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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]

"You live in a house built by a developer" is such a tired trope.[/quote]

It's not a tired trope, it's literally true. You live in housing where there didn't used to be housing, be it a greenfield, warehouse, former commercial space, or whatever, and somebody thought they could make a buck by building housing there.

Even if you built your house all by yourself, you still performed an implicit calculation that it was more lucrative for you to build your own house than buy one from someone else.[/quote]

It's a tired trope because it almost always is true and adds nothing to the discussion except an opportunity for you to say "ooooo sick burn." It's not literally true, as you correctly contradicted yourself in the following paragraph. (Nice argumentation)

I am pro new housing and commercial development. I think single family zoning near transit needs to go away, and I think we should find ways to impose costs on developers who sit on approved plans to add units for years upon years or who decide to shrink projects after they're approved.

The problem with a lot of YIMBY argumentation is that it's pro developer without being pro development. I don't think it's government's role to maximize profits for developers (really Wall Street) at the expense of everyone else. I don't think government should be subsidizing market rate housing. I don't think government should be prioritizing high-rise development (the least affordable) at the expense of putting in any effort to promote other forms of increased density that have the potential to deliver more affordable housing.

And I really resent the implicit and explicit charges of racism and classism when anyone questions whether a project that's getting a subsidy in any form is delivering adequate public benefit. Guess what? When a developer wants to add housing in my neighborhood, I am always certain that the new residents will make as much or money than I do. I am reasonably certain that they will almost all be white, and that we'll continue to warehouse poor or Brown people just in some neighborhoods. I have big problems with both of those facts, and so should the YIMBYs if they're true to their advocacy. That the YIMBYs don't have a problem with the outcomes makes the whole movement look more like astroturf than grass roots.

If you want to be pro development instead of being pro developer, start thinking about ways government can get projects moved from approval to groundbreaking more quickly and calling out developers who have been sitting on approved plans for decades. They're at least as much a part of the affordability problem as NIMBYs.[/quote]

What developers have been sitting on approved plans for decades?[/quote]

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