itch.io

You've said that you don’t want to reply to this discussion anymore twice already, but you still keep replying.  That's a you thing, not a me thing.

I mentioned NIMBYs once.  Then you kept bringing up the topic, so I had to reply to that.  The reason why NIMBYs have been discussed here is because you keep bringing up the topic. 

I am only pointing out the fact that the housing shortage is the cause of high housing prices and most homelessness in America:  https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem/

And we know that not building enough housing is the cause of the housing shortage.  NIMBYs are blocking new housing construction.  Therefore, NIMBYs are causing the housing and homelessness crisis.  It is reasonable to point out that a political group of  people are causing big issues with the policies they advocate.

I was not talking about the game, I was pointing out that cities with high housing prices have low vacancy rates, not high ones.  

Whenever I have criticized something, I have provided a good reason or reasons why I don’t think it will work.  For example, vacancy taxes will not solve the housing crisis because they only free up a small number of units (see: Vancouver, where a vacancy tax only greed up a few hundred units).  Explaining why you don't think something will work is the opposite of dismissing it.

Earlier, you kept insisting that housing demand is infinite.  I pointed out that studies have found that when new housing is built, prices typically go down instead of up, which shows that demand is not infinite (otherwise prices would still go up).

I was responding to you falsely claiming that I said if NIMBYs went away, all our problems would be solved.  I have not said that at all.  I only said that NIMBYs blocking new housing are causing the housing and homelessness crisis.

Think about how many people are not politically engaged on the national level despite the huge stakes for everyone.  Now take that to the local level where a lot of people don't even know who their city council person is.  It's not surprising that much of the public is disengaged from local politics despite the stakes, which is how NIMBYs came to dominate zoning and housing discussions.

People are already organizing after they saw the high rents and homelessness from too little housing and recently have overcome NIMBYs in some places to pass some upzonings to build new housing.  Here's one example:  https://www.sightline.org/2020/02/21/one-of-north-americas-boldest-housing-initi...

However, these upzones are still not sized to meet the backlog of needed housing production over the last few decades because of NIMBY opposition scaling down the upzonings.  So there's still a long way to go.

To get the needed housing production, we will need to go statewide and pass mass upzoning in all cities statewide:   https://qz.com/2052284/california-passes-a-zoning-law-designed-to-create-more-ho...