9
Building new units is proven to push rents down – but not for the reasons you may think
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Yes in my backyard!
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In this community, we believe in saying yes to:
- Housing
- Density
- Public transit
- Renewable energy
- Alternatives to cars
Typical YIMBY policies include:
- Elimination of restrictive zoning
- Elimination of parking minimums, setback requirements, and other arbitrary density-decreasing deed restrictions
- Elimination of Euclidean zoning
- Elimination of "inclusionary" zoning
- Elimination of undue red tape that gets in the way of new housing and transit development
- Establishment of stronger "by right" development
- Replacement of property taxes with land value taxes (LVT)
- Construction of high-quality public transit w/ transit-oriented development
- Road diets, with more space dedicated to bikes and pedestrians and less to driving and parking
Typical housing crisis "solutions" YIMBYs are wary of:
- Scapegoating immigrants
- Scapegoating airbnb
- Scapegoating "foreign investors"
- Scapegoating "greedy developers"
YIMBYism transcends the typical left-right political divide; please be respectful of fellow YIMBYs with differing political views. That said, please report anyone saying anything hateful or bigoted.
Reading List
- Housing Breaks People’s Brains
- The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism
- Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation
- An Airbnb collapse won’t fix America’s housing shortage
- Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot
- More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents
- Constraints on City and Neighborhood Growth: The Central Role of Housing Supply
- Progressive Cities Aren't Living Up To Their Values
- Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas
- The Origins of Inequality, and Policies to Contain It
- Progress and Poverty
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For whatever reason, people want it to be more complicated than "2463 households need 2463 houses". I mean, at the nitty-gritty level it is, but at scale that's the sort of complexity that cancels itself out if you just leave it alone enough, as all the Western countries do last I checked.
You see a weird sort of symbiosis between affluent NIMBYs and some of the less sophisticated antipoverty activists, sometimes. In a housing crisis, would it be better to build small apartments rather than luxury apartments, given a fixed square footage? Yes. Are luxury apartments still houses? Also yes. Both groups want to ignore the second bit, but for completely opposite reasons relative to the first bit. Sometimes, they work together and manage to get no houses built at all.
Which would you prefer- a now dated but once luxury apartment, or a newly built basic apartment? The older apartment is likely to have a lot more living space and those luxury features mostly still work.
affordable housing too often is hate on the poor having nice things.