Reply to Can anyone cite an example in which YIMBY policies have worked?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most of "downtown" Arlington; Cathedral Commons, the Wharf, Navy Yard, 14th Street, H Street, U Street, Bethesda Row, Pentagon Row, I could go on, just in the DC area.[/quote]

Haven’t all those places gotten MORE expensive?[/quote]

You're missing the point. Development of a particular piece of land is going to be done because it can be converted to a higher use, so yes, the thing you build is going to be more expensive than the thing it replaces. It would be hard to get people to put money up otherwise. The idea is that by building more housing you increase the supply and prices across the market don't rise as much as they would have otherwise.

It's hard to prove whether it works or not because you can't run controlled experiments. Who knows what prices in DC would be if Cathedral Commons hadn't been built? It's just too speculative. [/quote]

I don’t think specific projects that went through normal zoning processes are what OP was getting at. I think OP was asking about jurisdiction-wide policies.

In Montgomery County, YIMBY policies seem to boil down to policies that help developers make more money, and those policies seem to have succeeded because projects in Montgomery County have higher cap rates than projects in neighboring jurisdictions.

Clearly, increasing the housing supply would drive prices down, but that’s an objective, not a policy. The question is what policies will help us meet the objective, and the answer is probably a mix of policies that developers like and policy developers hate, to prevent them from using the favorable policies to earn windfall profits while preserving scarcity. It’s hard to have a real conversation about this subject because suppliers benefit from shortages, homeowners similarly benefit from shortages, and lobbyists masquerading as think tanks (Like the Coalition for Smarter Growth) have polluted the discussion. [/quote]

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