I used to be very YIMBY. Build, build, build. But what I've come to understand is that this just isn't going to help. Do it anyway, but it's just not going to correct the problem of unaffordable housing.
The entire real estate industry and our government is designed to make housing prices go up over time. Voters are behind it because it gives the impression of increasing wealth but it's an illusion for most people. If the median price is $200k and you buy a house for $200k and the median price and your house goes up to $600k, you still only have one housing unit's worth of wealth and you need to live somewhere.
All increasing real estate prices does is enrich a tiny minority by stealing from the next generation. And the negative externalities are massive. Housing makes everything more expensive.
If you look at NYC, you can see that a lot of apartments get built but almost all of them are for the ultra-wealthy to park money. You aren't increasing the available housing.
In the 1990s the average house price in London was 70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Are wages 10x? No, no they are not. The whole thing is a giant Ponzi scheme to keep people in debt so they're compliant little workers.
> what I've come to understand is that this just isn't going to help.
This is false though.
Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%. That's a big win for a lot of people seeing lower prices!
NYC is not a place that builds very much in proportion to the population.
I think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing" is an extraordinary one, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Maybe Austin is an outlier. They have high property taxes. Or people left because of those taxes Most cities that built a lot of housing saw it bought up by investors.
Investors only invest in things with a good return. It's why they don't buy up, say, nails, because the nail makers would just produce a lot more nails to sell to them and they'd be left sitting with a bunch of nails.
They invest in housing because it's scarce because we don't build enough of it.
And if you look at the actual numbers, large-scale institutional investors just aren't that big a factor. It's another bogeyman for people desperate to avoid the solution to not having enough housing: building more housing.
Austin is an example of the market balancing out when allowed to do so.
Recently some socialist lackwit on Twitter was railing that YIMBYs only lowered prices from $600k to $500k. This person apparently did not understand that the difference - $20k up front and $700/mo for 30 years - is the margin between affordable and not affordable for tens of millions of ordinary people.
In case anyone reading thinks otherwise: you can absolutely be a socialist and a YIMBY. Maybe your goal is Vienna style housing. The only thing you need to acknowledge is that cities need 'enough' housing.
Yeah but there's this entire genre of hammer-and-sickle-in-bio online guy who thinks socialism is about ideals, not the material experience of the proletariat. Those guys think we should outlaw home building until after the revolution.
> Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%.
This is false. Just look at the chart [1]. All that's happened is some of the pandemic price gouging, something landlords were being sued over [2].
We simply cannot capitalism our way out of this problem.
> i think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing"
Where did I say that?
Speaking more generally, the idea of a "free market" is a myth, particularly for housing. It's one of the most manipulated and politicized markets there is.
But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
Landlords would be happy if rents never fell though. They're not dropping them because "gosh, maybe we charged too much during the pandemic". New housing was built and landlords had to compete for tenants. Dropping prices during a time when inflation is still a thing is a pretty big deal, and very beneficial to thousands of people.
The housing market is, indeed, anything but free. That's a core idea behind the YIMBY movement: make it legal to build more kinds of housing, rather than just meet demand by outward sprawl.
> But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
That's what YIMBY is about: fighting back against those constraints. They have hugely detrimental consequences for people, the economy and the environment.
In terms of "capitalism", I think most YIMBYs are pragmatic - capitalism is the system we have in the US, so we need to leverage it as much as possible to get the housing we need. If we could get Vienna style social housing, I think a lot of YIMBYs would be happy to sign up. You still need Vienna style zoning and building codes to get that, though.
Check out the story on Block 216 in Portland. A well known local developer sunk a lot of his own money into the development of an upscale hotel/residences. The result? The new, finished development is valued at $415 million, however the loan debt is $510 million. And of course it isn't generating any tax revenue for the city, which has about $100 million budget deficit, recently announced cuts in services.
San Francisco collected $522 million in real estate transfer property tax in 2022. This year will be less than half that.
The inflationary rebound after the pandemic and lower than normal interest rates created an artificial market that otherwise may not have existed.
Unoccupied housing or otherwise housing purely for investment is certainly a problem. If they aren’t renting at least with AirBnB they would actually be better served by holding gold in many cases.
It does help and is helping. Here's an article published this week in Berkeley about how a modest building boom has stabilized and lowered rents in existing buildings, after rents doubled in the 2010s.
If you look at the trend for all Bay Area cities over a similar period [1], you'll see Berkeley is pretty much in line with the overall trend.
Now you can argue that's because of greatly increased development, but I don't think that applies to SF (or SJ) and it doesn't match the Berkeley timeline anyway.
Yeah, the specific contribution here is tracking a stable cohort of existing housing, not the entire market, to show the effect of new construction on the price of older housing.
I mean in the Bay Area where SFH have massively ballooned in price condos have remained steady for a long time. It works. Maybe not everyone gets the SFH but that’s fine and not the point. Everyone can own a home.
The entire real estate industry and our government is designed to make housing prices go up over time. Voters are behind it because it gives the impression of increasing wealth but it's an illusion for most people. If the median price is $200k and you buy a house for $200k and the median price and your house goes up to $600k, you still only have one housing unit's worth of wealth and you need to live somewhere.
All increasing real estate prices does is enrich a tiny minority by stealing from the next generation. And the negative externalities are massive. Housing makes everything more expensive.
If you look at NYC, you can see that a lot of apartments get built but almost all of them are for the ultra-wealthy to park money. You aren't increasing the available housing.
In the 1990s the average house price in London was 70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Are wages 10x? No, no they are not. The whole thing is a giant Ponzi scheme to keep people in debt so they're compliant little workers.