I live in Oakland and am a member of a few groups that give me a look outside my usual wealthy tech bubble to the sentiments of the lower income folks here. There is HUGE resistance to new development in Oakland among the very people who are being priced out. But unlike property owners who tend to resist new development because they worry about supply pushing prices down, many of these people seem to see an opposite correlation: that new development means higher rents, which displace them and their communities.<p>I think this is simply a misunderstanding of how development works. They see rents going up, and new buildings going up, and assume that the new buildings are the cause of the increase, not a response to the increase. They think we need to build more below-market rate units, because the luxury ones raise average rental prices.<p>But really, the shortages which create high prices are what create the business case for building expensive luxury condos. If rents weren't already high, these buildings wouldn't be built. If the demand is there but not the supply, everyone at the wealthy end of the spectrum will take all of the supply, leaving the poorer ends out of a home. So the more market rate units we have, the more lower end units that are available. Seems simple to me, but a lot of people seem to get this wrong.<p>They have this idea that there are a bunch of wealthy and greedy developers out to get them and their precious neighborhoods. The buildings these developers start have a shockingly high rate of spontaneous combustion in Oakland, right when framing is complete.<p>I wonder if the property owner interests only encourage these mis-perceptions since they serve their interests.
This is not at all surprising when one considers that most of the time housing intensification is focused around low income areas, and so new market priced housing goes hand in hand with gentrification and displacement of low income residents. Why wouldn't existing renters be opposed to this?<p>This wouldn't be an issue at all if municipal governments instead intensified housing in the <i>most expensive areas</i>, but homeowners there are rich and capable of superior organization. For that reason you basically never see any attempt to upzone wealthy areas with low density detached housing.<p>The only available easy out for municipal governments is to rezone industrial land to residential and upzone it before anyone lives there.
Of course they are, they don't want to get priced out of their neighborhood by gentrification. You can live in an undesirable area for 20 years and have somewhat stable rent, but once the area gentrifies because of a crunch on housing availability, a developer's going to start buying properties, slapping on a coat of paint, and doubling the rent.<p>It's happening _incredibly_ quickly in Boston's neighborhoods one by one. It happened to The South End, Southie, Jamaica Plain, Somerville (not technically Boston proper but 10 years ago they used to call it Slummerville), and now Dorchester and Roxbury are gentrifying.<p>I own a single-family house in a previously undesirable area, and on 2 separate occasions I've had developers come to my door cold trying to buy my single-family house to tear it down and develop on the property.
Link to paper: <a href="http://mhankinson.com/assets/jmpWeb.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://mhankinson.com/assets/jmpWeb.pdf</a>
tldr; At the macro (city-wide) level, renters tend to be more supportive of development. But wrt development in their own neighborhood, renters in high-rent cities exhibit NIMBY-ism towards market-rate housing (associated with gentrification). Interesting that they don't mind more <i>affordable housing</i>, which suggests that their concern is not simply economic but rather involving risk-aversion, fear of lesser quality of life, and gentrification.
Renters and pro-growth, urban-minded owners would seem to constitute a majority in many of the highest cost parts of California. And yet my town recently passed a milestone of sorts: the principle and interest to buy the median home consume 100% of median household income, before taxes, food, or any other expenses. This study appears to explain how the current situation has come about.
Isn't the causational arrow in the other direction? If your polity didn't prefer to have high prices, you wouldn't have high prices. If you have high prices, <i>of course</i> your polity prefers high prices.
This is due to rent control.<p>Renters become more like homeowners when there is rent control. They essentially have an investment to protect. Their immediate financial situation (rent being due, much like a mortgage payment or property tax) is unaffected by neighborhood changes. The enjoyment of their neighborhood is affected though, and they seek to maximize this.<p>The difference between the controlled rent and the market rent is in some sense an income that the renter receives from the landlord. The higher the market rate rent, the greater this income will be.<p>Long leases may have a similar effect; this is voluntary rent control.