This idea is pure fantasy. This condition of classifying people as NIMBYs if they disagree with you on this topic is incredibly toxic. There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.
> plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth
Totally agree. But the counterpart of that is rising housing costs. If you accept that tradeoff, you aren't a NIMBY. This covers many homeowners. But renters opposed to development while complaining about housing costs are trying to suppress their housing costs by increasing others'. That externalization is textbook NIMBY.
Thank you for taking the time to make a nice reply, and for not taking my criticism of your post personally. I really appreciate that.
I feel like you have a very arbitrary definition of NIMBY. I'm writing this post right now from the 14th floor of a highrise building in Sydney's inner city, in the apartment I rent from a landlord who lives in mainland China. There are still rows of historic terrace houses in the nearby suburbs that have been heritage listed. I'm sure property developers would love to turn these into more highrise apartments. Even though I'm renting, I don't want these to be replaced with endless new apartments. I could list a dozen reasons too. For one, I don't think this would help create a city that people would actually enjoy living in.
I've been told by people who would know that one of Sydney's big problems is that property developers are able to artificially inflate property value by staggering the release of newly developed property onto the market. So more development isn't necessarily going to solve any of this country's problems with property value. It hasn't so far.
> There are still rows of historic terrace houses in the nearby suburbs that have been heritage listed. I'm sure property developers would love to turn these into more highrise apartments. Even though I'm renting, I don't want these to be replaced with endless new apartments. I could list a dozen reasons too.
Funny, I would have the opposite opinion. Just because someone was alive and rich back in 1950 or whenever these cute little houses were built, doesn't give them more of a right to live in that area than others, in my opinion.
Let's face it, most of these cute litte historic houses are probably owned by the same mega-rich investors and CCP party members as your apartment building.
1 person having a garden does not justify 15 families not being able to live there.
NIMBY means not in my backyard. As in, I want the benefits of a thing but not its cost. Wanting affordable housing while denying development is NIMBY. Saying no development because you want higher property prices is not NIMBY, it's prohibitionism. (Depending on the environment, it could be reasonable and/or heartless.)
> been told by people who would know that one of Sydney's big problems is that property developers are able to artificially inflate property value by staggering the release of newly developed property onto the market
This is prudent pipeline management. Why would you bid up the cost of materials and labor only to dump the finished product at a loss?
On supply and demand: American house prices are elastic, but over long timelines [1]. In Sydney, dense housing is more elastic than detached housing [2]. The abundance of those historic terrace houses, together with long development approval times, cause the high prices and relative price inelasticity.
Doesn't this contradict your central thesis? If the supply of housing doesn't exceed the demand, the price isn't going to drop. How can urban consolidation actually benefit the renter class if property developers are able to artificially increase the value by restricting supply until mechanisms like immigration cause demand to catch up?
No. In development-constrained world, particularly one with long approval timelines, you need to make money on margin. In a less-constrained world, you can bring to force economies of scale and make money in volume.
The thesis is: if you have an anti-development environment, developers will maximise margins. This isn’t a conspiracy and it isn’t artificially increasing value. It’s survival. If ten houses will get built but there is demand for twenty, and everyone pays the same for labour and materials and lobbyists, all those houses will be as high end as the market will bear. You’re competing in getting the right to build; the market is inelastic. If anyone can build twenty or thirty houses without years of approvals, you’re going to prioritise your costs, because there is a chance you don’t sell every single house. You’re competing on price and value; the market is elastic. (You also get a learning curve.)
This is why Sydney has price inelasticity for detached housing. The scarcity is a policy choice.
This sounds intuitively correct with regards to the economics of property development. I'm not a property developer though. I'm not really that concerned about their profits. I'm a young person renting an apartment in a city that is rapidly becoming unaffordable for the average Australian. The point of my post above was: If property developers are legally able to artificially constrain supply to maximise their profits, then how does all this YIMBYism actually benefit me? The main argument I hear for urban consolidation is that increasing supply lowers the cost. If this doesn't actually happen, then what's in it for us again?
> There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.
There really aren't, though, in the sense that the costs (both societal and individual) drastically outweigh the benefits. Of course prohibitions on new construction are narrowly beneficial to specific individuals. Who wants some guys starting up new construction at 7AM next door? If you like your quiet little block, then why on Earth would you want it to densify? Somebody else's construction project is little more than an annoyance, after all. If you can ban it, then great!
The problem is that these individual preferences come with enormous costs, both economic and with respect to individual freedom. When weighed against the downsides, those banal individual preferences about densification are no longer compelling.
In short, yes, people do have rational, coherent reasons to oppose growth, but, no, those complaints are not in the end valid.
Everything in your post is just your own personal opinion.
> The problem is that these individual preferences come with enormous costs, both economic and with respect to individual freedom...
What if I don't agree with increasing the population? If I don't want to increase the number of people in the city I'm living in, then why on earth would I want urban consolidation? Does anyone actually enjoy living in a tiny apartment, as opposed to being able to afford a house with a yard? The need for endless population increase is not just some foregone conclusion. Not everyone here is an SWE living in SF, with SF problems, and SF opinions.
> In short, yes, people do have rational, coherent reasons to oppose growth, but, no, those complaints are not in the end valid.
I don't agree with your opinion. Should I just classify all of it as 'invalid'?
> What if I don't agree with increasing the population? If I don't want to increase the number of people in the city I'm living in, then why on earth would I want urban consolidation?
I’m not sure what kind of answer you’re looking for with those “what if” questions. What if you preferred that the human race go extinct? I suppose the answer to all of these “what if” questions is simply that other people will disagree with you and oppose you in various ways.
> Does anyone actually enjoy living in a tiny apartment, as opposed to being able to afford a house with a yard?
In order to answer this question for yourself you need to first accept an iron law of economics: because decisions are not made in a vacuum, there is no such thing as an abstract preference, only constraints and tradeoffs.
My preference is that I have a 10,000 square foot single-family home located on an otherwise empty block of land just south of Central Park. That way I get everything great about single-family living and access to the economic and cultural superpower that is Manhattan.
But, and I mean this technically and in the kindest way possible: literally who gives a shit?
Everything in life is tradeoffs. The NIMBY position is that tradeoffs can be wished away by legislation. But they cannot. It only deranges the situation.
>What if I don't agree with increasing the population? If I don't want to increase the number of people in the city I'm living in, then why on earth would I want urban consolidation?
In the case of the western world, what population growth? The amount of couples in the first-world having children has slowed to a trickle in the last few decades. This seems to have spooked governments in the western world into enacting policies to encourage immigration, ostensibly to prevent a decline in economic growth coinciding with a shrinking population. The only place where the birth rate is actually increasing is Africa.
My personal theory (which people are free to disagree with) is that the decline in birth rate in the first-world is a reaction to overpopulation. Although I acknowledge that extrapolation from this example is risky, we know that some animals lose their desire to breed when population density increases, and in captivity. Is it so strange that humans could be similar?
> What public policy do you endorse that has the ability to significantly reduce the number of people being born?
I'd endorse free contraception.
Options I'd oppose but others might favor include not requiring insurance to cover fertility treatments, prohibiting IVF entirely, mandatory birth control until marriage, sterilization as punishment for crime, and removing the child tax credit. Plus restricting immigration and increasing deportations which have a similar effect on the people/housing ratio.
(But I'm in favor of more people being born, and building lots more housing)
Increasing the level of education for women. Increasing the access to pre-natal care for women. Decreasing the poverty level generally and specifically for young families. Moving more people out of agricultural work.
Those things are highly correlated with lowered birth rates, though I suspect the last one is probably not applicable to the US.
The birth rate in the US is 1.64 children per woman. It’s already a significantly shrinking population, replacement rate is around 2.1 children per woman. The US only maintains its population through immigration.
The public policy you want to reduce population growth is simply development. There’s a strong negative correlation between HDI and birth rate. The US, Canada and virtually every other developed nation would lose about 20-40% of its population in a single generation were it not for immigration.
