Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
"You live in a house built by a developer" is such a tired trope.

DP. The point of "a developer built your house" is: what if, when the developer proposed the building you now live in, the neighbors had been able to stop it?

I personally know people who live in new developments, who oppose the building of even newer neighboring developments. I've never had the heart to tell them that the pre-existing neighbors didn't want their new development, either.

I think it's totally OK for current community to have a say in the future of where they live.

having a say is one thing

blocking anything and everything is another.

we don't live in amber

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"You live in a house built by a developer" is such a tired trope.

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.

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.

What developers have been sitting on approved plans for decades?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The densification argument is a classic YIMBY argument. Densification is not a new concept. Tell me where in DC housing prices have gone down or been stabilized based on new construction?

Such a tired and ignorant argument.

Prices are going up because we aren't building nearly enough to satisfy demand. It's like you invited 100 people to a BBQ, cooked 10 meals and are demanding to know why there are still hungry people.

The bigger question is not "why are prices still expensive," it's "how much less expensive would they be if we built an adequate number of units and how much more expensive would they be if we had done nothing."

Can you point to actual evidence?

The only way that affordable rental housing has ever been constructed for low income people is when the government did it. Current “affordable” rental housing is just full depreciated structures in bad locations in need of CAPEX (which is how the market is supposed to work).

The only historical time in this country that real estate prices ever went down in real terms was due to the unique combination of two factors, a population bust combined with a mass expansion of greenfield development (ie the suburbs).

Your entire mental model is invalid and unfortunately you don’t understand that.

It's not about making the value of real estate decrease. It is about trying to stabilize and reduce the rate of increase, because it is unsustainable to have our teachers and first responders living in West Virginia.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I ofter disagree with YIMBYs but I understand their point of view. It's the YIYBYs - the Yes, in your back yard! types - who are insufferable. They're the so-called smart growthers who want height and density everywhere, except in their own back yard. A case in point is the new chairman of the Woodley Park-Cleveland Park ANC, who has been a big cheerleader for up-zoning the area, even though much to it lies in two historic districts, and effectively ending single family zoning. Yet he resides most of the time not in DC, but in the single family home he purchased in Calvert County, MD. And while this "Absentee Neighborhood Commissioner" pushes density on the DC neighborhood he purports to represent, along with an ex-ANC commissioner he has opposed proposed infill development that might affect the view from his apartment rental in DC. A real YIYBY indeed.

Reminds me that the founder of GGW lives in townhome on a historically protected block in DuPont Circle. His life is totally impervious to everything that he advocates. I find that this is a common feature.

he lives what he espouses, an urban lifestyle with better housing and transportation options

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:YIMBY's love cloaking themselves in woke terminology and then guilting areas into YIMBY priorities and then feigning shock when the programs never amount to anything.

The densification argument is a classic YIMBY argument. Densification is not a new concept. Tell me where in DC housing prices have gone down or been stabilized based on new construction? How many below market rate houses are in the Navy Yard area? How many of those houses have families with kids in them? How many new schools have been built to accommodate the newly attracted families?

YIMBY is code for I have money invested in something involved with development.

Exactly. The most visible spokesman for densification in upper NW, a director of Ward 3 Vision, is a former Trump operative who uses the terminology of the woke left (affordability, equity, inclusion, fighting climate change) to secure windfall profit opportunities through zoning changes for the big developers who retained him. Yet the consulting firm he owns twice worked as chief pollster for Donald J. Trump, the president who used dog whistles to "save the suburbs" from affordable housing and the most anti-climate, anti-equity, anti-inclusion president in modern US history. The guy uses focus groups to test messaging to sell the agendas of unpalatable candidates, but this is beyond cynical even by DC standards. And yet the local politicians seem to accept at face value woke-sounding arguments pushed by Trumpers, to give the developers what they want.

1) Ward 3 Vision doesn't have any "directors"
2) there is no one on the steering committee who has ever worked for Trump or has any association with Trump. Maybe you are thinking about a second or third degree relationship?

Anonymous wrote:I ofter disagree with YIMBYs but I understand their point of view. It's the YIYBYs - the Yes, in your back yard! types - who are insufferable. They're the so-called smart growthers who want height and density everywhere, except in their own back yard. A case in point is the new chairman of the Woodley Park-Cleveland Park ANC, who has been a big cheerleader for up-zoning the area, even though much to it lies in two historic districts, and effectively ending single family zoning. Yet he resides most of the time not in DC, but in the single family home he purchased in Calvert County, MD. And while this "Absentee Neighborhood Commissioner" pushes density on the DC neighborhood he purports to represent, along with an ex-ANC commissioner he has opposed proposed infill development that might affect the view from his apartment rental in DC. A real YIYBY indeed.

I don't know who you are talking about, but you know, we are in a pandemic where people are wherever they are until it is over.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
"You live in a house built by a developer" is such a tired trope.

DP. The point of "a developer built your house" is: what if, when the developer proposed the building you now live in, the neighbors had been able to stop it?

I personally know people who live in new developments, who oppose the building of even newer neighboring developments. I've never had the heart to tell them that the pre-existing neighbors didn't want their new development, either.

I think it's totally OK for current community to have a say in the future of where they live.

Sure, as long as you acknowledge that if the community had had an equivalent say when your house was built, your house probably wouldn't have been built.

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing. Why is one OK but the other isn't?

The outcome in Westbard fascinates me. The developer has proposed to scrap half of the proposed apartment units which would have produced the MPDUs (which YIMBYs used to accuse the community as being against affordable housing) and now requests to convert it into an assisted living facility. It is effectively a bait and switch that seems to be a common end-around the planning and permitting process and I have not seen or heard anything from the usual YIMBY suspects about this outcome, despite it resulting in a major impact to the amount of both market rate and regulated "affordable" housing units produced.

Similarly, look at the Carr property in downtown Bethesda, another bait and switch. Project site plan originally approved with 480 units. Later the developer reduces the units to 456 and then later comes back and requests to make 80 of those units "short-term rentals" and the MDPU requirement only applies to the remaining units and there is no impact to the overall project footprint. Again, where are the usual YIMBY voices? Where is the howling and screaming?

I would honestly respect YIMBYs more if they were not dishonest about their goals. On the one hand they extol great urbanism of European cities, evoking continuous low-rise density with abundant tree canopy, public open space and parks. However, in practice the YIMBYs actually advocate for allowing developers free reign to build imposing and lifeless monstrosities that promote an urban environment that is exactly the opposite of what they claim to extol and any opposition to moderating developers is countered with vicious attacks and attempts at public shaming to effectively label people as racist (everyone knows who I am talking about).

Requesting a setback to allow for a wider sidewalk with planted trees is bad because it reduces the number of units that developers can build which affects the availability of overall supply which prevents their mythical housing supply/price mechanism from working when hurts affordable housing for low income residents which makes the person requesting this effectively racist. Let's be clear, this chain of events is the exact logic and as you can see in this thread, to point out the fallacies of these arguments is to be met with attacks. It's bizarre.

The Planning Department is guilty of this too. Presenting these preposterous utopian renderings of things like continuous step downs in density (which I think most people think is fine) but cannot actually be implemented in practice. They also lack the ability to plan for actual day to day details of the lived experience, which is troubling. Where in their plans have they accounted for parking of delivery vehicles, for example? Or, when you look at their Silver Spring 4 stack "missing middle" proposals, where in their proposed site plans does the dumpster go? These are the practicalities of life and it really is telling how little interest there are in these things, which really need to be accounted for at the planning stage.

Anonymous wrote:YIMBY = Yes In My Backyard = the opposite of NIMBY.

The pro-development, pro-any kind of housing at any cost, a movement that straddles the social justice left and the libertarian/pro-corporate right. Locally, YIMBY outlets include Greater Greater Washington, Just Up The Pike, and Market Urbanism Report.

The idea is that deregulating zoning and building everything everywhere, housing at all price points including luxury, will ease the supply/demand ratio and help solve the housing affordability problem. Criticisms from the right include potentially threatening property values of homeowners in wealthy neighborhoods and "social engineering", criticisms from the left include "shilling for corporate developers" and skepticism surrounding the concept of filtering (meaning that construction of new "luxury" units will enable wealthier residents to move into them and open up older, cheaper units for middle and lower income residents).
YIMBY politicians include Montgomery County Councilmember Hans Riemer.

So what do you think of YIMBYs and their housing solutions? Does it work? Does it benefit high-earning young professionals exclusively? Does "filtering" work? What are your thoughts.

They love to preach to others before retreating to their Takoma Park home, safely protected from all this new development.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The densification argument is a classic YIMBY argument. Densification is not a new concept. Tell me where in DC housing prices have gone down or been stabilized based on new construction?

Such a tired and ignorant argument.

Prices are going up because we aren't building nearly enough to satisfy demand. It's like you invited 100 people to a BBQ, cooked 10 meals and are demanding to know why there are still hungry people.

The bigger question is not "why are prices still expensive," it's "how much less expensive would they be if we built an adequate number of units and how much more expensive would they be if we had done nothing."

Can you point to actual evidence?

The only way that affordable rental housing has ever been constructed for low income people is when the government did it. Current “affordable” rental housing is just full depreciated structures in bad locations in need of CAPEX (which is how the market is supposed to work).

The only historical time in this country that real estate prices ever went down in real terms was due to the unique combination of two factors, a population bust combined with a mass expansion of greenfield development (ie the suburbs).

Your entire mental model is invalid and unfortunately you don’t understand that.

DP. I posed this in a different thread, but increasing supply lowers prices, and is well-established in academic literature:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7fc2bf_ee1737c3c9d4468881bf1434814a6f8f.pdf
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...=1334&context=up_workingpapers
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oplls6utgf7z6ih/Pennington_JMP.pdf?dl=0

I hate to "nuh-uh" you, but it's actually your mental model that's incorrect, and you can't see it.

LOL.

1. Not published or peer-reviewed
2. Broken link to “think tank” that does not publish peer reviewed work
3. A legislative report?
4. Not published or peer reviewed. Affiliated with same “think tank” as #2

Keep Googling.

Okay, it's trivial to find more papers on the link between supply and affordability. This has been thoroughly established in the literature.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.32.1.3
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/03v09n2/0306glae.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA9823
https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Regulation-and-Housing-Supply-1.pdf

The evidence is so overwhelming, one wonders how you have avoided it all these years. Could it be that your ignorance is willful because you're a beneficiary of restrictive land use regulations?

Also, I think it's great that you demand high-quality research that has been peer-reviewed! Where's your evidence? Besides what you've pulled from your ass, I mean.
••••••••
And I love how you think that the Shiller chart is some sort of gotcha, because you've placed a nonsensical restriction that the explanation only relies on supply issues. That's absurd. That chart, however, is easily explained by the interaction of supply with demand, which is what we're all talking about to begin with.

You were gone a long time and still have not been able to address the core question of how your model explains real housing prices. This is not a “gotcha”, this is actually the most important test because it is a real world test of your model in practice. You still have not achieved that outcome because according to you, if would be equally valid to reduce demand for housing to reduce price and make buying a house more affordable. It’s a weird thing to argue and I’ll let you figure out why.

I was gone a long time because I have obligations outside of responding to strangers on a message board for moms in DC. I'm really glad to hear that you have a lot of time to sit around and refresh this thread, though. Good for you! I wish I had as much free time as you.

Housing prices go up when there is high demand and short supply. That was the story in 2008, and that is the story today. Yes, housing prices go down when demand decreases, but I do not think it is wise policy to induce a recession to reduce demand for housing, so I prefer the approach of increasing supply, but to each their own. I have provided plenty of high-quality peer-reviewed papers out of the vast literature that demonstrates a link between housing scarcity and affordability. Now tell me, where are the high-quality peer-reviewed papers supporting your theory? I'll be sure to refresh this thread before I go to work tomorrow morning, I promise.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing. Why is one OK but the other isn't?

Do you think YIMBYs should ask the county to force developers to build projects?

Regardless, that's not the point. Your position is: building MY house THEN was ok even though the then-neighbors opposed it, but building YOUR house NOW is not ok because the now-neighbors oppose it.

I think that YIMBYs should call out developers who make decisions counter to increasing housing supply. I also think local governments should look at imposing costs when developers seek to delay or downsize projects, and they should make short-term rental conversions very expensive to account for the societal impact of exacerbating the housing shortage.

Also, that's not my position. I'm pro development. I just don't find the case that NIMBYs or zoning are causing a housing shortage in the area to be a compelling one. The pipeline of approved projects just waiting for a developer to pull permits is plenty deep.

A simpler solution is to shorten the allowable period between approval and construction. If you haven't broken ground within 3 years of approval, your approval should go away, and you should have to start over from scratch. That would remove the incentive to get approval for projects that are mostly speculative. Most of those approved projects in the pipeline of approved projects are never going to get built, and everyone knows it.

Changing the zoning would certainly have an effect, though. Think of all of the stupidly-big one-household teardowns in Bethesda. Lots of people don't even necessarily want a house that big, but that's what it makes sense for the builders to build. If the builders had had the option of building two-household buildings (i.e., duplexes) instead, there are some parts of Bethesda where the number of housing units would have doubled in the last 20 years or so.

I support changing the zoning near transit for sure. It would be a game changer for housing supply because it would open the market to small and medium developers who take more modest returns than the high-rise developers. There's a bill to do this before the council but Hans Riemer has refused to move it through his committee and Planning recommended adding a number of regulatory requirements that would make it difficult for small and medium developers to work. It's puzzling that two of the loudest YIMBYs haven't supported the bill, which isn't perfect but is much better than what we have. It's almost as if they want to protect big developers from competition.

I'm not sure such a rigid restriction on the development window is the right way to go. Securing financing for these projects is hard because many of them are too big for banks, so the developers need to seek equity investment instead. Some kind of tolling fee -- which would terminate if the developer withdrew and escalate if the developer sought further delays -- would also get speculative projects off the books.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing. Why is one OK but the other isn't?

Do you think YIMBYs should ask the county to force developers to build projects?

Regardless, that's not the point. Your position is: building MY house THEN was ok even though the then-neighbors opposed it, but building YOUR house NOW is not ok because the now-neighbors oppose it.

I think that YIMBYs should call out developers who make decisions counter to increasing housing supply. I also think local governments should look at imposing costs when developers seek to delay or downsize projects, and they should make short-term rental conversions very expensive to account for the societal impact of exacerbating the housing shortage.

Also, that's not my position. I'm pro development. I just don't find the case that NIMBYs or zoning are causing a housing shortage in the area to be a compelling one. The pipeline of approved projects just waiting for a developer to pull permits is plenty deep.

A simpler solution is to shorten the allowable period between approval and construction. If you haven't broken ground within 3 years of approval, your approval should go away, and you should have to start over from scratch. That would remove the incentive to get approval for projects that are mostly speculative. Most of those approved projects in the pipeline of approved projects are never going to get built, and everyone knows it.

Changing the zoning would certainly have an effect, though. Think of all of the stupidly-big one-household teardowns in Bethesda. Lots of people don't even necessarily want a house that big, but that's what it makes sense for the builders to build. If the builders had had the option of building two-household buildings (i.e., duplexes) instead, there are some parts of Bethesda where the number of housing units would have doubled in the last 20 years or so.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing. Why is one OK but the other isn't?

Do you think YIMBYs should ask the county to force developers to build projects?

Regardless, that's not the point. Your position is: building MY house THEN was ok even though the then-neighbors opposed it, but building YOUR house NOW is not ok because the now-neighbors oppose it.

I think that YIMBYs should call out developers who make decisions counter to increasing housing supply. I also think local governments should look at imposing costs when developers seek to delay or downsize projects, and they should make short-term rental conversions very expensive to account for the societal impact of exacerbating the housing shortage.

Also, that's not my position. I'm pro development. I just don't find the case that NIMBYs or zoning are causing a housing shortage in the area to be a compelling one. The pipeline of approved projects just waiting for a developer to pull permits is plenty deep.

Anonymous wrote:

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing. Why is one OK but the other isn't?

Do you think YIMBYs should ask the county to force developers to build projects?

Regardless, that's not the point. Your position is: building MY house THEN was ok even though the then-neighbors opposed it, but building YOUR house NOW is not ok because the now-neighbors oppose it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The densification argument is a classic YIMBY argument. Densification is not a new concept. Tell me where in DC housing prices have gone down or been stabilized based on new construction?

Such a tired and ignorant argument.

Prices are going up because we aren't building nearly enough to satisfy demand. It's like you invited 100 people to a BBQ, cooked 10 meals and are demanding to know why there are still hungry people.

The bigger question is not "why are prices still expensive," it's "how much less expensive would they be if we built an adequate number of units and how much more expensive would they be if we had done nothing."

Can you point to actual evidence?

The only way that affordable rental housing has ever been constructed for low income people is when the government did it. Current “affordable” rental housing is just full depreciated structures in bad locations in need of CAPEX (which is how the market is supposed to work).

The only historical time in this country that real estate prices ever went down in real terms was due to the unique combination of two factors, a population bust combined with a mass expansion of greenfield development (ie the suburbs).

Your entire mental model is invalid and unfortunately you don’t understand that.

DP. I posed this in a different thread, but increasing supply lowers prices, and is well-established in academic literature:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7fc2bf_ee1737c3c9d4468881bf1434814a6f8f.pdf
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...=1334&context=up_workingpapers
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oplls6utgf7z6ih/Pennington_JMP.pdf?dl=0

I hate to "nuh-uh" you, but it's actually your mental model that's incorrect, and you can't see it.

LOL.

1. Not published or peer-reviewed
2. Broken link to “think tank” that does not publish peer reviewed work
3. A legislative report?
4. Not published or peer reviewed. Affiliated with same “think tank” as #2

Keep Googling.

Okay, it's trivial to find more papers on the link between supply and affordability. This has been thoroughly established in the literature.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.32.1.3
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/03v09n2/0306glae.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA9823
https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Regulation-and-Housing-Supply-1.pdf

The evidence is so overwhelming, one wonders how you have avoided it all these years. Could it be that your ignorance is willful because you're a beneficiary of restrictive land use regulations?

Also, I think it's great that you demand high-quality research that has been peer-reviewed! Where's your evidence? Besides what you've pulled from your ass, I mean.

And I love how you think that the Shiller chart is some sort of gotcha, because you've placed a nonsensical restriction that the explanation only relies on supply issues. That's absurd. That chart, however, is easily explained by the interaction of supply with demand, which is what we're all talking about to begin with.

You were gone a long time and still have not been able to address the core question of how your model explains real housing prices. This is not a “gotcha”, this is actually the most important test because it is a real world test of your model in practice. You still have not achieved that outcome because according to you, if would be equally valid to reduce demand for housing to reduce price and make buying a house more affordable. It’s a weird thing to argue and I’ll let you figure out why.

I think you can let them off the hook now. This doesn't work in the real world because developers also know the YIMBY secret that increasing supply too fast causes prices to fall. Developers have gotten better at forecasting demand at their desired price range, and they seem to be more worried about getting caught long in a soft market than they are about getting caught short in a hot market, probably because when they get caught short there's a windfall both for their existing holdings and their new properties. There is plenty of already approved density, projects just sitting on the shelf with all of the NIMBY hurdles cleared. If NIMBYs were the only thing preventing development, then these projects all would be built by now. The reason you can't find a two bedroom in new construction in a great neighborhood for $2,000 a month is because developers don't want to provide it.

I think most stereotypical YIMBYs are very happy to say that stuff should go near other people's houses, as long as it's far away from the YIMBY house. I also think they prioritize nice townhomes and UMC amenities and stuff that seems hip and progressive, while ignoring actual community needs.