It drives down prices. When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M you really dont want anything to touch your nest egg. Its NIMBYism at its finest. Everyone says, "just build affordable housing!" Just as long as its not in _my_ neighborhood.
It's exaggerated in timescale and returns but not by a huge amount.
Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.
It really wouldn't. Not any time soon. A developer being able to build a 4-unit place on top of a single family home would increase the value of that land cause now they can sell it to four times as many people.
So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to buy anything in the short term.
The price the NIMBY in the parent's example would care about is the price of the SFH they already owned. That price goes up - it's now harder to find SFHs, and the land value is also increased because it could be turned into 4 units that will add up to more value than the prior 1.
Here's an agent discussing this happening right now:
> Traditional sales comping remains relevant, but it should no longer be the single factor when determining price. Recent legislation allowing additional dwelling units (ADUs) is a game changer, as savvy investors and agents understand that accurate comps should now include not only neighborhood sales prices but also potential revenue from future ADU development.
> Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a slew of bills that will allow property owners to build a backyard home of at least 800 square feet or convert a garage, office or spare room into an additional living space. Single-family zoning effectively evaporated on Jan. 1 when the new laws went into effect.
If NIMBY's only cared about money this would be a fucking gold mine for them.
The hassles of having tenants make it not worth the extra income for a lot of people who would only have one. There are real examples of tenants destroying a place and moving out leaving the landlord a large cost to fix the place up. There are real examples of tenants using various discrimination and tenant rights laws on false claims to get months of cost free living. I make no claim as to how common it is, but if you are landlord stuck with the evil tenant it doesn't matter if is only 1 in a million who is that evil.
Sure, in this scenario the "protecting their property value" person would just cash out and sell to the developer who's gonna be good with tenants and is willing to pay more since it's no longer single-family-restricted.
But the opposition to upzoning here in LA and the Bay Area is largely coming for qualitative reasons instead of quantitative reasons. And that's lost when you reduce your argument to "they only care about their property values" so you lose any chance to convince them...
Let's say you live in a neighborhood of mostly single family homes. A new law is passed changing the zoning to allow higher density, and other barriers to building up are reduced or eliminated.
A few people near you sell their homes; they're bulldozed and are replaced with multi-family units. Sure, over the short term, your home value might drop because of greater supply helping to meet demand.
However, over the long term, or even medium term, two things may happen:
1. Your home value goes up because single family homes are less available, and are more desirable.
2. Your home value goes up because developers want to buy your home in order to build a multi-family dwelling there.
Meanwhile, more people are able to live nearby, more affordably, likely cutting down their work commute and increasing their quality of life. I guess the incumbent owners really are that selfish that they fight tooth and nail to prevent others from increasing their quality of life.
If people are actually investing in housing, then I see nothing weird or hypocritical with wanting the value of those investments to go up.
But a primary home is not an investment. Many many many people mistake it for one, or try to treat it like one, but it's not. Often it works out in the end as if it was one, but it's not. There's a reason why we call non-primary homes "investment properties"... because your primary home is not that.
It's a liability. It ages. It requires costly maintenance. It requires upgrades and renovations. In most jurisdictions you have to pay ongoing taxes simply to own it.
The main reason housing prices often rise faster than inflation is because of scarcity, much of which is often artificial and due to zoning and other legal tricks.
Opposing housing in high-demand areas is one of the most selfish things a person can do.
I don’t know how you can say this because for 9/10 people their primary home is de facto their single biggest asset and a significant part of their retirement planning. This is how it actually is in the real world outside the bubble.
It’s easy to sneer at nimby-ism but what you’re actually proposing is to make ordinary people destitute so techbros can have an easy ride. That’s why voters are pushing back and why tech is hated.
This doesn’t make any sense because owning stock in one company doesn’t prevent another from also rising or prevent ones own company stock from rising.
In theory perhaps but in practice a) it’s unreasonable to tell people for literally decades that homeownership is the path to security in retirement then move the goalposts and b) tech-driven wealth disparity is fully the root cause of this situation and if it were “corrected” through taxation we wouldn’t even have this problem
It's not unreasonable... it's slowly becoming necessary. Someone will have to eat the bill and it's probably a distributed cost that we have to spread across everyone.
It's not just tech-driven...housing is expensive across the nation and taxing RSUs may help in SF, but doesn't really get to the root of the problem which is zoning restriction, high development costs, increased homeowner rights enabling NIMBYism
