Comment by munchler
2 days ago
There's also a large lobby group that is fully invested in building new houses, namely real estate developers, and since most politicians at a high level usually need large campaign contributions, they are fully invested in it as well.
This is not the problem. We should not castigate people who want to build homes and earn a rightful profit from that endeavor. The problem is the undemocratic process that is the town hearing. It is unreasonable to expect working families and young adults to attend week day, day time hearings to state their position on the construction of new homes or anything else for that matter. The atrocities of urban renewal by Robert Moses and his followers in the 50s and 60s which wrecked many urban and black urban communities, many of which still haven’t recovered, led us into this mess. The antidote was that all movements towards progress must be debated by citizens (mostly seniors as they are the only ones with the luxury of time) in a hearing format. The citizens able to participate are most likely not going to live long enough to see the results of their positions anyways. It’s a disaster.
You want to let rich outsiders make decisions about what happens to a community instead of the people who live there, because... town hearings are undemocratic. All those annoying old people are just going to die anyway, so it's really best to ignore them.
I think I've heard everything now.
All these old people are going to die now so their incentives don’t really align with people from other demographics. This is factually true, same with how people that have more wealth generally have different incentives than poor people.
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Are you suggesting that the problem with housing is that we are producing too much of it?
No, I'm suggesting that one problem with housing is wealthy real estate developers who have undue political influence.
I wish they had more influence, then they’d be able to build more and prices would go down.
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Yep. A town can become desirable after its residents carefully built its character and reputation, then suddenly apartment/condo developers want in.
Usually the town was made "desirable" by residents there from ~1890-1940, and the current NIMBY's are leeching off that. In most cases the desirable part was bulldozed in the 50's-70's to make parking for the suburbanites. Portland, OR had streets that could make you think you were in Budapest before they were demolished in the 40's