This post incorporates content from Streetsblog Chicago Cofounder and Advisor Steven Vance’s development data website Chicago Cityscape. This week there was reason to celebrate for both Chicago sustainable transportation fans, and folks working to make housing more plentiful in our city. Prior to Wednesday’s City Council vote, Chicago’s Connected Communities Ordinance, passed in July 2022, […]
Making space for storing large metal boxes is no longer mandatory.
That means their property values go down if housing is just generally cheaper.
Thus, anything, literally anything that lowers construction costs is opposed by them.
…
They climbed the ladder over the wall, then they built the wall higher, and took away the ladder.
They will fight for every single possible, arbitrary costly thing that can be tacked on to make a ‘bare minimum viable housing unit’ as expensive as possible, because they are directly financially incentivized to do so, vis a vis their own wealth being reliant on property values never ever going down, in real or nominal or relative terms.
No public transit, no bike lanes, no rent a bike/scooters, no tax breaks nor subsidy programs for renters at anywhere near the scope and magnitude offered to homeowners, no solutions for food deserts, no tenants rights, no goddamned nothing that in a direct or indirect way might make their next home value on appraisal go up by too little, or their property taxes go up by too much.
They are demons, they want you to be broke and suffer so they can be rich and lazy, and they will lie to your face about this being their motivatiom, and they will hire others to do so.
Landowners vs non-landowners, tale as old as time, just looks a bit different in our particular setting.
That and the HOA / NIMBY crowd.
They hate affordable housing.
That means they make less money.
That means their property values go down if housing is just generally cheaper.
Thus, anything, literally anything that lowers construction costs is opposed by them.
…
They climbed the ladder over the wall, then they built the wall higher, and took away the ladder.
They will fight for every single possible, arbitrary costly thing that can be tacked on to make a ‘bare minimum viable housing unit’ as expensive as possible, because they are directly financially incentivized to do so, vis a vis their own wealth being reliant on property values never ever going down, in real or nominal or relative terms.
No public transit, no bike lanes, no rent a bike/scooters, no tax breaks nor subsidy programs for renters at anywhere near the scope and magnitude offered to homeowners, no solutions for food deserts, no tenants rights, no goddamned nothing that in a direct or indirect way might make their next home value on appraisal go up by too little, or their property taxes go up by too much.
They are demons, they want you to be broke and suffer so they can be rich and lazy, and they will lie to your face about this being their motivatiom, and they will hire others to do so.
Landowners vs non-landowners, tale as old as time, just looks a bit different in our particular setting.