Who's Worse: Developers or NIMBYs

I started this poll because I don't really know!

It has long been said that comparisons are odious, but how much more so when both subjects to be compared are independently odious.

There's a chicken and egg thing too, because NIMBYs move into the places developers build. But then they turn around and try to stop the next developers.

Nothing inherently wrong with building housing. Blame racist zoning.

I agree there's nothing necessarily wrong with building housing or other things too, but it is also true that developers often treat existing residents, ecosystems, ecology like trash. (There's a reason they're the bad guys in every other '80s movie — they were preparing us for Trump.)

developers, easy. nimbys who _demand_ gentrification, that's fucking awful behavior, but at the end of the day, they're the addicts. developers are the pushers.

cosign that

I agree there's nothing necessarily wrong with building housing or other things too, but it is also true that developers often treat existing residents, ecosystems, ecology like trash. (There's a reason they're the bad guys in every other '80s movie — they were preparing us for Trump.)

Related: people who move into overpriced luxury flats that have been shoehorned into the immediate vicinity of a popular and extremely obviously active nightclub, and then immediately try to get the nightclub shut down with noise complaints

The related US phenomenon is possibly people moving into working class neighbourhoods and then calling the cops because some old Mexican lads are playing the radio and playing dominoes outside the apartment block in the same way they have for the last 30 years?

yes, they are both symptoms of the same disease

local version- complaining about mice in the field across the fence

Related: people who move into overpriced luxury flats that have been shoehorned into the immediate vicinity of a popular and extremely obviously active nightclub, and then immediately try to get the nightclub shut down with noise complaints

oh man, an even dumber situation has happened locally: a *business* moved into a newer office on the same block as a music venue that's been there 15ish years now in an older building, and they filed a complaint about pre-5pm *sound checks* going on

I suspect there's some additional fuckery going on between the property owner, the renters, and what they want to do with that block but they've been nearly universally shouted down at the moment

kind of a tough comparison since developers are cutthroat professionals in a high risk industry and nimbys are just home owning randos of various asshole levels, i think the answer is developers tho, if they were in favor of actually building more housing in a way that would alleviate the housing crisis then theyd maybe be an acceptable necessary evil but theyre not they like housing scarcity, shouldve put yimbys on here too

I just watch these two groups fighting each other all the time and often find it hard to be sympathetic to either.

I’m not sure housing scarcity benefits developers much—restrictive zoning leads to higher land costs for the developer. Generally real estate developers keep to a 6% profit margin regardless. Also many builders have cash flow issues that requires them to sell the house or building quickly so they can get the capital to start another project.

Speaking as someone remotely managing a business that will very possibly soon have to close/move because the land is (potentially) being sold, I'm voting for developers as they are all amoral pieces of shit who are in it to scam as much short-term profit as they can. Like everything else the homebuilding industry should be regulated about 1000% more than it is.

Related: people who move into overpriced luxury flats that have been shoehorned into the immediate vicinity of a popular and extremely obviously active nightclub, and then immediately try to get the nightclub shut down with noise complaints

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/18/news.rosieswash

primal indoor voice

I’m not sure housing scarcity benefits developers much—restrictive zoning leads to higher land costs for the developer.

― O 'Tis Redding (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, September 17, 2024 10:54 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

youll have to talk to them about that

it's wild to age through seeing multiple neighborhoods go through the whole deal, maybe even see a gentrified neighborhood where the apartment rents are starting to drop back down after fifteen to twenty years of accelerated gentrification

I think city governments and even some federal incentive programs deserve a little bit of the blame. Subsidies to developers based on them carving out a certain number of units that will rent below market rate to lower income renters for a certain number of years, then flipping the building into fully market rate, or swapping apartments out for condos. Tax abatements on new development that last for a certain number of years with no guarantee that they're not saturating the rental market, or that they're not creating a homogenous housing stock that means the entire neighborhood's populace turns over every decade.

Lagoon, I'm a city planner so I hear this stuff--land costs somewhere around the year 2000 started skyrocketing in my area.

MH, subsidies, at least in my jurisdiction, take the form not of cash or tax breaks but of additional density (more dwelling units than the zoning would otherwise allow them to build) to offset the costs of the subsidized units). Units have to be affordable for at least 30 years and lately we have been demanding up to 60 years). These things are monitored very carefully by our Housing Division. Converting to condo doesn't get them out of it---the units will either have to be affordable to own, or deeded over to an affordable housing provider for them to rent out. My jurisdiction is small enough (with a large enough bureaucracy) to keep up with the various commitments (we've been doing this bonus-units for affordable housing thing for 50 years, so we've got a good system in place of checks and balances, including we always place legal covenants recorded on the property deed that every lender or new owner would be aware of).

Lagoon, I'm a city planner so I hear this stuff--land costs somewhere around the year 2000 started skyrocketing in my area.

― O 'Tis Redding (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, September 17, 2024 12:24 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh thats cool, would be curious to know if the developers support zoning etc reforms that would allow them to build more but also would have the effect of driving down prices, cause to the extent ive followed this stuff which was like half heartedly when i lived in nyc, a place where real estate in general has huge political power, it seemed like developers were trying to have it both ways, walking a line where they get to build but prices stay high, tho obvs real estate includes landlords too and we all know what they want, and some developers are landlords etc, prob to some extent successful developers are happy with the status quo cause theyre successful, thats all sort of market stuff then theres subsidies/rules around middle/low wealth people can afford to have housing in the mix too

xp that sounds a lot more sane than what I've seen locally!

I think the developers here have very little incentive to build anything in the part of the city that has any sort of density that isn't capitalizing on supposed "hot" neighborhoods. Almost all the other new construction is suburban

Around here the subsidy for low-income housing takes the form of PILOTs, which offset the property taxes to some degree (because the state counts LIH tax credits as part of the property value, so they're appraised/assessed at the same value as market-rate apartments). Those are almost all 30-year deals afaik.

I’m not sure housing scarcity benefits developers much—restrictive zoning leads to higher land costs for the developer.

Also many builders have cash flow issues that requires them to sell the house or building quickly so they can get the capital to start another project.

Xxxxr Lagoon, in my area developers who are strictly builders (and then turn over the finished product to someone else) would love it if we had no zoning and public review of projects. They’d probably build as much as they could, subject to any other constraints. Builders who are also landlords, it’s more complicated obviously.

Lagoon, I'm a city planner so I hear this stuff--land costs somewhere around the year 2000 started skyrocketing in my area.

― O 'Tis Redding (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, September 17, 2024 12:24 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh thats cool, would be curious to know if the developers support zoning etc reforms that would allow them to build more but also would have the effect of driving down prices, cause to the extent ive followed this stuff which was like half heartedly when i lived in nyc, a place where real estate in general has huge political power, it seemed like developers were trying to have it both ways, walking a line where they get to build but prices stay high, tho obvs real estate includes landlords too and we all know what they want, and some developers are landlords etc, prob to some extent successful developers are happy with the status quo cause theyre successful, thats all sort of market stuff then theres subsidies/rules around middle/low wealth people can afford to have housing in the mix too

Oops … zing ate my post …

Basically if you notice why so many multi-unit and mixed use projects all look the same, it’s because developers paid architects, engineers, and other consultants a large sum of money to create plansets that would both meet strict code requirements (zoning/planning/building) and pencil financially in their desired time frame … they just use that as a template because the cost to change them is … expensive

Xxxxr Lagoon, in my area developers who are strictly builders (and then turn over the finished product to someone else) would love it if we had no zoning and public review of projects. They’d probably build as much as they could, subject to any other constraints..

Mh and tipsy raise good points though … the dynamics are different in parts of the country where there is still a fair amount of open space, as opposed to denser urban areas, like where I live and work.

Here there are also a lot of issues around historic preservation and “adaptive reuse” which complicates things.

_Xxxxr Lagoon, in my area developers who are strictly builders (and then turn over the finished product to someone else) would love it if we had no zoning and public review of projects. They’d probably build as much as they could, subject to any other constraints.._


OTM … even the ones who build and then manage the properties… going to planning commission hearings, addressing public concerns, revising things, making slide decks to address such things, commissioning reports to address these things … they would prefer not to.

Boring — at your work, do you get the nice old people preservationists? I sometimes feel like they are a dying breed.

Not really—ours are a weird lot they span all ages genders and, uh, shall we say, temperaments.

Most of our history is postwar which doesn’t inspire the same passion I see in other communities that have colonial or 19th century built environments.

We have a pretty good preservationist group here that has lobbied for some local laws to protect specific properties, and works with property owners, buyers, developers to guide them through historic tax credits and that kind of stuff. They're mostly of a different breed than the "all density is bad/you know what kind of people live in apartments" folks who show up to "preserve" their property values and way of life.

(like, the actual historic preservationists don't care if you put 60 units in some old warehouse at the edge of a single-family neighborhood, as long as you renovate it and preserve its architectural details etc)

Also I should say that the developers willing to take on those kinds of projects ime tend to be of a different, more collaborative type than the relentless bulldoze-and-build profiteers. #notalldevelopers and all that

Basically if you notice why so many multi-unit and mixed use projects all look the same

― sarahell, Tuesday, September 17, 2024 1:17 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

saw a video from the early 90s recently that had some of those current cookie cutter ass looking buildings in the background, mustve been some of the first in that style

But one of the key problems I see is the developers’ preference for “economies of scale” … so cities end up with lots of smaller buildings that would be great to convert to low-income housing, but because they are small, developers aren’t interested.

Because my work involves “adaptive reuse” and legalizing “naturally occurring affordable housing” it is always a trip to me when I see plans for “normal projects” where there is uniformity. That uniformity is standard and preferred because you don’t have to remember all the specific details of individual units.

Xp Boring … you would probably “love” Berkeley … if you aren’t already familiar with that municipality’s land use dramas

Yeah I would never work in California, lol.

some interesting state wide stuff trying to for the locals hands tho no

in my area developers who are strictly builders (and then turn over the finished product to someone else) would love it if we had no zoning and public review of projects. They’d probably build as much as they could, subject to any other constraints.

― O 'Tis Redding (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, September 17, 2024 1:11 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it part of their politics to make the zoning more amenable do they spend money on it, and if they were to be allowed to go nuts building do you think it would solve the housing crisis or partially solve it or what would it look like

the land cost part is kind of weird read something a while ago that said a lot of it was driven by larger forces of inequality too much investment money sloshing around etc, and that historically land has been more expensive

I work in a built up area with good mass transit access, so land costs are magnitudes more than an area with limitless farmland to develop. Developers in my community don’t really have much political muscle but the elected officials are broadly pro-increasing housing supply (the DC metro area is notoriously tens of thousands of dwelling units behind demand). Development in my community generally involves tearing down a vacant 50 year old 10-story office building or some nondescript 1950s strip commercial.

Speaking of DC, the worst example of gentrification was all the rich ppl in the nice new condos by Howard university complaining about loud go go music

A very good friend's partner spends a lot of time on Twitter talking about how YIMBYs are the devil. I'm afraid to tell him that I do think there's a supply problem and that market-rate housing is part of the solution. IIUC he thinks there's no supply problem, landlords are just lying about vacancy rates. He thinks building more market-rate housing will just increase displacement. And anyone who thinks otherwise is a crypto-fascist.

Re-reading that I feel like I'm being unfair but that is how he talks about YIMBYs. And like, yes, many of them are annoying and tone-deaf and some of them ARE crypto-fascists ... because it's a pretty large group of people who support building more housing, you're gonna get some assholes.

But apparently he doesn't mind being on the side of ultra-rich conservative homeowners who are willing to approve office space in their suburbs but not housing ... which absolutely does increase displacement in nearby cities.

wait can someone explain YIMBY to me? I know NIMBY...

I mean, I know what it means, but I have never heard of it as a political bloc?

The positive gloss on YIMBYs is that it's people who actually are fine with more density and affordable housing in or around their own neighborhoods. The cynical take is that they're shills for developers who give a "We care" gloss to the same old greedhead stuff. I didn't include them in the poll mostly because they're not much of an organized presence where I live, and also even at their glibbest they don't seem as obnoxious as the worst developers and NIMBYs.

Also I think they tend to be focused on "market solutions" rather than direct government housing efforts. They're about upzoning and getting the red tape out of the way etc.

ah ok that makes sense, ty

Here in Oregon we have some fairly unique state-level land use laws that attempt to preserve agricultural land, of which we have some of the best anywhere sadly located adjacent to urban areas. The land preservation idea is good and encouraging urban density as opposed to urban sprawl is good, but in real life it has also led to a lack of older, run-down but affordable housing stock as gentrification and development have relentlessly bid up prices. Local governments keep trying to channel development toward low cost housing, but none of their inducements have worked very well and the drive to maximize profit still reigns supreme.

There are left-libertarian YIMBYs too.

imho i think we absolutely need to build tons more housing have more density etc but i wouldnt call myself a yimby cause seems like thats come to mean a free market absolutism that thinks we just need to create the conditions for developers to do their thing and everything else will sort itself out, where i think everything else needs some attention from the government to be sorted out

I'm currently a NIMBY. There's a lovely wooded vacant lot outside my kitchen window (with squirrels and jays) that has never had any structure on it. Developers routinely buy the plot and some guys walk around with blueprints and point at things, then they put the plot up for sale and some other guys with orange vests buy it and walk around it.. sometimes they post some artist's depiction of the building they intend to build

However, they're no match for my Icelandic magick spells, and the plot is still undeveloped after a decade of my protection

im coming over there with a witch in an orange vest

we have a weird thing in Northern California where a bunch of clueless tech zillionaires have been buying up productive farmland to create a new neo-urban paradise bland suburb that will probably never get built... everything was super sneaky until they basically got outed

https://nypost.com/2024/08/26/business/marc-andreessens-family-plans-visionary-development-near-california-forever-project-report/

super rich people will never stop wanting to build their own weird city, and tbf i get it who doesnt think they could make a good one

this is what it will look like

https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/12/california-forever-30032708-1.jpg

smh that just looks normal could be any number of places if youre going to do it you have to make everyone live in a weird dome or smthn

Cute kids about to get splatted by an SUV

gotta be golf cart only thats rule 1 when youre starting a town from scratch

i think maybe making a whole town that looks like marthas vinyard gingerbread houses except it goes on for miles and miles and its super confusingly laid out and theres some sort of sinister underground economy operating

Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard

A very good friend's partner spends a lot of time on Twitter talking about how YIMBYs are the devil. I'm afraid to tell him that I do think there's a supply problem and that market-rate housing is part of the solution. IIUC he thinks there's no supply problem, landlords are just lying about vacancy rates.

― default damager (lukas), Tuesday, September 17, 2024 5:33 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ive seen this opinion around and its wild, the usa has more people than it than it used to and we havent built enough housing to keep up the numbers are available for all to see

an increasing number of Americans live alone (67% in Denmark!) but they're still building shitty suburbs with five bedroom McMansions

Oakland does have an astonishing number of new apartment buildings (podium style, with commercial space on the ground floor that usually sits vacant for years) but they all seem pretty posh and unaffordable

lots of cheap houses in america they’re just not in the areas where ppl wanna live

In red is every US county where the median house price is less than $150,000. pic.twitter.com/9Si4rNIvXk

— Hunter📈🌈📊 (@StatisticUrban) September 17, 2024

Baltimore has something like 17,000 empty abandoned houses

most of those red areas are pretty rural its not even that many cheap house

Fully resigned to not only never owning a home, but also working til the day I die. Great outlook for my generation.

xp median 150k within a county is extreme tho, in the south and midwest median home price is around 370k

https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/quarterly_sales.pdf

NIMBYs create the conditions that allow landlords to do all the things you don't like about landlords, so NIMBYs are worse.

gotta be golf cart only thats rule 1 when youre starting a town from scratch

― lag∞n, Tuesday,

aka The Villages

gotta be golf cart only thats rule 1 when youre starting a town from scratch

I feel like the people who say YIMBY but balk when the thing moving in is a residential care mental health facility, or housing for people in a jail-to-work program who were nonviolent offenders, are another issue

I feel like the people who say YIMBY but balk when the thing moving in is a residential care mental health facility, or housing for people in a jail-to-work program who were nonviolent offenders, are another issue

NIMBYs worse

Steve Ballmer to thread

Or a nursing home, which seems to bring out the NIMBYs for some reason.

Old people are a menace

Boring, what MD city do you work for? i have two new neighborhood dad friends who both work in development. man do they get uncomfortable when i start talking about this stuff. PG county is not exactly exemplary when it comes to reigning in developers

I don’t work in Maryland—I’d prefer to stay a little vague though

what are they uncomfortable about xp

They just no how touchy it is. Fwiw, they had good points about how it’s just as difficult to build low income housing in our county. I was also complaining about these huge renovations on smaller starter homes which reduces that market for first time buyers, but they were like, no one wants to leave their mortgage which I get as well.

After much vacillation I went with NIMBYs, but only after defining NIMBY narrowly enough to exclude people who strenuously object to e.g. the creation of a 20-acre industrial hog farm across the road from their suburban residential area. Basically, I'm interpreting NIMBY as a synonym for "totally selfish asshole" and leaving aside the more problematic cases.

California has laws forcing the construction of affordable housing EVERYWHERE and we have some posh communities that are just going apoplectic at the idea of the poors living in their midst... Even Steph Curry was going ballistic at the idea of - get this - an apartment building within sight of his mansion

The enclave of Woodside declared they couldn't build any affordable housing because of the threatened mountain lion population (they're not threatened at all)... cities have even offered to build housing elsewhere so they don't have to see these poor folks at their Mollie Stones market (unless they work there, of course)

California has laws forcing the construction of affordable housing EVERYWHERE and we have some posh communities that are just going apoplectic at the idea of the poors living in their midst...)

yeah I guess I was thinking of SB-9, which is ostensibly supposed to provide more middle income housing via multi-family dwellings

tbf steph didnt go ballistic he was pretty apologetic NOT that i support what he said

this article is from last year but illustrates the depths of NIMBYism among the San Francisco Bay's wealthiest

The Curry family, who moved to Atherton in 2019, came up again later in the meeting. Resident Pam quipped of her opposition to development in Atherton, "Who knew that I would have anything in common with Steph and Ayesha Curry?" Pam, too, said she is "faced with the horrific notion of losing our privacy and our space" by being in close proximity to another building. Widmer followed Pam's remarks by asking her if she can "shoot the three," apparently joking about another thing she might have in common with the Warriors guard. Her response was, "What does shoot the three mean?"

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/atherton-backs-curry-opposed-housing-17755551.php

headline teases crying nimbys but doesnt deliver

Stephanie Cries

During public comment, a woman named Stephanie started to cry as she literally begged Arata not to proceed with his plan.

ah nice missed that

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only in California... someone is suing to stop a food bank from opening a new location because of a "historic parking lot" https://t.co/eAnkLiaRz2 pic.twitter.com/jtvRNNiZ5h

— Adriana Porter Felt (@__apf__) September 18, 2024

This CEQA suit was no doubt inspired by the Berkeley one which made strange bedfellows of rich NIMBYs and radical activists who usually are on the other side (re UC building student & low-income housing on the site of People’s Park).

Voted developers. As irritating as nimbys can be, in the UK the total effect they actually have on what gets built or not is minuscule, whereas developers wield a lot of power and have been responsible for some pretty horrendous practices and projects.

Generally real estate developers keep to a 6% profit margin regardless.

This is astonishing to me, being somewhere where developers tend to seek 20% profit--maybe 15% if they're feeling generous or confident about the development process--and will try to claim anything below that is 'unviable', which gets them out of having to provide stuff like 'affordable' housing, 'green' features, landscaping, etc.

What was the thing in the UK where the developer was forced to rebuild some demolished historic pub, brick by brick?

We don't have that in the U.S., they'll just pay a fine.. cost of doing business

they should be forced to rebuild historic british pubs in america

It was actually mine and salsa shark's local, the Greyhound, funnily enough

ha wow

There's also this more recent one where a council is demanding a developer tear down a very recently built residential tower for failing to meet several building criteria, which is unprecedented

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/greenwich-council-mast-quay-thames-demolished-planning-b1109661.html

that's the way to do it! That'll teach them not to fuck around

Generally real estate developers keep to a 6% profit margin regardless.

This is astonishing to me, being somewhere where developers tend to seek 20% profit--maybe 15% if they're feeling generous or confident about the development process--and will try to claim anything below that is 'unviable'

the reason developers make higher margins in the uk is because uk is way more nimby and restrictions on new residential construction are so tight

in 2023 the uk had about 2 new units per 1000 people. compared to 5 in Poland and 4.2 in france. only bosnia-herzegovina and italy are lower in europe (https://www.statista.com/statistics/650798/initiated-dwellings-by-country-europe/)

big reason for this is the tories basically let nimbys go completely unfettered

The ruling Conservative Party let local anti-development sceptics grow in influence over the past 14 years by choosing not to intervene in the vast majority of UK homebuilding applications.

That’s based on calculations by Bloomberg News using data from the Planning Inspectorate and National Archives, which shows the number of planning applications reviewed by the secretary of state — known as a “call-in” — dropped to five in the previous financial year from an average of more than 50 per year during the 2000s. The government has the right to take over the determination of a planning application rather than letting the local authority decide, a tool often used to push development through in areas where local protectionism is rife.

The number of annual recovered decisions — which give ministers the power to determine appeals instead of allowing a planning inspector to make the call — also dropped to 19 from an average of more than 100 in the same period.

It suggests a hands-off approach to planning from the Tories, who came to power in 2010 with a promise of giving local authorities more control over development in their communities. The result has been a transfer of power to the not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, lobby that’s contributed to the country’s acute housing shortage.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-17/uk-housing-market-beset-by-nimbyism-under-tories-how-will-labour-change-things

it’s not that developers in the uk just love profits more and ask for higher margins, it’s the cumulative effect of an explicit policy to restrict new builds for 14 years

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A fair result.