Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.
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This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.
The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty clear that my comment you are replying to includes the words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business".
I don't know why it did not happen before.
All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed utterly when Airbnb became a thing.
I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue before then; the relative complexity and process involved in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected properties and had greater requirements.
But either way, Airbnb did unambiguously change things. Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they're even able to rent a room or a flat.
Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. After all, it's the only solution if you don't primarily place the blame on lack of construction.
There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on which houses can be built restrictive due to geography (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does not scale. New property building both has not caught up with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term demand.
As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of general economic weakness; the number of "thriving holiday let" properties that are on the market now suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs problem is going to cause a bit of a bust.
But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for residents.
> Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise.
It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. They can no longer afford the houses at the prices at which they will be built and the rates at which they can be.
NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive housing development policy in order to prop up their own home values.
Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more people who can have their own backyard.
This is said rather matter-of-factly, but how do you propose doing that in a society with democratic values (ie people get a voice in their governance) and also where 70% of most household wealth is in their property?
I'm skeptical that national zoning is feasible if for no other reason than the diversity of land and land uses.
It's a very bad thing for people to invest in a fundamentally depreciating asset and expect a return, there's literally no other way to get a return then besides inflation.
And sure, returns have been low, but that's because the real interest rate in Japan for the last 30 years has been negative! You can't get a return if the fundamental balance of loanable funds leads to a negative real interest rate, you need stimulus instead, which they've been trying for over thirty years! And shocker, now that we're seeing Japanese interest rates rise, Japanese stocks are shooting up!
>Japan does this just fine
You seem to be implying Japan's scenario adequately mirrors the U.S. In other words, they have a high proportion of their net worth tied up in real estate, which is what I am pointing to as a driver of NIMBY-ism. If that analogy doesn't hold, then I would argue it's not an apt analogy and probably doesn't offer much in terms of policy insight.
Also, in the US, I don't think you can argue that real estate in general is a "fundamentally depreciating" asset. I don't think the recent history is illustrative, but over the long term real estate tends to be positive.
Of course in the US there's been huge capital appreciation: housing and shelter went from 10% of CPI in the 60s to 40% of CPI today! Are you going to keep drawing the line and say "yeah, it's totally reasonable for us to continue it to have capital appreciation out-of-line of actual yields when supply and demand are balanced" - like how far is enough for you? 50% of CPI? 60? You're never going to be able to get the real appreciation that we've had over the last 40 years because that'd take us to 160% of CPI!!!
Regardless, all of that is a digression from the original question: does Japan have a similar dynamic where the bulk of household net worth is tied up in real estate? That's central to my claim that people are more protective of the assets tied to their wealth. In other words, we need to be careful about thinking Japan provides an example if there is a different wealth dynamic. It seems like you are trying to have a different conversation.
To be generous so as not to think you just have a problem conceding a point, you seem hung up on the moral argument. I’m not making a moral argument. I’m explaining the how it is, and not making a claim about how it ought to be. FWIW I think it’s stupid that people have 70% of their wealth tied up in a non-liquid asset, but that’s the scenario we’re dealing with. People are incentivized to keep their wealth high, and especially home wealth because it gives them equity to borrow against. Likewise governments like having high property values because it gives them a larger tax base.
So there’s two salient aspects to the point: 1) people have a say in how they are governed in a democracy and 2) people/govts have economic incentives to protect their wealth/tax base. NIMBYism is the convergence of both. So which do you disagree with?
I agree that, insofar as local governments go, NIMBYism is the inevitable convergence of both, and if the story stops there, there's not too many scalable solutions. I guess my point is that NIMBYism need not be the convergence of both in the general case. In CA at least, forming a YIMBY coalition is (obviously) democratic and is formed in response to housing being 40% of CPI (so trying to increase aggregate wealth). The reforms need not cause nominal declines in housing prices! Merely stopping growth is enough to cause real declines.