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I think Congress should ban this nationwide. They should also ban minimum lot sizes.

Here in KC, like 0 units have been built utilizing the IZ scheme from 2021

The problem with IZ is that it’s on off budget, no tradeoff “solution” for sanctimonious politicians. Literally a dream policy for a policy maker with no backbone.

Is this an example of form over substance? It sounds good or reinforces my ideology, and I'll stick my head in the sand when it comes to actual results. In my humble opinion, as a person who believes in moderation and pragmatism, left and right are both often guilty of this.

Fuck those people

I missed the Copley Sq thing. They paved it over?!?!

"Trust the science" only mattered to my Mayor when it was Covid related.

The article says “Developers argue that rising interest rates & construction costs have scrambled project budgets.” Not IZ per se. But the Trump slump is an opportune excuse & affordable housing an easy target. And Mayor Wu is offering tax breaks, (i.e. paid IZ which you like) so cant blame her.

Unfunded IZ => new housing construction collapses => we need tax breaks to incentivize building => that incentive has obvious flaws (eg 99 units in NYC) This is happening in multiple big US cities and is a bad design.

The best solution would be publicly funded free or low rent housing, but for some reason voters really like conditioning upzoning on IZ. You get 10 more units per lot but one of them has to be rented for $500 a month is better than no density increase.

Housing won't align with people's needs as long as we keep dumping money on tech to set on fire...

You also need to ensure that rents rise enough to cover costs in older buildings. And that you're building enough so that newcomers have a place to go (because it will mean fewer people moving, which raises prices for newcomers). There's a lot of potential pitfalls.

*technically if you're a rich renter you're still taxed, but "rich renters" are not really a meaningful group of people outside of like san francisco and manhattan. it goes back to the whole luxury condos thing. "luxury condos" are not really a thing. even more so, "luxury apartments" arent

a tax on poor renters in fact by driving up their rents through rental unit scarcity!

What do you mean by “luxury” high rise? In my experience, usually “luxury” is building-manager for “the floors are mid-quality laminate instead of the literal cheapest carpet we could find, and the appliances are less than ten years old.”

Well if they're "luxury" that must mean only the wealthiest rent them, surely

Left to their own profit motives, developers would build only for the richest. How is that not obvious.

That's a fair point, and it gets to the heart of the issue: unfunded mandates are popular because no one votes for taxes. There are, however, federal housing subsidies and recent interest in Congress in housing affordability, so I don't think expanded subsidies are totally out of reach.

well even more specifically on new apartment housing

It's a tax on renters mostly paid to landlords

very classic bay area boomer blind spot where yuppies in the city are rich and need to be massacred or expelled, while the westside boomer NIMBY with a $3M house he bought for $200k in 1978 on which he pays zilch in property taxes who rants about developers is pure of heart and of noble intention

What we are asking people to be allowed to build in urban neighborhoods is queens, not Manhattan.

Next, do the west side districts. Then do the Castro and Noe Valley. Then do the Marina. The Mission district (zips 94110 and 94103) has built 800+ affordable units and has 600+ in progress, prioritizing housing for those displaced by yuppie latecomers.

is income inequality increasing or decreasing in the Mission

The set asides for affordable housing in SF are a tool of NIMBYs to pretend they care while keeping apartments segregated away from them as much as possible.

You must be new around here.

Do you think the upper tier lives in apartments?

Both are premised on the notion that you can just wish away uncomfortable problems at no cost by just passing laws that reinforce your own ideology. We can create more affordable housing for free by just demanding that it gets built without changing anything else in our lifestyle or way of business

Hard not to see this as part of the American allergy to state ownership of _anything_. An alternate version where the state forces the developer to sell a percentage of the units to public housing at a negotiated price would allow local government to be market-responsive in the negotiation process.

They just upped the fee in lieu in Santa Fe 300% on vibes. It’s going to halt new MF development