Urban Planning Megathread - I'll NIMBY in your YIMBY

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NIMBY?
	NIMBY
	YIMBY
	I can't afford my medicine.

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I was asked to crosspost this here from the retail thread. I want to emphasize that some of the research this is based on is shaky - I am not confident about most of the "blue outline" properties in question. Hopefully this weird little deep dive is of interest.

Discendo Vox posted:

I think I'm underselling this. Let me try to give the issue some scale; let's talk about Seacoast. The below is the result of some googling I did last year when someone asked me to try to identify people who were backing confederate apologist groups in SC.

Seacoast is a megachurch located in South Carolina. It's popular across all income levels and races, but principally caters to the comfortably wealthy and white. It forms a major locus of public, political and social thought among Charleston voters, particularly politically influential exurbs. Republican Senator Tim Scott is a prominent member of the church. It is fundamentalist and very conservative, but they don't burn crosses - they inspire brand loyalty. (This whole vein of research was a dead end, btw- there was no sign that the church was associated with the revanchist group I was looking at).

Here's a picture of their original "campus". It seats about 1,300, but they're expanding it to seat 2,400 soon- and they have a number of other campuses and a tele-church program.

For scale, that footprint is about 2000 feet long, according to google maps. There's a main street to the immediate north, and a weird side entrance in the west, going...somewhere, from the parking area. What is that? Well...

All of the yellow areas are areas I know are currently owned or under negotiation for purchase by Seacoast.

That street leading out of their parking lot? It goes directly to a shopping center, with an immediately joining apartment complex behind it to the South. The shopping center is owned by Seacoast, managed through an entity called "American Asset Corporation". The apartment complex (which has only exits going past the church and shopping center) is also owned by Seacoast.

On the north side of the main road, there is a more disjointed area of commercial offices, law firms, and fast food joints. A Chik-fil-a just moved in (of course). Seacoast owns all of that property too, aside from some small detached dwellings owned by African American families. These families have lived in the area since before Seacoast existed, and are now hoping to sell their properties to the church for enough to greatly improve their situation. Seacoast is beginning to close the properties in this northern section; they are consolidating them into a new shopping center.

You may have noticed a yellow line going out of the map to the northwest. What is that? Well...

That triangle in yellow is a residential development connected to all the neighboring properties by a narrow road, called "Seacoast Parkway". You might be wondering why it's called that. Seacoast used to own it, and were going to build a 6,000 capacity megachurch there, along with their own planned community with residential and commercial development. The local government blocked it (the whole thing has one narrow road in or out, which, well, it's an area that sees frequent, massive flooding- you do the math). Seacoast sold the real estate to another developer instead, who still built a neighborhood there. (there's another property at the northwest corner there I'm excluding for the moment).

You may have noticed the massive industrial looking-thing in the Southwest. Well...no, that's the port of Charleston. I don't think Seacoast owns that. But, well...

I believe Seacoast currently or previously has had controlling interests in all of the areas in blue. This includes most commercial properties serving the port. It also includes the residential properties, where I believe the church used to own the property, and now maintain control through an agreement with the developer that controls the HOA. This includes that real estate in the northwest corner, which is cut off from the rest of the area by floodplains and is connected by a single, two lane road that goes under the highway, in a flood zone, then loops through the rest of the office and commercial properties to connect to an escape route. The properties Seacoast has or currently holds It may also include the public and private schools and community center that are attached to the central north neighborhood, which is wealthy and has a heavy Seacoast attendee population.

I don't have public news coverage of these forms of control or purchase like I do the things in yellow, but it would explain the rate and form of land development in the area...over the course of at least 30 years, as part of a planned development and investment approach that would have occurred at the same time that Seacoast was formed. Seacoast has another, similar campus set up near the other major port in the Charleston area. This is probably not a coincidence.

All of this is to say that retail should always be understood partially in terms of real estate ownership, because that scale of institutional investment and control will gladly set up retail as a part of a much, much longer-term scheme. Seacoast and its owners are enthusiastic amateurs compared to actual, dedicated real estate developers.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2019 18:47

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 20:29

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

has MoCo MD gone in for much discussion here? They've written a fair amount of the book on growth management.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2019 06:46

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Solaris 2.0 posted:

Oh hello fellow Moco goon! I�m glad I discovered this thread as I�ve gotten pretty involved in local planning issues over the last year. Went to several planning forums, joined a local YIMBY group, transit group, and Sierra Club.

Did you go to the Vienna housing forum hosted by Hans Reimer? Some of the local DSA people were there, including Vaughn Stewart. A crazy lady got up, took the mic, and spent several
minutes yelling at all of us and accused us of wanting to turn Moco into Vienna (which I would very much welcome)

There are several goons in the region involved in these areas. We should form a book club- I just moved to rockville, and I have some (outdated) inside skinny on some things here.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 06:54

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

A lot depends on context, scaling and design with ADUs (like a lot of things). You gotta regulate them carefully to keep them from turning into, e.g., horrible unregulated airbnb slum strata, or being leveraged to justify worse sprawl development layouts versus other options. Imo ADUs are easier to justify as a densification step (with extremely detailed, significant accompanying regs) for specific previously developed residential areas. A general rule of thumb is if the developers are coming to your jurisdiction proposing something (including something that seems goodish like ADUs) it's because they think they have a way to screw you over with them. Since real estate moneymen are the original big bad supervillain moral evil in the US who are very, very good at undermining or perverting land use regulation, it also means you have to worry about the genuine intentions of "organic grassroots movements" promoting policy changes that seem good on their face.

None of this should be read as opposing the Moco ADU policy; to the degree that I've researched it, it seems excellent.

Solaris 2.0 posted:

A crazy lady got up, took the mic, and spent several minutes yelling at all of us and accused us of wanting to turn Moco into Vienna (which I would very much welcome)

Vienna....Maryland? I'd think that was what the NIMBYs would dream of, just look at those racial demographics!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Sep 29, 2019

# ¿ Sep 29, 2019 07:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bagheera posted:

Great thread. Long time lurker, first time poster.

This thread has really good ideas for city-, state-, and nation-wide solutions to housing issues. I've learned a lot from reading here.

Would I be permitted to narrow the focus to the individual? I'm about to move to a historic neighborhood that has gentrified in the last decade. I'd like to describe my situation, solicit advice on how I can be a good neighbor, and maybe help other people in my situation.

Is that the right thread for this? Or do we want to focus on higher-level issues?

This is as good a thread as any.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2019 07:23

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cicero posted:

"Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now, a thread": https://twitter.com/CascadianSolo/status/1204306278173958145

This thread's nonsense, most of these aren't illegal, and a bunch of them aren't permitted in new development because they're not sufficiently dense for urban zoning. The idea that commercial ground floor and residential upper is "illegal" is just...nuts. That is one of the most popular new development models (for good and ill under different circumstances). And bunch of these are actively sprawl contributors or --

oh wait.

quote:

Policy outcomes don't care about your intentions. Neoliberal. YIMBY. Market Environmentalist #TeamPete #TeamDelaney

Yeah that makes sense.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Dec 28, 2019

# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 16:51

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cicero posted:

Yeah they are, in most residential land (in the US). Even in many, perhaps most major cities, you're restricted to detached single family homes on big lots. Higher density dwellings are generally only then allowed on smaller areas of land within the city.

In saner countries like Germany or Japan, they don't have this kind of zoning anywhere in the entire country, IIRC. There's still different levels of density permitted, but the bottommost level still allows for stuff like townhomes and fourplexes and whatnot.

residential land != "most cities". and good god they're still not "illegal", they're restricted to specific places for zoning.

FISHMANPET posted:

Have you ever actually read a zoning code? And which of these are contributors to sprawl?

I am familiar with zoning codes, yes, well enough to know that there's more than one purpose or use to many of the features the account is describing, such as setbacks having purposes other than street shading. What he refers to as missing middle is also a problem when it's applied in places where higher density is more appropriate.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 22:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cugel the Clever posted:

What does this mean?

The tweet that was the basis for this convo begins with the categorical "Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now, a thread". The rejoinder from Cicero is about "most residential land", with a bunch of other qualifiers. "!=" is shorthand for "does not equal".

# ¿ Dec 29, 2019 00:03

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

You're defending a series of tweets that were factually wrong on several levels by reinterpreting them into something you want. Look at the account's affiliations. Is it really someone worth doing this over?

# ¿ Dec 29, 2019 14:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Planned democratic changes to congressional rules on funding are actually likely to produce greater support for state-level and interstate funded infra projects.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 05:55

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The City in History by Mumford.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2021 08:38

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I cannot help but notice that article is focused on the idea of doing away with environmental impact assessments and is written by a Republican economics policy specialist formerly of the tax foundation, on a site focused on him and a libertarian f trying to find ways to phrase deregulation arguments to sound neutrally beneficial.

Cicero posted:

I don't agree that the USPS sucks, but man basic things taking that long to approve is insane. This isn't a skyscraper, it's just one dude's house.

It is, in fact, insane, and you probably shouldn't take that man at his word, or his example as representative. Also plenty of DMVs are fine; Maryland, for instance, had a lovely DMV and they improved it. They did not improve it by reducing the regulation of cars or drivers.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 20, 2022

# ¿ Mar 20, 2022 17:47

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I just got off the phone with a retired city planner to discuss options for "redensification" in existing urban cores in response to the hollowing and aging of existing unused commercial space. His starting assumption, on the topic of rezoning such buildings for residential use, was that any refitting started with bulldozing the building completely, because commercial spaces, e.g. office buildings, are virtually never readily convertible to residential use. He also stated that any building more than 10 years old was close to a write-off for such a standing conversion because the existing infra in the building, particularly utility infra, would already all be either out of date or well into its useable life.

His view was that core redensification would happen, and would likely look similar to existing freestanding and gentrifying mixed use clusters, where parking and commercial occupy lower floors (coupled with public entities like libraries) and housing (including "moderate income", his words) would occupy the upper floors. This is really popular as a new development model for luxury apartments, but is less viable for mixed income dense housing where there isn't a strong zoning requirement. He pointed out that there were already modeled grant programs for this sort of purpose, including one that specifcially incentivized building elderly housing in higher levels of mixed use buildings, which was a major investment area for the Catholic church in the 1960s. These programs were all killed off by Nixon's consolidation into the state revenue block grant program. So that's how far we have to look back for prior federal solutions- but that's where some potential solutions lie. If I have time (and no one else does it) I'll try to find more details on what these programs entailed.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2022 00:40

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

SpaceCadetBob posted:

Not really sure where 10 years old being a writeoff is coming from. Mechanical components live pumps and motors might be pretty aged by 20 years, but the overall systems including piping ducting and wiring can be easily reused or refurbished going on 40 years.

Occupancy loads between traditional urban office space and modern residential space is actually relatively similar, so your overall building requirements for electricity, air, and water/sewer tend to be within capacity for the conversion without major new civil upgrades.

Im working pre-construction on a project to convert a large 80s office building into 400 apts and while it has some complications it will certainly be doable.

Because the asset age and cost of refurbishment reduces the relative benefit extracted from the conversion. edit: this may be influenced by the guy having done a lot of really specialized infra project work outside of city planning.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jun 18, 2022

# ¿ Jun 18, 2022 19:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Cugel the Clever posted:

Funny how it always seems that folks across the country using language like "right size" always find that the right size of their neighborhood is the current size (or smaller).

Another NIMBY phrase that I love to hate is "human-scale", which somehow always aligns with their preference. Ludicrous McMansion? Human-scale. Modest duplex? Oversized and oppressive. I've been annoyed, though, to see some YIMBYs embrace the term, just recast as their preference for mid-density, 6-story apartments. I couldn't care less about the size of a building, so long as it's creating homes where people want to live, but can't. In most of America, the 6-story will work just fine given our SFH sprawl, but there's no sense in preemptively giving ammunition to those seeking to reject more where it might be appropriate.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 15:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Something something insecure owner.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2023 21:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I can�t currently access the letter, but on whose behalf was it submitted?

# ¿ Aug 4, 2023 20:53

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Baronash posted:

I'm curious if anyone has run across any research paper or study or comprehensive plan that actually sets out to examine what it would take to retrofit an existing suburb for usable transit and walkability? It's pretty easy to find articles that speak about it in broad terms, or bring up some example of a particular neighborhood within a town that is uncharacteristically walkable, but I'd love to see an actual A-Z plan for a specific town that goes over how it could be done.

Montgomery County, Maryland, has a bunch of plans or plans in development that reflect these general goals. While the county is far from perfect, the relatively ringfenced multicounty planning entity (and the extremely unsual concentration of wealth, education and diverse cultures in the area) mean there's a lot more overt long-term development planning, and, generally, better planning, than in many other parts of the country.

Also they have more planning documents than any one person can read in a lifetime. Prepare to choke on literal thousands of pages.

https://montgomeryplanning.org/planning/communities/

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Aug 23, 2023

# ¿ Aug 23, 2023 02:37

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'd be interested to know more about the details of the environmental regs or effects being argued in this perverse way. It seems like something that could be preempted with careful standards design.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2023 01:53

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The specifics of the environmental review under contestation is what I'm interested in. From my review of the holding, the full buildout framing of the analysis is patently disingenuous, but the city should have performed any kind of rationale other than economic for the environmental impact (assuming the judge's characterization that the city didn't do so is correct, which I am not confident of).

At root, though, the MERA language (not the official code, but this appears up to date compared with it) might be the problem- I'm having trouble telling whether it could allow densification, because it seems to privilege any kind of individual enjoyment impairment claim against something like the aggregate climate or other benefits of densification. And, of course, the densification benefits are harder to argue when you have to deal with the ludicrous full buildout scenario.

edit: okay gently caress this judge, the litanization on page 10 is making it obvious they're not serious.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Sep 7, 2023

# ¿ Sep 7, 2023 03:50

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I am curious about the stacked infra aspect of Japanese construction, and particularly how it squares with the other policy I've heard is practiced in Japan; building lifespans that end in rebuild.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2023 03:37

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 20:29

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

A potentially useful article on the press, court and lobbying playbook used by the landlord and real estate lobby.

Pity the Landlord

by Charlie Dulik for the (excellent) Baffler

quote:

Lincoln Eccles is feeling the pressure. For the last few years, the Jamaican-born landlord has struggled to operate the fourteen-unit rent-stabilized building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn his family has owned since the 1950s. He is, by most metrics, a �small landlord,� though as with many small landlords, the diminutive is complicated: he �owes [his] break� to his uncle, reportedly the owner of more than one hundred multi-unit properties. For a single-building owner, Eccles�s tribulations have received an inordinate amount of press. Since 2020, he has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, CBS, NY1 Spectrum News, Yahoo, CNN, Curbed, Tablet, Crain�s, and more. He is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, incredibly active on Twitter.

Eccles�s complaints are copy-paste: onerous rent regulation and anti-eviction protections jeopardize his ability to do basic building maintenance, encourage malfeasance from delinquent tenants, and threaten his ability to scrape out a living. All unsurprising opinions for a landlord to hold�but Eccles takes it a step further. Oppression of landlords, he argues, is a racial justice issue.

As Eccles sees it, any regulation designed to protect tenants amounts to a continuation of the country�s long history of racist housing policies. Rent stabilization is �the new redlining�; fining landlords for poor building conditions in their buildings is racist, anti-Semitic, and unfairly targets �immigrant landlords of color.� He has favorably equated the defeat of new tenant protections to the Supreme Court striking down racial gerrymandering in Alabama. In 2021, Eccles tweeted that politicians seeking to halt evictions during the pandemic were �saying Black Property Owners� lives, particularly those of Black women and children, don�t matter.�

Eccles�s widespread media presence is no accident. In 2019, he became one of the public faces of Responsible Rent Reform�a faux-grassroots group backed by the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA), the largest landlord organization in the state�which has set about weaponizing the stories of a dozen �mom-and-pop� landlords to undermine rent regulations. Eccles, in other words, is not an everyman plucked by the papers by chance; for years, he has been part of a landlord lobby that has become increasingly organized in response to tenant protections passed by the New York State legislature in 2019 and to the economic precarity of the pandemic. His social justice-inflected grievances are the bleeding edge of a revanchist development in New York housing debates: landlords, especially the smaller ones, have begun repurposing the identitarian language of systemic oppression in a relentless public campaign against rent regulation and eviction protections.

It continues with details from there, ending at SCOTUS. I encourage others to read in full.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 01:48

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