
Low-income housing has no impact on nearby home values (2016) - gerbler
https://www.trulia.com/research/low-income-housing/
======
netcan
Short & medium term effects on real estate prices is only part of the issue.
Ultimately, NIMBYism exists for a bunch of reasons... and the reasons don't
matter much.

Once you have actual organized NIMBYism, you are selling to existing property
owners and residents. They have no real reason to "buy" this story. Either low
cost housing doesn't affect anything, or it is against their interests. In no
scenario does benefit them, so why shouldn't they object... just to be safe?
At the least, construction is noisy and unsightly.

I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. Existing housing has an interest in
preventing new housing by default, especially down market of them. That's how
organised NIMBYs see it. That's how it plays out in practice. YIMBYs are not
going to beat NIMBYs locally.

NIMBYism exists. The relevant questions are about how to build despite of
NIMBYism, not how to reason with it.

~~~
chii
> how to build despite of NIMBYism, not how to reason with it.

i think it's "easy" \- pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost
value when constructing objects in their "backyard".

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> i think it's "easy" \- pay the existing NIMBY people the equivalent in lost
> value when constructing objects in their "backyard".

Suppose the difference is actually large. Their currently million dollar house
will be worth half a million dollars.

Who is paying this money? Low income people who need housing? They haven't got
it, that was the original problem. Local taxpayers? That's just the original
homeowners paying themselves.

~~~
darawk
If the government believes that it's in the public interest to have low income
housing, then the government should pay for it. It's not exactly the same as
the homeowners paying themselves, either. Structuring it this way ensures that
the cost is allocated fairly across all of society. If we believe that it is
in _societies_ interest to have low income housing, then society as a whole
should pay for it. The cost shouldn't just fall on a few unlucky homeowners.
Making the cost widely and evenly shared makes it equitable.

~~~
Waterfall
Who's gonna pay for it? The government? How do they get money? Taxes? So we
pay the government (they of course pay the federal employees and some pork
barreling) to pay for affordable housing? In the end who will really pay for
it aside from the people who will live in affordable housing?

~~~
darawk
My whole comment was an answer to that exact question. The government pays,
because the government paying smooths out the hit. The cost is more equitably
distributed over the whole population, as opposed to being concentrated in a
few unlucky neighborhoods.

~~~
Waterfall
My point is the government never really pays, we pay the government after all,
but I understand your point too.

~~~
imtringued
The people who pay for affordable housing are those who caused the housing
market to be unaffordable. That's only fair.

~~~
Waterfall
If candy bars are too expensive it's the buyers fault? That's fair?

~~~
Waterfall
Sorry I misread your comment!

------
Waterfall
>In the nation’s 20 least affordable markets, our analysis of 3,083 low-income
housing projects from 1996 to 2006 found no significant effect on home values
located near a low-income housing project, with a few exceptions.

Talk about cherry picked years. Why don't they analyse from 1998 to 2008 and
say the same thing? Did it really take until 2020 to post this?

>Of the 20 markets examined, Denver was the only metro area where homes
located near low-income housing projects registered a positive effect in terms
of price per square foot after a project was completed.

And the absence of serious, critical thought. Has trulia never heard of
correlation vs causation?

~~~
stepstop
> And the absence of serious, critical thought. Has trulia never heard of
> correlation vs causation?

They probably don’t teach that in data science boot camps

~~~
Waterfall
They had to cherry pick it. This article is intentionally misleading.

------
bb2018
I am in favor of looser zoning laws and generally consider myself a YIMBY.
However, I wouldn't say it is good politically to only support local low-
income housing conditional on the fact that there is no negatives. I think
that is the best policy but also acknowledge that there will be some
tradeoffs.

As others have said I don't think looking at home values in major cities like
Boston or Seattle is that interesting. Cities are used to having very rich
areas next to poor ones. I grew up in a town of about 20,000 that had close to
no housing that wasn't zoned as single family. As a result, the median income
was very high, property taxes stayed extremely low as a percentage (since
everyone was contributing a lot), and the schools were considered great
despite people not having to pay a lot in taxes. The neighboring town had
higher taxes (because the median property value was significantly lower) and
the schools were known to be bad. I wish there was more state level funding at
the time - but there wasn't and don't think there is now.

~~~
pydry
>However, I wouldn't say it is good politically to only support local low-
income housing conditional on the fact that there is no negatives.

It obviously isn't but the history of progressive politics demonstrates that
ideological purity is a great way of never getting anything real done.

E.g. planned Parenthood's murky beginnings, food stamps (buyer of last resort
for leftover agricultural produce), schools (training kids to be obedient
factory workers).

I doubt there are any progressive institutions which aren't partly borne out
of an uneasy alliance with some powerful but unethical group whose interests
either align or are at least aren't all that badly affected.

------
AlexTWithBeard
This is an interesting example of a pseudo-research article. It indeed looks
like it's using scientific approach to an important problem, but the method is
questionable:

\- why did the authors pick 2,000 feet and 4,000 feet as thresholds? They
refer to another article, but that article doesn't shed much light onto the
problem as well

\- why does the research cover the range of 1996-2006?

\- the article looks at the low-income housing project built in 1996-2006.
What's about the projects built before that?

\- what was located on the site before the project was built?

------
thinkingkong
The low income property makes almost no difference. What matters is low income
by _density_. If you spread out low income housing then you get to build it
and it has no effect on prices or perceived value. If you had tons of dense
blocks of housing, then I could see how youd end up with a deteriorating
situation.

------
OneGuy123
This study is useless because it looks at this on only a 10 year span.

To go from a "good neighbourhood" to a "bad neighbourhood" takes longer time
than just 10 years since more and more houses are build graudually and people
move in over longer periods of time until the majority of the population there
is low-income.

~~~
Waterfall
Do you have a study where it shows what happens over a longer period of time?
The period of 1996-2006 is very suspect too.

------
mdoms
In the markets with already extremely high demand, arguably markets where
value and price are already fully uncoupled (eg bubble markets). An analysis
on more "normal" markets would, I suspect, paint a very different picture.

~~~
stormbrew
Ok? But the studied markets are the ones where low income housing is both most
needed and also often staunchly opposed by nimbys.

~~~
remarkEon
Yeah, but that's the point the parent is making. "Most needed" just means
"high demand market", and in markets like that it's almost impossible to do
anything to upset the trajectory of housing costs - unless we have another
2008-style mortgage crash because of fraud. The lesson to take here is that
putting affordable housing in excessively expensive markets might actually be
a really smart idea.

~~~
woah
It tends to be excessively expensive to build in those markets, which is what
has led to the excessively high prices in the first place.

------
ergocoder
Unless they expect low-income people to cause issues, why would housing price
decrease?

It should increase because the amount of land of normal price decreases.

Also, I always joke that you can help lower housing price in the area by
causing non-offense nuisance. Walking shirtless and talking gibberish to
yourself loudly. It will probably help a little.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Unless they expect low-income people to cause issues, why would housing
> price decrease?

In principle, by supply and demand. If there is more housing then people don't
have to outbid each other for the existing housing and the prices decrease.

Obviously this only applies if there is enough new housing to move the needle,
which for housing projects like this there often isn't, but that's also the
exact reason why programs like this are so ineffective. You have a city of a
million households, a quarter of a million can't afford housing (or are having
to scrimp in order to afford it), then you build a thousand units and imagine
that will do something. What about the other 249,000?

Anything actually effective at making housing more affordable would reduce
housing prices, because that's literally what "more affordable" means.

~~~
bananaface
I mean the bigger problem is that if amount of housing determined price,
cities would be waaaaaaaaaaaaay cheaper than towns. Available housing may
drive population growth, pushing _up_ the price, since for whatever reason
people like to aggregate.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Price is determined by supply and demand. There is more demand in cities so
you need more supply to get the same price.

People want to live near other people/businesses, but that's what cities are
already, which is why there is already more demand there. There is a limit to
the amount of housing you can add before you end up on the other side of the
curve and prices start going back down again.

There is also a matter of general policy. If hypothetically one city (and no
others) added a lot of new housing so that the cost of housing there was lower
there than in other cities then many people might move there, because they'd
get to live in a city for less than it costs anywhere else, which would drive
prices back up to near equilibrium. But if every city added housing then you
wouldn't have that sort of migration because people could get into new housing
without moving to another city, and then prices would decline everywhere.

