The view that a home is an investment is poisonous to the housing supply. It makes people of all political affiliations into raging NIMBYs. Why would they want to change anything or allow any new construction in their area if it might negatively affect their housing price?
There's "wanting to protect the value of your home" and there's "I'm going to vote NIMBY/BANANA and screw everybody else out of a place to live because I decided to 'invest' all my money in this house and expect it to be a nest egg that catapults me out of the working class." It sounds like the parent is in the latter category.
Is the problem "losing value in my house" or "not realizing astronomical gains like my peers"? And if building much-needed housing does decrease your house's value then hey, maybe your house was overvalued at the price you paid and you made a bad 'investment'. Why punish everyone else and artificially strangle housing supply to cover your bad decision?
Homeowners want to see their investment appreciate, plain and simple, and will do anything and make up any justification to impede development so as to reduce supply and increase home values. Pretty much any argument, any rule, that restricts housing ("ruining neighborhood character", "affecting the historic value of the neighborhood", and in almost all cases, "environmental impact") can be understood if seen through the prism of selfishness. Never mind that people's lives are more important than obtuse feelings of 'neighborhood character', and never mind that the reason the shitty silicon valley house you bought in the 70s is worth millions only because of the blood, sweat and tears of all the people who came here and started companies and built things.
As you can probably guess, I'm pretty disillusioned at probably not ever being able to ever afford a place to live in the place I call home. (And I'm a relatively well paid engineer, others have it much worse).
And new housing, .. but not built in their neighborhoods. Oh, and don't build over farmland or undeveloped green spaces.
Without being snarky, the problem here is that there is a tension between what people believe in general, and what they believe about their situations specifically, especially when they have an incentive to feel the opposite way about it. For example, people may know (or believe) that building duplexes and apartments in their neighborhoods will reduce their property values, or "ruin the character of the neighborhood" and so oppose them.
"The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable."
Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic.
I'm not saying I agree with those fears, but it's helpful not to make cartoon characterizations of the other side's arguments, when many of those arguments have merit. If you spent most of your life savings on a house in a cute suburban neighborhood, you'd (rightly) be pretty pissed if people suddenly wanted to surround it with high-rises.
Again, I don't agree with these arguments, but it's helpful to actually understand them.
My guess is that voters who actually care about city level politics or influential people in the city are already home owners. For home owners, building more housing means a decrease in their home value so they have no incentive to push more housing.
In my experience, the same people who oppose new housing due to the lack of infrastructure often also oppose building that infrastructure. They don't really oppose the housing itself but changes in their neighborhood.
US homeowners made a decision to use their homes as their primary or secondary investment vehicles so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values.
There’s also a good bit of plain old racism involved but people are in denial about it and insist they’re implying something else.
For example, in a nearby community they were proposing some “starter townhomes” priced at $295K (median home price in the area is 350K). These were not rentals, low income, section 8a - they were new construction townhomes on the lower end of the pricing spectrum. People FREAKED out, and suggested they’d be bought up by gangs and junkies and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and the project was killed. Someone stood up at a zoning meeting and said “Do you really want someone who lives in one of these as your neighbor? Do you want their kids going to our schools? I sure don’t!” To thunderous applause.
I personally can’t wrap my head around the logic. It’s not like these existing homeowners are rich - in fact the sort of person who scoops up a $300K townhome is probably a young professional with an office job who probably make the same or more as the residents complaining that they’ll bring poverty. It’s nuts!
Or they don’t want to remove the debilitating environment and neighborhood regulation which makes new home construction take years when it could be months.
Or they want lots of new housing, but they also want the owner to rent control all units.
Or they want at least 30% of the units to be under market rent.
In other words, they want something for nothing and they’re fine with YOU being stuck with the consequences.
Exactly, the people who are against building new housing are the people who already own houses, and there is obvious "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude at work here. It's wonderful for them that the housing price gets artificially inflated and they can then rent out their 2 bedroom small condo for $5k a month.
The people preventing new construction are greedy. They are dictating what others can and can't do with their land in order to protect their own interests. They get million dollar home values and everyone else is stuck with $3000+/mo rents.
The idea is that the politically active homeowners follow their self interest when they support policy which discourages new housing construction, driving scarcity in the housing market to raise prices.
The home owners are the ones stopping new houses from being built.
Homeowners don't want their property values to go down, and want the city to be locked in time, never changing and never growing. They are the ones stopping new houses from being built.
Exactly. Current homeowners don't want more housing because it will lower the value of their homes. They also vote against property tax increases for the same reason.
Exactly; local residents totally don't like housing in their area become cheaper, because their own houses would become cheaper. They use their privilege of being local residents to constrain other property owners' rights in their area, preventing them from building denser housing.
To be clear (and this is probably my fault) when I said natural reasons I was thinking along the lines of naturally occurring economic reasons. For example, if people move to my town that will drive property prices. On an individual level there isn’t too much I can do. Maybe I vote to restrict immigration or enact anti-growth policies such as a maximum limit on children. Maybe I sell my home to a developer who turns it into a mall or a 5 story apartment building. Many reasonable courses of action here. By the way, we don’t seem to have much of a problem with prices decreasing, even if that causes a larger financial impact (if you buy a home for $300,000 and policies out of your voting control cause you to lose value, you’re just screwed with no recourse).
I don’t buy for a second though, that if your home value doubles that your lifestyle doubles. My mortgage payment and neighborhood are exactly the same. It can certainly have a positive impact, but it’s unrealized.
Largely I think people are too quick to focus on demonizing the NIMBY, without really considering the full scope. What if people in the state legislatures vote for something that increases my home value and I vote, write reps, and do anything a person has a reasonable capacity to do. Now my taxes should double or triple? And if I can’t afford it you force me out of my house, away from friends and family?
Life isn’t fair I guess? But then people can’t get upset if people go and vote themselves Prop 13 or to defund affordable housing. It’s in their self-interest. Economics is hard.
I don’t know the right answer, but as a homeowner in the Great Lakes Region, I feel more sympathy toward other home owners than some here may do.
It’s simply astounding to me that if someone runs for an election saying they will reduce home prices, they are guaranteed to lose as land and homeowners simply don’t want that to happen. They don’t care about people who don’t have homes or simply cannot afford to even rent but only about protecting their ‘investment’. The whole setup about HOAs, bylaws, zonal regulations etc. all written around protecting the ‘investment’ instead of just seeing a home as a place to live exacerbates the problem.
There actually are several silver bullets to use like - efficient use of land, better zoning regulations and including more use of land to build more homes etc. but they are all non-starters because of greedy land and home owners.
"Sure, many object to new housing for reasons like "it will change the character of the neighborhood". But many others object because they are worried about the value of their own home going down."
At least in my area, it's all about people wanting the area to remain semi-rural. They generally aren't opposing low density SFH in independent builds. The people in my area are against many development and medium density homes.
Can you not spare a shred of sympathy for people who want to live in the city they work in but can’t because property owners won’t let them? Sorry, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who actively block building new housing because “screw you, got mine”. (Also, building housing doesn’t just tank the value of your home, trust me.)
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