Urban Planning Megathread - I'll NIMBY in your YIMBY

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Urban Planning Megathread - I'll NIMBY in your YIMBY

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

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Troy Queef posted:

as someone who lives in a city with seemingly none of this problem, the whole "YIMBYs are loving white scum, PHIMBY is the real poo poo" attitude from the Left (the "YIMBY" ep of Chapo, District Sentinel, coastal DSA chapters etc) is, to put it lightly, confusing. can someone pls explain

PHIMBY's want public housing, which is good, but seem unwilling to compromise (changing zoning to also allow more market-rate housing), which is bad. Kind of a "let's let the perfect be the enemy of the good" kind of deal.

Trabisnikof posted:

In addition to what others have said, there is a bit of a focus bias where a lot of what the yimby talk about are "in their backyards" aka in their communities and it can be a bit exclusionary to other communities are experiencing.

Take for example, environmental regulations: a lot of yimbys oppose environmental regulations that can delay or increase housing costs because in affluent communities environmental reviews are often used by nimbys as a tool to block development. But in other neighborhoods just miles away it is those environmental regulations that are the only reason developers cant stick people on top of leaking hazardous waste landfills (but they're trying!). So it can be hard to bridge that gap.

You're not really wrong, but, like, other countries seem to manage environmental regulations that stop gross abuses while not blocking higher housing density. It seems like the real problem is regulations like CEQA in California that are overbroad and let people raise objections for 'environmental' concerns like "this tall building will cast a shadow".

I don't think YIMBY's want to get rid of environmental regulations wholesale, they'd just like to see reform that would get rid of affluent old people concern trolling high density housing into oblivion.

fermun posted:

YIMBY people often ignore the fact that their typical pro-density development ideas result in displacement of the people that actually use public transport, and result in a net increased greenhouse gas emissions due to displacing the poor who then have to commute by car.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosenthal-transit-gentrification-metro-ridership-20180220-story.html

Something here seems off:

quote:

This story has repeated itself across the city. In those same years, rent and home prices spiked in Koreatown and Hollywood as dense new developments were built near busy transit lines. But the population in these areas fell, especially among people of color.

How did the total population of the area fall if there were dense new developments?

quote:

The Vermont, a 464-unit building constructed in Koreatown in 2013, is a stark example. It sits at the junction of the Metro's Purple line subway, the No. 720 bus and the Red line subway (which lost around 3 million riders between 2013 and 2016). The Vermont's cheapest apartment now costs $2,550, more than double what the average L.A. renter can afford; two bedrooms run to $4,500. It has three floors of parking � enough spaces for every apartment to have at least one car.

Ah, there it is. How much do you want to bet they're required to have that much parking? E.g.

quote:

How much does parking cost in Los Angeles? For one project just blocks away from Union Station, it could be as much as $28 million.

Trammell Crow Co.�s La Plaza Cultura Village, a $140 million development rising on the site of two former public parking lots, is set to include 365 apartments and 43,000 square feet of retail across a 425,000-square-foot village on the corner of Spring Street and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Thanks in part to the city�s zoning codes, the project will also need to include a whopping 720 parking spaces.

https://therealdeal.com/la/2017/02/14/a-zoning-code-cant-change-its-parking-spots/

With such backwards parking policies, that's not really transit-oriented development. Combine that with a total population decrease (so either that new housing wasn't that dense, or there wasn't that much of it), and falling ridership seems less surprising.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2018 12:13

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 05:20

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Ardennes posted:

Btw, the US has seen a general drop in public transit ridership the last few years, probably a combination of lower fuel prices and a moderate economic recovery. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if those condos owners fought tooth and nail for those spots considering the class divide over public transit in LA.

Hmm, maybe. For apartments though, I imagine most developers would love to have fewer parking spots.

quote:

Also, PHIMY's probably oppose rezoning for market-rate housing because they want that land for public housing in the first place.

That's dumb, since there's no shortage of low density areas in basically every American city that could be easily redeveloped into higher density public or private housing. There's no need to compete here, if anything these cases complement each other.

quote:

Also, it has been clear that high-end high-density housing really doesn't help affordability to a significant degree.

That's debatable: http://cityobservatory.org/more_evidence_of_portland_rent_declines/

Although even in Portland, like most US cities, the new housing density is mostly concentrated in a few areas where significant new amounts of housing supply are legally allowed. You'd probably see more impact if more of the city was open to new housing. I partially agree in the sense that, like, bigass towers are inherently expensive to build, so if most new housing supply is coming in that form, you're not going to see the needle move as much as compared to an equivalent number of units in low-rise/missing middle housing.

quote:

I could see it work if just they tax the hell out of new developments.

How exactly do you expect higher taxes on a thing to make that particular thing cheaper? Like I'm all for higher general taxes to fund public housing, but why would you want the tax to come specifically from new housing, when new housing is what you want more of?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2018 15:12

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YIMBY's tend to be skeptical/critical of rent control because it can easily turn people into FYGM NIMBYs: once a subset of people are immune to the whims of the market, they often don't care of the housing supply problem, because they don't need to. It's similar (albeit not as strong) to the effect prop 13 has on boomers that way.

American-style rent control is also bad in how it strongly privileges people based on when they arrived in their current home, which is terrible for both transplants and immigrants. It's really strange to see people who claim to be progressive fight for a system that benefits incumbents and fucks over newcomers, rather than striving for something that at least attempts to be egalitarian. German-style rent control at least puts people on a relatively even playing field.

Cugel the Clever posted:

This. Cities need to take up the burden rather than only leaving it to private developers and mandating carve outs to address affordability. The reason I also fight for the latter is because it's still miles better than the status quo of Boomer NIMBYs fighting to keep their single-family housing in the middle of the city.

You probably need at least state support, if not federal to get enough money to make a serious dent in public housing needs. The latter is obviously not going to happen right now, though.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Aug 23, 2018

# ¿ Aug 23, 2018 15:19

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luxury handset posted:

he's pretty right on about the problems and potential solutions, the issue is how do you implement this stuff. like i dont see the city of san francisco being able to set up a public bank large enough to handle the task

No, he's dead wrong about at least some of the things.

For example, community input: sounds great in theory, in practice it means the old boomers with tons of free time on their hand, or the politically connected, get their way. Community input means homeless shelters or halfway houses or other "undesirable" type buildings will never make their way into affluent neighborhoods. It also means that in addition to the published, transparent, democratically created regulations governing new developments, you have a second set that exist only in the minds of a subset of people that live near each development. That's bad.

I'm not saying that all forms of community input are bad, but it's extremely common to wield it in the service of obstructionism, to preserve the surbuban trappings that current residents like at all costs, and to hell with what anyone else wants or needs.

Capitalism is serving the top end in SF because: a) the top end's desires for housing haven't been met and they're obviously more profitable, b) they can only make so much housing anyway due to the glacial development process and zoning requirements, and c) developing tall buildings in particular is inherently expensive to a certain degree (especially when you go beyond 5 or 6 stories and have to stop using as much wood). If SF got almost completely rezoned like Scott Wiener wanted, you'd see at least somewhat cheaper housing around the city, too, because while there are a lot of techies there, there aren't that many. But it's true that at least in SF proper you wouldn't see much affordable for the working class.

quote:

a narrative that the only way to solve our housing crisis is to increase supply at the top end of the market, instead of building housing that is immediately affordable to working-class San Franciscans and passing strong tenant protections to keep them from being displaced in the first place.

This narrative is irresponsible to push; it serves profiteers and no one else.

See, this is a mix of true and false. Developers will target the top end as much as they can, yes, but the demand there isn't infinite. And passing strong tenant protections to protect against displacement isn't always desirable, because to get more housing you do have to displace people in the currently existing housing. The goal there should be to make sure people just get displaced, like, down the street rather than out of the city, or even worse, out of the metro area. And to give some kind of assistance, especially for low income renters, to handle the move itself.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Aug 24, 2018

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 17:14

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luxury handset posted:

effects_of_gentrification.png

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1032840368667209729

I dunno if he's right or not, but the person you're quoting here says it's not gentrification in the very next tweet (and following tweets explain in more detail): https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1033009193807175681
He also says there's a bit of good news:

quote:

The flipside of this process is that WHITE segregation is rapidly declining - a much, much higher share of the white population is exposed to racial diversity than in earlier years, primarily Asian and Hispanic people.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 17:17

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luxury handset posted:

as annoying as charettes are to run they are way more accessible than other forms of community input like local organizing and lobbying groups. the thing you're flipped on here is "should we accept community input or no" which is different from what this guy is saying, "community input should be equalized so that everyone has it and not just the people with time/money to lawyer up"

Yeah I'm not opposed in theory to community input, just highly skeptical because of how it tends to go. Which is to say, it usually is regressive as all hell. And I'm not convinced that the suggestions here would make things better.

quote:

developers ALWAYS target the top end, because that is where the money is. there's no market for brand new intown cheap homes, none, which is why the government must intervene in the first place

Developers will always target the top end to the extent that they can, because they like money. If demand at the top is sufficiently satisfied and there's still money to make elsewhere, sure they'll do that. Toyota doesn't make middle-class cars out of generosity, they do it because Lexuses are only going to be bought by so many people.

quote:

if developers can't make money building housing for wealthier people intown, they're not going to try to cater to lower incomes in the same area. they're going to try to develop housing for wealthier people, or less wealthy people, in places where land is cheaper. the only time you're going to see market rate housing for less wealthy people being built intown is in weird scenarios like the price of intown land falling or something, which isn't likely to happen again with current trends

Like I said, you're probably not going to see new market-rate housing in SF for the working class even with huge rezoning, that's true. Right now it's too desirable and booming for that. But you probably could get new housing for the middle class (middle class by SF/bay area standards, anyway). Not disputing that public housing is something we should have a lot of, but it mostly doesn't conflict with what urbanists/YIMBYs want anyway, so framing it as either/or is dumb.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 17:28

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luxury handset posted:

to extend the car analogy, there's a minimum level of profit to be made on a vehicle before it's not worth producing. toyota isn't going to crank out bare minimum cheap cars if it projects it might clear a hundred dollars in net revenue on each car, because of the risk involved. likewise, developers aren't going to invest $99k to build a $100k home because any market swing could end up costing you money. and housing has some volatile inputs, especially if you're building larger projects, think materials and labor cost here

Agreed, although in the case of cars there's the fact that poor people still get cars, they just get used cars, which is probably better than, say, lowering vehicle safety regulations enough to where you could make a new one for < 5k. If housing is inherently expensive in an area, having housing for middle-class/poor people just be "used" housing isn't automatically bad.

Basically even if the market only serves the affluent for brand new projects, it can still serve lower-income people indirectly, as it does with cars.

quote:

the bay area is a particularly bad example in terms of the american housing market because it has unique challenges, but as a mental exercise, consider that if the developers of luxury condos in SF proper suddenly see their market opportunities collapse, they're not going to scale down their projects in the city, they're going to go further out to oakland, richmond etc. to do scaled down projects. the price of infill and redevelopable land in the city of SF is not going to drop appreciably

Honestly I feel like the bay area's "unique challenges" are largely self-inflicted.

Having the cheaper private housing be out in Oakland or wherever isn't even necessarily that big of a problem, if transit is good enough. But yes for poor people in somewhere like SF proper (highly desirable, great economy) you're going to mostly need to rely on public housing.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 17:44

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luxury handset posted:

this is exactly how housing is provided for lower income persons, except that this mechanism entirely breaks down in areas with intense competition for housing. trickle down doesn't work when even shacks are being bid on with same day 100% cash offers

Agreed, but that's largely because even the top end is very heavily restricted, often for very stupid reasons. Just look at laundromat guy.

quote:

you've got prop 13, a terribly stupid law, but that's a state law

Okay, that's fair.

quote:

the bay area is also home to an extremely lucrative industry right now that throws wages out of whack

I mean, the high wages is a good thing. If housing prices weren't crazy, it'd be a good thing even for workers in non-tech industries. Like, my sister was able to take photographs of kids for overworked career moms and charge an arm and a leg, because of how much money there is floating around.

Sans dumb regulations, housing prices would still be going up, yes, but they wouldn't be rapidly outpacing what people would be able to earn.

quote:

this is in addition to decades of san francisco punching way above its weight culturally, so it has a tremendous amount of cool factor - seattle and new york have the same problems, and portland, dear god. compare this to like, chicago, or new orleans which is very cool but also has a lot of Problems to whittle away that desirablility

also geography, both local (peninsula, coastal, somewhat rocky) and global (pacific coast, climate is nice and big access to immigrant populations from south and west)

and then on top of that all the dumb zoning and nimbys

Eh, I don't feel like the geography is that big of an issue. The total bay area population density isn't very high at all, building taller would be easy, it's not Hong Kong there or whatever.

I agree about the desirability. Although comparing it to Chicago and New Orleans feels like a low bar, like all you have to do is be liberal, but also functional.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 18:06

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The reason I don't think the geography is that much of an issue is that even where geography permits, liberal areas tend to enforce urban growth boundaries explicitly to reduce sprawl. Which is good, it's just that you can't block building outward AND upward.

To me I was thinking more that I associate Chicago and New Orleans with just being really poorly managed in general. Particularly Chicago gets a rep of being a hotbed of violent crime and corruption.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 18:25

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luxury handset posted:

...no? urban growth boundaries are definitely the exception in the us, not the norm. off the top of my head there's portland or, honolulu, minneapolis, miami, and probably a handful of other cities, with varying levels of enforcement

Hmm, I should probably do more research on that then. For cities like Salinas or Watsonville, there's definitely some kind of regulation stopping them from expanding out further, isn't there? I'd find it hard to believe that the development stops because of developers not being interested.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 18:45

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fermun posted:

So the majority of that section is talking about polluted land.

No it's not?

quote:

Community Input, Community Input, Community Input

Many San Francisco politicians who have worked closely with developers want nothing more than to eliminate community input on new developments. This is often under the guise of �streamlining� the process, but it�s extremely damaging to low-income communities that are facing gentrification or projects that are being built on polluted soil. Community input is essential to ensuring the affordability and health of our neighborhoods.

Here�s how we improve it:

* Hold community office hours every single day of the year � Sundays, Christmas, every day � in District 10 neighborhoods so everyone has direct access to the Supervisor�s office.

* Be proactive during development processes, bringing in community leaders and holding public workshops before building plans are drawn up, so outcomes are maximized.

* Reform the Maher Ordinance to ensure community input and public review is added to the land cleanup process, so we can avoid scandals like the Shipyard again on our waterfront.

* Create and support programs that will make it easier for tenants to buy their buildings with community land trusts.

* Work closely with public housing residents in District 10, to ensure that their rights as tenants are protected and that the City fulfills their responsibilities as a landlord.

I've bolded the part talking about polluted land. Not sure what "majority" means for you, but in conventional English it doesn't fit here.

quote:

It sounds very much like you are 100% ignorant of the fact that there is radioactive waste on these parcels of land which hasn't been tested and that the people living here are having symptoms that are consistent with radiation poisoning. They really would like some real radiation testing, and even the Trump EPA agrees with them.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/EPA-blasts-Navy-for-plan-to-retest-soil-at-former-13164851.php

I'm aware that there are absolutely valid reasons to have community input, including potential land pollution. I believe this has also been an issue with development in the north bayshare area in Mountain View, where urbanists and Google want to (and now, will) put housing. I'm not categorically opposed to community input, but there's no denying that the most common use for it in SF and really anywhere in coastal California is just to block development for reasons like "this tall building will cast a shadow", "abundant car parking is my right", or "bringing more people here means there'll be more people here". Ideally we'd preserve or expand community input for non-bullshit reasons while eliminating the bullshit ones.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 13:11

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vyelkin posted:

If you live in a sprawling subdivision and downtown is a mile away along an empty highway, you're probably out of luck though.

If that was the case, a fully off-street walk/bike trail would probably be preferable anyway. Walking right next to really fast traffic sucks.

As an example of that, look at Dutch standards for separation of bike paths from roads:

quote:

The higher the speed of the traffic, the greater the separation should be between the tracks and the main carriageway although for safety, bikes should still be visible to car drivers. In built-up areas, the minimum width of the buffer between a cycle track and the road should be at least 0.35m for a one-way cycle path and 1m for a two-way one but usually the width will be greater depending on the barrier type.

In rural areas the following guidelines apply.

Speed Limit: Minimum Separation / Recommended Separation
60 km/h: 1.5m / 2.5m
80 km/h: 4.5m / 6.0m
100 km/h: 10.0m / 10.0m

https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/wiki/dutch-cycle-infrastructure

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 15:09

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OddObserver posted:

Wouldn't it also be reasonable to zone things as "High-Density Residential requiring 25% affordable" to start with?

Why stop there? Why not just say, "hey developers, you have to rent things at max $500/month." Bam, instant affordable housing everywhere.

There are people who actually think like this.

If a real estate market is supply and demand based, requiring below market rate units reduces the profit incentive to build more housing, which means you'll get less new housing supply, which raises rents. If the market is cost-based, then the developer will have to raise rents on the market rate units in the development to pay for the subsidized ones; that's just a shell game, total affordability stays the same.

If you want to subsidize something, don't put the subsidy's cost solely on a thing you want more of.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 08:24

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fermun posted:

As originally written, SB 827 was nothing but a gentrification engine which immediately upzoned all areas with decent public transit and would have displaced the poor in areas with low property values but decent transit. It also allowed for outlying areas to continue to be NIMBYs by just cutting back on bus line service. It was later amended to be better and include some amendments to help with displacement and gentrification, but from the start it was written without any consulting with any advocacy groups. It was also written by Scott Wiener who literally no one but YIMBYs and moneyed interests trust, so no tenant's rights groups got on board because he's the kind of dude that you can't trust to amend things again. Hell, he abstained from the DCCC vote on whether to support or oppose prop 10, repeal of Costa Hawkins to allow rent control to become legal again in California, even when he knew that the SF DCCC would vote in support of it. He also abstained from the vote on Prop C, creating a up to 0.5% tax on corporate incomes above $50M (industry determing the specific rate) which would house thousands of SF's homeless and expand the shelter/navigation center bed count by 1000 (the current average nightly waitlist). How the hell did he think he was going to upzone areas of single family homes without even trying to getting tenants groups on board, anyhow?

Actually SB 827 was good and cool. While it would've resulted in immediate displacement from particular blocks where development would happen, you would've also seen less total regional displacement as housing prices would've gotten (slightly) more reasonable. And saying, "well lovely NIMBY communities would then block transit" is dumb, because, like, those lovely NIMBY communities usually try to block decent transit anyway (see: history of BART down the peninsula). Plus, we could always deal with communities blocking transit down the road, like, say, mandating a regional transportation authority for any metro area above X population.

And really, it just makes sense that any area around decent transit SHOULD have a fairly high population density allowed. It makes zero sense to invest in good transit -- especially in cases like rail or BRT -- and then block people from actually accessing said transit by having mandatory low-density housing. It's totally ludicrous.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 11:09

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luxury handset posted:

uhh dallas has the largest light rail system in the nation and is still expanding it? seattle's system clocks in just below charlotte, north carolina. if you're going to be costally smug at least be factual about it

Dallas also has a transit mode share of a whopping 2% so if they have the biggest light rail system they must be loving up the implementation big time one way or another, probably zoning & car-oriented transportation policies elsewhere if I had to guess.

Seattle's is at 10% which ain't great, but still five times as high.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2018 10:47

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luxury handset posted:

first you were saying we should just massively upzone, now it's only around transit stations - or you're leading up to a large scale expansion of the light rail network. while you're rubbing that genie lamp can i get a winning lotto ticket pls?

Upzoning the whole city to at least missing middle type housing would be a massive upzone by US standards, as sad as it is. This type of upzone was recommended by the HALA committee, and was going to go in before the NIMBY backlash from people terrified of desegregation.

And then you can put high rises on top of/next to the train stations, maybe steal a page from Hong Kong's playbook to generate revenue while you're at it if that's feasible.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2018 11:34

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luxury handset posted:

this doesn't matter in the context of the dicussion that was had. when it comes to how willing a locality is and was to fund infrastructure growth, you can look at growth of infrastructure directly instead of ridership, or track width, or the quality of the graffiti in the bathrooms etc.

Well poo poo if you're going by how willing it is to fund infrastructure growth, Seattle beats Dallas by a country mile. For example, Dallas' light rail expansion plan in 2006 cost $2.5 billion, Sound Transit 2 in 2008 cost $17.8 billion, and around 12 billion of that was for light rail. Now obviously Seattle is more expensive partially because it's not as much of a sprawltropolis as Dallas, but nevertheless they appear to be much more willing throw down serious dough on transit. Sound Transit 3, for example, is budgeted as ~$54 billion.

quote:

"how much track are they willing to put down? well, let's look at how much track is on the ground and how much is budgeted for right now"

Looking at miles is an incredibly silly and nonsensical way of looking at seriousness of infrastructure investment. 25 miles of extending existing light rail at-grade to a suburb is way easier and cheaper than 5 miles of building separated-grade light rail in the middle of a major city. This is one of the issues Portland's MAX system has in comparison to Seattle's light rail, MAX isn't buried or elevated downtown and while that made it cheaper to build out, it also limits its effectiveness rather severely. Just looking at total miles by itself is nearly useless outside of a dick-measuring contest.

If you want a simple metric and you're looking at how seriously an area is about funding transit, look at dollars, if you want to see how effective transit actually is, look at ridership. Going "well gee this system is really long" is ridiculous, who gives a poo poo?

Sneakster posted:

Dallas won't catch up to Baltimore's density with even 100 years of constant population growth at higher than current rates. Its delusional to think Dallas, covering 4x the area and having a fraction of the density of a city will have a transit system that isn't a novelty last resort of people who can't afford a car within the century.

Realistically you could probably still have decent transit if you had major upzones around rail stations, creating little transit villages. But in practice most of the time US cities do upzones for this kind of thing, they're incredibly half-assed, you go a few blocks and you hit mandatory single-family homes again unless you're downtown in the principal city.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Sep 4, 2018

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 10:32

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luxury handset posted:

why would you cherry pick two specific examples from 2006 and 2008? is this the best way to support your argument? do you have an argument or are you just being stubborn?

Because those were the ones I was able to find data on and they were comparable, having been planned around the same time period. Go ahead and try to find an example of Dallas spending more, but we both know you won't find it.

quote:

meanwhile, if we want to look at who is most willing to fund light rail, well, one thing that is important to this picture is who has built the most light rail, and...

No, like I already pointed out, just going by total light rail miles is a stupid dick-measuring contest. If you want to gauge seriousness, look at money (Seattle has spent way the gently caress more and continues to), if you want to gauge effectiveness look at ridership (Seattle has a much higher mode share of transit trips).

You're just desperately clinging to "well Dallas has more physical miles of track laid down" as if that means anything significant. Yeah, they have 4x the number of lines and stations as Seattle, and yet Seattle manages to have ~75% of their ridership with a single line that isn't even close to complete yet, it currently awkwardly terminates just south of UW. Almost like Seattle took the harder, more expensive path that will pay off in the long run because it's higher-quality transit to begin with. And their overall transit program is obviously superior because way more people actually use it.

luxury handset posted:

"lets argue stridently for pages over a highly pedantic side argument, except you're not allowed to use any of your metrics - only my metrics are acceptable"

Your metric is stupid, there are much better ones but they undermine your completely wrong point. You could just admit, "yeah actually those coastal liberal cities HAVE invested more seriously in transit than Dallas or Charlotte" but that would require you to not be unreasonably stubborn.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 16:22

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luxury handset posted:

"the existence of thing cannot be used as a proxy for willingness to create thing"

ok guy

"Look sure the 300 miles of track lead to a single dude's house, but look how long it is!"

Makes total sense, great job, definitely a better metric than money invested or how many people actually use it.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 16:54

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Oh look: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-07/rental-glut-sends-chill-through-the-hottest-u-s-housing-markets

quote:

Seattle-area median rents didn’t budge in July, after a 5 percent annual increase a year earlier and 10 percent the year before, according to Zillow data on apartments, houses and condos. While that’s the biggest decline among the top 50 largest metropolitan areas, it’s part of a national trend. Rents in Nashville and Portland, Oregon, have actually started falling. In the U.S., rents were up just 0.5 percent in July, the smallest gain for any month since 2012.

“This is something that we first started to see two years ago in New York and D.C.,” Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist at Zillow, said in a phone interview. “A year ago, it was San Francisco and most recently, Seattle and Portland. It’s spreading through what once were the fastest growing rental markets.”

Tenants are gaining the upper hand in urban centers across the U.S. as new amenity-rich apartment buildings, constructed in response to big rent gains in previous years, are forced to fight for customers. Rents are softening most on the high end and within city limits, Terrazas said. Landlords also have been losing customers to homeownership as millennials strike out on their own, often moving to more affordable suburbs.

It's almost like adding enough supply to where landlords have less leverage is helpful for rent prices or something.

Of course, things are still pretty horrible overall and we could still use public housing etc.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 10:57

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ardennes posted:

If you upzone...the result is going to just be bigger monolithic skyscrapers .... filled with "luxury studios."

Demand for luxury studios isn't infinite, this is another example of yeah, the market will take the lowest-hanging, most profitable fruit first.

Plus what's really needed is upzoning the all super low density areas for missing middle type housing, not skyscrapers. Leftists really need to stop defending economic segregation like this.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2018 19:54

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ardennes posted:

If anything the current prices and strategy has pushed out working-class families and minorities from most of central Portland.

Agreed, the current strategy of "hardly do anything" has been a disaster. More radical, serious solutions are required. The government enforcing economic segregation in SFH-only neighborhoods is the people's money being used to make invisibly gated communities. That has to stop.

quote:

Portland has already tried upzoning all over the place, and the results have been mixed to poor/negative.

Bullshit. Portland has hardly upzoned anything. Most of the residential area is still mandatory very low density, just like nearly all US cities.

Even then, when lots of new supply comes on the market, prices tend to drop or at least stabilize.

quote:

In Portland, it is already done, but developers pushed the lowest hanging fruits by focusing on apartments for singles. Eventually, prices for studios will probably decrease but infill housing usually doesn't address the issues of families needing housing, if anything it exacerbates it. If anything the non-upper middle class are just ignored/left behind because massively producing over-priced studios was seen as lucrative until that specific niche was completely oversaturated.

Developers like money and will target the most profitable, lowest-hanging fruit first. When you don't upzone very much, and the areas that are upzoned are relatively "central" neighborhoods upzoned for large apartment buildings, yeah no poo poo it's mostly apartments for singles or DINKs, what else would you expect?

quote:

It isn't that some type of upzoning needs to happen, it is just the current system of largely letting the market run while with various tax-funded subsidies is creating severe issues.

Not sure what subsidies you're talking about, but currently the market is severely handicapped and thus performing poorly. Public housing would certainly be a good thing too (and would also help market rate housing), but unfortunately getting large amounts of that is even less realistic than major upzones.

quote:

(Also, part of the issue is that many of these developments were cheaply made but already designed with a certain high price point in mind. Rent prices are probably going to be sticky.)

IIRC, rent prices for new places can be surprisingly sticky due to commercial loans rolling over and the interaction between that and the appraised value of the property being based on the rent prices. But they can't stay high against market pressure forever, and even before the rent price drops, often there are other discounts offered like waived application fees, first month free, security deposit reduced, etc. which still helps reduce the housing cost burden.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2018 19:55

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quote:

You absolutely have no idea what you're talking about and clearly, haven't a real clue about how things are right now in PDX. There is infill all over the place including middle class/upper middle class areas.

All I've read about are upzones in central areas and little strips. The current zoning map shows most of the residential area still zoned for very low density. That's hardly "all over the place".

quote:

Also, they fact that most of Portland are still single family dwellings is a non-sequitor, it is still a relatively small US city.

Have you never been outside of the US or something? Portland is the principal city for a metro area of 2.5 million. It's on the smaller end of population for a major city, but it's still a major city. I can find suburbs in Europe literally surrounded by farmland that have substantially higher population densities than Portland does. It's completely ridiculous.

quote:

Prices are still increasing for two-three bedroom apartments bud. Trickledown isn't working.

lol, more "trickle down" bullshit from supply and demand denialists. Or rather, people who acknowledge that demand outstripping supply causes prices to rise, but insist that increasing supply will have no effect, somehow. "The poor are getting outbid by the rich because there's not enough X to go around, so let's make more X" is totally the same thing as "give tax cuts to the wealthy", right?

quote:

Btw, even non-central neighborhoods have been opened up for upzoning including those of the edge of the city.

Only in little bits and pieces though. It's basically the urban village model. Now, concentrating the most density along certain corridors or in certain areas isn't the worst idea, it's just that, if you look at the map, you can see even most of the "higher density areas" in, say, Eastern Portland are still only like R2 or R1. That's basically "missing middle" level density, which is really what the minimum level of zoning should be at across the city, and those corridors should be at low or mid-rise.

quote:

The subsidies are BIDs and property taxes strictly being funneled to developers and infrastructure in those districts.

Do you have an article that talks about this more? Also, property taxes being funneled to developers or to infrastructure are two very different things.

quote:

Basically, you are asking "faith" in a plan that clearly hasn't been working and now the population has been caught in the middle. Moreover, the housing market has cooled off and fewer new projects are in the pipeline and zoning has almost nothing to do with it. The entire endeavor created a bubble to fulfill speculation on the construction of the "lowest hanging fruit" but this didn't actually trickle down to the population at large since developers didn't have an incentive to construct affordable housing and instead you have a bunch of projects that will be underutilized and perhaps some that won't even be completed. Upzoning without government intervention to address affordability just hasn't worked.

It only requires "faith" if you haven't been paying attention and think supply and demand don't exist (or only works one way?).

quote:

Btw, a lot of this discussion sounds semi-libertarian, that it is the government "getting in the way" that is causing the problem not that market dynamics in the US have and will continue to generally gently caress over the poor because that is how capitalism is designed. Developers will naturally try to avoid providing afforable housing if possible because there are looking for a lucrative market even if you allow them to do whatever they want. Portland's municipal government has bended over backwards to pretty much allow them to what they will, and they did. It just didn't work.

It's actually restrictive zoning that's hosed over the poor. I mean goddamn, just look at SF. Fought development as hard as they could, and it just made their problem worse. How many more cities need to follow this lovely example and lose all their poor people before you'll acknowledge the obvious? Yes, lots of public housing would be even better, but letting the market make a lot more housing would be much less bad than what we have now.

And you don't have to be a loving libertarian to have a basic grasp of how markets function. Was Obama a libertarian? Is Paul Krugman libertarian? Is California's Legislative Analyst's Office libertarian? You're just throwing around "libertarian" and "trickle down" as cheap tricks to deflect from the fact that you somehow don't think increasing supply will help a problem where the whole issue is demand outstripping supply.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Sep 17, 2018

# ¿ Sep 17, 2018 12:53

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

The urbanist/YIMBY idea is that while yes, new market-rate housing that replaces older buildings will generally be more expensive than what it replaced (it is newer, after all), the total housing stock going up relieves price pressure for the region as a whole. And eventually, what was once brand new, "luxury" housing will become the older, affordable housing in the future. And indeed, that's exactly what you see: Berkeley did a series of case studies on particular neighborhoods in the bay area and found:
http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84

quote:

* At the regional level, both market-rate and subsidized housing reduce displacement pressures, but subsidized housing has over double the impact of market-rate units.

* Market-rate production is associated with higher housing cost burden for low-income households, but lower median rents in subsequent decades.

A bit more on this from a research brief: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/udp_research_brief_052316.pdf

quote:

Housing Production May Not Reduce Displacement Pressure in a Neighborhood

As Rick Jacobus explains, because market mechanisms work differently at different geographic scales, market-rate construction can simultaneously alleviate housing pressures across the region while also exacerbating them at the neighborhood level. At the regional scale, the interaction of supply and demand determines prices; producing more market-rate housing will result in decreased housing prices and reduce displacement pressures. At the local, neighborhood scale, however, new luxury buildings could change the perception of a neighborhood and send signals to the market that such neighborhoods are desirable and safer for wealthier residents, resulting in new demand. Given the unmet demand for real estate in certain neighborhoods, new construction could simply induce more in-moving. By extension, then, one would expect market-rate development to reduce displacement at the regional scale but increase it or have no or a negative impact at the local neighborhood scale.

Here we test this hypothesis. We do this by analyzing our regional data set at the tract level and comparing the results to the block group level for San Francisco, where we have our most accurate data on housing production. What we find largely confirms this regional versus local argument; there is some, albeit limited evidence that at the regional level market-rate housing production is associated with reductions in the probability of displacement (Model 5), but at the block group level in San Francisco it has an insignificant effect (Table 4, Models 6). Comparing the effect of market rate and subsidized housing at this smaller geography, we find that neither the development of market-rate nor subsidized housing has a significant impact on displacement. This suggests that indeed in San Francisco, and by extension similar strong markets, the unmet need for housing is so severe that production alone cannot solve the displacement problem.

To illustrate this point, in Figure 1 we plot on the X-axis construction of new market-rate units in the 1990s and 2000s and on the Y-axis the change in the number of low income households from 2000 to 2013 for both tracts in the entire region and block groups in San Francisco. Although at the regional level the relationship between market-rate development and change in low-income households appears linear, the same is not true for the block group level, where no clear pattern emerges.

Of course, the context here is very limited upzoning, concentrated all new growth into small neighborhoods or sections of neighborhoods, which will obviously exacerbate local displacement pressure for those particular neighborhoods that get upzoned.

I look forward to hearing how UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project is also "libertarian" and obsessed with trickle down economics.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Sep 17, 2018

# ¿ Sep 17, 2018 13:44

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ardennes posted:

Also, "Market-rate production is associated with higher housing cost burden for low-income households, but lower median rents in subsequent decades." sounds like it is saying what I am saying.

It's associated with higher housing cost burden in the short term for the neighborhood where the development is concentrated, yes. The fact that it reduces displacement even in the short term for the region implies that the regional housing cost burden goes down immediately.

If only there was something we could do about the former, like, say, spread out the development over the whole region rather than hyperconcentrate it into tiny little areas. Alas, it is impossible for us to do what every other country already does for some reason.

quote:

In Portland, the growth of market rate studios has actually started to decrease rental prices through supply, but it hasn't helped low-income households. The issue with "letting the market roam wild" supply is targetted to particular types of housing stock at a certain price point. In Portland, this is exacerbated by the urban growth boundary (which has its issues) since there is only so much cheap housing on the fringe of the metro region. In SF, sprawl probably helped address this issue to a certain point (at the cost of congestion and environmental damage).

Either way, prices for studios and I bedroom places did stablize in Portland (at a higher price point) but 2 brs and 3 brs are continuing to climb in price because they simply aren't being built.

It would be easier for them to be built if missing middle housing was legal in more of the city. That said, where are you getting your data? Because what I'm seeing is that 2br and 3br prices stabilized too within the last couple years:

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/or/portland/
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-portland-or-rent-trends/

For example, Rent Jungle is showing 2br prices about the same now as in early 2016.

quote:

The metro area is about 2 million (most of which is suburbs, some in a completely different state), while Portland itself is about 700-800k it isn't a terribly large place.

No, the metro is about 2.5 million (well, 2.45 million): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_metropolitan_area and the city proper is 650k. Yes, small for a major city, but still a major city. And you're just ignoring how tiny suburbs in other countries are still more dense. You seem to have a weird sense of American exceptionalism, as if low density was just built into the soil.

quote:

But the fact you think there are single family homes left is the issue explains a lot. There has been a absolutely massive building boom in Portland, and just because most of the original city is left...isn't enough. Basically, it sounds like you will only accept the entire city being bulldozed.

Who gives a poo poo about non-historic buildings if refusing to replace them means people suffer more? What a bizarre position for a socialist to take.

Besides, you should know that the strict exclusionary zoning has much of its origin in keeping out "undesirables", whether that be other races or the impoverished. The former is less of an issue today than it was in the past, but the latter sentiment is still alive and well. And even though not everyone supports that kind of zoning for the purpose of economic segregation, that is nonetheless the result: where a working class family can't afford an entire house but could afford a unit in a 4-plex, the outcome would be unacceptable to many.

quote:

Btw, most of the year I live in Moscow, a city most of which is made up of extremely high density housing blocks. Those housing blocks were built on the fringes of the existing city and then connected to the center through very high capacity heavy-rail transport. It works becuase it was designed in a certain way and had the infrastructure to support it (the traffic is a nightmare). Portland honestly doesn't expect for light-rail lines in awkward areas. If Portland had Moscow style density, it would be a f'ing trashfire.

Agreed, to accommodate truly high density buildings en masse, you'd need radically improved infrastructure (which would be a good idea). But you don't need that for missing middle level housing. For that, you could get away with cheaper, faster improvements: more buses, more greenways and other bike-friendly improvements, more mixed-use zoning so that more businesses are in walking and biking distance, etc.

quote:

Different types of housing dude, I have said this a dozen times at this point.Btw, the BIDs are pretty much tax subsidies to the rich.

If these are separate markets because of different kinds of housing, why is it that new market-rate developments in the bay area -- which are largely nicer, "luxury" complexes -- is still associated with lowered regional displacement, even in the short term? If I'm missing something there, by all means point it out. So far you seem to be doing your best to ignore the fact that even a very obviously left-leaning study out of UCB said that while market-rate units aren't as good as subsidized ones for affordability, they're still a net positive.

quote:

Basically, the city couldn't handle that type of density even if the market wasn't cooling, there just isn't the transportation infrastructure that could support it

Absolutely it could, it only lacks the political will. Sure, heavy rail/subways would take a long-rear end time, but converting general traffic lanes to bus only lanes can be done much more quickly and cheaply. Converting local neighborhood streets to greenways for increased bike usage is also pretty drat easy, they seem to be doing it mostly just throwing down diverters every few blocks, that's certainly not that hard. Increasing parking fees or even introduction a rush hour congestion charge, these are options that aren't too difficult to actually implement. Politically these things are certainly challenging, though.

quote:

Both, "Propser Portland" has a bunch of planning documents. I honestly discovered most of it myself. Look at the maps and budgets in particular to get a sense of the scale and money involved. Most of it is still supporting development. Also, the infrastructure is usually concentrated in particular districts.

Wait, so first the infrastructure isn't good enough to handle higher densities, and now focusing the improved infrastructure in higher density areas is bad? But thanks for the tip, I'll take a look.

quote:

That is because the world is clearly much more complicated than "supply and demand" and that social utility is usually lost in that mix. The market will supply plenty of luxury studios and 1 brs aparments, what is everyone else going to do? Letting the market making one particular type of housing, isn't actually solving the issue and in some ways is exacerbating it.

The market demand for luxury studios and 1br apartments isn't infinite, and when affluent people take new units like those that didn't exist before, they free up space in lower end housing they would've otherwise competed for. That filtering down effect is real, it's not just "libertarians" that acknowledge it, and I believe it's discussed in the study I linked to.

quote:

Obama loved charter schools and Krugman lost his mind over Bernie, they aren't the best examples man even if they aren't classical libertarians. Both of them are too reliant on market solutions, and both are still more moderate than your proposals.

Bulllllllshit. You can't say that because -- at least from what I've read -- they haven't put out specific proposals to even compare against. But what we DO know is that Krugman and Obama's administration supported relaxing zoning rules to allow for more housing. For example:

quote:

The Obama administration Monday is calling on cities and counties to rethink their zoning laws, saying that antiquated rules on construction, housing and land use are contributing to high rents and income inequality, and dragging down the U.S. economy as a whole.

City zoning battles usually are fought block by block, and the president's involvement will create friction, particularly among environmental groups and the not-in-my-backyard crowd. But the White House jawboning is welcome news to many others, including mayors and builders increasingly foiled by community opposition to development.

The White House published a �toolkit� of economic evidence and policy fixes to help local political leaders fight back against the NIMBYs that tend to hold sway over municipal zoning meetings.

�In more and more regions across the country, local and neighborhood leaders have said yes in our backyard,� the paper states. �We need to break down the rules that stand in the way of building new housing.�

The prescriptions call for more density, speedier permitting and fewer restrictions on accessory dwelling units such as basement and garage apartments. The plan rejects some of the arguments made by environmentalists, labor unions and other liberal constituencies that have stood in the way of development and endorses changes long sought by builders and the business community.

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/obama-takes-on-zoning-laws-in-bid-to-build-more-housing-spur-growth-228650

Heck, Krugman says there's lots more room to put more housing in NYC, which is already quite dense.

quote:

Increasing total supply simply put doesn't address the actual disparity happening simply put because it is overproducing one particular style of housing.

Developers just build what the market demands. That does translate to "build what gets you wild profits" when those profits are available, but demand for any one type of unit isn't infinite.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2018 20:27

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

This is a lengthy and good article about why transit sucks in the US and how it could be improved: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/

# ¿ Oct 10, 2018 17:42

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Suburbs don't have have to be lovely like the US does them. Plenty of suburbs in other developed countries that are still reasonably dense with good transit going into the city.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2018 06:24

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

People having a stupid derail in D&D???

If that's your bar just shut the whole thing down

# ¿ Oct 15, 2018 20:59

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

luxury handset posted:

congestion and noise is inevitable as a consequence of density, filth is largely negotiable. tokyo is cleaner than most american homes

I live in Munich and congestion doesn't seem like a very big issue. It's generally easy to avoid driving, and walking about the city rarely feels all that busy, even though it's considerably denser than principal US cities in comparable metro areas. Some of the trains can get cramped during rush hour but it hasn't been too bad so far.

Noise doesn't seem like a huge deal either, our previous apartment had a rail line used by the S-Bahn nearly in our backyard (it was ~20-30m away) and we barely noticed it. Then again, Germans are pretty big on tamping down on noise, both in terms of building construction standards (holy poo poo the doors and windows here don't gently caress around), and in terms of written and unwritten rules (IIRC there's an actual law about "quiet time" on Sundays). Would probably be worse closer to the city center though.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 09:54

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

luxury handset posted:

some of yall taking a very narrow view of what congestion is

Can't speak for everyone else but these things aren't really a problem in Munich which is still fairly dense (by US standards).

Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Oct 19, 2018

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 19:18

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

The Maroon Hawk posted:

Yeah, basically everyone I know here in Denver that doesn't use transit regularly has some variation of "I'd love to take the bus/train to work every day if it wouldn't take me two hours when driving would take 20 minutes/require four transfers/have me waiting an hour for my bus after work/etc"

Completely understandable in and of itself, but in practice many of those people will then vote against things that would actually improve transit, like bus lanes or reduced parking requirements or higher density zoning.

That's sort of the conundrum, a lot of people will claim "well I'm fine with transit when it's good" and then fight it ever becoming good because in reality they mean "I want it to become good with zero side effects whatsoever impacting my lifestyle and preferences".

It's not entirely unlike people who say that they're totally against racism and sexism but are mysteriously against anything that might actually reduce said racism and sexism.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2018 09:23

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

mobby_6kl posted:

If you want to to rely on public transport you just have to accept that some trips will take way long than driving (yes, sometimes several times longer), and either keep a car for those trips or just suck it up deal with it. If the standard for acceptance is "can't take longer than driving", it'll never take off.

Yesterday I went to see a movie with some friends and had to cross the whole city for it during the evening rush hour. My starting point was literally on a metro station and the destination was a few km from one too, so the perfect use case, right?

The stop and go was a bit annoying but even with the evening traffic driving took just about 35 minutes, returning at night was under 20. Google suggests the bus because the metro would take about 45 minutes to dump you like 4 km away so it'd take another 20 to get there. This is in a city with one of better public transport systems too.

Prague's system is better than most cities in the US, but that's not really a high bar. It only has three separated-grade metro lines, the street cars and buses run in traffic from what I saw. That's hardly ideal. It's hard to get actually good transit when it's sharing space with cars (although maybe you can get away with it if you strictly limit the number of cars around ala Zurich).

# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 10:45

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Yeah, I don't disagree that there are always going to be some trips that are faster in a car, even with excellent transit coverage and speed. In your example it's from the outskirts to other outskirts, and yeah getting that trip to be really fast on trains/buses is going to be hard.

The thing that's dumb about the US is that even in a much more straightforward scenario, like "middle of decent sized suburb to middle of major city", transit is often still substantially slower than driving, even in rush hour, which is like a near-ideal case for transit.

I didn't realize Prague's system was rated that highly. To me it seemed pretty good, but being American my internal bar for that is usually low.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 12:24

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Yiiiiissssss, die cars die: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/spain-nationwide-car-free-city-center-car-ban/576976/

# ¿ Dec 1, 2018 23:59

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Most YIMBYs are urbanists who are absolutely pro-transit.

It's a chicken and egg problem either way. It's harder to argue for expanding mass transit when population density is low. Also, even in areas that do have reasonably good transit connections, often you can hit mandatory single family homes within, like, a block or two.

It's hard to describe just how hosed up American zoning is. Little German towns with <20k people will have nicer, more urban-feeling downtowns than US cities 10x the size, it's unreal. They'll be vastly more walkable even though they have barely any more transit than a few local buses. Yeah obviously big apartment blocks may necessitate good transit, but you can get to fourplexes and townhomes and the like mostly relying on walking and biking to pick up much of the slack (assuming you also do mixed use zoning and other common sense changes).

IIRC Germany doesn't even have any single family home only zoning in the whole drat country, but American flip the gently caress out even when you try to remove it even a couple blocks away from light rail.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2019 01:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

American decision making on land use is totally different from Europe because the conditions are totally different. In America we have just this absurd amount of empty space left. A pretty huge chunk of the west is just plain undeveloped. Even the east coast isn't really having much trouble finding places to put new poo poo. This is also why we just keep dumping trash into landfills while...some Scandinavian country (Sweden, I think) has gotten so good at burning trash for power that they've started buying garbage.

Sorry, but this is mostly bunk. You think Sweden and Norway don't have lots of space relative to their population? Having lots of space meant that it was easier for the US to spread out compared to the UK or Japan or Germany, but it didn't mandate it. There's an important distinction there

The US being so different is mostly two things. One is that a very large amount of our urban development happened with cars being available. If you look at cities that were reasonably fleshed out prior to cars, like Boston or Philly, you find those areas are decent transit-friendly in how they're built; they had to be, since back when they were being developed most trips were just walking. Ones that built more afterwards, like LA or Phoenix, are more car dominant, which means more spread out.

The other is that we just collectively decided that more space = good and to build for cars. This isn't some inevitable thing, you can just look at how the Netherlands was going that direction post-WW2, then reversed course starting in the 70's.

quote:

Europe is packed much tighter. There isn't nearly as much empty space. What is empty isn't necessarily all that usable. Even so the tight packing makes mass transit much more usable thanks to economies of scale. A hell of a lot of Americans are still doing things like living an hour or three away from the nearest city but driving in for special occasions. Even if you mass transit the gently caress out of the cities that won't change. Europe is barely larger than the U.S. but has more than double the people. That's a gargantuan difference that makes mass transit more viable.

Nah, the fact that the US is so big is mostly irrelevant if you actually have the political will to get good transit, because the biggest thing with transit-friendliness is how spaced out things are within metros, not between metros. If cities stayed at the same geographic locations they have now, but each metro became packed together 3x as tight, that would be a massive boon for transit. Sure, a few people would still live out in the boonies and need to drive everywhere, but that's okay.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2019 13:52

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Doesn't basically everything look better with greenery and water features though?

# ¿ Jan 14, 2019 10:39

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2019 18:22

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I don't really see what "commodity" housing has to do with being terrible at urbanism.

Now, houses as investments are bad because they incentivize people to support policies that restrict supply and thus increase the value of their investments. It's like letting Apple and Samsung vote on whether other companies should be allowed to make smartphones.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 20:47

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 05:20

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Insanite posted:

Say I’m in a neighborhood of two- and three- story multifamily homes in a streetcar suburb. I’ve lived here for a decade or two, I have kids in the school system, and I love the feel and routine of where I live.

Why shouldn’t I feel anxious about, for example, zoning changes that would permit large, tall apartment buildings from being erected on all sides of my home? How do you sell that to me?

It's basically the same as selling a homeless shelter or halfway house.

You shouldn't have to sell it to that particular neighborhood, because each neighborhood will naturally fight to push those things into other neighborhoods or cities. That's why these things should be planned at the regional level (or higher), so that you don't get random areas vetoing poo poo that needs to get done.

In practice that kind of behavior means rich neighborhoods are untouched and poor neighborhoods get all of the 'undesirable' elements, because shocker of shockers, the rich neighborhoods have more political power. Community input is good, but only so far. Part of why gentrification/displacement of poor people in poor neighborhoods is such an issue is that we're so scared of touching SFH-only neighborhoods where the affluent live that all the increased housing density goes elsewhere.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Mar 18, 2019

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 13:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Urban Planning Megathread - I'll NIMBY in your YIMBY

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