I cannot wait until housing/zoning/gentrification succumbs to the undertow of history and we move on to the next universal solvent.
It blows my mind that investors are explicitly saying "we're buying up housing because it will keep getting more expensive since the supply is artificially restricted by zoning" and community groups are still saying "oppose new construction to stick it to the investors!"
Saiselgy's been a mixed bag lately (I think he's hopelessly naive on effective altruism) but this is an area where I probably agree with him most. He had a column a week or two ago about the idiocy of people trying to block better living standards because it will make neighborhoods more expensive. He didn't really go down this logical path but if you believe that NIMBY argument it follows that not only should we block improvements we should be actively degrading public amenities because it will make things cheaper. More open sewers, it will make rents go down! There's a historical term for maintaining crappy neighborhoods so that poor people have somewhere they can all affordably live in squalor.
I probably mentioned the anti-displacement condition as I put some focus on that in activism.
I think it's correct that gentrification is made to stand for way too many things: primarily, culture change with people actually being displaced.
I think it's revealing that while the author urges against lumping together things that are more complex, they also lump together Bloomberg's zoning policy (which actually was net downzoning plus various spot upzoning in low-income areas) with all strategies incorporating private development. Says something about the level understanding of elites' policy preferences. I suspect the book unfortunately goes down the same barren "all private development is conspiratorial hypercapitalism" path so many left-NIMBYs do.
There is a phenomenon that lefty people sometimes devolve into where it's "I know I'm talking to a sympathetic audience, and so I'm going to make assertions and slightly overstate everything." It kind of drives me crazy because I feel like I can't tuck what they're saying away for future use in a discussion with skeptical people who may be open to persuasion, but need it nailed down more solidly.
developers (who were also granted tax exemptions) bought up large swaths of land for massive residential, commercial, and tourist-oriented redevelopment. These new spaces are sites of foreign investment and real estate speculation, designed to make money, not serve as homes.
I would be interested to hear about all these massive residential developments in New York that were not designed to serve as homes. The residential vacancy rate in New York City is currently just over 2%, so it seems likely that most of then are, volens nolens, serving as homes anyway, and that there is not therefore very much to worry about here.
These ripple effects mean that the very kinds of places that make New York, New York were being homogenized while low-income and racialized people were being pushed farther and farther out of the city.
Middle class white people moving out of the cities was bad because it was "white flight" and led to sustained loss of tax base, underfunding of public services, etc. But middle class white people moving back into the cities is also bad because it's gentrification and leads to poorer people being priced out of the area.
It is also fascinating that, as an aside, she admits that the great struggle of her life is to preserve the wonderful essential character of the kind of neighbourhood that she... hasn't lived in since she was a graduate student in the early 2000s. She now lives in a tiny university town with a population of 6,000.
Yes, there is no answer to vacancy rates being low in expensive places, only a retreat to aggregate vacancy numbers which only sound big out of context.
Related, after so much chatter in legislatures about massive investors buying all the homes, I finally saw some aggregate data: investors of any scale were in 2021 the same share of the purchase market as they had been fifteen years before (with little visible trend over time); about half of those were people owning 1 investment property, another large chunk owning 2-9; institutional investors did start rising sharply from 2016, but to a whopping 2.5% of the purchase market; 4.5% if you include "instant buyers" like Opendoor. Class explanations are helpful, but there's a lot of focus on the wrong class.
Locally, we have a massive housing shortage exacerbated by the recent boom. We own our place, but we'd barely qualify for a mortgage on it now, and it's just horrid for anyone who isn't coming in with family money or an UMC income. It's 'gentrifying' in that the people often best placed to do that aren't Utah locals, so the people with the houses are often out-of-state transplants who are used to even nuttier prices (California) or moved here with the UMC job in hand, education finished.
Some of the problem is that it's more profitable for landlords to run AirBnBs for skiing/outdoors than it is for them to lease to ordinary tenants, so the small 'starter home' or ADU is effectively off the market.
What about the caveman guy who says he buys ugly houses?
I have become very cynical about this over time; it always seems to end up being an exercise in "we can solve the housing problem without building anything or doing anything if we can only find the right people to blame".
There is a phenomenon that lefty people sometimes devolve into where it's "I know I'm talking to a sympathetic audience, and so I'm going to make assertions and slightly overstate everything."
Yes, that is familiar and frustrating.
Locally, we have a massive housing shortage exacerbated by the recent boom.
Same here, and I keep saying to people, "growing up I was suspicious of development because developers were often unsympathetic politically (and wanted to free-ride as much as possible on existing infrastructure), but I've come around to thinking that housing prices are too high; it's bad for the city, and the way to bring down housing prices is to have more development."
A few weeks ago, someone commented that a condition on new developments should be that current residents are not displaced or charged more than their current expenses. I can't remember if it was a hypothetical policy or an existing policy, but it has stuck with me.
It's an existing policy specifically for HUD-funded projects (which, to be clear, are a very very small portion of overall development). It's known as Section 104(d) of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. In practice it's implemented in conjunction with the Uniform Relocation Assistance Act (URA), which applies more broadly to all federal projects but is tailored more to highway projects and administered by the Federal Highway Administration. URA basically assumes people will be displaced and is focused on compensation and providing replacement housing; the idea that the project itself might provide housing and how that should affect displaced residents doesn't really enter into it, but that has turned out to be a big, obvious issue for HUD projects so Section 104(d) was put in place to address it. There's more information here, but it's unfortunately not very clear on explaining how this works until you really dig in to the training modules etc.
8: sounds like a great place for developers to build more houses. Are they?
Government Code 66300(d), originating in the California Housing Crisis Act of 2019:
(1) An affected city or an affected county shall not approve a housing development project that will require the demolition of one or more residential dwelling units unless the project will create at least as many residential dwelling units as will be demolished.
(2) An affected city or an affected county shall not approve a housing development project that will require the demolition of occupied or vacant protected units, unless all of the following apply:
(A) (i) The project will replace all existing or demolished protected units.
...
(B) The housing development project will include at least as many residential dwelling units as the greatest number of residential dwelling units that existed on the project site within the last five years.
(C) (i) Any existing occupants will be allowed to occupy their units until six months before the start of construction activities with proper notice, subject to Chapter 16 (commencing with Section 7260) of Division 7 of Title 1.
(ii) Any existing occupants that are required to leave their units shall be allowed to return at their prior rental rate if the demolition does not proceed and the property is returned to the rental market.
(D) The developer agrees to provide both of the following to the existing occupants of any protected units that are lower income households:
(i) Relocation benefits to the occupants of those affordable residential rental units, subject to Chapter 16 (commencing with Section 7260) of Division 7 of Title 1.
(ii) A right of first refusal for a comparable unit available in the new housing development affordable to the household at an affordable rent or an affordable housing cost. This clause shall not apply to any of the following:
(I) A development project that consists of a single residential unit located on a site where a single protected unit is being demolished.
(II) (ia) Units in a housing development in which 100 percent of the units, exclusive of a manager's unit or units, are reserved for lower income households.
14: This is America, not some place that you're allowed to build houses!
14: yes, but there's a lot of bitching about it. It's been a strange shift. Ten years ago my house was valued at about a third of what it is now. So people with roots here think of the single family home as the only real option because a decade ago it was achievable for a working class family. More condos and such going up, too, but a lot of people are stuck renting or living with parents. Rents have more than doubled in the past decade, too.
It's also just taking time. Lots of labor shortages.
The other challenge is that it's more profitable to put one greige McMansion on a lot than a more affordable smaller home.
More profitable and typically the only legal way to get more out of it.
(One ostensibly pro-housing city in CA allows without any special approvals a 9,000-square-foot, three-story mansion on a standard 6,000-square-foot lot, then where they're forced to allow duplexes, they girded that option with design standards that prevent it from being more than two stories and about half that floor area.)
15. C(ii) looks all very fine but what prevents the developers doubling the rent after 12 months, or trebling it when a unit becomes vacant?
20: The same year we passed rent caps and just-cause eviction. Both are a lot weaker than they should be, but they do prevent rent from doubling.
Middle class white people moving out of the cities was bad because it was "white flight" and led to sustained loss of tax base, underfunding of public services, etc. But middle class white people moving back into the cities is also bad because it's gentrification and leads to poorer people being priced out of the area.
I had a related thought which I wasn't articulating in quite so bellicose a way. My version is that some portion of gentrification is regression to the mean after white flight. I still think it ought to be the case that the same group of vulnerable people aren't doubly screwed over each time the pendulum swings, though.
Oh wait, 1482 only applies to buildings 15+ years old. Let me look into what protections apply for protected right-to-return tenants.
My version is that some portion of gentrification is regression to the mean after white flight.
I wonder about that. Older cities housed all income levels a lot more effectively - if not at a dignified standard of living.
My version is that some portion of gentrification is regression to the mean after white flight.
Yeah, there's definitely something to this. You see stuff like people buying a big old house that was subsequently converted to apartments and converting it back, e.g. Some (not all) of the currently gentrifying neighborhoods were originally wealthy and only became poor because of white flight.
That's so ten years ago in Pittsburgh.
Actually, twenty years ago. I'm old.
Anyway, houses are really cheap if you bought one twenty years ago in Pittsburgh.
And honestly, the kitchen needs replaced.
Okay, I'm informed the right to return units have to stay affordable to the same tenant indefinitely, where affordable is defined as 30% of 60% of area median income.
There's no protection of the rent upon vacancy though.
I was reading an early 20th century detective novel the other day and one character muses at one point how it's weird that there are lots of London districts that used to be nice and are now slums, but you never find one that had gone the other way. Lots of nice houses broken up into slum living, no slum houses razed for mansions or even reasonable terraces.
I wonder how true that was and if so for how long.
32: Because of early suburbanization, maybe?
I had a related thought which I wasn't articulating in quite so bellicose a way. My version is that some portion of gentrification is regression to the mean after white flight.
I would add that we are a significantly more affluent country (with some important caveats) than, say, 40 years ago. So a middle class household can most likely afford a larger home, and almost certainly eats out more and drinks more fancy coffee than a household at the same point in the income distribution 40 years ago.
33: The timing would be about right, yeah.
33: of course. That would be around the time of the Tube expansion. Metroland and so on. Suddenly "close to the centre of town" expanded to cover a much larger area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-Land_(1973_film)
Tube expansion is associated with growing families.
Or just with being happy to see someone.
Same thing happened in Edinburgh when the New Town was built. Within ten years the Lord Provost's old house was being squatted in by a weaver family IIRC.
Oh yeah, we've got a family of orb weavers squatting on our porch, too.
But not an early 18th century Lord Provost. Exactly my point.
Kind of related: I am once again going to kill the mice the have decided to live in my basement without paying rent.
I have killed
the mice
that were in
the basement
from which
you were probably
hoping for rent.
Forgive me
they were shitting
all over
Moby's belongings.
It's actually not original to me - I'm riffing on a different poem about fruit.
I just learned that Lorenzo Lamas was a nepo baby.
Mel and Abe Vigoda working together reciting Neil Simon's casual anti-Asian racism.
Charles Emerson Winchester the 3rd.
Did the Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker get their ideas from Neil Simon?
I think this Stockard Channing is going to have a great career.
This is like Colombo if the women were written accurately as wanting to have sex with Peter Falk.
I guess I should see Murder by Death.
47:Son of the original "You look marvelous!" guy, right?
But, yes, after brief research. He was the Victor Laszlo in The Cheap Detective.
These ripple effects mean that the very kinds of places that make New York, New York were being homogenized while low-income and racialized people were being pushed farther and farther out of the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City
Her statement seems to be completely the opposite of reality, as far as the census figures seem to show.
65: "New York City" always means Manhattan until proven otherwise. Manhattan is whiter* than it used to be, ergo NYC is whiter than it used to be, and all the non-white people apparently live in Scarsdale now.
Anyway, as always, the only correct NYC is the one that you moved to after college.
*this relies heavily on unspoken assumptions about whiteness, of course: for the purposes of this discussion, an Italian on Mulberry Street in 1940 was not white, but an Indian doctor on the UWS is.
There is a phenomenon that lefty people sometimes devolve into where it's "I know I'm talking to a sympathetic audience, and so I'm going to make assertions and slightly overstate everything." It kind of drives me crazy because
it means they are essentially bullshitting: the truth value of their statements doesn't matter, what matters is that their fellow lefties are nodding along.
"New York City" always means Manhattan until proven otherwise. Manhattan is whiter* than it used to be
But the figures don't even back that up!
Going by the census percentages of "non-Hispanic white": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
Manhattan in 2020 is
less white than in 2010 (it has more white people, but they make up a smaller percentage of the population)
less white than in 2000
less white than in 1990
and less white than in 1980.
Before that they didn't split Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites out in the census, but Manhattan is less white (plus white Hispanics) now than at any time since 1900. There was a very slight uptick in white population from2000 to 2010 which has since reversed.
In living memory, Manhattan was 80% white!
I am trying not to be bellicose about this, but this woman simply isn't telling the truth.
Everyone knows "Manhattan" for the purposes of this discussion doesn't go past 116th st.
At any rate, I agree with ajay that this statement is full of shit, even if we can somehow caveat it into being technically true.
An important point is that this discussion completely erases gentrification by people of color. Lots of young affluent black people moving into Harlem in the last 30 years!
Yeah, my neighborhood has gotten a bunch richer without, to my eye, getting much whiter in the twenty-odd years since I moved in.
If there's anything true that the statement is referring to, it's that ethnically uniform enclaves have been noticeably disrupted over the last twenty or thirty years. When I was a young woman, I could think of a lot of neighborhoods where I'd be visibly out of place on the street, to the point of feeling uncomfortable. These days, there's hardly anywhere in the city where it would be surprising to see a white person -- plenty of neighborhoods that are majority minority, but no place where the number of white people you'd expect to see on the street is zero.
And now looking back at the statement, "low-income" is doing a lot of work. I would buy (I don't know that it's true, but it's plausible to me) that the percentage of NYC residents that are really poor is way down since twenty or thirty years ago.
There really is gentrification happening, but a lot of it is reflected in the population being wealthier, which doesn't mean whiter, but does lazily get conflated with it. Manhattan median household income has gone from $28k in 1989 ($68k after inflation) to $84k in 2021. Or comparing to the country at large, over that time it went from 96% of national MHI to 119% more, while New York City went from 109% to 103%.
Also reflected in the population being less Black: non-Latino from 20.3% in 1980 to 11.8% in 2020.
But when an author is that cavalier with facts...
(Although Black Hispanic/Latino population has gone from 1.5% to 4.5%.)
Maybe my main urbanist hobbyhorse is that Americans grew accustomed to urban stasis after 1970*, especially within neighborhoods, and there's just no muscle memory for the concept that cities are inherently dynamic. CHANGEBAD is a broad human tendency, but historically one that urbanites were relatively inured to. Sure, you'd mourn whichever of your old haunts went away, but the idea that entire districts should be frozen in amber, not only physically but also demographically... it's beyond absurd. But it's the essential thread tying together NIMBYs of all supposed ideological bents.
I don't really have any theories of how to reverse this other than, if you force the issue, then people will get used to it again, and I absolutely believe that a dynamic, growing city will feel better than a static one, and that eventually the sentiment will shift.
*so many factors, most essentially white flight/suburbanism, but also zoning and building codes. Central business districts have been generally dynamic, but people got used to the idea that residential districts should stay mostly the same. And note that suburbia works this way as well: sprawl always changes the landscape, but once a neighborhood is built, it stays roughly static until the first generation grows old and moves out, and the new people redo the siding. Levittowns are famous for how their cookie cutter houses were altered by owners and no longer look recognizably the same, but post-1960 suburban houses see very little alteration, and that's mostly in the back (a big deck, a kitchen bumpout).
re: 76
It's interesting how much the expense of London housing means that, where I live, everyone's houses are heavily modified. Most people buy a very small 2-bedroom terraced house (the sort of thing that canal workers* lived in in the 19th century) and then they put in an attic extension, knock the two tiny downstairs room into one larger room and then add an extension at the back. Sometimes they drop the level of the interior of the house at the back to raise the height of the kitchen, etc. But, as you say, that's mostly visible from the back. They might have literally doubled in interior size, but from the street, they look basically the same.
* literally canal workers, for the area I live in, and people who worked at the asylum
Maybe my main urbanist hobbyhorse is that Americans grew accustomed to urban stasis after 1970*, especially within neighborhoods,
God, yes. So much self-assured bloviation by both NIMBYs and professional planners who should know better about what "fits" the neighborhood, even when the neighborhood was whatever could be thrown up quickly in living memory, and was only legally frozen that way maybe twenty years after that.
76 is definitely true, and it's the biggest challenge to fixing anything. As JRoth notes, there are several factors involved in how we got here, but I will emphasize that mid-century planning orthodoxy and the popularity of zoning (related but separate phenomena) played a big big role. Many planners will claim, correctly, that planning and zoning don't actually work together the way they're supposed to, but I think that's more an indictment of the planning theory behind the current setup than they realize. More cities zone than plan, which should be a huge red flag, and this has always been the case. Zoning gives a huge amount of power to local governments, which are typically dominated by the interests of incumbent property owners and have enormous political influence at the state level. California has passed a lot of really great state legislation recently but is starting to see the difficulty of actually implementing it in the face of determined resistance by cities. As we've discussed before, New Jersey and Massachusetts have been dealing with similar problems for decades. I think, and hope, that a lot of YIMBY types are starting to realize that while this is a simple problem to fix conceptually (just build more housing!) it's a very big lift politically and takes a level of courage and dedication by politicians at all levels that can be hard to find.
I think, and hope, that a lot of YIMBY types are starting to realize that while this is a simple problem to fix conceptually (just build more housing!) it's a very big lift politically and takes a level of courage and dedication by politicians at all levels that can be hard to find.
When I first started on Twitter, I spent half my time yelling at YIMBY types that they were delusional, not about their basic stance (I'm 100% in favor of development/new housing/etc), but about the political realities they were facing. I've settled down on that, and certainly they've made more progress legislatively than I thought they would, but as you say, localities still have plenty of power even in the face of pretty pro-housing state laws.
My other frequent beef was that they conflated zoning with building codes. Some of them will reply "zoning stands for all that stuff," but frankly I think that's just ass-covering, because ~5 years ago building codes were NEVER part of the discussion, and when I brought them up, even people who were heavily engaged in the YIMBY world would point back to zoning. There's c certainly more attention paid to code issues now, but other than point access blocks, I"m not sure there's remotely enough energy to overcome inertia. BCOs and the people who write the codes have zero incentive to make it easier/cheaper to build, and it will take tremendous organizing to countervail that--and NIMBYs of all stripes will find it very easy to claim that such efforts are nothing but making buildings less safe so developers can make more $$.
I just don't understand how people live in places where a 1,300 square feet is $750,000.