CrossroadsUrbanApts wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 12:09 pm
Because KCT thinks the market "won't work for everyone", they specifically attack that market and try and make it work worse for everyone. I guess what you are not getting is that their organization is actively trying to limit the addition of new supply to the KCMO housing market, because the great majority of that additional supply is going to be high-end market rate apartments. If KCT didn't fight new development, I wouldn't have a problem with them!
I'm still not really interested in relitigating what KCT's goals are. Suffice it to say, I don't think their ultimate objective is "to limit the addition of new supply to the KCMO housing market," this is just an effect of the tactics that they employ, and that distinction does matter because it speaks to the range of mutually agreeable outcomes that could potentially be found (which, in your framing, would be zero, but I think your framing is wrong). Again, on pages 16 and 17, I already discussed what they are trying to accomplish and why they do what they do, don't think there's any new information to discuss here and don't really have the energy to just repeat it all again.
The "left-right NIMBY alliance" that you talk about later in your post isn't even remotely unique to KC, but you acknowledge that other cities have had more success building housing anyway. Supposing KCT isn't just a scapegoat for more complicated issues affecting the KC market, what is it that you think makes KCT disproportionately more powerful than likeminded groups in other cities?
TheBigChuckbowski wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 1:26 pmYou are dead on with all of this but then somehow miss the point. One of government's jobs in a financial system like ours is to harness capitalism's drive to make money into a greater good for society. Our local government is completely failing in its role. It's not harnessing capitalism, it's fighting it. Our zoning code isn't functioning as a means to produce housing for people that need it, it's functioning as a means to keep property values high for those that already own it. Zoning has wasted so much developable land in and around our cities on low density sprawl, we are now forced to build in exurbs or do complicated and slow infill. Our building codes don't factor in cost, only risk. Single staircase buildings work and are not dangeous everywhere else in the world. But here? Nope, too dangerous, doesn't matter how costly. If our regulations are not working to make housing more affordable but exist precisely to do the opposite, make it more expensive, why would we expect anything else to happen? And why would we fight developers instead of fixing our regulations?
I agree with your points about code but doubt that these changes will make low-income housing sufficiently profitable. And from a practical standpoint, I feel like you might be overlooking how incredibly difficult it will be, politically, to enact genuine reforms here. Land use regulations that protect existing property values didn't just arise by accident, and their beneficiaries (homeowners who are whiter and wealthier than the nation as a whole) are a much more powerful constituency than the low income renters of color who create and comprise groups like KCT. Granted, other solutions, like constructing public housing, are also extremely difficult politically, so there are no easy answers here, but public housing would at least have the benefit of actually being affordable, where the market-driven free-for-all will produce only whatever kind and amount of housing can be expected to maximize profits. That being said, I am all for reimagining our zoning laws and building codes, I just don't expect this to singlehandedly fix the housing crisis.
You're not wrong but you're also missing a pretty important element of this. Developers don't need to make a profit off of low income tenants. We already have housing built 10-100+ years ago that can be maintained or renovated at a fraction of the cost of building new. And, take profit out of it. New social housing is going to run into the exact same zoning and building code issues that contribute to the expense of for profit housing. Ignoring regulations and focusing on profit makes little sense. Take out profit but replace it with bureaucracy that has the same material costs, labor costs and regulatory hurdles and you're not going to produce cheaper units.
It's true that developers themselves don't have to build housing for low-income tenants, but it's still necessary for providing low-income housing to be the most profitable use of whichever property, whether it's a new build or an existing building. Landlords who own existing buildings still have costs beyond just maintenance or renovation (and I would be careful about assuming that an old building can necessarily be renovated at "a fraction of the cost" of new construction), like mortgage and taxes (depending on incentives, the tax burden on an existing building may be much higher than on a new build). If a landlord finds it more profitable to renovate his 100 year old building and rent it to higher-income tenants, he's going to do that. Or property owners might decide to knock down and replace their building (or sell it to someone else who will do that), which won't necessarily yield more (and certainly not cheaper) units than were there before. Anecdotally, I've heard complaints from Chicago about old apartment buildings getting replaced with new houses (not sure how widespread this is there, apparently enough for someone to gripe about it, but that can be a low bar), and the NYT also
wrote about a similar phenomenon in NYC a couple years ago. Obviously, just by definition, there will always be some housing that is old or undesirably enough to find itself at the bottom of the market, but there is nothing about the market that will guarantee that any given unit remains at the bottom of the market or that there is enough housing at the bottom of the market for everybody in that price range. That will only happen if providing low-income housing is the most profitable use of a property. In most cases and assuming a healthy market, I am doubtful that it is.
(That NYT story is also interesting in that it notes cases in which current zoning would have allowed more -- sometimes many more -- units than developers chose to build. Obviously the developer at 15 W 96th St felt that 21 multimillion dollar condos would make them more money than either the 30 apartments that were already on the site or the 66 they could have built.)
Public housing wouldn't necessarily need to be cheaper than privately-built development. If there is political will to build it, it will be built, whatever it costs. Our electeds certainly don't lose any sleep over our eye-popping infrastructure costs, they just keep writing those checks. That isn't to advocate for intentionally inefficient/wasteful spending, but realistically, it isn't an obstacle.
Yes, providing housing for families making minimum wage without government help is never going to be profitable. If we want to provide new housing for those people then the government needs to step up and figure out how to produce it and/or fix the voucher system. Expecting developers to do it with limited incentives, while navigating a years-long political process that's constantly changing while investors and banks see faster, simpler, less risky returns in every other market, is never going to work (and that's not the developer's fault).
I agree, but I also don't think it is ever going to work even if developers don't have to navigate a years-long political process.
And, beyond all that, we can't lose sight of the fact that the housing market is much bigger than just those with the lowest incomes. Housing prices continually increasing affects everyone and we can't cut off our nose to spite our face by making housing more expensive for everyone because we're only interested in making housing affordable for those with the lowest incomes. Affordability matters across most of the market.
Sure, but this is the KCT thread, so we also can't lose sight of the fact that any solution that boils down to "give the people with money what they want now and we pinky swear we will work on something for the poor later" is never going to happen. Also, any solution that provides an adequate amount of housing that is affordable to low-income renters will necessarily relieve upward price pressure from the bottom up.