Things I Find Interesting [aka, the stuff rattling around inside the brain of Torr Leonard]

“A new rung at the top of the housing ladder permits people lower down to climb up.

One well-worn refrain of progressive urban politics is that new, “luxury” housing will not help solve the housing shortage. A 2024 study of U.S. voters found that 30 to 40 percent believed more housing would, instead, increase prices, and another 30 percent believed it would have no effect.

But research generally points in the other direction: More housing supply of all kinds leads to lower prices in general terms.

A new study lays out exactly how a brand-new building can open up more housing in other, lower-income areas, creating the conditions that enable prices to fall.”

It’s like Matthew Yglesias said way back in 2015:

• “Even luxury projects help address housing scarcity. In a marketplace with no new luxury projects, rich people don’t forget that they enjoy fancy houses in appealing neighborhoods. They simply snap up older properties and renovate them (or house-flippers do it), thus blocking the process of filtering and taking middle-class residences off the market.”

The question is:

How can we convince people to stop feeling that “luxury” new housing units are bad? As long as people still feel that way, they’ll continue to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to all proposed new “high-end” housing. Data doesn’t change minds, only stories do.

Homes cost too much in California because we don’t build enough housing, because people are NIMBYS, because traffic is bad. If traffic weren’t so bad, people wouldn’t have such a negative reaction to new housing construction. People want CA’s population to go DOWN because they wrongly think it’ll solve traffic.

I attend Los Angeles Neighborhood Council meetings, and so I put together this list of the most common complaints that people voice about why they oppose new housing units (of any kind!) ever being built:

• “They’re gonna be luxury units, so they’ll cost too much! But also: we oppose affordable housing because they’ll just bring crime!”
• “It’s gonna cause more traffic! But also: we want there to be more parking spaces included in the plan!”
• “Our property values will go down!”

Their logic is contradictory and incoherent. What they’re really saying is, “I have a mortgage, so I don’t care if other people’s rents keep rising.” But here’s the thing, even many renters express the above views! It’s very frustrating.