this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Yes in my backyard!

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In this community, we believe in saying yes to:

Typical YIMBY policies include:

Typical housing crisis "solutions" YIMBYs are wary of:

YIMBYism transcends the typical left-right political divide; please be respectful of fellow YIMBYs with differing political views. That said, please report anyone saying anything hateful or bigoted.

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Building new units is proven to push rents down – but not for the reasons you may think (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The key impact of new construction isn’t the price of the new units themselves – it’s that high-income people who can afford to move into them move out of their current, older homes. The people who move into the newly vacated homes then vacate another round of homes and the game of musical chairs continues, a process known as “moving chains”. Even expensive new homes result in shorter inspection lines and lower prices at the bottom end of the market, a finding that’s been repeated in studies of cities around the world.

No that was exactly the reason why I thought more apartments would help at any price point, and this is essentially the basis of supply side economics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

For whatever reason, people want it to be more complicated than "2463 households need 2463 houses". I mean, at the nitty-gritty level it is, but at scale that's the sort of complexity that cancels itself out if you just leave it alone enough, as all the Western countries do last I checked.

You see a weird sort of symbiosis between affluent NIMBYs and some of the less sophisticated antipoverty activists, sometimes. In a housing crisis, would it be better to build small apartments rather than luxury apartments, given a fixed square footage? Yes. Are luxury apartments still houses? Also yes. Both groups want to ignore the second bit, but for completely opposite reasons relative to the first bit. Sometimes, they work together and manage to get no houses built at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Which would you prefer- a now dated but once luxury apartment, or a newly built basic apartment? The older apartment is likely to have a lot more living space and those luxury features mostly still work.

affordable housing too often is hate on the poor having nice things.