Even if they did vote, a lot of the politically active young renters oppose new development since they see it as gentrification or only enriching real estate developers or only building luxury housing.
If you increase the supply of housing, it puts downward pressure on rent
That's the bug right there. Rental housing is a popular investment vehicle, at a ROI of 9.5 % it slightly outperforms the stock market. Any regulation and anything that would decrease profit will be stridently opposed by the wealthy classes. They go and vote and sit on the city council.
I think part of it is due to lack of understanding, you see new buildings being built that are going to rent out at the high range, and you think nobody actually affected by lack of housing will benefit from it. People who think differently ought to do a better job explaining to the general public why building luxury housing can help the people not living in luxury housing
It’s also frustrating because new housing is always necessarily market rate, and when the market rate is ridiculous, new housing is ridiculous. I live in “luxury” apartments from 1970, and even though I live in an expensive city, my rent is decently reasonable for the area (plus, I would hardly describe my unit as luxurious, unless you consider shoddy craftsmanship and ugly decor luxury). Point is: new is market rate, and market rate is expensive. So people see new apartments go up with market rates and assume that it’s just intentional gouging vs a reaction to market forces. And this doesn’t even touch things like how zoning encourages buildings like this, etc.
luxury housing doesn't have a fixed luxury price; it just tends to be more expensive than lower end housing. I just moved into a relatively expensive apartment that is at the upper edge of what I can afford. rent in this area is actually experiencing a bit of downward pressure because several new high-end apartment buildings are going up at the same time. previously I was renting a place that was much cheaper. if the new place had been $100 more expensive, I wouldn't have moved. but I did move, and now someone with less money can live in the place I moved out of. the new building I moved into has many more units than the townhouses it replaced. if enough people like me move into it, they will no longer be bidding up the lower end housing.
I agree! I’m saying we should explain this phenomenon of luxury housing supply opening up more lower end units to people, rather than throwing our hands in the air and lamenting that people just don’t get it
Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting.
Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.
That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.
There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.
> do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once?
Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house/neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) and high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth many more times than that solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.
We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.
Gentrification is a really complex issue, because on one hand it is objectively improving an area, and on the other, basically anybody without housing equity (ie a mortgage) in the gentrifying area gets screwed.
I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).
Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.
I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.
I agree there is some nuance, but a lot of the reason why people move in and build in that poorer area is that they've been zoned out of the wealthier area where it's impossible to build any new housing at all.
New building that has been blocked in SF would replace a laundromat, chained lot that used to be a McDonalds, a Walgreens. Who exactly would have been displaced by any of those?
The argument that building new buildings "displaces" people is nonsense. In fact, I'd argue that more people are displaced by not building, due to supply constraints. Wealthy people will always be able to outbid others, and if supply doesn't keep up with demand people will be displaced.
Also, nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want at whatever price they want. It's this attitude that drives so many "affordable" housing programs that are complete failures (and a tax on the middle class).
