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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The issue of course, and I'm broadly on the YIMBY side, is that the moment that slughterhouse gets plopped down it imposes economic costs on some with diffuse benefits for all. The people who paid not cheap prices for their houses are out a significant portion of their largest asset and the diffuse beneficiaries will not compensate them.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between projects which impose a true negative externality on neighbors and projects which merely remove a previous positive externality. A slaughterhouse really is making things specifically worse and I think that should be compensated but residents who currently enjoy the seclusion brought by the woody area behind their neighborhood and thus are lobbying to disallow bulldozing it to build more houses can fuck right off.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners? It's not like a fish canning factory can just plop out of nowhere, large disruptive projects take years/decades to build and the intention to build as such is broadcasted well in advance.

We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?

I think you'll find people quite unwilling to just eat huge unfair economic hits like this. They'll lobby whatever powers they can to prevent their loss and ultimately they will succeed, even if they have to go to extreme lengths. If you don't let them do it through cities they'll do it through some other scheme. You're talking about taking the equivalent of several years of work away from people's net worth, they'll bomb the construction if it comes to that.

The ONLY reason the middle class has jumped head first into real estate investment is because of the government consistently enacting zoning regulations to deliberately benefit homeowners at the expense of everyone else, which likewise benefits a community’s most consistent voters. Anyone else who borrowed an amount of money 3-4x their salary as part of a 30-year loan, wiped down the countertops, then cried crocodile tears when their “investment” didn’t make them millionaires, would rightly be told they were an irresponsible idiot.

If it didn't cost them half their take home salary they might be a little less defensive, but that's not the system we live in and no one is going to pretend they're already living in the system you propose while you wipe away a significant portion of their net worth, and for many many people this is not even an asset that appreciates all that much. For every person who has seen their house go from $300k to $2M over thirty years there are many more who saw their house go from $300k to $300k over the same time span. It's like social security, we can talk about how in principle it's a bad and wasteful system but people didn't get a choice to participate and it's already eaten huge portions of their income for decades, you're damn right they're not willing to bear the entire burden of reforming the system alone.

Go ahead, find a way to balance the diffused costs so that we can all be better off, but don't just steal my money, distributed it evenly and pretend you didn't. Because we'll take every god damned cent back by force.

Homeowners created the system we live in such that it directly benefits them. So I’m fresh out of sympathy when you play the “that’s just the way it is” card, as though homeowners are blameless victims of circumstance. Again, crocodile tears don’t move me.

Any other investment, caveat emptor is in full effect. But when it comes to real estate, oh no, suddenly we need RULES. After all, poor Real Estate Mogul Wannabe #1,298,745 needs to eat. It’s not his fault they opened a gas station across from the slums he purchased at auction.

I still remember when they opened a perfectly legal Royal Farms across the street from the entrance to my quiet suburban neighborhood. Of course, the high maintenance, self-serving losers in my neighborhood went ballistic. I also remember getting a flier on my mailbox that read, “GOOD CHICKEN MEANS BAD NEIGHBORS.” It’s been 5 years now, and all that happened was I got a very convenient gas stop on the way to work, while the property value has doubled. May the morons I share a neighborhood with get ass cancer.

You're adding more heat than light to the discussion. Tone down the belligerence and the sneering.

I'm sorry, I forgot that I personally went back in time and designed a system where I had to take out a loan for five year's salary. I should totally lose several year's salary for that sin.

Presumably, you do more with your house than look at it and feverishly check its Zestimate every month. Perhaps even live in it.

If you want to complain that houses are too expensive, then that’s a more complicated argument.

Correct, I write a fat check every month for it as well.

Do you have anosmia? Royal Farms reek like the worst blend of gasoline and fried chicken.

I can smell it in the parking lot. Not down the street. Let alone in my home a mile away.

That also was never raised as a concern by my multiple neighbors complaining about it, so I’m not willing to entertain that grievance.

It's not just homeowners, concentrated benefits / diffuse costs are a general problem - overfishing may benefit you, personally, now, but takes a bit away from other fishers now, and from you in the future, and persistent overfishing would necessitate regulation.

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

In a world where homeowners are hapless agency-less simpletons, yes. But it's not a wise long-term strategy for the potential slaughterhouse owner, people will wisen up to his tactics. There are countless ways businesses can extract money out of you now too, but competition fixes that issue just fine.

Might as well ask why people are allowed to have a say in the way their city/state/nation is run. Because we've accepted that from other principles. If you want to argue for the god-emperor to make every zoning decision, be my guest. Until then, let people who live there decide how they want to live, and suffer or reap the consequences.

let people who live there decide how they want to live

This is contradictory to letting people use their land that they own the way they like. People can decide how they live as long as they bear the cost of it instead of politically strongarming others into making decisions that benefit them.

Just empirically, people are not allowed to use their land however they like. There are innumerable restrictions, which is basically what this whole fight is about — which possible set of restrictions is optimal. The answer to that varies based on one's vantage point. "Do whatever you want" is not on the table because we live in a society, etc. It would be cool if Ancapistan existed but it doesn't because it's game-theoretically untenable.

Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?

Because there are a lot of them and they vote in their own interests, and otherwise advocate for themselves, to a greater extent than opposing demographics. Insofar as this changes, preferential treatment of homeowners will also change.

I assume you already know this so possibly I'm being obtuse about what you were actually asking, or it was a rhetorical question?

We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.

This isn't strictly true, for example there are assets you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor.

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