448
Why do people dislike California?
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
448 points (93.1% liked)
Asklemmy
44196 readers
1191 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It's not so much wealthy elites that are the problem here as everyday homeowners.
Because of the zoning ladder-pull people started decades ago, there's a lot of older middle class homeowners that bought an affordable house that's now worth millions. They're incredibly afraid of their house losing its value because it's probably the single largest part of their net worth, so they have a ton of cognitive dissonance over affordable housing.
They want affordable housing in the abstract, but they're 100% opposed to anything they think might lower the value of their house. And you can't really make housing more affordable without lowering the value of houses; they're kinda synonymous. So they come up with all kinds of bullshit special pleading to justify NIMBY policies.
The problem is that in most of the neighborhoods that are consistently rejecting plans to build high density housing, the 'everyday homeowners' are the wealthy elites. As you note, they're people that bought houses when they were affordable in an area, and their home has appreciated in value to the point of being worth millions; that does make them millionaires in the classic sense (e.g., assets worth more than a million dollars on paper).
My town recently closed down a homeless shelter because they were afraid it was 'attracting' homeless people and would lead to drug problems. Which, yeah, that's true; it was pulling them into the homeless shelter instead of them living int he woods, out of sight. The homeless people are already here, and the drug problems (meth and opiates) are there too, they just can't see them. Opening a homeless shelter? Try that in a small town, amirite?