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Urban planning would be a lot easier if we could just get rid of all these obnoxious people who keep ruining everything.
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Aug 1, 2018 22:52
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Cugel the Clever posted:One thing that must be said about the YIMBY movement in its current form is that it is predominately leftist at its core, not libertarian. By empowering both public and private interests to construct more new homes where they're most needed, the housing crisis is diminished. By empowering renters against scummy landlords and taxing vacant homes at a higher rate, the housing crisis is diminished. Both construction and protection are necessary. While I agree fundamentally I think you are underestimating the leftist support for harmful NIMBY policy. No poo poo when you demolish somebody's old rent controlled building to put it new higher density housing stock, those people are going to have a hard time finding an equivalent place to live. Especially when new construction is being blocked by everybody else too. In a lot of ways its just as fygm as the single-family home owner who is terrified of declining property values wiping out his wealth. Almost everybody acknowledges you have to build more IN THEORY. It's just that everybody wants it to happen someone else. It's really hard to wrap our minds around the complex fundamental causes of things like housing shortages and rising rents. Really easy to just blame it on the Chinese and other nebulous foes.
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Aug 2, 2018 06:08
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luxury handset posted:the problem with this argument is that it assumes people are looking to cash out their homes eventually and downsize. a ton of old people want to die in their homes and keep the homes within the family - this makes the whole "property value" aspect of NIMBYism fall apart. this argument is also in opposition to the gentrification of homeowners - wouldn't people like to be displaced by a mechanism that causes their equity to balloon in value? also when you look at mechanisms like prop 13 in california (an extremely bad idea) it torpedoes the incentive people have to sell their homes, making californian homeowners more agnostic to the value of their home as compared to the immediate environmental conditions around their homes (traffic, crowds, air quality, view etc.) I don't think the argument assumes people are planning to downsize necessarily. Just having the option to sell is a big source of security for a lot of people, even if they don't plan on doing so. Anyway, I think the prevalence of articles like this on the subject of downsizing in retirement is evidence enough that a lot of people serious consider it. Not to mention younger people like yourself who hope to earn a profit after moving out of their starter home. Your point about opposing mechanisms that might increase equity is fair, however people tend to be risk averse, weighting the risk of losing assets one already has higher than the risk of forgoing the opportunity to profit. Also, I think it is wrong to conflate the motivations of the subburban homeowner NIMBY and the anti-gentrification activists. While I don't have hard evidence, in my experience, every anti-gentrification push I've seen has been driven by renters who don't profit from increased property values. Very frequently they involve people living in rent controlled housing as well, and if they are removed from them it may be impossible to find equivalent housing at the same price. Prop 13 and ancillary laws regarding the transfer of tax benefits to family screw with the incentives of selling property but don't reduce the absolute value of property. quote:i'm not saying that no NIMBYs ever cared about their property values, of course they do. but it's more complicated than that There's a reason inexpensive starter homes have "always" been on the fringe of development -- It's because building inexpensive dense infill is practically illegal in much of the United States. American sprawl is not natural, its just bad planning. Squalid fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 02:47
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Badger of Basra posted:This is really a chicken/egg issue. No matter how amazing your transit system is, it’s still not going to have good ridership if no one is allowed to live near the lines. But if you upzone to allow that, people say the infrastructure can’t handle it. Also while I won't speak to San Diego's particular situation, many places in the US routinely overbuild road and parking capacity pretty much for no reason. Nevertheless talk about putting in a dedicated bus or bike lane in and local businesses will get up in arms about theoretical declines in traffic due to traffic or loss of parking, even though these infrastructure improvements are almost always good for local business. It's just hard to convince people of that.
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Aug 3, 2018 02:57
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donoteat posted:hello i made this AMA Your videos are good dogg.
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Aug 3, 2018 03:23
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luxury handset posted:haha nope, my hope here is to keep this property in good repair until my child is done with public education. based on location alone i'm guaranteed to at least break even if i reenter the housing market in the 2030s Your home doesn't have to appreciate for it to be a major store of value. For many Americans who have no other savings it may be their own store of equity. The effect of homes as equity on the political behavior of populations has been well studied in the economic literature, for example in the 2005 book The Homevoter Hypothesis, by William A. Fischel. The unreliability of real estate as an asset may contribute to risk averse. Protecting the value of real estimate is specifically cited as a reason to enforce zoning regulations by many activists. To quote from a paper on the effects of land use controls in Houston: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/Kiarie_nonzoning_Houston_1996.pdf [quote] Mixon [ed: A local pro-zoning proponent] told me that "zoning is 95% for providing protection for residents in residential neighborhoods" (Interview with John Mixon, December 12, 1995). Zoning protects worthwhile current investments. A zoning ordinance should protect existing viable and valuable single-family neighborhoods inside the city from inappropriate and destructive adjacent uses. Mixon says that "zoning stabilizes value and protects investments; it does not increase price." He believes that zoned land in Houston commands a higher price because protected land is scarce and in demand. [quote] This quote is provided to highlight the importance placed on the value of property and how it effects people's decision making in local politics. The reason I think the motivations of NIMBYs is worth considering is because bad regulations are not accidents. They are generally enacted for logical, if often selfish and shortsighted, reasons. The real reasons are often not those most loudly trumpeted. That means fixing the problem requires changing the underlying incentives driving bad decision making, rather than constantly trying to tack against overwhelming headwinds. I'm not personally involved with any anti-gentrification folks now but most of my experience and media I see on the subject comes from urban California and big eastern cities, though that may just be a product of media coverage bias. edit: apathetic poster? Is that you? You're not going to start posting about Atlanta now are you 
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Aug 3, 2018 16:26
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" is as frequently a polemic thrown at boomer suburbanites than a useful description of people's behavior. which, it is a very useful polemic at times, but not as an explanatory tool
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luxury handset posted:i'm not sure what you think i'm trying to argue but it definitely is not "people don't care about their property values". certainly some do, but not enough for it to be a button you can push to explain NIMBYism Specifically I am saying this quote:this makes the whole "property value" aspect of NIMBYism fall apart. Is false and you are not correctly analyzing the incentives that explain much of NIMBY behavior. It obviously doesn’t explain all policy but it explains a lot.
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Aug 3, 2018 19:37
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Cicero posted:I dunno where you've been reading urbanist opinions but I haven't really seen this. Like, they're certainly okay with skyscrapers and want them in certain areas, but they also want medium-density buildings (spread throughout a larger area) as much if not more. This is kind of my impression too. I don't recall reading anyone getting excited about skyscrapers recently.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:02
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Insanite posted:Thinking of here as an example, I don't think that allowing higher construction across the board without some regional coordination would be great for us. Which is kind of the exact problem. As long as you and everyone else are just looking out for themselves the result will bad decisions for society as a whole. You might even be right, but that doesn't get you out of the prisoner's dilemma.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:54
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Insanite posted:I guess I wouldn't call "resisting capital turning every inch of my little city into a smart investment vehicle" a bad decision. Presuming your city is in the United States it is already that. Cicero posted:He's right though that regional coordination is the answer here. Transportation and housing should both be decided primarily at the region/metro area level. It's close enough to take local concerns into account, while avoiding most of the problem of "some other city/neighborhood take the growth". That's the point of the reference to the prisoner's dilemma. In this analogy the local governments are the prisoners, and the way out of the dilemma is regional coordination. Insanite might be right that blocking local development is a good decision for himself. However if everyone makes that same decision simultaneously the result is bad for everyone. Anyone unilaterally trying to change course will end up bearing the costs for the selfish and self interested. We all benefit from development. It's just we'd prefer that all the related costs be borne by somebody else. Unless we can force everyone to share the burden, its just natural that people are going to try and free ride or push the burden onto people who can't defend themselves.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:12
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Insanite posted:So, a bill repealing a ban on rent control is up for debate in my home state. it's pretty much guaranteed to reduce the market's ability to supply housing. Of course if the state steps up and fills that hole its not a problem. Alternatively if you don't want the state to be buying or building housing, you could achieve the same effect as rent control by providing a cash housing subsidy to working class renters. This would provide affordable housing without disincentivizing the provision of private rentals. Of course doing things requires money. Rent control gives you free benefits today in exchange for screwing your children. If you hate your children and want them to live far away rent control might work for you.
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Apr 6, 2019 05:09
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ReidRansom posted:Some recent talk about golf and how much it sucks and how a lot of golf course communities are dying because their game is expensive and sucks and no one under 70 wants to play it in numbers to keep all those places afloat in another thread got me thinking, are there any examples anywhere of these places being turned into European style allotment farms? I saw some mention of some developer or another wanting to do something along those lines to a failed course, but it was in Arizona or some other hot deserty place entirely unsuited to farming pretty much anything. It feels like a pretty solid idea, though. I know urban farming has taken off in some rust belt cities, but could suburban farming also work? Turn the course into farming plots, maybe set aside some space for small scale livestock or dairy, clubhouse becomes workshops and crafting spaces, you could hold regular trading markets for people to share their stuff; I think it could work and might actually be something that in some places could actually get some younger folk interested in living somewhere they otherwise might not consider. I don’t know how much point there would be in that since most of the houses in neighborhoods with golf courses will also have yards large enough for their own gardens. In America we usually call an allotment farm community gardens, they are not uncommon but given average lot sizes in North America they aren’t a necessity for most people who just wants a few herbs and tomatoes. If golf’s popularity continues to decline I expect a lot of these will be converted to various other uses, no point spending money on maintenance if nobody wants to play. Also I’m not sure what a “trading market” is but I suspect it will be somewhat analogous to the American ‘yard sale’ when you put your junk out in front of the house and sell stuff you don’t need for a few pennies on the dollar. You don’t normally trade stuff for stuff as the idea is generally to reduce clutter, but you could.
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Apr 8, 2019 19:01
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luxury handset posted:radical upzoning seems like a nice general solution but it's a somewhat simple idea which people like to apply as a blanket solution to all ills. it's also oddly libertarian which a lot of demsoc YIMBY types are in denial about, if only government was out of the picture then the free market would solve our problems (the free market IS the problem) When I look at how this conversation plays out in public it strikes me that people really, really, don't want to talk about any changes that might involve spending money. Rent control and upzoning are both proposed "solutions" that don't require the government to raise taxes, and I think that's why so much of the debate revolves around those two changes. They are also both simple concepts and easy to grasp, whereas the minutiae of local tax policy is not. Unfortunately it's really hard to see anyway out of this pit we've dug that doesn't involve spending money somewhere. I have no idea how to make that argument politically, but there's clearly no one quick fix. At least cities are willing to spending money on public transit again. Even Phoenix is building out rail.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:15
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luxury handset posted:i completely agree. upzoning is a solution which is within the grasp of every local planning agency and it requires little political capital and practically no funding. however, if quick solutions performed via ordinance at the local level were capable of fixing our housing mess, then it would be fixed already. raising taxes is a hugely difficult fight, and even people who are in support of general tax increases recognize that incorporating that into fixes is a death sentence for policy proposals Honestly I don't see any real systemic solutions appearing in the near future, because they are not in the interests of the centers of power. However the housing crisis in places like California is now being pushed to such an extreme, in the next decade it almost seems like they must do something, the status quo is just unsustainable. I also don't like portraying rent control as contributing to a large solution, because systemically, it is guaranteed to make the housing crisis worse in the future. Whether or not you think the market is a the problem, it is also fundamentally how the vast majority of housing is provided in America. Rent control decreases the profit from rentals. Regardless of what you think about the morality of capitalism, or land lords, when you decrease profit in an industry, the result will be decreased investment in housing. The result is inevitably worse and less housing in the future. Rent control HAS to be paired with funding to compensate for the lost private investment, or else it will worsen the housing crisis. A rent subsidy could have a similar beneficial effect on renters as rent control, without locking people into a single apartment they can never afford to leave. That of course, would require spending money. So it might as well be a pipe dream.
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Jun 12, 2019 18:03
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showbiz_liz posted:Couldn't this also result in a situation like what's happened with college prices, where the easy availability of student loans wound up massively increasing the cost of tuition? I'd worry that widespread rent subsidies would ultimately just make rent more expensive across the board. Yeah, I think problems like this could appear if a policy is implemented badly. I'm really just spit-balling ideas here. My main point though is that a lot of the time we refuse to talk and think about the systemic roots of these problems. People see a policy like rent control as means to reduce housing costs for free -- but it is not free. It's just that the cost of rent reductions today is reduced investment and development. It takes years for the results to manifest, but they inevitably will, in the form of shortages and lower quality housing stock. If you want to ameliorate these issues, you have to make up that reduction in private investment from somewhere else. Instead we have people deny that there is even a problem in the first place. People that deny there is even a housing shortage in places like California in the first place, or who claim that supply doesn't matter. Or they have hair-brained schemes that have no hope of addressing the underlying issues, like redistributing vacant apartments. One off policies like that might add supply this year, but what are you going to do next year? There's a deep unwillingness even just to acknowledge the full scale of the problem. I am not a free-market fundamentalist. I don't care at all if services are provisioned through the state or market. I am stunned though at the way so many people just refuse to acknowledge what seems like basic common sense. Just breaking the market isn't going to supply housing, you need to have an alternative.
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Jun 13, 2019 04:15
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Cicero posted:Couple of interesting links for y'all. I heard an interview with a doctor on the radio a few weeks ago about walkable neighborhoods being associated with lower rates of disease, so that new study doesn't surprise me. Also shocker: building housing lowers rents  It's bizarre how many people refuse to believe that. Someone was telling me not long ago that he didn't believe there was a housing shortage in San Francisco because he could see new residential construction in his neighborhood. It was the housing equivalent of global warming isn't real because it's cold outside. I don't understand how people can be like that.
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Jul 19, 2019 03:18
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nrook posted:I’ve heard the theory before that a major cause of gentrification is cities only allowing apartment buildings to be built in poor areas, not rich ones. The idea is that if building is only possible in historically poor areas, new development will be concentrated in those areas; since people like living in new buildings, rent will go up, and people already living in the neighborhood will find it expensive to stay. I recall hearing it before and it makes intuitive sense. The one complication is that I'm not sure gentrification in the poor neighborhood will be less acute in a scenario where there is no upzoning, as in that case the supply shortage will be even more acute. We'll have to check back in on this issue in five to ten years when we can assess the impact of the state and city wide rezoning in Oregon and Seattle. I'm hopeful this is the start of a trend.
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Jul 19, 2019 03:46
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luxury handset posted:nah. there's a complicating factor here which is that wealthier people are more likely to live in historic preservation districts, aka super old housing which is special in some way and so can't be torn down. but otherwise apartments are "allowed" equally in rich and poor areas. it's just that, if you want to buy a dozen rich people homes, you have to fork over a shitload of money to buy out the land. if you want to buy a dozen poor people homes, either the landlords are willing to pay if the price is more than adequate, or you have generally older homeowners who are amenable to a big cash payout as their retirement fund, if not a half dozen heirs of which one is likely to want to cash out. basically you profit more from building in poorer areas to house rich folk because the margin is much higher as it is way way cheaper to get the land and tear down the houses I think there's a bit of chicken and egg thing at play here. Rich people are better at getting their neighborhoods classified as historic preservation districts, and thereby preempting development. Developers aren't leveraging the government to rezone, but rather wealthy areas are able to leverage their existing political influence to prevent change. I haven't seen any academic discussion on this issue, but I feel like local feedback can have a big influence on citywide zoning changes. https://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-zoning-density.html quote:Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York in 2002, and in less than six years his zoning reform campaign rezoned 6,000 city blocks. The process was uneven. Low-income neighborhoods such as Long Island City in Queens and black and Latino neighborhoods in Brooklyn were up-zoned to allow greater density. Developers didn’t drive this process -- policy did. The intention, Lind says, “was to incentivize demand.” Meanwhile, affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and Richmond Hill in Queens were down-zoned. The net result: High-rise luxury apartments went up in Long Island City; market-rate condominiums replaced older single-family homes in overwhelmingly black Bedford-Stuyvesant; and affluent Park Slope and Richmond Hill remained virtually untouched. quote:When Seattle settled on its “Grand Bargain” for up-zoning, it may have fallen into the same trap New York City did more than a decade ago. Only 6 percent of the exclusive single-family zones in the city will be up-zoned. Much of the up-zoning will occur along Seattle’s Link light rail line and in what have long been low-income neighborhoods. Like New York before it, Seattle’s decision could unleash the brute force of the market on its low-income residents, while sparing many of its more affluent residents from the impacts of up-zoning. The placement of public transit are not independent of local political lobbying. Many rich neighborhoods have used their influence to change transit routes and this feeds back into zoning. There's also the unique weirdness of Houston. Houston might not have normal zoning, but most of the affluent suburban neighborhoods have private restrictive covenants which basically amount to single use zoning. The result is that development gets concentrated in poorer neighborhoods. I don't know how strong these effects are relative to other motives, but I'm not sure we can ignore them. Blanket state and citywide changes appeal to me in part because they completely eliminate this as an issue. Pairing upzoning with transit development is a pretty sensible policy. It's annoying that even after public transit is constructed some areas are able to prevent upzoning. Here's a picture of transit stations in the San Fernando Valley colored by neighborhood income and density:  The low density areas would have been forced to upzone by the recently killed SB50. Low density housing around mass transit stations. It's so stupid. Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jul 20, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 00:54
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Part of it is the problem is so big and complicated its difficult to talk about the big picture, so instead we focus on little details where we feel like we have influence. Or there are things we all agree on and therefore there's no point arguing about them. I think probably everybody who posts in this thread is already going to support expanding public transit and bikes and stuff, so there's nothing to say about it. However the debate over zoning, rent control, and housing development cuts across party lines, which means we have more to say to each other on the subject.
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Jul 20, 2019 01:11
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Bubbacub posted:Elderly homeowners in my area are throwing a shitfit over an upzoning proposal. Affordable developers are allowed to build an extra floor, and up to 3 extra floors near a transit hub. Oh now you've done it. You've tipped off Insanite and now the councilors are going to have to listen to him yell about the loss of neighborhood character along with the rest of the nimby peanut gallery at the next planning meeting.
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Aug 5, 2019 02:47
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Weirdly Phoenix, which is one of the most insanely suburban old chuddy cities ever, seems like one of the places now most determined to keep expanding light rail networks and public transit. I think it's because the city is now completely hemmed in by mountains and Indian reservations, so its run out of room to sprawl and has no choice but to densify. Converting traffic lanes to other uses causes so many people to freak out, even though the city has the most insanely overbuilt roads I've ever seen.
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Aug 16, 2019 19:55
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Badger of Basra posted:https://twitter.com/jboehm_NEWS/status/1166546655778234368?s=20 good and cool. I think there have been several similar anti-transit propositions that have been forced in the last decade, but they all got defeated? People of Phoenix surprisingly not dumb
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Aug 28, 2019 05:14
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This vote also inspired me to look again at what Phoenix is doing planning wise and there was something. . . odd about their proposed transit expansion plans. Looking at it I gradually realized what felt off -- there's no central hub. This is a transit system designed for the modern polycentric sprawly city. Looks more like a grid than a spiderweb. Hope we'll get to see how it works once complete and the annual Koch funded vote to kill it won't eventually succeed! Looking at the existing system too I also noticed more than 50% of the area around the train line is still parking area. Doesn't seem like the city has relaxed parking minimums? I wonder if there's any plan to eventually change that. I don't know how public transit can ever be truly competitive with the car if they don't permit density to increase.  It's hard to see in this Google Maps 3D screecap but the train line is in the middle of the street. SRSLY Phoenix why even build a train if you're going to put it someplace that looks like that
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Aug 28, 2019 23:27
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okay that makes sense. Also looking at some other areas on google maps I noticed their images of Phoenix are from 2017, and there's definitely been an increase in density along parts of the network since then. It's just been concentrated in downtown and the area north. It's just spreading slooowly. Years ago I read the book Cities in the Wilderness by Bruce Babbitt, who was governor of Arizona from 1978 – 1987. The book is about land use and natural preservation in the USA, and reading it I was surprised that even back in the eighties Babbitt was already grappling with Phoenix's sprawl and plotting how to densify the city. Unfortunately I've forgotten all of the details, but that kind of long term planning probably explains why the city has been so willing to fight for public transit expansion.
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Aug 29, 2019 00:22
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hifi posted:That map has got to be like 10 years out of date, I've never heard of half of those future routes and the south phoenix route we just voted on is the closest thing to getting built, IIRC. glendale voted down extending the light rail to their entertainment complex: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/glendale/2017/10/23/glendale-city-council-kills-plans-downtown-light-rail/781004001/ That map is almost exactly 10 years old, but I think it still reflects the long term aspirations of Phoenix planners. Notice that the more recent map is still just filling out the same planned routes on the old map. Nobody's building those lines through Scottsdale or out to Peoria in the next decade, but in the broad strokes they represent how things could look in the far future. That Gendale line might be dead for now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the issue revisited unless uber or driverless cars somehow magic away Phoenix traffic. I think the Tempe streetcar highlights the polycentric vision of the future of Phoenix held by planners. A little loop around one of the edge cities. . . Still yeah you're basically right downtown will still be the hub of the system for the foreseable future, or at least it will be in 2023 when there's finally more than one line
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Aug 29, 2019 01:09
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luxury handset posted:in my extremely personal, controversial, and not to be extrapolated beyond the musings of a single person opinion - i think that leftists discovered housing policy and urban planning through yimby memes for new urbanist teens sometime around 2014 and we have not yet collectively progressed beyond the nuance level of sloganeering. but again, that's just me, and my very individual opinion I think this is part of a lot of the problem. Especially in a state like California, but in every subburb everywhere in the United States, there's a lot of people who maybe identify as left or liberal but it's really a shallow identity thing for them -- while they actually have a petit bourgeoisie class interest. As a result they end up supporting a bunch of cynical and self-serving policy but go through bizarre contortions to try and justify it through a leftwing lens. and this is my own controversial musing -- but I've noticed in this kind of discussion there can be an unstated conflict in perspective that leads to disagreement. From the perspective of reducing the rate of increase of housing prices it seems pretty much impossible to make a coherent argument against ADUs. Judging by Boot and Rally's posts he doesn't even really try to argue they are bad per se, I guess he's mainly just saying they aren't enough. So what explains his hostility to the idea in the California thread? It seems like he primarily looks at the housing crisis from the perspective of a political contest, rather than as a technical and logistical problem. The protests in the other thread tend to be along the lines of ADUs are "not a substitute for reasonable housing policy," or that ADUs expand "the renter-landlord dynamic." Alternatively zoning for ADUs suggests that "the very wealthiest are the ones who need more housing resources in California," and "it lets people delay solving the actual problem." The overriding concern seems to be less with whether changing laws to allow ADUs will have a positive effect, but that this change will somehow lend political advantage to the political enemies, or that it will be used as an excuse to avoid other necessary changes, or that it will be someone else who benefits. Rather than asking "does this provide more housing or reduce the rate of increase in rents," they ask "Will this give lead to us having more political power and authority?" It's not that such questions don't matter, but to some extent you have to be able to prioritize solving real problems on the ground. I've also noticed public discussions of housing issues seem similar to those about healthcare. People are extremely risk averse and fear change more than even the terrible status quo. Obama had to reassure people they could keep their terrible private insurance when he was campaigning for the Affordable Healthcare Act because people were terrified of losing what little healthcare they had. Likewise, even small changes to zoning regs like permitting ADUs inspire that same kind of irrational fear which makes people act crazy. There's a powerful normalcy bias at work
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Sep 30, 2019 05:11
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Boot and Rally posted:There is a lot of rambling in your post, but two things: I mean its hard for me to extrapolate exactly what you think is the consequence of that. It is not surprising permitting ADUs increases the cost of ownership because it takes housing that had been for one household and converts it into housing for two. Since more use can be had from parcels it makes sense that they would have higher value. It doesn’t actually follow from this that the cost average or median people will pay for housing will necessarily increase. More likely it will decrease as renters are able to enter neighborhoods from which they were previously excluded. So that data and the theory in the papers you looked at sound to me like exactly what we would expect to see. If I have misread your position I am sorry. I was trying to generalize to more posters than just you so maybe calling you out specifically was a mistake, I just like giving people the ability to respond. I guess your specific complaint is that you “see ADUs as predatory rent seeking at worst, and pointless at best.“ You are mistaken that someone opposing ADUs because it is rent seeking won’t find themselves working with wealthy NIMBYs however, because they absolutely will join you in this fight. If you’re afraid of predatory behavior, it’s probably best to address it directly, rather than instead going for a blanket ban on something that is otherwise good.
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Sep 30, 2019 07:25
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Boot and Rally posted:No, it is hard for you to extrapolate what any of the consequences of it are. You're assuming it will do good and accusing people of some horse shoe theory bullshit when they disagree. Alright, well I think you should excuse me for being confused about your position as you're sending out confusing signals. Like if you are not opposed to ADUs its a little confusing why you felt you had to come to this thread and defend the honor of the NIMBYs in the California thread who really are opposed to ADUs. You also keep using loaded language that suggests you are opposed to ADUs, for example when you said you "assume this is a rent grab" regarding this zoning reform. But whatever, as long as you aren't one of the people actively fighting these reforms I guess I have no issue with you. Just going by the literature you've cited and the points you have raised in this thread I think there's enough evidence to support it as a sensible, if insufficient policy change. For example converting illegal ADUs into legal ones is clearly a net positive. You then provided theoretical research that we should expect positive effects from ADUs, so that's another point in their favor. You provided another paper which suggested they can increase property values locally. That can be good or bad depending on perspective, but we also have to ask what is the global effect? Even if there is a local property price increase, we might expect additional supply to cause a global decrease. You keep providing reasons to support ADU development but then use very negative adjectives to describe it, which is confusing.
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Sep 30, 2019 17:54
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Skimming that paper it seems highly supportive of permitting ADU development.
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Sep 30, 2019 18:14
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Boot and Rally posted:It does support permitting ADU development. It does not support the apparent consensus of the people currently engaged in this thread that it will lower rental prices. That conclusion assumes facts not in evidence. Because of the author's support, I assume that if such evidence was available they surely would have mentioned it. okay reading this this evening and it seems to absolutely provide evidence that ADUs can lower rents via increasing the supply of affordable units. It is based on economic models rather than empirical work but idk why you think it says anything different: quote:This evidence supports, therefore, a view of secondary units as likelier to provide rental quote:The benefits to affordability and, by extension, to place vitality provided by these (mostly Also because California barely even builds 50% of the housing necessary to meet demand, even really good effective policy is unlikely to actually lower housing prices. A policy that added an extra 25% of affordable housing supply, which would be a huge effect, would simply slow the rate of increase. Realistically no single policy is actually going to be able to reduce housing prices in this context. You need to implement lots of different policies, each of which makes some small contribution. The research on ADUs you have posted seems pretty clear that it is a good way to provide more housing that is more affordable.
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Oct 1, 2019 00:56
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Boot and Rally posted:None of those are evidence. Notice it uses “assume” and “likelier”. You’re also not posting the caveats that mass transit is required, the NIMBYs are responsible for actually building it, that traditionally cheap cottages go to family and that previous implementations have been very, very racist because of the aforementioned NIMBYs. Pop the crys if you want, I’m not celebrating a few studios for Stanford students that pay down someone’s mortgage for them. you are being really weird about what constitutes evidence. I'm not posting the caveats because this is a work of theoretical economic modelling. Obviously there are tons of caveats. I don't know why I have to say this since you have clearly read the paper? In favor of the idea ADUs increase the supply of housing and provide more affordable housing we have several decades of theory from urban planners, developers, and economists. Then we also have specific economic models from California which strongly support the idea permitting ADUs will increase the supply of affordable units. What is missing: hard empirical verification of the theory. That would be nice, but in the real world we rarely have that in economics. That's why people put so much effort into models and theory in the first place. Also Boot and Rally, you keep contradicting yourself itt. Contrary to everything said by the economists and urban planners (who you yourself have posted itt!), you insist "Not that prices will go down, but not enough, but that nothing at all will happen," to rental prices following the permitting of ADUs. However then you go onto say that this change might have the effect of "one moderately sized apartment building opened," presumably per neighborhood or w/e. If this were true though then the basic tenet of supply and demand suggest that it WOULD have at least a small effect. Then you go on to suggest that it might provide more affordable housing, just that the problem is it will go to the wrong people. It actually is kind of lovely of you not to care about affordable housing for students. The cost of housing is a huge barrier to higher education for low income families, one that is all too often insurmountable. You say you aren't opposed to permitting ADUs but you keep trying paint them in a bad light. They're lived in by the wrong people. Also they're racist. Also it's just rent seeking. If you aren't opposed to ADUs, you sound an awful lot like someone who is. Can you at least admit permitting them is a positive reform, even if it won't reduce rents and solve the housing crisis?
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Oct 1, 2019 03:19
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I appreciate the effort you put into this post and your points are good and interesting. However I don't think anyone believes the magnitude of the effect of this policy change will be large. It's just one small engagement in the battle against single use zoning. The fact that such a small reform engenders such bitter and nonsensical resistance is just symptomatic of the hosed up way Americans think about urbanism.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:05
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Your point about not shifting the fundamentals is valid, but I don't think this is a case of activists getting distracted and wasting effort on side issues. This line of discussion was originally inspired by this article regarding some bills making their way to Governor Newsom's desk. During the spring there was a push for much more wide reaching reforms which ended up failing amidst a horrible embarrassing spectacle. These bills are the consolation prize. Maybe next year we can get something more impactful. You can't let bad faith arguments dictate policy, regardless of what you do the NIMBYs will always come up with some other excuse to stall reform. Still, each blow against exclusionary zoning does matter, as does every bike line. The bike network is built one lane at a time after all. If you keep saying "it doesn't really matter" each you put down another piece of the puzzle after a while you start looking a bit silly. There seems to be a certain kind of opposition to the idea from the left that has nothing to do with the scale of effect on housing prices. Instead people like are afraid these kinds of policy changes will lead to "rent seeking" or "expanding the renter-landlord dynamic." I think this is an example of how some people have let their view of housing policy be distorted by concerns other than the purely technocratic interest of providing affordable housing. I mean maybe there's some higher political strategy going on, but it just seems bizarre to me to let these concerns get in the way of sensible if small moves in a good direction.
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Oct 1, 2019 22:06
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Insanite posted:You’re a filthy NIMBY unless you support giving families the choice of an endless series of twopenny hangovers. poors should have to commute 3+ hours a day or live in derelict vans by the river like god intended.
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Dec 31, 2019 17:28
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Insanite posted:Yes. These are the two sets of options that we should be satisfied with. in a lot of places that have banned ultra small and communal living spaces those are the only options for the working class! Out of sight out of mind, that's my motto.
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Jan 1, 2020 00:55
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Doc Hawkins posted:it's a lever for displacement and gentrification you do in fact, have to do something though. probably you have to do a lot of individually small somethings. Hopefully when you add them all up, it will amount to a real substantial change. also i'm the high density housing these people think can be magicked into existence without effecting anyone's lives or demolishing existing stock
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Jan 30, 2020 21:01
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yeah solaris is making a good point. In a world where even this little, incremental piece of legislation cannot pass, what kind of fantastical circumstances do posters like Doc Hawkins imaging occurring in which Californians vote for the government to eminent domain the suburbs and replace it all with housing projects? Like, here you are cheering all the insane policies that have led to massive, spiraling housing shortages. Tell me, once all of the state's renters have been exiled by spiraling prices and all that's left are the sons of millionaires who have inherited houses bought in the seventies, who do you think is going to vote for tax increases to pay for mixed use housing? What exactly is the brilliant political plan that's actually going to get you the policies you want? Because right now you look like a bunch of useful idiots for all the rich right-wing assholes who can't wait for all of California's undesirables and working class to be driven from the state entirely edit: lol looking at the California thread these are the people Doc Hawkins has chosen to ally theirself with: https://twitter.com/aceckhouse/status/1222749067635130368?s=21 california saddens me because i think there really are a bunch of people who sincerely want to help deal with rising housing costs, but unfortunately they are idiots who are just fundamentally wrong about the nature of the problem and the way politics work. Squalid fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 23:34
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luxury handset posted:how are you going to add more housing units without increasing development? i think he's saying that you would, and that this would decrease displacement from the city people live in. That is even if people have to change apartments, they are better able to stay in the same general area long term than if development is broadly discouraged. I think that makes intuitive sense, although I haven't seen the supporting research.
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Jan 31, 2020 00:12
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Doc Hawkins posted:I don't think I'm especially useful, but the people who I trust on housing policy are not idiots. The answer was and remains public housing, and there are bills, and organizations, and candidates behind which you can put the force of your justifiable anger. I choose to believe we can build power beyond allying with one bourgeois faction against another, and I think one of the general political lessons we can take from the century so far is that it's not smart to tell people to vote for something that sucks because not having it is even worse. I don't know why you'd think history supports any of this. You sound like you'd have opposed the new deal because Roosevelt was seizing private businesses, or Medicare because it wasn't universal. Like I can think of literally nothing about modern california politics that would make me think you can get anywhere at all without allying with bourgeois factions like individual home owners. Like what kind of timeline do you think you're going to overcome these people on? Ten years? Fifty? That the morons opposing SB50 did in fact have to work together with those exact bourgeois interest groups to kill the bill is pretty strong evidence that there is no choice. Choose to believe something that's more than just a fantasy.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:40
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MickeyFinn posted:On parking minimums: bad, abolish them immediately. it's worth pointing out that the housing crisis in places like California is so bad, and so many people looking for housing are so cost constrained, that in the present environment they literally have no options. In this context any changes that bring down housing costs are likely to benefit them, since cost is a major barrier to housing for so many. Also its worth pointing out that the poorest people who are most likely to be cost constrained are also those who are least likely to have a car, and therefore least likely to be impacted by reduced parking availability. Also, while you're obviously right about funding public transit, I think you are underestimating the significance of other travel modes which are severely negatively impacted by parking. I'm talking about walking and biking. Replacing urban area devoted to parking with more useful buildings improves these transport modes a lot even without increased spending on their infrastructure. Of course once again it's worth restating that everywhere has its own problems, and there aren't one size fits all solutions. Obviously every modern city needs to accommodate cars, there's no escaping them. The important thing is that we all agree that we should prioritize developing alternatives.
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Feb 1, 2020 21:48
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