Increasing housing supply does not decrease home values, because high density housing benefits from network effects/economies of agglomeration. NIMBYs don't object because they think their house will be worth less, they object because they believe their quality of life will go down (based on what is important to them).

Higher density brings both good and bad:

upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)

downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)

The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals, which tend to not currently live in the neighborhood and will move in if density goes up.

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Rendello 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> more traffic - more noise - more pollution

These are often true, but not inherently so. I've lived in remote rural, suburban, and dense city environments. My dense city had disadvantages, but it was quiet and had little traffic or pollution. In my experience the suburban environment is the worst for all three once you get off the residential streets, there's loud, polluting traffic (3/3).

In two of the places I lived, I couldn't keep the window open due to the constant tire noise. It wasn't an issue in the densest place I lived, which was a low-car-traffic place and pleasant to be outside in. Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.

	▲	matsemann 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If anything, my experience is that NIMBY's also strongly oppose things that would reduce traffic, noise and pollution. Because a low traffic zone, reduced speed limits, or bicycle lanes, would infringe on their ability to drive their car everywhere without any disturbance.
	▲	pibaker 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Don't forget the gas powered leaf blowers. A whole symphony of them.
	▲	al_borland 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do urban centers deal with NIMBY vs YIMBY? It was always my impression that this was more of a suburban thing… multi-family or mixed use developments going into areas that are all single-family homes. These are people who left the urban area to get away from the density of the city, but didn’t want to move far enough away from conveniences for it to actually be quiet. These are area that typical have poor public transit (at least the places I’ve lived), so adding more density does add more traffic and noise. Offering alternatives to address that is a decades long project that requires a lot of political will and significant inconveniences for residents during construction. I lived in a city that implemented a lot of road diets, while building more apartments and condos, and it was a mess. If you happened to live downtown and were staying in a walkable area downtown, it was fine. But getting to and from downtown, to go grocery shopping, was painful. It was possible to live outside that downtown ring for easier access to the surrounding area, but then going downtown for dinner had significant friction, as they didn’t have good solutions. It was either a very slow and infrequent bus, or use a car. > Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise. I used to live a block away from a Metra stop in Chicagoland. I now live near where two interstates cross and there are a lot of street racers. While I do hate the bikers, when those trains would stack up and 3 or 4 of them would spend 5 minutes blowing their whistles back and forth constantly while I was trying to sleep, it would drive me insane. I can hear the trains from where I am now, but I’m a bit further away and it’s not like those rush hour Metra trains. I have the feeling there are a lot of different situations with trains. I had an AirBnb in London and 3 days in I realize the window (covered with curtains) had been wide open the whole time. When I looked outside there was a ton of train tracks, but I didn’t even notice any noise.

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llsf 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

- more traffic: compare to now? or pre-COVID? because now it is already lower than pre-COVID, at least in SF. I have lived here for more than 20 years, and only now I see seeing empty parking spots around my house. I would never see this 10 years ago. So, if we double the population, yes there would be some additional traffic. But how would it compare to 10 years ago ?

- more noise: From traffic? electrification is making transportation quieter than before. From people in the streets? again the streets are way less busy compare to pre-COVID at least in SF. People either do not work, or work from home, get delivered everything from movies (Netflix), to food (UberEats) or shopping (Amazon), etc. foot traffic is WAY lower than pre-COVID. So if we double the population, yes there would be some additional foot traffic. But how would it compare to 10 years ago ?

- more pollution: From traffic? electrification is offsetting some of it. From trash, well those people were trashing elsewhere too.

- more anonymity, crime: That is cultural. Tokyo is fairly dense city, and with fairly low crime compare to US standards.

"The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals": Go visit a major city in Europe (Paris, Barcelona, etc) that has high density, and you would see lots of different generations, not only young professionals. It is possible to live from cradle to grave in those cities. It does not have to transition spot when you are young, professional and looking at dating. It could be where you go to kindergarten, up to university, work and retire.

I feel like the main thing that NIMBY fear is change, any change. Hausmann, where are you ?

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happytoexplain 4 days ago | parent [-]

>I feel like the main thing that NIMBY fear is change, any change.

Broadly disparaging large, diverse groups of people like this is what makes things harder, not easier. This is tribalism.

	▲	tptacek 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		NIMBYism isn't a fixed group of people; it's a policy position. Policy positions can be bad or good or all points in between. What they're not is analogous to religions, or even political parties. They do not need to be entertained. It's valuable to know where people are coming from, so you can persuade them out of unproductive policy positions (or at least deactivate them so they're less in the way of change). It's important to be respectful of people. It's often counterproductive to be respectful of bad ideas.

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enragedcacti 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)

These aren't all foregone conclusions. For example, Arlington, VA (11th highest density county in the US) most likely has the lowest combined traffic/homicide fatality rate in the country. Traffic peaked in 2000, and by 2015 it had gone down 20% while population rose 20%. This of course required a lot of planning and investment, but that is enabled by the higher property tax revenues that more housing brings.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...

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kstrauser 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Increasing housing supply does not decrease home values

This contradicts every common theory of economics I've heard.

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bwhiting2356 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

	▲	pibaker 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

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bryanlarsen 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He said home values, not prices.

The value of a home to an owner should be higher than the price, otherwise they should sell and move. (We're talking theory here, there are a lot of good reasons why people don't do what they should).

Building more houses will decrease prices, but increase value. Until the two meet and then the new houses will stay unsold and will stop getting built.

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slopinthebag 4 days ago | parent [-]

Can you explain the difference between price and value here? Like I understand in general that the market price of a good might not align with the price an individual ascribes to a good, but in this case why would value rise with more supply?

	▲	nrr 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		In the case of housing, agglomeration effects play the biggest role. A single family house in the middle of nowhere is very scarce, but it also has limited economic productivity[0]. Notably, that lone house isn't enough to support commerce. It's also worth observing that land supply is a fixed constraint[1], and a platted parcel is what everyone should be looking at. The more inhabitants we can keep on a parcel, the more potential customers and employees we have for the businesses adjoining that parcel. -- 0: In some models, it's also said that this house has limited utility, but I'm reticent to put this front-and-center on HN. I've nonetheless left it here as a footnote to split the difference. 1: At least, it's fixed barring, like, land reclamation, which is extremely expensive.

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al_borland 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if it’s akin to how adding lanes to a road doesn’t reduce traffic. Once the road has more capacity, people use it more, using up the added capacity and leaving it in the same congested condition.

I think their theory with housing was similar. Added supply would create the conditions for increased demand to fill it, and everything would equal out. Maybe a short term dip (as is the case with traffic), but not a a long-term downtrend.

Bringing people to the city could also act as more of a feeder for future single-family home buyers in the area, and those still do have a more limited supply.

I think the big question will be what happens if we build a ton home housing right as the baby boomers are vacating their homes. Is this a short term crunch, where building to meet it will create a surplus of housing over the next 10-15 years that will tank the market?

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majormajor 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are there more housing units in Manhattan or Dubuque?

Which one has more expensive housing units?

Part of the purpose of development is to make more shit happen and increase demand. It's rarely just "new increaesed supply vs constant demand"

Or rather: a demand that would result in anyone producing new housing units does not happen in a vacuum. And outpacing that rate of demand rarely happens from construction alone.

	▲	smallmancontrov 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you built more houses in Manhatten, would it increase or decrease Manhatten house values? If you built more houses in Dubuque, would it increase or decrease Dubuque house values?
	▲	orangecat 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		People in hospitals are less healthy than the general population. Clearly hospitals make you sick.
	▲	kstrauser 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Are there more housing units in Manhattan or Dubuque? Which one has more expensive housing units? That's an interesting question, because it's often — not necessarily in this case, but often — asked by people who ignore capitalism when it's inconvenient to their case. Other askers simultaneously claim things like "Dubuque has a lower cost of living" and "Dubuque is a better place to live". That ignores the fact that Manhattan is more expensive because more people want to live there, to the point that they're willing to pay several times more for the benefits they believe it gives them. When someone argues that city X is n% more expensive than city Y, it's another way of saying that residents believe they're getting at least n% more value from Y than they would from X.

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briandw 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you are conflating a number of factors. Increasing the supply of a good, when all other things are equal, decreases the price. Austin TX is a good example.

If increasing the amount and density of housing increases the desirability of a place thus increasing the value of the housing, this still has limits.

The SF bay area has had a housing shortage for 30 years. Its driven by people wanting to move in that have lots of money AND the refusal of local cities to allow housing to be built, also there isnt new land to build on. However the number of vacant plots in Mountain View is disgraceful.

If we allowed people to build high-rise apartments in downtown Mountain View rent would drop.

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happytoexplain 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, increasing housing supply does not always decrease home value, but I also think the home value concern is a secondary distraction.

More saliently, I don't believe you're right to imply that "young professionals" only want to live in dense areas. Sometimes they have to, but that's something we can change.

	▲	jeffbee 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Increasing supply always decreases price compared to a counterfactual without the supply but with all else equal.

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onlyrealcuzzo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)

Ah, yes, we live in a black-and-white world where this always happens, and so does this:

> upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)

There plenty of VERY affluent rural-ish areas.

There are also plenty of very nice places to live with high density that have FAR less crime rates that typical rural America, minimal traffic or noise, and far less pollution than you can find anywhere remotely rural and industrial or even agricultural areas.

The reality is - there's a lot of Karens that will do anything they can to deny everyone else of anything else they can possibly deny.

That's a large component of NIMBYism. These types will find any reason to justify it.

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stephen_cagle 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where are you thinking of when you say that young professionals move when density goes up? That does not track with my observations.

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pydry 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

increasing supply while demand remains steady does actually lower prices.

NIMByism can be killed with a land value tax/a property tax that approximates LVT and vice versa.

It was kicked into overdrive in California thanks to prop 13 which capped property taxes.

	▲	tptacek 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		LVT : housing :: guaranteed income policy : labor. It's not a bad idea, but it doesn't moot the underlying questions, because it will never be deployed at the scale where it would be dispositive.
	▲	bwhiting2356 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Can you show me an example where prices went down (in the long term)?
	▲	jakintosh 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		the problem is that all supply is not equal. in the classic NIMBY case, we’re talking about single family home owner in a neighborhood that has high housing demand, meaning it is largely built out, and they are opposing the introduction of multifamily housing to their neighborhood. in order for new multifamily units to come online, this means that over time existing SFH units are being converted/redeveloped into multifamily homes. this means that at the point where NIMBY pushback starts to matter, the number of SFH in a neighborhood has already largely peaked, and that the supply of that type of home will only ever go down and become more scarce (especially as a percentage of overall units). as more people move into a neighborhood in new multifamily buildings (and bring jobs, businesses, services, and general opportunity) the demand for that neighborhood goes up as well—demand is not fixed, and often goes up with supply, and depending on other macro factors can even outpace it if the agglomeration benefits are working properly. in this case, the NIMBY’s SFH value goes up, because the land value is much higher due to redevelopment potential, and also because that type of home is scarce and highly desirable to wealthy people who want proximity to opportunity in an urban place with the privacy and luxury of a detached SFH. tl;dr: “while demand remains steady” is doing a lot of heavy lifting that doesn’t really make sense in a real dynamic urban system.

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bko 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People choose where they live partly based on the current makeup of residence. If you want dense urban living, you'll choose based on that. If you want suburbs where you kids school has 100 to a graduating class, you do that. It's not fair to those that live there to just uproot the neighborhood entirely and flood it with new people against the will of the current inhabitants. Call that nimby if you'd like, but it's reasonable behavior. We should have diversity. One neighborhood may be completely laissez faire, anything goes, while another can have insane zoning requirements that prevent you from painting your house without approval. Let people decide where they want to live and give them some certainty that their neighborhood won't change much.