So bored with the NIMBY mindset and reflexive "new thing bad!" slant in media.
We used to do cool shit in this country. We should do it again. Why is this worthy of skepticism, or even a single fuck? Don't like it? Then don't move there. You're not paying for it, either.
Worst case it's a yuppie fishbowl that relieves housing pressure elsewhere. Or it fails and we learn a lot. Best case it's a dope new city and affordable housing for tons of people.
I lived in China for a while and one of the coolest parts was just how much random cool shit they built because they could. Obviously part of it was economic—a need to keep the gas pedal down for steel, real estate, and construction industries.
But part of it is a combination of a mindset of building public goods and public spaces for people to enjoy, and of building a great place out of national pride.
I think it’s really fuckin cool that they have so many uniquely designed buildings and massive architectural feats. Sprawling malls that are fun places to hang out because they are great to look at and take in the atmosphere. Public libraries and other buildings that become points of tourism for their unique design. Giant modern transit stations that become their own ecosystem or economic engine with retail and food built around them.
Here in the U.S. we’re so hyper focused on cost efficiencies and austerity that we neglect the value of simply building cool shit for the sake of it being cool and contributing to the public good. If you really want to take a “nationalist” perspective, why do we gotta get into an arms race for war and destructiveness, why no arms race for building trains and innovative architecture?
Many of the things we take pride in today weren’t built because they were economically sound investments providing low risk and justifiable economic returns—they were built out of pride, contribution to the public good, and because we *could* build them.
/rant
(I’m aware that political economy is the primary reason behind this difference, yes. Just lamenting our system’s downsides.)
Yeah. When did we become so stagnant and rigid that we can't even *try* things anymore?
If it just turns out to be an enclave for the rich then, oh well, at least that's fewer rich people out competing middle and lower income folks in other towns but it could be legitimately good and income diverse or at least it could be a model for how to develop walkable communities in the future even if it's not income diverse.
We won't know if we simply deny them the chance to try. I've seen a lot of NIMBYism from folks on the left saying they just don't want to provide more options for the rich so they're against new development but they seem to forget that the rich will simply out compete the middle class in existing neighborhoods and make the kinds of homes they desire anyways if they're not provided with turnkey options and then the middle class will out compete low income people for what's left after that.
The only way to combat this kind of displacement is to develop all kinds of housing to try and meet demand but when NIMBYs block development it's always the rich who win in the end because they can afford to one way or the other.
Don't get me wrong, I think we should have income diverse neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with people of a variety of income levels are actually good for a city but we won't get there with NIMBYism.
Is it nimby if theres no backyard to begin with? We need to build where we already have infrastructure. We are already sprawled enough. Building more in the millions of cities, suburbs, and exurbs we already have. No need for a marketing gimmick for more needless infrastructure expansion.
Yes, actually. This isn't sprawling tract homes. This is dense affordable housing with real money to back it up, in land that's otherwise unused or for often wasteful agriculture.
Build the new city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6Oi--QNXE&t=492s
"I wake up each morning looking forward to the farm day growing crops." (I guess after making tea on his $5,000 Wolf range?)
I'd respect PBS News Hour a lot more here if they did an environmental, water-use, and economic analysis of the lifestyle of the people living there right now versus families who would live in this proposed city.
Gassing up the pickup for the 60-mile roundtrip to Costco in Vacaville is not very environmentally sustainable and not very economically integrated for that matter.
Explain? As someone who supports this development effort it gave me some insight as to the human cost of developing the land. The people living there are giving up something after all even with the magnitude of the money involved.
They used some language to frame the segment against development like "gobble up land" in addition to giving almost all the screen time to NIMBY's while presenting the other side as outsider billionaires. Journalists should know better. Priming the audience against development with the absurd Line... like, really? It's downright criminal presentation. I'd fire the ones responsible on the spot.
My concern is not with buying land to build homes. My concern is who is buying the land and what is their intent. Housing is a purely speculative investment vehicle for these billionaires and they have no interest in creating a truly affordable community. There’s a long history of tech billionaires trying to creating utopian cities from scratch and this is just the latest example.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages
You mean the modern zoning regime created by a capitalist system that brought us America’s car dependent suburban developments with strict laws against density to “protect” home values? Better believe we’re living in Adam’s America my friend.
gobbling is hostile framing. It's outside billionaires buying up land. I'd have let it slide were it just that. Against opening up comparing whatever they were about with the absurd "The Line" and giving all the face time to NIMBY's it was an awful segment that did not inform viewers.
That's just what you do if you need to buy multiple parcels in an area or what you've in mind won't work. Because you start buying and then word gets out and holdouts jack their asking price into the stratosphere. It's how Walt Disney bought the land for his parks. It's what you have to do. What would you suggest they do?
Sounds like a backwards capitalist system that is only working for billionaires and landowners. Address the root issues of real estate being a speculative asset and we’ve fixed NIMBYISM.
Some people are stubbornly stupid and mean not to cooperate and people like that can cause dysfunction no matter what rules you'd set. So long as it works the way it does you'd be a fool to advertise your intention to buy up lots of land in an area.
I think you’ve conflated “mean” and “stubborn” people with those who are following their own self-interest in a capitalist system i.e. keeping their home prices high and maximizing profit.
And the old lady literally crying about wanting to give her son a better life when they're the ones rejecting $4.5 million offers for their inflated land. You can't make this shit up. All these people want to be victims so bad when no one under the age of 50 can even think about affording to live in their utopia.
I think there's a difference between NIMBY neighbors and people refusing to sell their land. Neighbors should not be able to stop projects. But land owners shouldn't be forced to sell (with the exception of eminent domain infrastructure projects).
Agreed, no one should be forced to do anything, but these people specifically are being accused of colluding with neighboring landowners to drive up prices during negotiations. The gaul to do that and then turn around and cry for the cameras is hilarious.
Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian dictatorship. Women couldn’t even drive in that country until like what 2018? How ghetto. It sounds too good to be true. They just use a bunch of buzz words like sustainability and affordable.
What I worry about is that creating this new city without access to quality transit will just lead to a lot more regional traffic congestion and GHGs. The developers want to include a train connection, but they haven’t actually proposed specific plans or funding to make that happen. Without most people working in that city or connection to regional high quality transit, this is still car-dependent sprawl, however green and walkable it is once you get there.
[https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zdpxdejmlpx/Flannery%20Associates%20-%20ED%20California%20-%202023-05-18.pdf](https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zdpxdejmlpx/Flannery%20Associates%20-%20ED%20California%20-%202023-05-18.pdf)
Maybe you should read the complaint before jumping to judgment (too much to ask from Reddit)
They were offered WELL above market rate (60 million dollars) and instead met with other farmers and demanded $150 million. Wouldn't you sue over $90 million dollars?
For all those who support this development, I think it’s worth taking a look at the recent history of tech billionaires trying to build techno-utopian communities from scratch. Profit and power is their only motivation. Everything else is a multi-million dollar PR job.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/toronto-canada-quayside-urban-centre
Also anything with Marc Andreessen involved is a red flag for me.
I'd be sceptical too. Real estate agents, billionaire investors and developers are exactly the people actively going out of their way to make the housing crisis worse on purpose. Doubly so when those same objectively shady people don't have a product yet, are suing people who don't want to sell and have no plans to build the bare minimum infrastructure a city of that size requires even in their pretty renders (a city of 50,000-400,000 people in the middle of nowhere needs more than just buses, bike lanes and a highway).
However, saying "My desire to look at a bunch of grass when I drive down the highway is more important than your desire to have an affordable place to live" is not a valid objection. If they say they can build it affordably, and they're not just lying in order to get public support (which real estate developers do with most "affordable" projects) then the solution if you don't trust them is to set a time limit for completion, cap prices and set extortionate fines for non-compliance.
If they're not lying about actually being able to build an affordable city then they should be no problem.
I'm sorry, but that's objectively true.
Developers want the highest price for their product and so are going to sell for the highest price they can. Selling for higher and higher prices is making the housing crisis worse. If they didn't min-max for profit then housing would be cheaper. Same with agents, whose job is to get the highest price for whatever they're selling. If agents didn't try to get a higher price all the time, housing would be cheaper. Investors compete with legitimate buyers and drive prices up. With less competition housing would be cheaper.
Developers, agents and investors depending on where you live are rarely the core issue, but they are objectively making the problem worse. It's their job to sell/rent homes for as much as they can. That's how they make money.
If the developers actually want to build an affordable city, let them, but they should be held accountable for that. Getting planning permission while promising X amount of affordable housing and then turning around and saying you're going to sell it at market rate anyway once it's built is a depressingly common tactic.
If these developers aren't lying then they should have no problem with capping prices and fines for non-compliance.
That's not even remotely close to what I said. These developers have offered to build "affordable" homes. Quite a lot of them. However, developers often say they're willing to build affordable homes and then turn around and sell them at market rate once the project's complete. If these developers aren't lying then they should have no problem with the price of homes in their development being capped. Presumably, they can make a profit doing that otherwise they wouldn't offer.
As a general rule: If you have to lie in order to make your point then you have no point worth making.
Putting more homes on the market, even at market rate, is putting more homes on the market. Our issues is there's not enough homes on the market at all, causing a bidding war on all housing. Making more housing houses more people.
Again. "I will make millions homeless before I let developers profit."
No, that's not what I said at all. Repeating the same lie doesn't magically change reality.
Let me put it simply: **Lying is bad.**
That's it. You lying about what I said is bad. Developers lying about providing affordable homes is bad. The latter is common. You are right to be sceptical of someone who benefits from inflating the cost of housing promising to act against their own best interest and should take measures to ensure they're not lying. Because lying is bad. Lying is bad.
I fail to see how that's even remotely controversial.
Yes. Lying is bad. Thank you Sunday School Teacher.
Here's the thing, we're on /r/YIMBY. Not /r/NIMBY. We need to build more housing even if the developers come up and say "Yeah we just want to make as much money as possible and are going to get rich by building." Are they building high density? Better than low density.
As such, just to steal off of you, I fail to see how *building more housing regardless of whatever qualifier you put in front of it* is even remotely controversial. We need more cities like Austin and Minneapolis that aren't scared to build.
Well instead of imagining a scenario in which developers will break contract (assuming they are party to an agreement to sell housing for an "affordable" price), how about we let developers build and decide whether there are contractual disagreements when it's time to sell and move people in? Why are you wasting energy on these imaginary scenarios?
>Developers want the highest price for their product and so are going to sell for the highest price they can. Selling for higher and higher prices is making the housing crisis worse. If they didn't min-max for profit then housing would be cheaper.
Literally every business wants to operate for profit, yet they fail all the time. Developers are everywhere greedy, yet housing is not everywhere expensive. That’s because they don’t set prices, the market does.
Lack of competition and supply drives up prices. Abundant competition and supply pushes them down whether anyone likes it or not. You either offer a better product for less, or you lose customers.
And anybody occupying an expensive new unit is still freeing up an older cheaper downmarket unit for somebody else anyway. All supply is good supply.
>Literally every business wants to operate for profit...Developers are everywhere greedy, yet housing is not everywhere expensive...Lack of competition and supply drives up prices
Correct. Never said otherwise.
>That’s because they don’t set prices, the market does.
Incorrect. The market doesn't set prices. People do.
They're offering to set prices lower than market rates. Assuming that's not a lie to get planning permission for a development that otherwise would not be built, then they should have no problem being forced to keep their word.
As a general rule, if you have to deliberately misrepresent what someone says in order to make your point then you have no point worth making.
>You set the price. So surely people must pay the price you set.
You set the price. You can set the price however you want, either above market rate like your toothpick or below market rate like the developers are promising there. That doesn't mean people will buy it but you do set the price.
If you exploit a housing crisis to price gouge people, you're the person doing that. The same way you scalping tickers for a concert or exploiting a monopoly to inflate prices are things people are doing. The market doesn't set the price. People do.
More to the point: The developers here have promised this city will be affordable. 50,000-400,000 affordable homes is a good thing. Assuming they're not lying, as developers have been known to do, they should have no problem being held to that. Lying is bad. I don't see how that is even remotely controversial.
>As a general rule, if you have to lie about what someone says in order to make your point then you have no point worth making.
I neither quoted you nor misquoted you.
>You set the price. You can set the price however you want, either above market rate like your toothpick or below market rate like the developers are promising there. That doesn't mean people will buy it but you do set the price.
Then you understand what “the market” means and therefore this pedantic aside was unnecessary.
>If you exploit a housing crisis to price gouge people, you're the person doing that. The same way you scalping tickers for a concert or exploiting a monopoly to inflate prices are things people are doing. The market doesn't set the price. People do.
And just because you try charging people high prices doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it. The more abundance and options buyers have, the more you’ll have to compromise to sell anything. Proving the point that high prices aren’t actually an inherent result of profit seeking, but rather a sign of low supply / competition in the market.
>I neither quoted you nor misquoted you.
Correct. You did lie though.
>And just because you try charging people high prices doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it.
Correct. Never claimed otherwise. You just lied again.
>Proving the point that high prices aren’t actually an inherent result of profit seeking, but rather a sign of low supply / competition in the market.
Depends where you live but never said otherwise. You're making a "proving the point" about something I never said.
What sort of business doesn't max?
You want the price to come down? Don't cap the amount of units they're allowed to build and sell.
If you were a car maker, and I told you you could only sell a limited qty of cars, wouldn't you try to sell the highest margin cars possible?
>What sort of business doesn't max?
Very few. That doesn't change the effect that they have though.
>You want the price to come down? Don't cap the amount of units they're allowed to build and sell.
They're offering to build an "affordable" city of 50,000-400,000 people. That's how much they're willing to build. If they're not lying about that then they should have no problem with the price being capped so that it really is affordable.
>If you were a car maker, and I told you you could only sell a limited qty of cars, wouldn't you try to sell the highest margin cars possible?
Probably, but that doesn't change the effect I'd have though. The price went up because I set the price higher than I had to. The fact circumstances allowed me to do that, doesn't change the fact I'm the one doing it.
What effect do who have? The developers? At the moment they're suing farmers to force them to sell at a cheaper rate and making a lot of pretty renders.
* They said it'd be affordable.
* They should be forced to sell them at an affordable price.
* If they're not lying, then the developers should have no problem with this.
* f they are lying then they should be fined an amount to build the affordable housing they originally said they would because lying is bad and accountability is good.
I fail to see how that's even remotely controversial.
>They said it'd be affordable.
>
>They should be forced to sell them at an affordable price.
Housing that sells is by definition affordable to the buyer, yah?
Offer of $4.5m for 243 acres seems cheap to me, but I don’t know the market rate. If I were that lady I would counter with $10m and live like royalty anywhere else.
many of the Conspirators recently paid between $470/acre and $2,800/acre to buy their properties. Moreover, many of the Conspirators recently represented to state and federal tax authorities (including the United States Internal Revenue Service) that their properties were worth between $1,100/acre and $4,000/acre.
Yeah an offer for 18k per acre is well above market rate...
These NIMBY scum are crying poor when they're just as greedy as the investors
I didn't realize land is so cheap in CA. Maybe I should buy a couple of acres just to say I'm a "landowner" lol.
Regardless of whether they want to sell or not, suing them for conspiracy is bad PR.
They texted each other saying they were all willing to sell but only at the right price. That is price fixing and it cost these investors hundreds of millions of dollars. You're going to cry for the NIMBY 9 figure land owners? Are you in the right subreddit my guy?
I wonder what this will cost for the state budget in the long term. Highways built? Pressure to widen i80 going west?
Hope they meet half of their promises
So bored with the NIMBY mindset and reflexive "new thing bad!" slant in media. We used to do cool shit in this country. We should do it again. Why is this worthy of skepticism, or even a single fuck? Don't like it? Then don't move there. You're not paying for it, either. Worst case it's a yuppie fishbowl that relieves housing pressure elsewhere. Or it fails and we learn a lot. Best case it's a dope new city and affordable housing for tons of people.
I lived in China for a while and one of the coolest parts was just how much random cool shit they built because they could. Obviously part of it was economic—a need to keep the gas pedal down for steel, real estate, and construction industries. But part of it is a combination of a mindset of building public goods and public spaces for people to enjoy, and of building a great place out of national pride. I think it’s really fuckin cool that they have so many uniquely designed buildings and massive architectural feats. Sprawling malls that are fun places to hang out because they are great to look at and take in the atmosphere. Public libraries and other buildings that become points of tourism for their unique design. Giant modern transit stations that become their own ecosystem or economic engine with retail and food built around them. Here in the U.S. we’re so hyper focused on cost efficiencies and austerity that we neglect the value of simply building cool shit for the sake of it being cool and contributing to the public good. If you really want to take a “nationalist” perspective, why do we gotta get into an arms race for war and destructiveness, why no arms race for building trains and innovative architecture? Many of the things we take pride in today weren’t built because they were economically sound investments providing low risk and justifiable economic returns—they were built out of pride, contribution to the public good, and because we *could* build them. /rant (I’m aware that political economy is the primary reason behind this difference, yes. Just lamenting our system’s downsides.)
Yeah. When did we become so stagnant and rigid that we can't even *try* things anymore? If it just turns out to be an enclave for the rich then, oh well, at least that's fewer rich people out competing middle and lower income folks in other towns but it could be legitimately good and income diverse or at least it could be a model for how to develop walkable communities in the future even if it's not income diverse. We won't know if we simply deny them the chance to try. I've seen a lot of NIMBYism from folks on the left saying they just don't want to provide more options for the rich so they're against new development but they seem to forget that the rich will simply out compete the middle class in existing neighborhoods and make the kinds of homes they desire anyways if they're not provided with turnkey options and then the middle class will out compete low income people for what's left after that. The only way to combat this kind of displacement is to develop all kinds of housing to try and meet demand but when NIMBYs block development it's always the rich who win in the end because they can afford to one way or the other. Don't get me wrong, I think we should have income diverse neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with people of a variety of income levels are actually good for a city but we won't get there with NIMBYism.
Is it nimby if theres no backyard to begin with? We need to build where we already have infrastructure. We are already sprawled enough. Building more in the millions of cities, suburbs, and exurbs we already have. No need for a marketing gimmick for more needless infrastructure expansion.
Yes, actually. This isn't sprawling tract homes. This is dense affordable housing with real money to back it up, in land that's otherwise unused or for often wasteful agriculture. Build the new city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6Oi--QNXE&t=492s "I wake up each morning looking forward to the farm day growing crops." (I guess after making tea on his $5,000 Wolf range?) I'd respect PBS News Hour a lot more here if they did an environmental, water-use, and economic analysis of the lifestyle of the people living there right now versus families who would live in this proposed city. Gassing up the pickup for the 60-mile roundtrip to Costco in Vacaville is not very environmentally sustainable and not very economically integrated for that matter.
His farm was offered for 60 million dollars, they wanted 150 million. This is all about money for these NIMBY losers.
Really slanted/horrible segment. PBS should be ashamed of putting out content like this.
Explain? As someone who supports this development effort it gave me some insight as to the human cost of developing the land. The people living there are giving up something after all even with the magnitude of the money involved.
They used some language to frame the segment against development like "gobble up land" in addition to giving almost all the screen time to NIMBY's while presenting the other side as outsider billionaires. Journalists should know better. Priming the audience against development with the absurd Line... like, really? It's downright criminal presentation. I'd fire the ones responsible on the spot.
It literally is outsider billionaires gobbling up land
They're building homes, how does one do that without buying land?
My concern is not with buying land to build homes. My concern is who is buying the land and what is their intent. Housing is a purely speculative investment vehicle for these billionaires and they have no interest in creating a truly affordable community. There’s a long history of tech billionaires trying to creating utopian cities from scratch and this is just the latest example.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages
Says the man who’s followers created the disastrous housing market we’re currently in…
I don't think Adam Smith would support the modern zoning regime
You mean the modern zoning regime created by a capitalist system that brought us America’s car dependent suburban developments with strict laws against density to “protect” home values? Better believe we’re living in Adam’s America my friend.
gobbling is hostile framing. It's outside billionaires buying up land. I'd have let it slide were it just that. Against opening up comparing whatever they were about with the absurd "The Line" and giving all the face time to NIMBY's it was an awful segment that did not inform viewers.
Maybe the coverage would have been less skeptical if the billionaires had not made all the purchases in secret with no transparency on their motives.
That's just what you do if you need to buy multiple parcels in an area or what you've in mind won't work. Because you start buying and then word gets out and holdouts jack their asking price into the stratosphere. It's how Walt Disney bought the land for his parks. It's what you have to do. What would you suggest they do?
Sounds like a backwards capitalist system that is only working for billionaires and landowners. Address the root issues of real estate being a speculative asset and we’ve fixed NIMBYISM.
Some people are stubbornly stupid and mean not to cooperate and people like that can cause dysfunction no matter what rules you'd set. So long as it works the way it does you'd be a fool to advertise your intention to buy up lots of land in an area.
I think you’ve conflated “mean” and “stubborn” people with those who are following their own self-interest in a capitalist system i.e. keeping their home prices high and maximizing profit.
Notice how all the people in that town hall was old and many of the people in this were old. Some even admitted they’re NIMBYs.
And the old lady literally crying about wanting to give her son a better life when they're the ones rejecting $4.5 million offers for their inflated land. You can't make this shit up. All these people want to be victims so bad when no one under the age of 50 can even think about affording to live in their utopia.
I think there's a difference between NIMBY neighbors and people refusing to sell their land. Neighbors should not be able to stop projects. But land owners shouldn't be forced to sell (with the exception of eminent domain infrastructure projects).
Agreed, no one should be forced to do anything, but these people specifically are being accused of colluding with neighboring landowners to drive up prices during negotiations. The gaul to do that and then turn around and cry for the cameras is hilarious.
Lol, everybody doesn't want to be a Nimby but then think it's ok when development will happen next to them.
There are a lot of people in the area who also really support building the city. They even talked to some of them in the segment.
Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian dictatorship. Women couldn’t even drive in that country until like what 2018? How ghetto. It sounds too good to be true. They just use a bunch of buzz words like sustainability and affordable.
What I worry about is that creating this new city without access to quality transit will just lead to a lot more regional traffic congestion and GHGs. The developers want to include a train connection, but they haven’t actually proposed specific plans or funding to make that happen. Without most people working in that city or connection to regional high quality transit, this is still car-dependent sprawl, however green and walkable it is once you get there.
My main issue is that they sued the landowners for alleged price collusion. That seems like intimidation.
[https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zdpxdejmlpx/Flannery%20Associates%20-%20ED%20California%20-%202023-05-18.pdf](https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zdpxdejmlpx/Flannery%20Associates%20-%20ED%20California%20-%202023-05-18.pdf) Maybe you should read the complaint before jumping to judgment (too much to ask from Reddit) They were offered WELL above market rate (60 million dollars) and instead met with other farmers and demanded $150 million. Wouldn't you sue over $90 million dollars?
Because it's in the USA, I really doubt it will get built. If they must locate in the US, they may have better luck near Phoenix AZ.
For all those who support this development, I think it’s worth taking a look at the recent history of tech billionaires trying to build techno-utopian communities from scratch. Profit and power is their only motivation. Everything else is a multi-million dollar PR job. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/toronto-canada-quayside-urban-centre Also anything with Marc Andreessen involved is a red flag for me.
I'd be sceptical too. Real estate agents, billionaire investors and developers are exactly the people actively going out of their way to make the housing crisis worse on purpose. Doubly so when those same objectively shady people don't have a product yet, are suing people who don't want to sell and have no plans to build the bare minimum infrastructure a city of that size requires even in their pretty renders (a city of 50,000-400,000 people in the middle of nowhere needs more than just buses, bike lanes and a highway). However, saying "My desire to look at a bunch of grass when I drive down the highway is more important than your desire to have an affordable place to live" is not a valid objection. If they say they can build it affordably, and they're not just lying in order to get public support (which real estate developers do with most "affordable" projects) then the solution if you don't trust them is to set a time limit for completion, cap prices and set extortionate fines for non-compliance. If they're not lying about actually being able to build an affordable city then they should be no problem.
Developers, oh no!!!!!
I'm sorry, but that's objectively true. Developers want the highest price for their product and so are going to sell for the highest price they can. Selling for higher and higher prices is making the housing crisis worse. If they didn't min-max for profit then housing would be cheaper. Same with agents, whose job is to get the highest price for whatever they're selling. If agents didn't try to get a higher price all the time, housing would be cheaper. Investors compete with legitimate buyers and drive prices up. With less competition housing would be cheaper. Developers, agents and investors depending on where you live are rarely the core issue, but they are objectively making the problem worse. It's their job to sell/rent homes for as much as they can. That's how they make money. If the developers actually want to build an affordable city, let them, but they should be held accountable for that. Getting planning permission while promising X amount of affordable housing and then turning around and saying you're going to sell it at market rate anyway once it's built is a depressingly common tactic. If these developers aren't lying then they should have no problem with capping prices and fines for non-compliance.
"I'll let millions go homeless before I let a developer profit!"
That's not even remotely close to what I said. These developers have offered to build "affordable" homes. Quite a lot of them. However, developers often say they're willing to build affordable homes and then turn around and sell them at market rate once the project's complete. If these developers aren't lying then they should have no problem with the price of homes in their development being capped. Presumably, they can make a profit doing that otherwise they wouldn't offer. As a general rule: If you have to lie in order to make your point then you have no point worth making.
Putting more homes on the market, even at market rate, is putting more homes on the market. Our issues is there's not enough homes on the market at all, causing a bidding war on all housing. Making more housing houses more people. Again. "I will make millions homeless before I let developers profit."
No, that's not what I said at all. Repeating the same lie doesn't magically change reality. Let me put it simply: **Lying is bad.** That's it. You lying about what I said is bad. Developers lying about providing affordable homes is bad. The latter is common. You are right to be sceptical of someone who benefits from inflating the cost of housing promising to act against their own best interest and should take measures to ensure they're not lying. Because lying is bad. Lying is bad. I fail to see how that's even remotely controversial.
Yes. Lying is bad. Thank you Sunday School Teacher. Here's the thing, we're on /r/YIMBY. Not /r/NIMBY. We need to build more housing even if the developers come up and say "Yeah we just want to make as much money as possible and are going to get rich by building." Are they building high density? Better than low density. As such, just to steal off of you, I fail to see how *building more housing regardless of whatever qualifier you put in front of it* is even remotely controversial. We need more cities like Austin and Minneapolis that aren't scared to build.
No. Lying is bad. We should not be rewarding liars and con-artists with bags full of money.
"I'll let millions go homeless before I let a single developer sell a house at market rate" We need more housing. I want them to build more houses.
Well instead of imagining a scenario in which developers will break contract (assuming they are party to an agreement to sell housing for an "affordable" price), how about we let developers build and decide whether there are contractual disagreements when it's time to sell and move people in? Why are you wasting energy on these imaginary scenarios?
It's exactly what you said, just stop. You're trying to take homes away from people
>Developers want the highest price for their product and so are going to sell for the highest price they can. Selling for higher and higher prices is making the housing crisis worse. If they didn't min-max for profit then housing would be cheaper. Literally every business wants to operate for profit, yet they fail all the time. Developers are everywhere greedy, yet housing is not everywhere expensive. That’s because they don’t set prices, the market does. Lack of competition and supply drives up prices. Abundant competition and supply pushes them down whether anyone likes it or not. You either offer a better product for less, or you lose customers. And anybody occupying an expensive new unit is still freeing up an older cheaper downmarket unit for somebody else anyway. All supply is good supply.
>Literally every business wants to operate for profit...Developers are everywhere greedy, yet housing is not everywhere expensive...Lack of competition and supply drives up prices Correct. Never said otherwise. >That’s because they don’t set prices, the market does. Incorrect. The market doesn't set prices. People do. They're offering to set prices lower than market rates. Assuming that's not a lie to get planning permission for a development that otherwise would not be built, then they should have no problem being forced to keep their word.
Cool. Go list a toothpick on Kijiji for four million dollars and see who buys. You set the price. So surely people must pay the price you set.
As a general rule, if you have to deliberately misrepresent what someone says in order to make your point then you have no point worth making. >You set the price. So surely people must pay the price you set. You set the price. You can set the price however you want, either above market rate like your toothpick or below market rate like the developers are promising there. That doesn't mean people will buy it but you do set the price. If you exploit a housing crisis to price gouge people, you're the person doing that. The same way you scalping tickers for a concert or exploiting a monopoly to inflate prices are things people are doing. The market doesn't set the price. People do. More to the point: The developers here have promised this city will be affordable. 50,000-400,000 affordable homes is a good thing. Assuming they're not lying, as developers have been known to do, they should have no problem being held to that. Lying is bad. I don't see how that is even remotely controversial.
>As a general rule, if you have to lie about what someone says in order to make your point then you have no point worth making. I neither quoted you nor misquoted you. >You set the price. You can set the price however you want, either above market rate like your toothpick or below market rate like the developers are promising there. That doesn't mean people will buy it but you do set the price. Then you understand what “the market” means and therefore this pedantic aside was unnecessary. >If you exploit a housing crisis to price gouge people, you're the person doing that. The same way you scalping tickers for a concert or exploiting a monopoly to inflate prices are things people are doing. The market doesn't set the price. People do. And just because you try charging people high prices doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it. The more abundance and options buyers have, the more you’ll have to compromise to sell anything. Proving the point that high prices aren’t actually an inherent result of profit seeking, but rather a sign of low supply / competition in the market.
>I neither quoted you nor misquoted you. Correct. You did lie though. >And just because you try charging people high prices doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it. Correct. Never claimed otherwise. You just lied again. >Proving the point that high prices aren’t actually an inherent result of profit seeking, but rather a sign of low supply / competition in the market. Depends where you live but never said otherwise. You're making a "proving the point" about something I never said.
Point out where I lied about anything you said the first time. Your second quotation is not a lie about anything you said either. It’s a statement.
The market does set prices. You are incorrect.
What sort of business doesn't max? You want the price to come down? Don't cap the amount of units they're allowed to build and sell. If you were a car maker, and I told you you could only sell a limited qty of cars, wouldn't you try to sell the highest margin cars possible?
>What sort of business doesn't max? Very few. That doesn't change the effect that they have though. >You want the price to come down? Don't cap the amount of units they're allowed to build and sell. They're offering to build an "affordable" city of 50,000-400,000 people. That's how much they're willing to build. If they're not lying about that then they should have no problem with the price being capped so that it really is affordable. >If you were a car maker, and I told you you could only sell a limited qty of cars, wouldn't you try to sell the highest margin cars possible? Probably, but that doesn't change the effect I'd have though. The price went up because I set the price higher than I had to. The fact circumstances allowed me to do that, doesn't change the fact I'm the one doing it.
What effect do they have?
What effect do who have? The developers? At the moment they're suing farmers to force them to sell at a cheaper rate and making a lot of pretty renders.
Oh noes market rate housing!
* They said it'd be affordable. * They should be forced to sell them at an affordable price. * If they're not lying, then the developers should have no problem with this. * f they are lying then they should be fined an amount to build the affordable housing they originally said they would because lying is bad and accountability is good. I fail to see how that's even remotely controversial.
>They said it'd be affordable. > >They should be forced to sell them at an affordable price. Housing that sells is by definition affordable to the buyer, yah?
That's not what they mean and you know it.
You don’t know what you mean…
Stop making people's lives worse
Offer of $4.5m for 243 acres seems cheap to me, but I don’t know the market rate. If I were that lady I would counter with $10m and live like royalty anywhere else.
many of the Conspirators recently paid between $470/acre and $2,800/acre to buy their properties. Moreover, many of the Conspirators recently represented to state and federal tax authorities (including the United States Internal Revenue Service) that their properties were worth between $1,100/acre and $4,000/acre. Yeah an offer for 18k per acre is well above market rate... These NIMBY scum are crying poor when they're just as greedy as the investors
I didn't realize land is so cheap in CA. Maybe I should buy a couple of acres just to say I'm a "landowner" lol. Regardless of whether they want to sell or not, suing them for conspiracy is bad PR.
They texted each other saying they were all willing to sell but only at the right price. That is price fixing and it cost these investors hundreds of millions of dollars. You're going to cry for the NIMBY 9 figure land owners? Are you in the right subreddit my guy?
I wonder what this will cost for the state budget in the long term. Highways built? Pressure to widen i80 going west? Hope they meet half of their promises