Political Memes

My U.S.S.R. refugee/immigrant next door neighbor that owns a few houses she rents out. She’s not the brightest bulb.

The polling on rent and immigrants is ridiculous. Over half the country wants to just start deporting immigrants. And nobody likes not being able to afford rent.

To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”

There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.

But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in "single family" houses.

We don't do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.

To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.

It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they're given.

So you'll be interested in California's solution. If the project contains enough low income housing and the city won't approve it the developer can just build it anyways. All the safety standards are still required, they just can't be stopped from building it. And if they build it within a certain distance of a light rail stop they don't have to include parking.

I've never met a person actually making that argument, though. I'm certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it's primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:

The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY ("not in my back yard") tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]

As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1  and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY

EVERY BUILDING project in my city is upscale rich housing.

Do some reading about "the missing middle." In many cases the sort of medium-density housing like row houses or duplex/triplex/quadruplex designs that offer more comfort and privacy than a massive apartment complex but are more affordable than single family houses on large lots are explicitly regulated against in American cities, and local codes need to change in order to allow the sort of humane-but-cost-effective housing that will make a dent in the affordability crisis. Problem is, though, that existing homeowners see denser housing as a threat, both to the value of their own properties, and to the comfortable social homogeneity of their neighborhoods. At some level you need to have the power to force these developments through over the objections of the neighbors, undemocratic as that is, or else the problem never gets solved.

1. Thank you for the clarification in your "ETA".

2. Evolving the (sub)urban planning directive beyond "single-family houses" while also "increasing the density of living space” is "making it easier to build", TBH. 😅

If housing is expensive where you live, and most of the land is tied up in single-family homes, what's stopping people from just converting their homes into plexes, or straight-up selling to someone who will turn a couple single-family lots into an apartment complex that houses hundreds?

If you're anywhere in North America, chances are it's literally illegal to do so, because of restrictive zoning and other NIMBY land use policies that make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most.

So the solution, then, is to make it legal and easy to build housing so people don't have to fight over scraps.

This is a short video about how one law makes it more difficult to build denser housing in the US and Canada: https://youtu.be/iRdwXQb7CfM?si=fLJ6qcVIOzHEFOvU

...keep building legal and easy housing. Megacorps and oligarchs get crushed when the bubble pops underneath them.

People who realize that not all places that need more affordable housing have space to build more housing, and that prices are inflated because of landlords and companies buying up the limited property. Like in cities.

Different situations, different priorities.

NIMBYs whose main complaint about short-term rentals is the (admittedly significant) nuisance factor of having a "party house" next door... but also don't want a duplex or other multifamily housing arrangement across the street, where it might bring The Poors into the neighborhood and drive down their property values.

Fact is, though, that most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and their financial situation only works out if they think of their house as an eternally-appreciating asset that they can continually leverage to pay off other debts. If the line ever stops going up, they're fucked. I hate NIMBYism, but we've made our society into such a hypercapitalist hellscape that on some level it's hard to blame people for it.

Yep, developers are already building unlivable shit boxes as it is, you don't want to lower standards even more.

Some regulations could be looked at (like parking minimums), but you have to be real careful that you're not just enabling developers to build substandard housing. I saw a YouTube video recently where some guy was advocating removing stairwells from buildings that are mandated by fire codes, and that strikes me as a dangerous idea.

As an architectural professional, this misses the point. It's as easy as it's ever been to buy a plot of farmland for relative pennies vaguely near a major metro and throw up a cookie-cutter exurban subdivision full of builder-grade single-family homes. The cost has gone up due to inflation, but if anything bureaucratic and administrative expenses have dropped as a percentage of the overall cost. Builders are constantly fighting new code provisions that would increase costs, but on average most new code revisions add something on the order of a couple thousand dollars of cost to the average new home -- basically nothing against the current average sales price. Most of the cost in a new home is materials and (espescially) contractor labor and profit -- if builders want to offer cheaper standard homes, they ultimately will have to reduce their own cut.

What people are actually talking about when this comes up, is building denser housing closer in. Local zoning regulations often explicitly prohibit multi-family housing in large swathes of cities, especially the kinds most desired by families (townhomes and multiplexes, rather than large apartment complexes). It's easier to build less expensive housing closer to where people want to live, if it can be made legal to build new, middle-density homes where more density is in demand, and even to convert large single-family properties into livable duplexes (such as can be found in cities like Boston and Seattle).

There are other initiatives that I'm more ambivalent about -- for example, the push to change the building code to permit single-stair apartment buildings, that @[email protected] mentions below. This would put American building practice more in alignment with European practice, but I am personally of the opinion that the requirement in US codes for multiple means of egress is one of the most significant safety improvements we've made, and single-stair towers, in combination with the related design philosophy for residents to shelter in place during a fire, was one of the largest contributors to tragedies like Grenfell. But the advocates do have a point that egress requirements do dramatically reduce the efficiency of the typical apartment tower floorplate in the US, and there is probably a way to balance out the risk with other fire protection features.

True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason -- they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there's no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn't as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don't have them -- housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it's not doing any good.

That's already happened. US birthrates have been below replacement rates for over a decade, and most of Europe before that.