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"NIMBY" is a bit of an Americanism to begin with, and I'd say it violates your "doomed because not following my preferred policy" constraint,
Excessive rents in tier-1 metro areas (even for poor-quality accommodation in less-good neighbourhoods) is a near-universal problem and near-universally recognised as a problem. So I don't think this is a "doomed because not following my preferred policy" issue - it is a "doomed because universally recognised problem is not being solved" issue (although the simplest solution would be to adopt my preferred policy and increase housing supply). Certainly my intent when stating the proviso to exclude issues like "taxes too high" or "you can't own a gun" where the question of whether there is a problem at all is controversial.
The problem is worse in the UK and Ireland than in Continental Europe, but Barcelona, Paris, and Frankfurt all show the classic pattern, with the same retarded political response as London or San Francisco.
Are you sure?
You keep doing this thing where you want to school ignorant Americans on how the world is, and act like you know about a whole bunch of things that... well, let me just say if you really do have deep knowledge about all these subjects and their peculiarities in all these different places, my hat is off too you, and I really respect you.
I lived in a bunch of European cities, and have indeed noticed that the housing prices are too damn high. What I don't know is whether this issue is caused by NIMBY. I have no knowledge of the ins-and outs of real estate development in any of the places I lived in. As far as I can tell there's a historical center (and I mean actually historical) in most cities that they like to preserve, and otherwise there isn't much of a fuss to build anywhere else. Definitely none of the car-centrism, or allergy to "density" that the YIMBY's love to complain about.
This is "doomed because not following my preferred policy", because calling it "NIMBY" implies the solution is "just build more, bro", when it's an open question how affordable that would be, and how much it would even help in the face of the current immigration numbers.
The only time I hear a connection between immigration and house prices is in a positive context, from home owners: ‘with all these immigrants, the prices can’t go down!’.
It’s not : We have immigration => we should build more to meet the demand.
It’s : We need high prices, therefore unmet demand => let’s build nothing and have immigration on top of it.
Instead of solving one problem, homeowners’ financial incentives are creating two.
I know for a fact there’s a shit ton of red tape, plus the greens consider any new constructible land to be ‘a loss for nature’.
You hearing it only as a positive is not surprising, as anything else is considered crass in polite society.
In any case I don't know how much of it can be laid on the feet of homeowners. Most people I know fret more about their mortgage rates than the value of the home they bought, haven't really heard anyone complaining about new construction, and I definitely haven't seen homeowner friends lobby for more immigration.
Well, like I said, I don't know much about this so I'm not gonna fight about it too hard.
You're saying you don’t see the evidence of european nimbyism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the continent known for regulations and environment protections has three times the housing price to income ratio of the country with the more libertarian bent. We don’t have the yimby/nimby distinction here because it’s all nimby, all the time, to a level that an american couldn’t comprehend. In my ~10,000 pop. home village they routinely raze perfectly good, newish houses to replace them with 3-story, 6-small-apartments buildings. It's nuts the wealth that gets destroyed because people can't get a building license.
Huh? Am I missing something, or is that YIMBY, rather than NIMBY?
P.S.: Now that you mention it, I saw the same thing happen in one of the towns I lived.
Nimby because it's a village, it's surrounded by empty fields. A building license in a village should not be worth 300k euros (the destroyed house).
Another thing I remember: In my grandparent's village (pop 2000, in the middle of nowhere), the one time in their life where they felt rich was when the village council declared some of their land constructible, which they immediately sold for like 100k, when it was worth almost nothing before.
From what I understand, the kind of things that American YIMBY's complain about, is that you are not even allowed to demolish a house and replace it with a flat. Maybe they have more flexibility in rural areas.
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Consider German villagers (and sometimes town-dwellers) trying to block everything from pork farms to wind power plants to power cables to roads to mosques to railway lines and stations getting built. They're not always wrong to do so, but NIMBY as a phenomenon clearly does exist here.
I thought in the US context it usually refers to residential construction (hence "NIMBY cities") and was a way of saying "the real estate prices are too damn high" (which they are) but polluting it with his preferred policy.
I freely admit to letting local news fly in one ear and out the other, so maybe I missed the phenomenon, but I also haven't noticed particular shortage of solar and wind farms, and a local railway construction is currently adding half an hour to my commute.
FWIW, the real estate prices are indeed too damn high. Rents, too.
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