The utility of your argument relies on it being something burdensome like a 200% increase but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary not only for the nation but for your area as well. If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room even after you paid off the capital gains especially when the first 250k single or 500k married couple is tax free.
When you reduced the projected change in price to a more reasonable increase like 10% your argument about not being able to move to a lower col area becomes true because everything has gone up equally but it is hard to argue that the increase has greatly burdened your life to the point that people ought not be allowed to build on property they own.
For example locally if assessed value went from 200k to 220k my taxes would increase 16 per month. 400-450k would net me a cool $41 per month.
Looking at actually realistic figures makes it much harder to justify constraining housing supply which negatively effects all of society in order to optimize your tax bill.
> but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary
It's not, at least in the us. In the past nine years, my house went from a real-world value of ~$90k (2012), to now being worth ~$240k (2021), despite wages being mostly flat. This is not uncommon, most homes in this or any nearby city have posted somewhat similar gains (plus or minus 10%). This property specifically, recorded it's highest jump ($40k over a single year) in the year after they built luxury apartments in the lot directly behind it.
And that's not a NYC / SF / Chicago / Seattle / Austin type hip place. It's just generic small-city Midwest nowheresville. A place with no restrictions on housing construction whatsoever, and has entire neighborhoods of new development in the past decade to prove it.
> If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room
You are not getting it. No, I literally can not do that. If my house went from 200k to 600k, then every other house has also gone up a similar amount. If I sell my house to cash out, my family is homeless, I don't have a "new living room". And if I want a "new living room" to live in, I have to give every single dollar of that 600k back, for some new property at similar high prices. It's not real money, it's debt that I happen to be holding in my hands in paper form, and the future occupant of my house is now on the hook for.
Californians simply can not seem to wrap their head around this. They just assume the money is real, because "move to the south or the midwest" is always an option for them, so they can cash out and keep a bunch of it. Some of us already live in these places, and don't have a magic "high quality housing at cheaper-than-my-home-market rate" place to escape to.
> justify constraining housing supply
Literally no one is arguing to constrain housing supply. Blocking a shitty luxury development never constrains housing, it frees it to be used for real housing.
Fighting against Poisoned Milk sales is not "justifying constraining milk supplies". Fighting against cost-raising developments for private equity firms is not in any way "justifying less housing". You can want more housing and not want everyone's rent to spike, these are not in conflict in any way.
To be clear housing went up 18% per year for 9 years which is materially different than a housing development causing your house to go up 200%. Teasing out the effect would involve looking at similar areas with different development profiles and would be complicated by the fact that the luxury development is more likely to be built in areas that have themselves recently become more desirable..
Whatever you discovered assigning all growth in your property value to that singular event is clearly erronious. As you mentioned all houses in urban areas have gone up substantially. If we assign 10% of that effect to adjacent luxury development we would conclude they had added 15k to your property value. Of course tax calculations vary by state but lets go with WA for a for instance.
It costs you about $12 a month if you save monthly towards your annual property tax. If we assign 20% to the presence of the luxury development which is almost certainly too much it cost you closer to $25 a month.
>They just assume the money is real, because "move to the south or the midwest" is always an option for them, so they can cash out and keep a bunch of it. Some of us already live in these places, and don't have a magic "high quality housing at cheaper-than-my-home-market rate" place to escape to.
When you reduced the projected change in price to a more reasonable increase like 10% your argument about not being able to move to a lower col area becomes true because everything has gone up equally but it is hard to argue that the increase has greatly burdened your life to the point that people ought not be allowed to build on property they own.
For example locally if assessed value went from 200k to 220k my taxes would increase 16 per month. 400-450k would net me a cool $41 per month.
Looking at actually realistic figures makes it much harder to justify constraining housing supply which negatively effects all of society in order to optimize your tax bill.