My city, like many in the US, is facing rising rents and a shortage of low income, or even just affordable housing. The city has been preempted by the state from passing any sort rent control, public housing options or really any thing other than what the developers want to build.
In the face of a drought of affordable housing developers have offered the city the exact opposite of what we need, more luxury housing. They claiming that the increased supply will cause wealthier renters to move into the new housing, which will open up space in market rate housing for middle income renters to move in which should open up space in low income housing for the poor to move in. The housing will trickle down.
The developers will first claim that this trickle down housing policy will lower rents, until anyone interrogates it. Under scrutiny, they eventually concede that it only slows down the rate of increasing rent. Not a solution. Barely a stop gap. But any alternative has been foreclosed upon. So in our thirst for affordable housing developers offer to piss in our mouths. And the YIMBYs fucking beg for more. Piss in our mouths, we are thirsty.
that "economic filtering" thing about how increasing the inventory of luxury housing induces rich renters to upgrade and frees up lower income housing is like the stupidest shit i have ever read. i first saw it in an article in the last week or so and i was just like, "this is a thing educated scholars think happens?"
i seriously cannot force myself to accept it is anything other than a quarter-assed justification builders and their investors throw around for their self-serving / self-dealing scam to only ever build luxury housing. rich fucks warehouse that shit on their books as an appreciating asset, they sit vacant for years, but get passed around as an investment asset among the elites for deal sweeteners and obscuring the exchange of actual assets/favors like art.
my only consolation is that when the revolution comes, all that vacant luxury housing in prime locations is going to make for great multi-family housing, free clinics, and shelters. like was done in cuba. it lifted my heart to see so many luxury homes from the 20s-50s be occupied by regular ass people and families all over havana and made me realize why gusanos are filled with so much hate.
luxury housing.
And if I understand the matter there's nothing luxurious about luxury housing these days. More square footage, but the same shitty construction techniques that use the least amount of materials allowed by the building code as everything else.
all that vacant luxury housing in prime locations is going to make for great multi-family housing, free clinics, and shelters.
Unoccupied houses tend to go to shit really quickly - Mold creeps in with no one to notice, animals get in, water leaks in. All it takes is one broken window and a few days or weeks of rain to get a black mold infestation that makes the building a tear-down.
Rarely is there much in the way of extra footage. At best is location.
I was in one of the high end apartments once. The tenant was paying 2K for vinyl plank floors, white drywall and bare concrete ceiling. But hey there was a coffee shop in the lobby.
I can't tell you how many times articles quote the some local professor to say "the highest demand in our city is for luxury housing". When you look into the methodology, the difference between our top income tenants vs top rental units is slightly higher than the difference between bottom income tenants and bottom rental units. And of course the demand of a rich person to live in a nicer apartment is one-to-one with the demand of a poor person to not be homeless. A better metric would multiply the differences by the vacancy rates of the units in those brackets.
I still don't get who to support.
NIMBYs or YIMBYs?
First the crowd turns against NIMBYs and then the crowd turns against YIMBYs.
I... know nothing about the issue.
NIMBY’s suck because they dress up what’s fundamentally them wanting to maintain their home value and keeping undesirables out as “cultural preservations.”
YIMBY’s suck because they use their position as a thought-terminating cliche where you either agree with their position of giving developers everything they want or you’re a NIMBY. Also, 9 times out of 10 they’re hypocrites who either balk at the idea of public housing in their backyard, or qualify their support in the same way that they say makes people NIMBY’s when it comes to luxury development.
This is not a bipolar issue. NIMBYs don't care about the problem (or actively benefit from it), and YIMBYs are neolib ghouls who think the solution is clearing the way for private developers to build whatever makes the greatest return on investment (luxury condos).
The solution is obvious - large-scale public investment in decommodified housing.
YIMBYs NIMBYs
abolishing private property and throwing all these dickasses in the "stop being an anti-social fuckwit liberal you jerks" 
GULAG!People who describe themselves as YIMBY are usually terrible amd nobody calla themselves a NIMBY - that is already known to suck.
Building new luxury housing doesn’t help rent rates for the working class because luxury housing and regular housing are two different markets. It might make older luxury housing more affordable for those at the lower ends of that market but it’s not going to turn a decade old luxury development into affordable housing. Also, a lot of luxury housing exists as co-ops/condos and thus are bought up by speculators looking for a store of wealth and thus do nothing to reduce rents. And this doesn’t even address the problem that landlords have incentive to make their buildings look as valuable as possible to other landlords they could sell the building to, and that means minimizing lower income tenants. That’s why a lot of buildings in NYC that got subsidies in exchange for settling aside portions of the building as affordable housing make the affordable housing tenants go through a different entrance. They don’t want the building to look like it has the “rabble” living in it.
fwiw the "luxury housing" in my city is most often private luxury dormitories which solely exist to scam the richest university students. Rich kids have their parents pay full downtown-1-bedroom prices for only a bed in some 2-4 bedroom apt. Almost certainly unlawful, but hey "it's legal in California so why not here?" That said, those students are probably the only demographic that will actually fill apartments at that price range.
Real estate companies proceed to sit on the housing, leaving it empty for years, to ensure high prices. Rich people buy their "city home" and hold on to / rent their suburban one. Misery increases.
Time to go preach the good word of Henry George until the yimbys agree with Georgism against their will.
The housing will trickle down.
The "Hermit Crab" theory of housing, if you will.
YIMBYs are frustrating because they're completely right about the problem, but their solutions are pretty bad. American single family zoning is awful and creates car-dependent suburban sprawl, which is basically the worst possible form of residential land-use. We should build mixed-use transit-oriented developments and fifteen minute cities to counter this. But the best way to do that is to build non-market housing for the residents, and there's a number of ways that can be done.
