Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Legitimate_Proof t1_j74g7nf wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in As homelessness crisis deepens, rural children pay the price by FearandLoathinginBTV

We could allow more, but people love to say NIMBY is the problem. In this case, how did people blocking new construction make more people homeless?

Those people were housed somewhere that they aren't any more. They weren't housed in housing that wasn't built. Converting apartments to AirBNBs or jacking the rent because fewer apartments are available is a more likely cause of this increase.

That people have no other options and that rent can be so high can be blamed on NIMBY, but I don't believe building more will help without other changes. Why wouldn't owners of new housing change high rent and make some AirBNBs too? More money for owners but no change for people who need lower cost housing.

11

Fabulousfemur t1_j74mu0u wrote

I built a solar field on star farm road a few years ago. The landowner wanted to build an apartment building, but the city was fighting it, so he had an array built because it was less of a struggle.

It also seems that new construction apartments are built for section 8 or 55+.

9

Legitimate_Proof t1_j76dbmy wrote

That site was a wetland and even the solar racking had to make special accommodation of that. The fact that housing couldn't be built there wasn't because of NIMBY.

New apartments are Section 8? Which ones? In Burlington, the new affordable housing I'm aware of is only what is required by the City's inclusionary zoning when market rate housing is built.

3

cpujockey t1_j76esv2 wrote

The section 8 and 55 plus crowd are the ones that are desperately hurting.

1

kraysys t1_j757vq2 wrote

Why don’t you believe building more housing would decrease the cost of housing? Very simple economic laws of supply and demand.

4

Legitimate_Proof t1_j76efp5 wrote

That over simplified "law" would only be true is housing were a commodity and everyone had access to all the market info. Then if we built a noticeable oversupply of housing, prices would fall.

Housing is not really a commodity and we are building mostly for the high end of the market. A small study was done after several new projects were built in my Burlington ONE neighborhood and the average rent in the area went up, not down! Basically the new apartments came in with significantly higher rent and advertised how fancy they were. Other apartments increased their rental price to be near, but significantly lower than the new ones. The cost of new construction is so much higher than the cost of an apartment in an older building that is paid off, that there's plenty of room for new construction to pull up rent prices.

Burlington has added around 1000 new apartments in the past several years, and the increase in rent has sped up. I think part of the problem is that it would require maybe 10x as much new construction to make a noticeable oversupply, and the market would build an oversupply if it can help it. So we have to have policies on existing buildings, like restricting short term rentals like Burlington did, increasing the tax preference for owner-occupied, etc.

What has changed over the past few years when the cost of housing was increasing was not an increase in population or decrease in supply as that simple economic idea would suggest. It was a change in who owns housing and their profit expectations. The tripling of the share of single family homes that are owned by investors was likely a big cause.

1

you_give_me_coupon t1_j79tkr2 wrote

Any housing we build would be bought by the people and entities currently buying it: out-of-state gentrifiers, third home-owners, airbnb speculators, and private equity ghouls. It certainly wouldn't be bought by the people I know who are currently getting priced out of their rentals.

Building housing could be a good idea if we guaranteed, or at least incentivized, its use by regular Vermonters who need places to live. We could do that, but our leadership won't. They want poor Vermonters out.

0