Monday, November 28, 2016

Status report

So remember how I bought a condo four years ago? I just moved in today. Too soon to tell how I feel about it.

I'll be blogging more about the process as time passes. (The process isn't yet complete - final closing is still at some indefinite point in the future.)

In the meantime, I have a job for you all: if I start nimbying now that I'm a homeowner, call me out on it!

3 comments:

Lorraine said...

I remember those posts. I didn't realize it was the same condo; just assumed the recent posts were about your second condo or something. Was starting to wonder if you're flipping real estate or something. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nevertheless, I must confess I'm pleased as punch that you seem to have no desire to become a NIMBY. I suppose, when prodded, I can imagine things that could turn me into a NIMBY. I have a pet theory that money attracts utility and repels negative utility, so if you have a cluster of people with a combined net worth of a billion dollars over here and a cluster of people with a combined net worth of a million dollars over there, there will be an equilibrium point 99.9% of the way from here to there where the forces cancel out and that will be the most probable place the toxic waste site will end up. So I've adopted the view that some things don't belong in anyone's neighborhood. So if you have a negative utility thing that doesn't have to exist, better to avoid creating it than having a push-of-war (opposite of tug-of-war) between neighborhoods. But if the something is something that has to exist because the first world way of life would be impossible without it or something, do site selection by random drawing, with a strict policy of no do-overs. While competition may be the only known antidote to error, randomization is the only possible antidote to bias. And all the resources put into NIMBY litigation, counter-NIMBY public relations, etc., could in theory be put into something else (since randomization, if done right, means these efforts have zero effect), or at least the savings from not doing that stuff could be pocketed.

Congratulations, and best of luck in your new home!

impudent strumpet said...

OMG, I could never flip real estate - this was way too difficult and stressful for me, and I now have to live here forever because I can't ever do it again!

I actually never even thought about negative utility when thinking about nimbying - the nimbys in my neighbourhood tend to be people complaining about homes being built that aren't exactly like theirs.

Here is a representative example, where people are complaining about four-storey townhouses being build near their single-family homes - at a site that is directly across the street from highrise apartments and on a block which contains several four-storey lowrise apartments - for fear that the $500,000 two-bedroom townhouses will harm the property values of their million-dollar four-bedroom detached houses.

I guess it's a bizarre sign of privilege that my neighbourhood has such petty nimbys

Lorraine said...

Here's some data visualization re. repulsive forces between cash and negative utility: https://twitter.com/mayormcginn/status/809160343419129856