The Big Shorter declares "Random Walk is correct! There is no affordability-shortage crisis, but there is a 30-year fixed rate mortgage subsidy crisis"
Housing is a distribution problem. I will say that in the desirable to live category, NIMBYism is real. I live in VT and it's no joke. Zoning laws are local and current residents have almost all the power and potential residents none. This shits lots of people out. Plus Vermont has shot itself in the foot with Act 250.
White collar workers who have relocated to the desirable to live places no longer provide the anchor for the multiple service jobs that supported them in the places they left and there is not enough housing in places they have moved to. This is probably small relative to the big picture, but it's happening.
I recently met with a local non-profit focused on the elderly and they said, to my surprise, that it is cheaper to keep old people in place, in their mostly empty homes, than to find a place for them to go and put a family in that home. This at least in Vermont. There are not enough old folks homes and they are too expensive.
Yes, the entire point of NIMBYism is to increase an area's desirability-to-live! It does so by shifting less desirable (current or potential) residents to other locales.
I think there's a good (and very under-considered) chance that causation runs the other way: nimbyism is what keeps nice places nice. The positive and negative externalities of how one's neighbors order their lives (or disorder them, depending on one's perspective) are not well-captured by property rights, as they are. In general, it's odd that people continuously make the observation that NIMBYism abounds in all these posh, exclusive places, and never even consider the possibility that perhaps NIMBYism is what helped make them posh and exclusive. I mean, it's the old Yogi-ism, "no one goes there anymore...it's too crowded."
I find that on a larger scale, considering the US as a whole, those pundits and politicians who seem to most celebrate a sort of permanent Dodge City atmosphere over large parts of the country, typically dismissing any concerns on any score as merely “aesthetic” or “wacko” environmentalist - invariably when you look them up, live in a township that has, say, an ordinance requiring the pumpkin patches to remain pumpkin patches.
I think you may have to face the fact that people don’t necessarily believe this in good faith, in a way susceptible to evidence either way. They believe it because it’s important for their ideological commitments. It so happens that this is shared by the three strands in American politics, more and less cynically, each for distinct reasons. That’s a powerful countervailing lobby; as with many other things reality is no match.
Housing is a distribution problem. I will say that in the desirable to live category, NIMBYism is real. I live in VT and it's no joke. Zoning laws are local and current residents have almost all the power and potential residents none. This shits lots of people out. Plus Vermont has shot itself in the foot with Act 250.
White collar workers who have relocated to the desirable to live places no longer provide the anchor for the multiple service jobs that supported them in the places they left and there is not enough housing in places they have moved to. This is probably small relative to the big picture, but it's happening.
I recently met with a local non-profit focused on the elderly and they said, to my surprise, that it is cheaper to keep old people in place, in their mostly empty homes, than to find a place for them to go and put a family in that home. This at least in Vermont. There are not enough old folks homes and they are too expensive.
Yes, the entire point of NIMBYism is to increase an area's desirability-to-live! It does so by shifting less desirable (current or potential) residents to other locales.
I think there's a good (and very under-considered) chance that causation runs the other way: nimbyism is what keeps nice places nice. The positive and negative externalities of how one's neighbors order their lives (or disorder them, depending on one's perspective) are not well-captured by property rights, as they are. In general, it's odd that people continuously make the observation that NIMBYism abounds in all these posh, exclusive places, and never even consider the possibility that perhaps NIMBYism is what helped make them posh and exclusive. I mean, it's the old Yogi-ism, "no one goes there anymore...it's too crowded."
I find that on a larger scale, considering the US as a whole, those pundits and politicians who seem to most celebrate a sort of permanent Dodge City atmosphere over large parts of the country, typically dismissing any concerns on any score as merely “aesthetic” or “wacko” environmentalist - invariably when you look them up, live in a township that has, say, an ordinance requiring the pumpkin patches to remain pumpkin patches.
Thee/Me.
I think you may have to face the fact that people don’t necessarily believe this in good faith, in a way susceptible to evidence either way. They believe it because it’s important for their ideological commitments. It so happens that this is shared by the three strands in American politics, more and less cynically, each for distinct reasons. That’s a powerful countervailing lobby; as with many other things reality is no match.
not only am I happy to face the fact, I have made the argument rather explicitly . . . 2.5 years ago! https://www.therandomwalk.co/i/136823724/people-using-the-same-words-dont-always-mean-the-same-thing