Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.
Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.
The conditions do change though, even if the buildings don't: you'll gradually be surrounded by different people as prices climb and climb. Perhaps, sooner or later, they'll look down on you as the undesirable they don't want nearby.
No, it frequently does have to do with the inhabitants. That's why you saw Forest Hill homeowners kill an affordable housing development because "the new development would house 'severely mentally ill' and 'severely drug addicted' people" [1].
You buy a house in a nice neighborhood with nice single family houses and well kept gardens and very little traffic. You like it that way. You pay a lot for that.
You don't like it when some of those houses are replaced by an apartment complex.
The part where the person thinks they have some right to tell others what to do with their properly-zoned property while simultaneously refusing to pay for that right?
Woah. Someone said "all homeowners benefit from increased density in their neighborhood". Tom replied that as a homeowner he didn't feel he benefited from increased density, and explained why.
He didn't tell anyone what to do. What are you so upset about?
> All homeowners benefit when the teachers, police officers, nurses, librarians, postal workers, garbage collectors, mechanics, plumbers, construction workers, retail clerks, gym trainers, restaurant servers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, artists, etc. etc. etc. can afford to live somewhere within a reasonable commute distance.
No, they don't. All homeowners don't have the same utility function. Not living near people of different socio-economic strata is a very important factor in some people's utility function.
> When the only people who can afford to live within 40 miles are senior software engineers, surgeons, hedge fund quants, corporate executives, and large landowners, the whole community becomes a fake and lifeless place.
The features you see as “fake and lifeless” are what many people actively desire and seek out. Aesthetics are highly subjective.
Changing zoning would only directly impact a tiny fraction of current home owners. High rises allow for vastly increased density so only 1-5% of the city could change to cover a 50% population increase.
> We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.
Speak for yourself. Not all homeowners want less density. I wouldn't have become a homeowner if the only houses available had yards with picket fences.
The problem with the SF and the Bay Area is that home owners actually have fairly strong ownership rights to the land surrounding their home. At least in the sense of being able to stop anything being constructed there.
You can think of it as an interesting experiment in collective land ownership.
I think the parent was referring to: homelessness on the rise, lower-income residents being forced out, the need for many service workers to transport themselves to the city because they can't afford to live here anymore, housing speculation and foreign investment leaving units empty and driving up prices, etc. All of that "changes the character of the city", IMO for the worse. One reason (of many) for these changes is obstructionist behavior toward building housing and increasing density.
At least that's what I'd be referring to if I were to make the parent's argument.
You'd think it wouldn't take so much effort to defend the claim "if you build enough housing, people won't be homeless", but it does. So let's go with a prominent example: Tokyo.
Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them.
The homelessness rate in Tokyo is astonishingly low and decreasing: just 1600 people in a metropolis of 13.6 million. Almost everybody can afford to live somewhere, because there is enough housing for everybody to live somewhere.
You may think I'm saying that your neighborhood has to look like the Ginza area, and I'm not saying that at all. Tokyo contains some calm, beautiful, residential-focused cities such as Setagaya. (If this is confusing: a metropolis can contain a city.)
Japan culture is very different than US. There is inherent respect obtained from having a job, any job, and dedicated yourself to it no matter how small. Being without a job or worse, homeless, brings much shame to that person and their family. There is strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many many hours into it.
There's strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many hours into it in the US, too.
That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're implying that homeless people in the US are homeless because they aren't ashamed enough of their situation to work harder and find a job, any job. That's... a gross misunderstanding of the problem, if so.
I think Tokyo is a good counter to the nonsense perpetuated in SF that the law of supply and demand doesn’t somehow apply to housing.
Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.
I am pretty sure if the price was high enough they would be interested. "Everyone is a bit coin operated" as Ed Zander said when I worked at Mortorola.
No, not at all. But I don't see why wanting things to stay similar to when you bought the house is any more selfish than wanting to barge yourself into an area that may not be able to absorb the additional population.
I think it's a bit obtuse to suggest that someone who had the luck to be born a little earlier and move into an area somehow has some sort of a natural right to keep others out through obstructionist policies, and expecting them to act with compassion is somehow selfish.
But I suppose that's par for the course for the US, where individual expression and selfishness is valued over collective good.
You keep talking about "natural right", but nowhere did I mention that. I just said that I don't believe what they're doing is any more selfish than what the people moving in are doing.
Not saying my opinion one way or another, but there is definitely a “natural right” just in the simple sense of physically being present before others.
How so? All "rights" are manufactured by humans. We would like to say that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are "natural rights", but they're not: a bunch of people just agree that they should be, so they are. (And imperfectly, at that! We wouldn't have capital punishment or prisons if we actually believed in these rights.)
And if we recognized "physically being present before others" as a natural right, I imagine the Native Americans would have a much better situation than they do. Thinking that's a right for some but not for others is the height of hypocrisy, but that seems to be what a lot of incumbent property owners here seem to believe.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say "right" as in the kind manufactured by humans. I just meant that two people can not be in the same place at once. It's a right in a very literal sense, I.e. it's "right".
I agree with you about housing but natural rights exist regardless of legal recognition. Rape, murder, genocide, and slavery are all wrong regardless what a bunch of people agree about. That's what natural rights are. They are things that can be violated by an all powerful dictator. But the dictator would be wrong and terrible for doing so.
That being said, I'm hard pressed to call desired housing density a natural right.
You're correct: the most important right, if you follow NIMBY conversations, is the god-given right to a free parking spot for your dockless automobile wherever you may happen to go with it.
Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.