I like this article a lot and agree with most of it. I do want to stand up for the existence of aesthetic preferences in and of themselves, unmediated by community or class. As someone who spends a silly amount of time and money decorating my home (with no financial and basically no social payoff for it) because when I look at something beautiful to me it makes me happy, there IS such a thing as taste. And there is even such a thing as objective beauty. A very attractive person with unfashionable paleness/darkness or body type would not be as popular as in other time periods but would still have many interested lovers. I like more traditional buildings but I can appreciate a modern building that is well balanced and executed, etc. I do wonder why we see no new buildings with embellishments. Maybe it will be the next fad. None of this is til day the factors you list aren’t real factors - they are, but they’re not the only ones.
I’ve read that much of contemporary architecture is designed according to costs. In other words, it’s cheaper to make ugly modern buildings and the different attempts to beautify them simply don’t suffice.
Good point. Tough to do in practice. One irony that comes up a lot is that buildings which are now considered iconic were opposed on aesthetic grounds when they were built. I have seen buildings that had been the touchstones that led to a city’s original zoning ordinances because they were so disliked that are now protected by historical designations.
Yesterday, when I was at my local barber shop I noticed that a building across the street had been torn down in the past week or so. I had absolutely no memory of what had been there, but I know that the loss of that structure--and its replacement with something new and larger---will change the "character" of the neighborhood in a way that will upset some people. So it goes. The evolution of cities depends on property owners making decisions that serve their interests and taking advantage of new technology and architecture when its available. That so much of the United States is prevented from do that is disgraceful. I can imagine some wanderer of the post-apocalyptic wastelands of America pointing at the crumbling remains of some suburban neighborhood and exclaiming "Look at the character this place had!"
I think it brings together a lot of the key issues in the US housing debate. Specifically, these two:
local vs national. What if we all do what's best for our local community, but it ends up worse the country as a whole? I would prefer for them to build massive apartment complexes somewhere that *isn't* my local neighborhood, but I do see the problem when everyone else feels that way too.
aesthetics vs numbers. How much is it worth to live in a "nice" neighborhood? Can you even put a number on that? I really do feel like it's worth *something*, but I can't even begin to guess how much. And there's a real question of how much a new building fits in with the existing ones. The pyramids, for example, look awesome in the desert of Egypt, but they would look weird in a suburban American neighborhood.
It is such a tricky issue when people justifiably feel like they are being judged simply for wanting to keep their neighborhood nice. How can we judge that?
Really nice piece. Striking title too. A few thoughts:
-The Prisoner's Dilemma describes the kind of collective action problem that towns face with zoning. If they don't allow housing they are always (in their minds) better off than if they do, whether or not their neighboring municipalities do. But if no municipalities allow new housing, you get collective problems like homelessness, traffic, labor shortages.
-It's super common to complain about the aesthetics of something proposed but then not care once it's actually there. I can't count the number of times people have fear mongered about a new building project ruining the neighborhood...while a larger and/or uglier building built years ago exists as part of the landscape without ever being a topic of conversation. The Sutro tower in San Francisco is an example I think of often. I think simple fear of change plays a huge role in motivating people's reactions to aesthetics, and in particularly NIMBY areas you do of course see opposition with non-housing, non-aesthetic issues like adding stop signs at dangerous intersections or whatnot.
-One thing I bring up sometimes in response to aesthetic objections to new housing is that zoning doesn't just block ugly buildings; it fundamentally says there is no apartment building pretty enough to deserve a place here. I think most people would recognize there are beautiful neighborhoods in the world that include multifamily dwellings. If people have a clear idea of a pretty kind of architecture that fits in with their neighborhood, it's certainly possible for towns to mandate it as a simple and objective standard. I actually think this is a good idea; when we consider some of the most beautiful cities in the world, it's often just a simple and pleasing kind of architecture repeated over and over: think San Francisco and Victorians or the Brownstones of Brooklyn and Back Bay. If we can route aesthetic objections into activism to establish feasible and appealing design patterns rather than subject every proposed building to design by committee of whoever shows up to the meeting, it could be a win-win.
-That video of LA is a gem. It's funny how often "Keep X City weird" is a local mantra, yet "Make X City Weird" never seems to be.
I think Prisoner's Dilemma is correct. I'm editing the post. Thanks.
I think you have a point about the potential value of aesthetic control. Of course, that's its own can of worms, in terms of making sure to create value without creating exclusion and how to do quality control on community decision making.
It relates to a subtle distinction that makes the whole issue so tricky. Nice, aesthetically pleasing things can add value. And, whenever a neighborhood is on the defensive, their presumption is "This neighborhood is nice because we protected its aesthetics." If aesthetics add value, and that is associated to an extent with higher property values, that's ok. But, when aesthetics are used to exclude, that also increases property values, because of scarcity. My model here at the tracker helps to see the difference, but in practice, on the ground, it is very hard to differentiate between scarcity driven prices and value driven prices. In most cases in the US today, locals think they created value when really they are just protecting scarcity. So, value-producing aesthetic control is hard to manage and its even hard to assess.
The way out of that perceived prisoner's dilemma would be to somehow make less restrictive zoning unilaterally the right move, no matter what other people do.
One some level it already is unilaterally the best move. But I guess different people have different incentives, and the people with de facto veto rights don't benefit enough?
There was a very interesting paper with the title 'Why are there NIMBYs?'. It's easy to find online.
The main thesis of the paper is that the single family home is the single biggest investment a family makes, and it's typically even bigger than their net worth and finances with leverage. It's a single, illiquid, undiversified investment.
The author argues that this makes people extremely risk averse. Ie instead of risk neutrally only caring about the change in expected value of the future market price of their house, they also want to clamp down on variance. They are even willing to sacrifice some expected value for a lower variance.
And that's why they are so resistant to change.
The author notes that people owning multiple properties (like professional land lords for example) or people owning apartments, or people renting, are less likely to be such extreme NIMBYs. Because they are either more diversified or less leveraged.
The author has a few interesting policy suggestions. Though he misses what I would find the simplest, most straightforward one: a land value tax would drop the market price of land (assuming land rents stay the same) and would thus lower the impact of the single family home on the family's balance sheet.
Thanks for the reference. I’ll take a look at it. But this is the homevoter thesis that I argue against in the post. I think the motivation to block change comes from their position as consumers more than as owners. Pocketing the gains might strengthen the motivation for NIMBYism but the motivation would still be there if they didn’t benefit as owners.
And, to use the framing of the post, the problem of the Louisiana dad won’t be solved by getting him to agree to pay a premium for a whites only dining room. To a certain extent they are protecting the consumer surplus associated with the endowment effect of their neighborhood as it exists, and the historical processes associated with that conflict have led to an irrational inflation of the perception of those benefits. I have doubts that clever incentives create a way out of this.
Your argument suggests that anyone living in a neighbourhood should be about equally likely to be a NIMBY?
William A. Fischel's "Why Are There NIMBYs?" explicitly makes the empirical claim that owner occupiers of single family homes with lots of leverage on their balance sheet are especially prone to becoming NIMBYs.
That seems like something we should be able to test?
I think homeowners are slightly more motivated to be NIMBYs. The differences between my thesis and the homevoter thesis can be subtle, though you’re probably right that there should be ways to identify them. If you think about my price/income charts, basically we both agree that residents are mostly trying to keep their dot from moving to the left. Fischel would claim they are motivated by price and I would argue they are motivated by things that are correlated with price. But most of the increase in prices is from the price/income line steepening which requires NIMByism from all the other neighborhoods in a city, so the actual changes in home prices come from coordinated behavior that is too extensive to be the result of collusion or even straightforward cause and effect from NIMBY motivations.
> Like, Mitt Romney’s zillion-dollar-a-plate fundraisers seem to always be pretty full. It can’t literally be in a rich person’s self-interest to buy a plate there. But a lot of rich people could have conservative-libertarian-pro-business ideas that encourage them to quasi-altruistically support Mitt Romney in order to push their values.
> But this is really weird and interesting – much more interesting than it looks. It suggests that, in the presence of a useful selfish goal to coordinate around, a value system will “spring up” that convinces people to support it for altruistic reasons.
> I’m not just talking about normal altruism here. A rich person motivated by normal altruism per se might be against tax cuts for the rich, in order to better preserve social services for the less fortunate. And I’m not just talking about normal selfishness either. A rich person motivated by selfishness would hang out in his mansion all day instead of wasting money on fundraisers. I’m talking about a moral system which is genuinely self-sacrificing on the individual level, but which when universalized has the effect of helping the rich person get richer.
Just replace 'rich people ' with 'home owners' and their political activism with NIMBYism. See the rest of the post for more.
I like this article a lot and agree with most of it. I do want to stand up for the existence of aesthetic preferences in and of themselves, unmediated by community or class. As someone who spends a silly amount of time and money decorating my home (with no financial and basically no social payoff for it) because when I look at something beautiful to me it makes me happy, there IS such a thing as taste. And there is even such a thing as objective beauty. A very attractive person with unfashionable paleness/darkness or body type would not be as popular as in other time periods but would still have many interested lovers. I like more traditional buildings but I can appreciate a modern building that is well balanced and executed, etc. I do wonder why we see no new buildings with embellishments. Maybe it will be the next fad. None of this is til day the factors you list aren’t real factors - they are, but they’re not the only ones.
I’ve read that much of contemporary architecture is designed according to costs. In other words, it’s cheaper to make ugly modern buildings and the different attempts to beautify them simply don’t suffice.
Good point. Tough to do in practice. One irony that comes up a lot is that buildings which are now considered iconic were opposed on aesthetic grounds when they were built. I have seen buildings that had been the touchstones that led to a city’s original zoning ordinances because they were so disliked that are now protected by historical designations.
Yesterday, when I was at my local barber shop I noticed that a building across the street had been torn down in the past week or so. I had absolutely no memory of what had been there, but I know that the loss of that structure--and its replacement with something new and larger---will change the "character" of the neighborhood in a way that will upset some people. So it goes. The evolution of cities depends on property owners making decisions that serve their interests and taking advantage of new technology and architecture when its available. That so much of the United States is prevented from do that is disgraceful. I can imagine some wanderer of the post-apocalyptic wastelands of America pointing at the crumbling remains of some suburban neighborhood and exclaiming "Look at the character this place had!"
Excellent, one of your best! You so deftly synthesize current dysfunctional housing policy with human evolution and philosophy. Masterful.
Thanks Riccardo! I was hoping you would see this post and appreciate it.
This is an excellent post.
I think it brings together a lot of the key issues in the US housing debate. Specifically, these two:
local vs national. What if we all do what's best for our local community, but it ends up worse the country as a whole? I would prefer for them to build massive apartment complexes somewhere that *isn't* my local neighborhood, but I do see the problem when everyone else feels that way too.
aesthetics vs numbers. How much is it worth to live in a "nice" neighborhood? Can you even put a number on that? I really do feel like it's worth *something*, but I can't even begin to guess how much. And there's a real question of how much a new building fits in with the existing ones. The pyramids, for example, look awesome in the desert of Egypt, but they would look weird in a suburban American neighborhood.
Thanks Charlie.
Great observations.
It is such a tricky issue when people justifiably feel like they are being judged simply for wanting to keep their neighborhood nice. How can we judge that?
Really nice piece. Striking title too. A few thoughts:
-The Prisoner's Dilemma describes the kind of collective action problem that towns face with zoning. If they don't allow housing they are always (in their minds) better off than if they do, whether or not their neighboring municipalities do. But if no municipalities allow new housing, you get collective problems like homelessness, traffic, labor shortages.
-It's super common to complain about the aesthetics of something proposed but then not care once it's actually there. I can't count the number of times people have fear mongered about a new building project ruining the neighborhood...while a larger and/or uglier building built years ago exists as part of the landscape without ever being a topic of conversation. The Sutro tower in San Francisco is an example I think of often. I think simple fear of change plays a huge role in motivating people's reactions to aesthetics, and in particularly NIMBY areas you do of course see opposition with non-housing, non-aesthetic issues like adding stop signs at dangerous intersections or whatnot.
-One thing I bring up sometimes in response to aesthetic objections to new housing is that zoning doesn't just block ugly buildings; it fundamentally says there is no apartment building pretty enough to deserve a place here. I think most people would recognize there are beautiful neighborhoods in the world that include multifamily dwellings. If people have a clear idea of a pretty kind of architecture that fits in with their neighborhood, it's certainly possible for towns to mandate it as a simple and objective standard. I actually think this is a good idea; when we consider some of the most beautiful cities in the world, it's often just a simple and pleasing kind of architecture repeated over and over: think San Francisco and Victorians or the Brownstones of Brooklyn and Back Bay. If we can route aesthetic objections into activism to establish feasible and appealing design patterns rather than subject every proposed building to design by committee of whoever shows up to the meeting, it could be a win-win.
-That video of LA is a gem. It's funny how often "Keep X City weird" is a local mantra, yet "Make X City Weird" never seems to be.
Thanks Toby! Great comments.
I think Prisoner's Dilemma is correct. I'm editing the post. Thanks.
I think you have a point about the potential value of aesthetic control. Of course, that's its own can of worms, in terms of making sure to create value without creating exclusion and how to do quality control on community decision making.
It relates to a subtle distinction that makes the whole issue so tricky. Nice, aesthetically pleasing things can add value. And, whenever a neighborhood is on the defensive, their presumption is "This neighborhood is nice because we protected its aesthetics." If aesthetics add value, and that is associated to an extent with higher property values, that's ok. But, when aesthetics are used to exclude, that also increases property values, because of scarcity. My model here at the tracker helps to see the difference, but in practice, on the ground, it is very hard to differentiate between scarcity driven prices and value driven prices. In most cases in the US today, locals think they created value when really they are just protecting scarcity. So, value-producing aesthetic control is hard to manage and its even hard to assess.
The way out of that perceived prisoner's dilemma would be to somehow make less restrictive zoning unilaterally the right move, no matter what other people do.
One some level it already is unilaterally the best move. But I guess different people have different incentives, and the people with de facto veto rights don't benefit enough?
There was a very interesting paper with the title 'Why are there NIMBYs?'. It's easy to find online.
The main thesis of the paper is that the single family home is the single biggest investment a family makes, and it's typically even bigger than their net worth and finances with leverage. It's a single, illiquid, undiversified investment.
The author argues that this makes people extremely risk averse. Ie instead of risk neutrally only caring about the change in expected value of the future market price of their house, they also want to clamp down on variance. They are even willing to sacrifice some expected value for a lower variance.
And that's why they are so resistant to change.
The author notes that people owning multiple properties (like professional land lords for example) or people owning apartments, or people renting, are less likely to be such extreme NIMBYs. Because they are either more diversified or less leveraged.
The author has a few interesting policy suggestions. Though he misses what I would find the simplest, most straightforward one: a land value tax would drop the market price of land (assuming land rents stay the same) and would thus lower the impact of the single family home on the family's balance sheet.
Thanks for the reference. I’ll take a look at it. But this is the homevoter thesis that I argue against in the post. I think the motivation to block change comes from their position as consumers more than as owners. Pocketing the gains might strengthen the motivation for NIMBYism but the motivation would still be there if they didn’t benefit as owners.
And, to use the framing of the post, the problem of the Louisiana dad won’t be solved by getting him to agree to pay a premium for a whites only dining room. To a certain extent they are protecting the consumer surplus associated with the endowment effect of their neighborhood as it exists, and the historical processes associated with that conflict have led to an irrational inflation of the perception of those benefits. I have doubts that clever incentives create a way out of this.
Your argument suggests that anyone living in a neighbourhood should be about equally likely to be a NIMBY?
William A. Fischel's "Why Are There NIMBYs?" explicitly makes the empirical claim that owner occupiers of single family homes with lots of leverage on their balance sheet are especially prone to becoming NIMBYs.
That seems like something we should be able to test?
I think homeowners are slightly more motivated to be NIMBYs. The differences between my thesis and the homevoter thesis can be subtle, though you’re probably right that there should be ways to identify them. If you think about my price/income charts, basically we both agree that residents are mostly trying to keep their dot from moving to the left. Fischel would claim they are motivated by price and I would argue they are motivated by things that are correlated with price. But most of the increase in prices is from the price/income line steepening which requires NIMByism from all the other neighborhoods in a city, so the actual changes in home prices come from coordinated behavior that is too extensive to be the result of collusion or even straightforward cause and effect from NIMBY motivations.
Yes, it would be interesting to disentangle this.
Btw, I'm reminded of this old Slate Star Codex post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-have-a-free-rider-problem/
> Like, Mitt Romney’s zillion-dollar-a-plate fundraisers seem to always be pretty full. It can’t literally be in a rich person’s self-interest to buy a plate there. But a lot of rich people could have conservative-libertarian-pro-business ideas that encourage them to quasi-altruistically support Mitt Romney in order to push their values.
> But this is really weird and interesting – much more interesting than it looks. It suggests that, in the presence of a useful selfish goal to coordinate around, a value system will “spring up” that convinces people to support it for altruistic reasons.
> I’m not just talking about normal altruism here. A rich person motivated by normal altruism per se might be against tax cuts for the rich, in order to better preserve social services for the less fortunate. And I’m not just talking about normal selfishness either. A rich person motivated by selfishness would hang out in his mansion all day instead of wasting money on fundraisers. I’m talking about a moral system which is genuinely self-sacrificing on the individual level, but which when universalized has the effect of helping the rich person get richer.
Just replace 'rich people ' with 'home owners' and their political activism with NIMBYism. See the rest of the post for more.