If increasing density in a populated area has some costs to current residents but is worthwhile overall, it should be possible to pay off the existing residents to allow it.
What does the first part (until the comma) have to do with whether it “should be possible” to pay off the existing residents? The latter is an empirical question that should be analyzed on its own merits.
Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math here. Imagine a developer trying to build a house somewhere in the United States. The average cost of doing so is around $300k. Now take a popular area and say that the developer needs to pay off the residents to be allowed to build. Since the average price of a house in the US is around $350k, it is highly likely that the residents would require, on average, at least around $10k/house in order to give permission for this (even higher if they expect the values of their houses to go down due to the construction or because they have a particular emotional attachment to the character of the neighborhood, etc.). After all, they are the ones who own the houses, and they are presumably perfectly fine with keeping the environment as-is, so they have all the bargaining power and can require ~ everything they want, threatening to walk away from the negotiating table if the developer disagrees (imagine there is a group of residents that refuses to allow you to build unless you give them $500k each; what do you do?).
With these assumptions, even paying off a single HOA becomes prohibitively expensive: since HOAs often number in the hundreds of members (and sometimes even thousands), you can get to the point of having to pay millions of dollars just to be able to build that one house. Even if you build a batch of houses instead (and you go on the absolute low end of all of the estimates I gave in my paragraph above), you end up spending more money to pay off existing rent-seekers than you do actually building the physical entity that’s the house. Now recall that in a really dense neighborhood, you have to deal with way more than one HOA, and also with tons of people who aren’t members of any such association...
More-than-doubling the cost of construction in this manner will massively reduce the new supply of houses, particularly any kind of house that’s meant to be in any way affordable to anyone but the very rich (after all, developers will pay this cost only if they expect a considerable reward in the future from people willing to buy the house, so they will target rich want-to-be-residents much more). Overall, this seems like a truly terrible policy outcome that not only fails to achieve its initial target (allowing for the construction of more houses to reduce homeownership and rent prices, to make living more affordable), but also has particularly perverse and regressive effects.
You only need a majority of voters, who would then vote for local government that would negotiate a mutually-beneficial deal. Not every single person.
People can already build a single normal house on a normal lot well enough. The people who want to massively increase density want big apartment complexes built. Big projects.
What does the first part (until the comma) have to do with whether it “should be possible” to pay off the existing residents? The latter is an empirical question that should be analyzed on its own merits.
Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math here. Imagine a developer trying to build a house somewhere in the United States. The average cost of doing so is around $300k. Now take a popular area and say that the developer needs to pay off the residents to be allowed to build. Since the average price of a house in the US is around $350k, it is highly likely that the residents would require, on average, at least around $10k/house in order to give permission for this (even higher if they expect the values of their houses to go down due to the construction or because they have a particular emotional attachment to the character of the neighborhood, etc.). After all, they are the ones who own the houses, and they are presumably perfectly fine with keeping the environment as-is, so they have all the bargaining power and can require ~ everything they want, threatening to walk away from the negotiating table if the developer disagrees (imagine there is a group of residents that refuses to allow you to build unless you give them $500k each; what do you do?).
With these assumptions, even paying off a single HOA becomes prohibitively expensive: since HOAs often number in the hundreds of members (and sometimes even thousands), you can get to the point of having to pay millions of dollars just to be able to build that one house. Even if you build a batch of houses instead (and you go on the absolute low end of all of the estimates I gave in my paragraph above), you end up spending more money to pay off existing rent-seekers than you do actually building the physical entity that’s the house. Now recall that in a really dense neighborhood, you have to deal with way more than one HOA, and also with tons of people who aren’t members of any such association...
More-than-doubling the cost of construction in this manner will massively reduce the new supply of houses, particularly any kind of house that’s meant to be in any way affordable to anyone but the very rich (after all, developers will pay this cost only if they expect a considerable reward in the future from people willing to buy the house, so they will target rich want-to-be-residents much more). Overall, this seems like a truly terrible policy outcome that not only fails to achieve its initial target (allowing for the construction of more houses to reduce homeownership and rent prices, to make living more affordable), but also has particularly perverse and regressive effects.
You only need a majority of voters, who would then vote for local government that would negotiate a mutually-beneficial deal. Not every single person.
People can already build a single normal house on a normal lot well enough. The people who want to massively increase density want big apartment complexes built. Big projects.