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[Andrew Korenchkin]

Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...ys-angry-millennials-radical-housing-solution

The movement is fuelled by the anger of young adults from the millennial generation, many of whom are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Rather than suffer in silence as they struggle to find affordable places to live, they are heading to planning meetings en masse to argue for more housing – preferably the very kind of dense, urban infill projects that have often generated neighbourhood opposition from nimbys (“not in my back yard”).

The birthplace of the yimby movement,
Clark and other members of yimby groups consider themselves progressives and environmentalists, but they’re not afraid to throw the occasional firebomb into the usual liberal alliances. They frequently take aim at space-hogging, single-family homeowners and confound anti-capitalist groups by daring to take the side of developers, even luxury condo developers. They have started a “sue the suburbs” campaign that targets cities that don’t approve big housing projects and have even attempted to take over the board of the local Sierra Club.

Their willingness to lobby for market rate housing in traditionally minority neighbourhoods has seen them called techie gentrifiers and developer stooges. Their penchant for market-based solutions, has seen them called “libertarians” with “trickle-down economics”.

San Francisco resident Sonja Trauss, 35, a former maths teacher, says the housing shortages facing many big western cities are not financial, technical or due to any kind of material shortfalls. “The cause of our current shortage is 100% political,” wrote Trauss in 2015, in an internet post that helped her build an army of followers to speak at public hearings, send letters and drum up support for housing on the internet.

The idea caught like wildfire. The yimby movement, which Trauss started in 2013 as a letter-writing campaign, has spread around the globe.

In the California state legislature, yimby activists have helped Democrats pass a sweeping new package of legislation designed to spur the creation of affordable housing. In San Francisco, supporters have even formed a yimby political party and signed Trauss up to run for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors in 2018.

Assembly member David Chiu said that when he was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before being elected to state office in 2014, residents would rarely speak up in favour of any local development projects.

“Often the only voices we would hear would be neighbours who were opposed,” said Chiu, who called on yimby support to get affordable housing measures through the legislature this year. “I think they’ve provided a counterbalance. They’ve been changing the conversation on the local level as well as in the state.”

Yimby groups want to reduce the need for cars by building dense, infill housing close to transportation. They want to do away with suburban sprawl. Most of all, they want somewhere to live.

That simple cry for housing can in practice turn out to be anything but straightforward. In the trenches of local politics, each battle for a single development can turn into vicious neighbourhood warfare.

Yimby groups have jumped right into this debate, arguing that any new housing is better than none at all. On 14 September, Trauss and other yimby activists went to the San Francisco Planning Commission to argue on behalf of a proposed 75-unit development in the Mission that would be mostly market rate. Hispanic activists argued against them.

“Eighty-nine percent of the units that are to be constructed are going to be out of income range of the vast majority of the Latino population living in the Mission District,” argued project opponent Carlos Bocanegra of La Raza Centro Legal, a legal aid group.

But Trauss countered that not building is not the answer to the housing shortage.

“The 100 or so higher income people, who are not going to live in this project if it isn’t built, are going to live somewhere,” she said. “They will just displace someone somewhere else, because demand doesn’t disappear.”

The net wealth of millennials in the US today is only about half of what of their parents’ generation, the boomers, had when they were the same age in 1989, according to Young Invincibles, a research and advocacy group. The typical millennial has accumulated about $29,000 in assets compared to $61,000 amassed by those in the boomer generation by 1989.

“They earn less, carry more college debt and face greater challenges to home ownership,” says Tom Allison, Young Invincibles’ deputy director of policy and research. But he says they seem more willing than other generations to stand up and change the world. “This generation is resilient. They are changing things in the face of adversity. That is the silver lining,” Allison adds.

 

[Not]

We're going to at least TRY to save the damn world

 

[sphagnum]

Millennials are killing zucchini gardens.

 

[Velocity:Design:Comfort]

I'm, uh, really just confused.

 

[WedgeX]

The YIMBY groups have been cropping up in DC as well.

https://dc.curbed.com/2017/7/27/16026510/yimby-housing-dc-washington

This coalition is a mixture of affordable housing proprietors, real estate developers, urbanists, and poverty advocates. Groups include developer EYA, anti-poverty group Bread for the City, and organizations like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and local blog Greater Greater Washington. To put it simply, the group is composed of YIMBY groups, the opposite of NIMBY (which stands for Not in My Back Yard).

Good to see them taking off.

 

[SolarPowered]

Millenials killing NIMBYs? Just another notch in our belts.

 

[Slayven]

Hope it doesn't lead to some backdoor gentrification

 

[Hexa]

These guys sound great. Fully have my support.

 

[Gallbaro]

I have an erection...

But let's not pretend that the zucchini last is motivated by anything more than her net worth by continuing to suppress additional supply in a desirable location.

And let's not pretend that millennial YIMBYs are not motivated by their own economic self interests (which in the piece, they clearly are).

Preventing new housing from being built is class warfare.

Spoiler

and given the high correlation between class mobility and race,
zucchini last and much of Berkely it's institutionally racist.

 

[Jintor]

yimby in sydney makes little sense though. Fucking apartments going up everywhere along the train lines right now and it's going to do precisely jack shit to drive down prices until the housing bubble bursts and/or someone finally gets around to revising negative gearing.

 

[FUME5]

Zoning laws, low density / high density housing ratios etc... is not a simple thing to fix, saying yes to every high rise proposed by developers is just as dangerous as hardcore NIMBYS shouting down everything.

We're going to at least TRY to save the damn world

C'mon Not, you're better than dumb hot takes like this.

 

[Orayn]

My YIMBY idea is to expropriate the McMansions.

 

[Not]

C'mon Not, you're better than dumb hot takes like this.

You'd be surprised! It sounds good to me, but I honestly don't know much about the intricacies and drawbacks. I'll have to enlighten myself.

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

My YIMBY idea is to expropriate the McMansions.

Thank you. Fuck McMansions, almost as bad as strip malls and big ugly parking lots.

 

[Gallbaro]

yimby in sydney makes little sense though. Fucking apartments going up everywhere along the train lines right now and it's going to do precisely jack shit to drive down prices until the housing bubble bursts and/or someone finally gets around to revising negative gearing.

I don't think you understand how supply and demand works?

Or as Obama would have said, more supply is "bending the cost curve."

 

[Ogodei]

The key is to make sure to keep Section 8 in the mix of all of this. This is absolutely needed for middle class relief from the housing crisis, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the poor, but in solidarity with them.

More housing, a proportion of it subsidized.

 

[Grug]

Avocado toast > zucchini toast.

 

[Grug]

I don't think you understand how supply and demand works?

He specifically referred to negative gearing which is a policy issue causing serious problems in Australia.

More supply means fuck all if the tax incentives are so great for investors and landlords that they can outbid owner-occupiers totally out of the water and claim their losses as a tax deduction.

 

[Shy]

Hope it doesn't lead to some backdoor gentrification

It will.

 

[WedgeX]

Zoning laws, low density / high density housing ratios etc... is not a simple thing to fix, saying yes to every high rise proposed by developers is just as dangerous as hardcore NIMBYS shouting down everything.



C'mon Not, you're better than dumb hot takes like this.

Charles Montgomery agrees with you on this. The actual design of buildings can have great impact on neighborhood cohesion and affect mental health. All of which is important to try and avoid setting off another mass-wave of suburbanization aside from normal migration.

 

[Tylercrat]

Good. About time.

 

[Giolon]

Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...ys-angry-millennials-radical-housing-solution

Why did you post the entire article? I thought GAFers knew better than this by now.

It's about time for people to stand up to the selfish generations that have imposed policies mortgaging future generations's access to housing. You can't just keep pushing affordable living further and further away from urban centers. They should be happy that industry and growth have come to their cities, unlike so many other places in the country. Yet they want to preserve things exactly as they had been. They're not much better than the ”but muh coal mining job!" folks.

 

[Surface of Me]

Hope it doesn't lead to some backdoor gentrification

Too late, read about the Mission county part in the article.

Im as pissed off as an other millennial about the world, but we shouldnt be tearing shit down for others to build ourselves up. That's how we got such a shit hand in the first place

 

[Gallbaro]

He specifically referred to negative gearing which is a policy issue causing serious problems in Australia.

More supply means fuck all if the tax incentives are so great for investors and landlords that they can outbid owner-occupiers totally out of the water and claim their losses as a tax deduction.

Well it's not as if investors leave the place empty. Very few cities actually have high vacancy rates. When Vancouver turned against "foreign" investors that was just outright racism, the occupancy rates were very high!

 

[Grug]

Well it's not as if investors leave the place empty. Very few cities actually have high occupancy rates. When Vancouver turned against "foreign" investors that was just outright racism, the occupancy rates were very high!

The data is Australia is pretty damn compelling. Sydney's housing market is absolute bullshit for prospective homeowners. Negative gearing is a policy disaster but politically getting rid of it is very hard.

 

[excelsiorlef]

Wait people realize this isn't actually affordable housing movement right?

It's a affordable housing for just us not the true poors movement.

 

[Emperor_Uriel]

It's not the most elegant solution, but if it works then more power to them. Let's get these folks to make some waves in Westchester and DC while we're at it.

 

[Ogodei]

Too late, read about the Mission county part in the article.

Im as pissed off as an other millennial about the world, but we shouldnt be tearing shit down for others to build ourselves up. That's how we got such a shit hand in the first place

Tearing up inefficient neighborhoods is part of the process, though. The thing to do is make sure that the housing that replaces it can accommodate the low-income people who were displaced, kind of like forestry policies that mandate a tree planted for every tree cut down: 1 square foot of affordable housing for every square foot demolished for high rises.

 

[Jintor]

I don't think you understand how supply and demand works?

Or as Obama would have said, more supply is "bending the cost curve."

cool so you put up more apartments here. who buys the apartments? Mostly it's people who already have other property, or foreign buyers, because everybody else is already priced out. the rents here are already astronomical; the cost of housing even more so. we're looking at anywhere from AU$1-2 mill for anything within half an hour to an hour of the city centre for the most part for houses. Apartments are going from $500k to $1.5 probably at a rough estimate. A shittonne of them sit empty anyway because people are only buying to flip the properties and they can take the loss via negative gearing until the market recovers.

I earn roughly $60k a year pre-tax. I live almost an hour twenty min out of the city, apartments in my area are going for probably about $650k for a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom off-the-plan. There's no way I'm beating an owner-landlord or foreign buyer on bidding on anything when I'm going to struggle to even get approval from a bank for a mortgage. Maybe doable as a couple.

 

[WedgeX]

Wait people realize this isn't actually affordable housing movement right?

It's a affordable housing for just us not the true poors movement.

DC's YIMBY movement is led by well-respected anti-poverty groups.

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

Why did you post the entire article? I thought GAFers knew better than this by now.

Done.

 

[Gallbaro]

The data is Australia is pretty damn compelling. Sydney's housing market is absolute bullshit for prospective homeowners. Negative gearing is a policy disaster but politically getting rid of it is very hard.

cool so you put up more apartments here. who buys the apartments? Mostly it's people who already have other apartments, or foreign buyers, because everybody else is already priced out. the rents here are already astronomical; the cost of housing even more so. we're looking at anywhere from AU$1-2 mill for anything within half an hour to an hour of the city centre for the most part for houses. Apartments are going from $500k to $1.5 probably at a rough estimate. A shittonne of them sit empty anyway because people are only buying to flip the properties and they can take the loss via negative gearing until the market recovers.

How? The data does not support your theory that split is not reducing cost. The bedrooms are being occupied.

Sydney has only a 1.7% vacancy rate. The bedrooms are occupied.

 

[Maximo]

I don't think you understand how supply and demand works?

Or as Obama would have said, more supply is "bending the cost curve."

Nah Sydney is fucked.

 

[Grug]

How?

Sydney has only a 1.7% vacancy rate. The bedrooms are occupied.

I don't see the relevance?

 

[Giolon]

Wait people realize this isn't actually affordable housing movement right?

It's a affordable housing for just us not the true poors movement.

The problem is so many of the nimby types in the SF area at least is they’re opposed to any dense housing being built. “It’s too tall. There’s not enough affordable units in it.”

If it’s not displacing existing residents, which in many cases the proposed projects are not, building 80 units where 17 are affordable rate is better than building 0 because you didn’t like the exact make up of units or because it was too tall. That’s still 63 more market rate units and 17 more affordable units than you had before. How do they think we got into this mess in the first place? I’ve seen projects like that cut down to 6 and 2, or die altogether.

 

[devilhawk]

Well the YIMBY's need to demand new housing that is actually rentable. Quit renting at places that have unneeded luxuries which allow inflated rents. Quit enabling and rewarding developers for knocking down a 12-unit building and replacing it with a more expensive and smaller square feet 8-unit building that has shit like community kitchens and lounges. This shit aggravates me so much in Seattle.

 

[Gallbaro]

I don't see the relevance?

Regardless of what financial mechanism is causing additional bedrooms to be built, the fact that they are being built and occupied is helping reduce prices, even if it is just a reduction in the acceleration of price increases?

 

[Jintor]

How? The data does not support your theory that split is not reducing cost. The bedrooms are being occupied.

Sydney has only a 1.7% vacancy rate. The bedrooms are occupied.

i presume you're getting that from this smh article? The same one that says that the vacancy rate is pushing rental costs upwards amidst skyrocketing housing prices?

looks like we're back up to 2.2% in august

 

[danm999]

Well it's not as if investors leave the place empty. Very few cities actually have high vacancy rates. When Vancouver turned against "foreign" investors that was just outright racism, the occupancy rates were very high!

It's not an issue of vacancy, it's that property investors can generate more capital to acquire any additional supply, and do so because the way tax concessions work in Australia you can offset income from other sources.

So what ends up happening is that surgeons, CEOs, high income individuals end up buying tons of properties that would otherwise go to owner occupiers as their effective tax rate in income tax would be much higher.

Adding more supply into that situation doesn't actually alleviate the market distortion, and is why Australian millenials have the second lowest homeownership rates in the world behind th UAE.

 

[Tal Shiar Agent]

I realize how fucking lucky I am to be a Millennial and own a single-family house.

 

[XMonkey]

I can’t speak for other states, but California is going to be screwed if we don’t start building more housing of all kinds. The recent pace of increase in rent and home prices is unbelievable. The rent for my 2 bedroom apartment has increased 50% in just 5 years.

 

[Gallbaro]

i presume you're getting that from this smh article? The same one that says that the vacancy rate is pushing rental costs upwards amidst skyrocketing housing prices?

Yes, and if they did not build additional units the same amount of people world be competing for fewer units? Causing process to be even higher? The only reason why there is a vacancy rate at all in Sydney is frictional movement. There is no spare stock because it had not been built.

If the vacancy rate rises because more units in supply than prices start going down. I do not understand why people think the most basic economic concept does not apply to housing.

 

[cdyhybrid]

Cities do need to increase housing supply and density, but jumping in bed with luxury developers is not the answer.

Need to include actual affordable housing (not just the "affordable" housing that these big cities push for) and not displace the current residents because your zeal for housing supply led you to jump in bed with a developer that wants to build a 100-unit building and charge $4K a month for each.

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

Cities do need to increase housing supply and density, but jumping in bed with luxury developers is not the answer.

Need to include actual affordable housing (not just the "affordable" housing that these big cities push for) and not displace the current residents because your zeal for housing supply led you to jump in bed with a developer that wants to build a 100-unit building and charge $4K a month for each.

It's so amazing how developers can put entire cities in a chokehold.

 

[Grug]

Yes, and if they did not build additional units the same amount of people world be competing for fewer units? Causing process to be even higher?

If the vacancy rate rises because more units in supply than prices start going down. I do not understand why people think the most basic economic concept does not apply to housing.

You're picking a weird hill to die on. The poster you replied to wasn't arguing against the basic principle of supply and demand applying to the housing market, nor is anyone else.

He just highlighted that in the particular market he is in there is a significant tax policy that is heavily, if not totally cancelling out the price easing that comes with increasing supply.

 

[Gallbaro]

Cities do need to increase housing supply and density, but jumping in bed with luxury developers is not the answer.

Need to include actual affordable housing (not just the "affordable" housing that these big cities push for) and not displace the current residents because your zeal for housing supply led you to jump in bed with a developer that wants to build a 100-unit building and charge $4K a month for each.

Yesterday's luxury housing is today's affordable housing. It's a well documented affect called filtering.

 

[midramble]

Finally a road to Tokyo zoning.

Yes please in my back yard.

Got many friends on the verge of bailing because This place is unlivable for the average person. SF has a history of culture born out of enclaves of cheaper housing. It's not possible these days.

Bring on more vertical space.

I've lived in my current apartment for 2 years but the one across the hallway just went on the market for %60 more than what I'm paying. Price rise is unsustainable.

 

[Jintor]

Yes, and if they did not build additional units the same amount of people world be competing for fewer units? Causing process to be even higher?

If the vacancy rate rises because more units in supply than prices start going down. I do not understand why people think the most basic economic concept does not apply to housing.

it would normally but it is being subverted right now because of the impact of negative gearing on market supply. Investors can afford to buy housing/apartments at much higher prices than most people looking to actually live in the places. So all that building more supply is doing right now is just inflating house prices because the price expansion from speculation is far outpacing the reduction from the additional supply

now when the bubble bursts that will be a different story, and also will probably trigger a recession as well

 

[cdyhybrid]

Yesterday's luxury housing is today's affordable housing. It's a well documented affect called filtering.

Correct.

If the average human lifespan was like a week.

 

[_Clash_]

Australian millennials really need to give Adelaide a chance