanagement gives you a huge incentive to see to it that the government doesn't get progressively more shitty toward you than it already is.
Yep, saying it's an age thing is missing that every homeowner is directly financially incentivized to ensure prices go up. I literally get physical printed mail (against my will) every other week telling me about the health of my neighborhood where higher home sale prices means better. Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
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How did you qualify for a mortgage without income?
It was 1991 and we pooled money from 10 people. The house was super cheap ($60k) and in a very depressed area (Attica, Indiana). The seller was a person and not a bank.
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The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws. Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the sam…
Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents. A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of…
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
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Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents. A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of…
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
https://nextstl.com/2021/04/harland-bartholomew-destroyer-of...
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These are challenges for people sharing housing, but they're not the legal reason why letting out rooms is illegal. Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus. It's the entire reason we have single-family zoning (a related legal proscription), which emerged very shortly after the Buchanan v Warley decision that outlawed outright racial zoning. There's a long and well-documented history of thi…
>There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family). That really doesn't track with the laws actually written. Every single city I've lived in with restrictions on number of unrelated tenants, simultaneously has an exception that there are…
Secondary suites are desirable for multi generational households. They are or were banned in many places.
The cities where you lived allowed any number of related people in a 1 bedroom apartment? A 2 person per bedroom limit seems common. Related or not. And prohibition of a child sharing the bedroom of an adult or a different sex child or a different gender child.
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It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.
If you legitimately would have no issues being surrounded by a landfill, you're such an outlier that your opinion is basically meaningless.
I have evaluated the risk and am sufficiently certain that won’t happen. The lots around my house are far too expensive to turn into landfill.