I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
> you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles
after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.
there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.
> watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously
"Yes you worked your whole life for that house that you carefully chose and maintained, but we want to send its value through the floor because we're more powerful".
They're responding to attempted guilting. "Retirees will lose all their value they worked their whole life for" is the guilting, "actually they didn't earn shit by buying land and sitting on it" is the "not giving a damn". Your reply is literally the exact inverse of reading comprehension.
Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell. But you should not expect to profit 2, 3, 500% by waiting 20 or 30 years. Speaking from my personal experience, housing in Japan is extremely affordable and Japan is much, much better off for it compared to the hellscape that is US housing prices. And for what purpose? To reward people for already having wealth by passively giving them more of it?
Not from what I’ve seen. This seems like fantasy cope.
They’re responding to markets locking up. And changes in actual laws, being forced through by shifting demographics allowing actual shifts in voting power - and hence changes in actual laws.
> Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell.
You do not get to decide this. And the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment. If people pay more for a house with a nice view, they have every right to protest if someone comes along wanting to change that. It not only reduces the value of the property monetarily, it reduces the value to them that they took out a mortgage on and worked for decades to pay off.
>the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment
People pay money for all kinds of things that aren't investments. Ever eat at a restaurant? Ever buy a car?
I agree with parent: houses should be more like cars and less like stocks. Prices should be lower, there should be less debt-financing, and we should end the expectation that home prices will go up endlessly forever.
And in some places they are. Japan works that way - houses generally lose value over time and there is even a cultural stigma against living in a "used house" - if you can afford it the convention is to buy a house and knock it down and start fresh.
I mean the fancy thing about living in a liberal democracy is that they do get to decide this in a limited sense. They get to have an opinion, advocate for it, and if they can convince people through the political process they do get to determine the outcome!
To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.
Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.
You don't get to decide it either. It's decided via politics. But you started the thread by being annoyed with people doing politics. You need to pick a lane.
In my experience, people call it ‘politics’ when it isn’t working for them or is frustrating, ‘the rules’ otherwise. Depending on the day, they might randomly be flipping back and forth.
"I am advocating for Thing and that's Good and Not Politics, but you are advocating for Other-Thing and that's Bad because it is Politics."
When you buy a property you buy a property, not a view. Check the deed for the property you bought; the view won’t be listed on the legal docs. The view is an externality. If you are lucky enough to have a view across someone else’s property, lucky you. Having had a free benefit does not mean that other people’s right to their own property should be restricted to
maintain access to a positive externality for you. In other words, if someone else can build something that blocks your view, it wasn’t your view, you were just lucky enough to be able to have access to someone else’s view for a while.
If you want to maintain the view, you should pay the cost of that, whether that is buying the property that the view crosses, or compensating that other property owner for the loss of use of their property.
Using regulatory means to shortcut other peoples property rights is - in my opinion - horseshit. It also sets a dangerous precedent to regulate out the ability to change. It’s all fun and games until someone out maneuvers you at a city council meeting and now you can’t build a carport without hiring a lawyer and 6 months of hearings (real story, had to do this because our house was old enough to be considered historic. For context the carport was being put in an alley next to a dumpster and a cinder block apartment building. No historic element was involved)
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
jakintosh · · focus · HN ↗
after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.
there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
"Yes you worked your whole life for that house that you carefully chose and maintained, but we want to send its value through the floor because we're more powerful".
ahtihn · · focus · HN ↗
What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
applfanboysbgon · · focus · HN ↗
Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell. But you should not expect to profit 2, 3, 500% by waiting 20 or 30 years. Speaking from my personal experience, housing in Japan is extremely affordable and Japan is much, much better off for it compared to the hellscape that is US housing prices. And for what purpose? To reward people for already having wealth by passively giving them more of it?
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
They’re responding to markets locking up. And changes in actual laws, being forced through by shifting demographics allowing actual shifts in voting power - and hence changes in actual laws.
Not guilting.
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
You do not get to decide this. And the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment. If people pay more for a house with a nice view, they have every right to protest if someone comes along wanting to change that. It not only reduces the value of the property monetarily, it reduces the value to them that they took out a mortgage on and worked for decades to pay off.
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
People pay money for all kinds of things that aren't investments. Ever eat at a restaurant? Ever buy a car?
I agree with parent: houses should be more like cars and less like stocks. Prices should be lower, there should be less debt-financing, and we should end the expectation that home prices will go up endlessly forever.
jhbadger · · focus · HN ↗
svpk · · focus · HN ↗
To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.
Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Everything up to and including murder is likely on the table, hah.
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
dghlsakjg · · focus · HN ↗
If you want to maintain the view, you should pay the cost of that, whether that is buying the property that the view crosses, or compensating that other property owner for the loss of use of their property.
Using regulatory means to shortcut other peoples property rights is - in my opinion - horseshit. It also sets a dangerous precedent to regulate out the ability to change. It’s all fun and games until someone out maneuvers you at a city council meeting and now you can’t build a carport without hiring a lawyer and 6 months of hearings (real story, had to do this because our house was old enough to be considered historic. For context the carport was being put in an alley next to a dumpster and a cinder block apartment building. No historic element was involved)