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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

#441

Post by mapt »

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…

There are often a lot of redundant parts of the legal & zoning code intended to limit development. You can legalize ADUs de jure, but you probably still have setbacks that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have parking or curb or utility requirements that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have HOAs that de facto prohibit ADUs, you still have "impact fees" and utility billing issues and all sorts of recently-added building codes that de facto prohibit ADUs. On top of that, the ADUs are usually extremely limited in character - "less than 1200sqft, less than 30% of the floor area of the house, no more than two residents", etc, etc. On top of that, you're paying for a financing category that the banks don't know how to deal with, without the subsidies that homeowners enjoy on mortgage payments, you're suddenly getting a property tax bill that's higher, and you're facing the possibility of squatting tenants under a regime that's designed to be inherently hostile to landlords.

You still have all sorts of laws against doing the thing you just supposedly legalized.

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

#442

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #105
eddythompson80 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue. Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.

The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with. Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.

[deleted]

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

#443

Post by ben7799 »

hayst4ck wrote: post #248
jakelazaroff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read your own link? It says that affirmative action enjoys at least plurality if not majority support: > Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure. > By comparison, Gallup h…

Affirmative action is reparations by another name. It's like saying I should pay for my ancestors crimes. I am a pretty liberal person, but watching a white male candidate pass the interview but not get a job explicitly because he was a white male (because the only slots left were for "diverse" candidates) even makes me uncomfortable. That's a lived experience. I watched it in real life. Jon Stewart has had two guest…

It's easy for Jon Stewart to feel that way cause it can't hurt him. There is no minority Jon Stewart to take his job, and he already has so much money he will be wealthy the rest of his life even if he loses his job today and never works again.

I think that is where democrats often run foul of average voters.. they see very wealthy democrats pushing something. It won't hurt the wealthy democrats, but it could hurt them. Average non-wealthy people don't want to be punished for the sins of past wealthy people who happened to have the same skin color as them.

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

#444

Post by mapt »

vintermann wrote: post #426
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…

> They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. This is a part of the problem which I think isn't discussed often enough. Because of the varying marginal utility of money, if the divide between rich and poor becomes big enough, owners will not want to rent out in their own homes, because nothing the tenant can pay will make any significant difference to their persona…

The really expensive neighborhoods are too desirable for anyone to live there. They exist as capital anchors for overseas sovereign wealth funds and various long-run finance concerns to sink into a deeper market than their own, to act as collateral for their business adventures and as a currency reserve hedged against local inflation. No rent you could pay is worth the risk.

Low property taxes are highly conducive to this use-case, and notably, tenant residents can vote on raising property taxes and overseas sovereign wealth funds can't.

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

#445

Post by banannaise »

Loughla wrote: post #398
xboxnolifes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kamala was too little too late. No candidate was going to work for democrats coming into the presidential race so close to the election.

Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances. Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment. Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many. It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not u…

They are more interested in personally retaining power over the Democratic party than they are in winning elections.

Republicans winning is a better outcome for them than progressives unseating them in the party.

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

#446

Post by dughnut »

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…

We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our democracy”. I just really don’t know what more you want here. Confiscate everyone’s bank anccount and liquidate it to build housing projects?

The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.

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

#447

Post by rcpt »

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…

> radical new zoning laws

> ADUs on their property

If this is "radical" then it just shows how far we've fallen.

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

#448

Post by mapt »

throw4847285 wrote: post #199
PaulHoule wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

Financial incentives stop aligning because of two things:

* Rent control means that tenants are paying less than market rate.

* Extremely low property tax rates combined with anti-development policy mean that asset price appreciation exceeds rents by a significant amount.

Stop controlling rents, tax the hell out of these people, and one way or another spend it on residents, and you are exacting a redistribution of wealth that doesn't distort the market in a way that leads to slumlords.

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

#449

Post by daveguy »

dughnut wrote: post #446
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…

We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our demo…

Our monetary policy changes by the month. And currently it is sustaining a 3% inflation just like it was when the ship was turned around during Biden's admin. The target is a 2% inflation rate, which no one considers "highly inflationary".

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

#450

Post by dragonwriter »

Gareth321 wrote: post #390
Braxton1980 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, what's the definition of "woke"?

In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice. To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.” That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Cri…

> In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice.

This is wildly wrong; for starters, “woke” predates critical theory; for another, there is no such thing as “Critical Social Justice”, which is just mashing together two terms right-wingers don’t like and misrepresent.

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