I'm not terribly surprised. In my experience the calls for more housing from the wealthy and business class are disingenuous; more often really a call for more apartments to be built exclusively in neighbourhoods dominated by the poor and working class and a continued ban of apartments in the low density single family home areas that the wealthy business owning class live in.
Often this is called the "Grand Bargain," that new housing can be allowed, but only if it is constrained to a tiny area (which becomes increasingly dense), while the bulk of single family homes are left untouched.
The challenge for voters is to discern between those that are calling for more housing that are genuine YIMBYs, that want to build more housing for everyone more equitably, everywhere in all neighbourhoods, and those like Andreessen, which merely want to continue on with Grand Bargain thinking, and want to continue the status quo by which the poors live as far as possible away from him.
Honestly, having had lived in mixed-income neighborhoods, the wealthy are missing out. Dense mixed-income neighborhoods, pockets of which are holding on for dear life in parts of New York for example, are an absolute delight.
We need to find a way to rebrand the American dream to be this.
As a New Yorker driving around middle america is super depressing. I can't imagine growing up trapped in my own home on a street with no sidewalks, only being able to go where my parents take me and finally growing into driving age so that I can go from parking lot to parking lot.
I've lived in rural, suburban (McMansion-dominated), and urban parts of the US, including NYC. I grew up in a semi-rural place.
NYC was by far the most depressing and soul-crushing for me. It's lonely despite being crowded, it's filthy, it's unreasonably expensive, it's hard to get anywhere, and it's unfortunately full of people with a similarly condescending viewpoint about people/places outside the city.
I now live in a large southern city with lots of sidewalks and love it, and returning to New York makes me incredibly sad for the people who still think it's the only city to live in.
My point is not that I'm correct. It's just how I feel. Rather, I suggest you examine how you talk about your viewpoint to avoid sounding so confident about things you have no actual experience in.
I was actually born in Poland and spent the first half of my childhood on the outskirts of a mid sized town, 2 blocks from a huge forrest, and enjoyed it a ton, as a 10 year old I was able to walk or bike to any corner of the town on my own.
I'm not being condescending about living in suburbs or rural areas, just the design of a large portion of car dominated suburban areas of the US. As an example, I just got back from Pittsburgh, where I was staying in an AirBnB that was only 2 miles north of the city. I was really excited to explore Pittsburgh and was hoping to bike or walk down to the city after work but it would have been a 50min walk down a narrow road that's dominated by F150s and mini vans, something that even as an adult I didn't feel safe doing. I got to see a large portion of the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh and most of it looked like that, as I was driving through it it hit me that there are no kids out even though it's the middle of Summer, the only place we saw any was at shopping malls with their parents.
NYC is not a soul crushing place full of condescending people if step outside of the touristy areas of Manhattan. I grew up in Queens (Ridgewood / Kew Gardens Hills) and lived in Harlem and northern Brooklyn as an adult, all of which are some of the most diverse zip codes of the world with a ton of friendly middle class people. As a teenager I was able to bike or take the train to any basketball court in the city, say hi and play with people from all over the world. These days with all of the bike lanes that they added I can bike to almost anywhere in the city in under 30min and it's my main mode of transportation.
> I'm not being condescending about living in suburbs or rural areas, just the design of a large portion of car dominated suburban areas of the US.
It sounds like your experience in Pitt was bad and I'm sorry you didn't have fun. I'm glad you found a home in NYC that you love.
What's not okay is projecting your suburb in Pitt onto the entire Midwest. There's a large geography to the US with many different cultures. What you wrote felt condescending and classist when framed alongside your projection that doesn't ring true for most of the towns in the Midwest.
To frame this with your example, if I only spoke about the worst parts of NYC and then projected them onto the entire city I doubt you'd have a very high opinion of me. That's why people don't like what you said.
He was talking about the car-mandatory suburban design of the USA, which is pretty much everywhere by law outside of a few grandfathered places that were built before the car was invented and some commercial down towns. They also tend to be very expensive since they are in short supply and high demand. It has nothing to do with the people or culture per say and his experience exists everywhere! Look at pretty much an identical experience in Houston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 . The channel also has few examples of the same thing in london, ontario, canada.
In Europe, small town life is not necessarily suburban life, there are a lot of of walk-able villages connected via a train line that you could take to commute to your job in city, and they're wayyyyyyyyyy better than the sadness that is US & Canadian suburbia.
The offense people took had nothing to do with cars and more to do with generalizations and common microaggressions by coastal folks from large metros.
Honestly, I am very frustrated that this forum struggles so repeatedly to empathize with voices outside large metros, but I will attempt to break this down shotgun-style for you.
> As a New Yorker driving around middle america is super depressing.
Imagine if I called the place you're from, the place you grew up "depressing". All for a lack of sidewalks? As others shared we have woods, parks, lots of activities, etc. Yeah, it's not the same culture as NYC, but I don't think it requires being insulted. It's also not factual that you can only get around with a car. I survived til I was 16 with just a bike and rode everywhere. Still do, and now I live in San Jose.
> I can't imagine growing up trapped in my own home on a street with no sidewalks, only being able to go where my parents take me and finally growing into driving age so that I can go from parking lot to parking lot.
To most of the midwest and south, this is an extreme exaggeration but conveyed as commonplace.
I don't owe any more mental energy to this thread, so this is my last reply. I do hope that you (and him!) can be aware of the microaggressions in this thread and why they're not okay.
Many of us grew up in "trapped in my own home on a street with no sidewalks, only being able to go where my parents take me and finally growing into driving age so that I can go from parking lot to parking lot." and escaped to cities or loathe the suburbia we live in today.
Just want to add that I actually did grow up in a Midwest suburb, developed in the 1980s, and I didn't like it at all. I totally agree with OP's characterization: I enjoy walking to get around, and the built environment, which doesn't allow for that, depressed me. I relished every opportunity to spend time in the city, which is quite walkable.
Some suburbs in the SF South Bay and Orange County, CA are even worse in this respect, though. The sidewalks are there but there's no walking in places like Yorba Linda or Placentia.
I would take no offense to anyone calling the places where I grew up or have lived depressing.
If this is the Strong Towns YT video talking about how Houston is basically a dystopia, not all of Houston is like this. There are many walkable neighborhoods in this city. Examples: Downtown and Midtown Houston, Downtown Woodlands, Downtown Conroe, some parts of Sugar Land, Downtown Galveston, etc.
There are also (many) more suburbs with housing across all price points that are primarily accessible by car, and the families that live there that are happy with this arrangement.
As someone who lived in NYC and now lives in Houston, I much prefer the latter.
It would be cool if there were more trees or a sweet bar along my walk, but I still try to walk two miles per day.
Public transit was cool (and I was a HUGE fan of the NYC Subways), and I wish we had a commuter rail station somewhere, but I much prefer the privacy and freedom of my own car.
Also, public transit in Manhattan is much more convenient than public transit in South Brooklyn or Forest Hills, where you're usually looking at a 30 minute trip minimum to get _ANYWHERE_. (I owned a car in NYC and all but stopped taking public transit once we got it.)
I like a lot of things about Houston and Dallas, but one thing I particularly like is that you don't _have to_ live the urban experience if you don't want to. We have something for almost everyone. I personally don't think that urbanization should be foisted on everyone.
Pittsburgh suburbs were just an example, there's plenty of nice walkable spots all over America, what I was talking about are car centric sprawls where you can't really go anywhere unless you get in a car. Having traveled most of North East, East Coast, Rust Belt and West Coast of the US, this is not a rare thing that's only seen in Pitt, even fairly dense parts of Long Island are just isolated homes and strip malls.
You’re still just generalizing your experience in a way that implies that you actually know what most of middle America is like, when you don’t. And having lived in Poland doesn’t somehow prove that you do.
I’ve lived in the US for over 20 years and have been to more than half of the states, including all of the east coast, west coast and large parts of the mid west. The states I haven’t been to are way more rural than the ones that I’ve seen. If I had to guess I’ve probably seen more of the US than 95% of Americans.
I’ve also done road trips through large parts of Europe and can tell you that none of it is littered with strip malls, parking lots and houses on streets without sidewalks.
I also find New York City to be extremely depressing, and radically subpar urbanistically compared with Berlin, where I currently live. You can take an S-Bahn in 30 minutes or so to S-Bahn Schlachtensee and swim clean, chill and easily accessible lake - a journey to the water in New York will take much much longer, involve more walking, and involve dirtier water.
It is easy to find scapegoats for the poor urbanism of the United States, but very difficult to think of a solution without a radical change in the nature of governance.
And in Berlin you can cycle! I'm not a regular cyclist, but on holiday I felt totally comfortable renting a bike and using the bike lanes to get around.
As a resident of Berlin (that likes living there) I feel it's important to also mention NYC has almost 2.5 times as many people and unlike Berlin is part of a large urban agglomeration (the northeast megalopolis - total population ~50m).
Right, but the original comment was (condescendingly) comparing NYC to middle America, so differing densities and other demographics are precisely the point.
No, my point was about the car centric bend of a large portion of suburban / rural America. I wrote that message at like 1am, see my comment here for what I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32355777
NotJustBikes has some excellent videos on the differences between US and European cities, this one captures many of the issues - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
You can certainly cycle in New York. Cycling has increased dramatically in New York City over the past decade or so with the installation of more cycle-friendly infrastructure, including over 100 miles of protected bike lanes, city bike sharing, e-bike rental apps, etc.
And for all of the cleanliness and convenience you also have to put up with 3/4 of the population blowing their cigarette smoke in your face. Especially indoors in bars, despite it being illegal.
This can't be quite true. In Berlin smoking is prohibited in public buildings, public transportation including nearly 100% of all train stations (the exception being designated smoker areas of ~20m² on open-air platforms), shops, bars and inside restaurants. Many places offer open-air seating (they call it Terrasse but it's the sidewalk); there, being outside smoking is not prohibited. There's an exception for small-ish bars which are clearly marked as being smokers' places and for adults only (>18yrs). So I'd say you've got a good chance of not getting smoke blown into your face.
Also, while you're right in that comparatively many people in Berlin are smokers (although that might be a commonality of cities as opposed to the countryside), they're still a minority of <30% [1], so more like 1/3 than 3/4 (it can feel like every second guy in the street though).
What? Smoking indoors is illegal in Germany, yet germans do it outright? This is a blow to the stereotype of the 100%-law-abiding-germans that I grew up with here in only-12%-law-abiding-south-america.
I'm actually being serious. I never thought that germans would smoke indoors if it became illegal. I mean, here in Brazil it's illegal (I think it became illegal in the early 2000's) and nobody does it.
Note that if you're the sort of person to be bothered by smoke, one person lighting up in a room with 100 people will be noticed by the other 99 people. It only takes 1% non-law-abiders to make everyone think that Germans smoke in bars.
I'm from Germany and this is pretty unusual. There are very few pubs where smoking is kind-of tolerated and sometimes a drunk person will light a cigarette in a club, but it's really rare and absolutely a non-issue in my experience.
In Berlin, the inside smoking laws are pretty much never enforced. Some bars have dedicated smoking rooms, but many don’t. As for clubs, you can mostly expect smoking indoors. A lot of people smoke, so you _will_ encounter smokey environments when out and about, especially during the winter
There's some odd dynamic going on then. What happened here in Norway was that the indoors smoking ban was at first immensely unpopular (it didn't help that the health minister at the time, who pushed it, was a Christian Democrat who fit nicely into moral busybody stereotypes). But as soon as the ban was implemented, attitudes changed overnight. Even the smokers agreed that things were a lot more comfortable. And I've heard similar stories from other places with public smoking bans.
I bet that even if a place managed to hide it from the public health authorities (they DO regularly do unannounced inspections anywhere food is served or made, after all), it would just be a colossal competitive disadvantage in most places. How strange that Berlin is different!
NYC has serious and complicated problems and it's perhaps not the best idea to hold it up as the pinnacle of a "walkable town". There are better choices to use for that example.
As you sort-of implicitly suggest, it doesn't have to be a choice between a soulless suburb with no sidewalks and a piss-soaked urban hellscape-- with NOTHING in-between.
What we do need, however, is more urban centers with walkable, complete streets, human amenities and a broad mix of different housing types for a wide spectrum income levels and NOT separate isolated enclaves for the wealthy and the poor. Especially important are appropriate and truly useable "third-places" rather just bauble shops for the wealthy, dollar stores for the poor, and distant megamalls for the middle-class surrounded an ocean of asphalt.
Where are you going in NYC? I live in a tree lined neighborhood with pleasant little cafes and restaurants. I bike a lot of places and I'm equally close to two large parks. There's some mix of incomes as the adjacent neighborhoods blend together. I hear the schools are pretty good, and there's good train access.
woah... I am not "against" NYC. I think it's awesome as a whole and I go there frequently. But yeah, it does have deep problems, the cost-of-living is borderline insane and it REALLY DOES smell like pee in far too many places.
I am just saying that NYC is not the best example of where we want urban centers to aspire to. For one thing, nothing in the USA is as big and or has the financial resources of NYC.
Towns in the US that want to improve their housing situation need to look towards what OTHER SIMILAR towns are doing and are successful at. NYC is such a weird case on the basis of scale and density.
Yeah, cost of living is a serious issue. We've been under-building housing for nearly 30 years.
I think that's all basically fair. I'm interested in how some places in Utah are trying to tackle housing, but haven't spent much time reading about it yet.
NYC is not midtown manhattan. Please go check out Queens or Brooklyn next time you visit, I promise you it's safe and full of walkable and bikeable streets.
It's the cars for me. I hate driving. I hate how everyone having a car makes it necessary to drive everywhere. Very few cities in the us let you get away without owning a car.
NYC isn't perfect, its just better than everywhere else ive lived.
> I now live in a large southern city with lots of sidewalks
So you pretty much agree with the person that you're implying is an elitist, and live in exactly the same neighborhood they would choose if they found a good job in your city. You're not defending McMansion-dominated neighborhoods very well.
It's not that that person was wrong. They were right -- about their own preferences.
They feel sorry for people who are different from them and want different things. Some people love being able to drive places (my disabled sister is one of them).
I feel sorry for people who don't know they're in a bubble. Maybe they truly want to live in a cookie-cutter McMansion suburb and just won't allow themselves to consider it for cultural reasons. That specifically is unlikely, but some version of it is probably happening, and they're missing out as a result.
I think it has to do with what stage you are at in life. If I was an eight year old kid NYC would be terrible: no pool, no pet dog, no backyard, rough schools, dirty public transits, restaurants don't have kids menus, etc etc. If I was a 23 year old college grad - NYC is the place to be: high paying stressful work, awesome happy hours, awesome C level mentors, easy to find roommates, killer Manhattan apartments, etc etc. If I was a 43 year old family man, NYC would again be horrible: terrible schools, long commutes, high crime, expensive beer, no car parking for kids, insane mortgages or rent, parks covered in homeless, old run down apartments.
Sound like urban living is not your cup of tea. Which is entirely fine and something YIMBYs strongly support.
YIMBYism is about options: those who do prefer to live in an area should not face artificial restrictions like bans on new homes in desirable areas near well paying jobs.
Growing up in Middle America was nowhere near as depressing as you’re describing it. We had bikes to get around, woods and empty lots and big backyards and parks to explore. Not to mention friends on the same block. Of course NYC would be much more exciting once you’re allowed to ride the train on your own.
I for one had a very isolated childhood because I couldn’t go anywhere on my own, and pretty much nobody in my development ever talked to each other, so I basically didn’t know anyone local. That said I didn’t know any better so I thought that was just normal and didn’t experience it negatively.
Man, it just depends. In my youngest years, it was exactly as you describe. But then we moved to a new state. It was a little bit more suburban (not quite rural, but closer), and houses were a bit more spread out. Populated streets were more spread out, connected by roads I wouldn't feel safe cycling on as an adult, let alone allowing a child to do so. I couldn't wait to get my license to drive so I could actually do something outside the house without requiring permission.
Agreed. I think people on the coasts (or at least the east coast) fail to appreciate the vastness of the rest of the country that they so often look down on.
Yes, but it really isn't that far. As soon as you leave the edge of suburba-mega-town you're in wilderness again. Where I live it's much less than a half-hour of driving, from the most interior parts of the city, in most conditions.
I can’t tell if you intend to agree with the parent or if you are trying to rebut his argument, but this is the parent’s point. Moreover, the US is still not very dense, and there is plenty of sparsity for everyone. People should leave their metropolises a couple of times in their lives and experience the vast expanses.
suburbs aren’t threatening nature in most parts of the country (agriculture OTOH…), and I say this as someone who personally dislikes the stereotypical American suburb for many other reasons.
I wasn't trying to rebut the parent's argument (assuming the parent wasn't trying to be ironic or so).
Denser cities make it easier to leave them for a short stint, too, because there's less sprawl.
Yes, it's probably a good idea to live outside a city for a while in your life. Though that's up to individual preferences.
I'm not quite sure whether it makes much sense one way or another to say that the US is 'still not very dense'.
In some literal sense, that is obviously true. In another sense, just because eg Russia has huge empty lands in Siberia bringing down the average density on a federal level, doesn't really make a difference to someone living in the suburbs of Moscow.
Similarly, if Russia lost Siberia tomorrow, the person in the Moscow suburb wouldn't experience density any different either.
I only chose Russia as an extreme case example. You can replace Siberia with Alaska or the flyover states, and Moscow and its suburbs with eg San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
After spending years in quite a few different places around the globe, I'm quite happy to live in Singapore these days, one of the premier global cities.
In the US it is sad that because of building restrictions so many people are excluded from its most productive cities; unnecessarily setting back the economy and thus the prosperity of the people. Including even of those people who wouldn't want to live in those most productive places.
Not sure what numbers you used. For comparison, here's a worked example:
Singapore has a size of 728.6 km2, and a population of 5.7 million people. For a density of 8,400 people per km2. (That includes water reservoirs, military bases, an international airport, areas for heavy industry, nature reserves, garbage dumps, power stations, 1.5% of the world's crude oil refining capacity, a few semiconductor fabs, etc.)
There are 7.96 billion people on the planet. That means if you scale up Singapore at the same density, you'd need 952,000 km2 to fit everyone.
Texas has a size of 696,000 km2. So our mega-Singapore would need about 1.37 Texases of area.
That's pretty close to your number.
Wikipedia gives New York City's population density as 11,313.68/km2, but the borders for that calculation will by necessity be drawn a bit arbitrarily. And I assume that doesn't include as much of the support infrastructure as Singapore does.
I have no idea what “human scale housing” means, but single family housing is not a threat to wilderness in the US. There is a ton of wilderness in the US, and it is far more constrained by agriculture.
It's a geometry problem. SFH takes up too much space.
You're absolutely correct that there's heaps of wilderness in the USA, but the more SFH there is, the more sprawl that is required, which means that that wilderness is further and further away.
I'd rather get to the wilderness faster and not have to drive through hours and hours of sprawling SFH suburbs.
Geometry has a solution! If you want to be closer to nature, move closer to nature. That seems a lot more reasonable than insisting that everyone around you uproot and reorganize. I'm strongly biased toward letting people live how they want so long as they aren't harming people (and I don't think "living between urbanites and nature" constitutes harm).
Where? In the midwest fields and forests still dominate, and the west is still vast expanses of wilderness. I don’t think your experience generalizes well (although perhaps it is more common on this forum considering it’s atypical demographics).
Sure, but odds are he lived in some outer suburb that is no longer the outer suburb. That woods might have hung on for a while, but it was always doomed just be the fact that it was near a large growing city where most people live and thus remember. Get out a little farther from the city and the wilderness is going to do just fine, but that isn't what people will remember as a kid just by virtual that they never lived near it.
I don't doubt it's true for him. I'm expressing a doubt that it's indicative of the American landscape broadly, a claim which seems to be implied by his opening "had.".
As a current Seattleite who grew up in middle America biking around as a kid anywhere I wanted, I have the opposite feeling. I thought it was great! Maybe it’s more about the person than it is the location.
A lot of people can't imagine how nice it is to be able to go out casually into the woods or wilderness With Friends on the weekend or even a school night
Arent most single family homes in suburbs or similar places where there are no woods and often no sidewalks? Then everywhere you go, there are just more of single family houses and going to nearest wood requires a car.
I guess it depends on what is meant by middle America in the parent post. In my experience, if neighborhoods don't have sidewalks, they are more rural than suburban.
Indeed, you typically see fewer sidewalks near houses that are closer to woods/etc.
I also wonder what sorts of distances people think of as "far" in this thread. I've lived in both suburbs and in NYC. It's easy to walk a mile in the city without realizing it, whereas that is sometimes unthinkable to suburban folks. But if I walk a mile from my house I hit: woods, trails, the downtown area, the train station (to NYC), a school, fields, and etc.
At least in the U.S. - think it matters quite a bit where you are. Lots of areas in South and West were developed entirely around car use whereas suburbs in the Northeast can be quite tightly packed.
It doesn't help that suburbs aren't designed for walkability or ease of navigation. Even if something might only be 500 metres from your house getting there requires a twisty stupid path to one of the handful or perhaps only entrance to the subdivision. So that 500m can easily turn into 2KM.
That's a fair point. My town (outside of NYC) is very much like that. With that in mind, the 1-mile walk I mentioned in my original response is based on the paths available to me (twists, intersections, etc.) rather than straight lines.
In my mind, this is another the under-rated aspects of parts of NYC - grids. Simplify the process of walking, judging distance, knowing where you are.
This is actually part of the secret to making walkable neighborhoods - make them hell for cars (one entrance, have to snake around) but have paths that go directly through walls/hedges. I've seen some very nice housing developments that are literally 100 ft from a shopping center, but you'd never know it because it's hidden behind a gate.
Love it, agree, I wonder how many suburban towns are able retrofit their neighborhoods like this. My guess is not many based on ownership and configuration, but it would really cool to see pathways snaking through neighborhoods like that.
In a lot of suburbs of Atlanta* (and even within Atlanta itself!) you will find residential neighborhoods with no sidewalks. And these are definitely not rural.
* The choice of city is due to personal experience, but I doubt it's unusual - e.g. I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same in/around Miami.
Most subrubs don't need sidewalks. there is zero traffic, so kids can play in the streets just fine. Stop the game when a car is coming. The car can even go slow (though it probably won't if there are no kids) as there is noplace to go on that street and so it doesn't have far to go.
Growing up in a midwest suburb during the 1980s, not only were we not trapped in our own homes, we were almost never in them at all.
Everybody just biked from place to place and spent like 18 hours a day outside of the house, playing basketball, duplicating cassette tapes and making music in various garages.
I feel it's interesting to see how many here touts bikes as the savior and best way to get around.
The US suburbs are now generally so bike-unfriendly. Big and dangerous cars dominate. Speeds in residential areas are high, so dangerous to play in the streets. The suburbs you grew up in are no longer the same.
What happened? Why did you all stop biking around and got a car instead?
Not sure you've spent time in too many suburbs but traffic tends to be minimal and the ubiquitous nature of kids means most drivers take some reasonable care.
No different than when I was growing up. Don't play in the street unless it's a quiet part (cul-de-sac's are great), or block it off with stuff you can move when cars come by.
I had great memories of living in the suburbs. I would rarely be indoors and had half a dozen friends within a minute or two bike ride. We'd hang out in parks, in front of people's houses, spend our quarters at the store buying snacks, doing kid stuff.
Just how many cars do you think are zipping around in a suburban neighborhood at any given time? The roads in a neighborhood are empty most of the time. I find it rich that people talking up the benefits of riding a bike in a big city would seem concerned about the safety of using a bike in a low density neighborhood.
> Speeds in residential areas are high
What? No they’re not. In any given neighborhood the speed limit usually tops out at 25mph.
The speed limit is of no concern to the parent in a big SUV driving their kids to practice. After all, their own kids are safe inside the car.
And my point is that at some point, kids stopped biking everywhere. But it's the same people that used to bike around as kids now driving them everywhere. Hence my question: What happened?
The rise of structured activities. Now kids don't have free time, they go from school to soccer practice to a math tutor. Gotta have extracurriculars if you want to get into a good school.
What happened to a lot of activities kids used to do? They got replaced by ubiquitous internet-connected devices that allow them to watch any video or play any game at any time. They’d rather do that than play outside, and childhood obesity rates track well with these developments.
To put it another way, the neighborhood I grew up in 30+ years ago still exists, and the roads are the same size, the sidewalks are just as non-existent as they used to be, and there’s no more traffic than there used to be. But as you point out, sure there’s less kids out and about in the neighborhood when I was a kid.
But I would note two things about that. One, when I was a kid, there was much less inside that could occupy my time than there is today. And two, I’d argue that if you’re an adult who has to work all day during the summer, you may not be noticing how many kids are actually playing outside during the day.
I think the devices thing is a bit of a chicken and egg in many ways. I have a 10yo nephew that I see a few times a year, and he uses the iPad and loves playing video games to a very large degree. But if you give him the opportunity to go outside and play with him or other kids, the device play time is pretty much ignored most of the time, and it's definitely not because of rules or structure the parents are setting, the parents have problems putting many restrictions on him due to various issues. He also love sports.
If there were always 30 kids outside in your neighborhood to play with and you didn't need permission or help from the adults in your life, I really bet a lot more kids would be having a lot less screen time.
Kids use the devices because there is not much else they are allowed to do, and playing by yourself or a sibling you are sick of in your back yard gets boring quick for most.
Adults need to create an environment where there is something better, and that is the sad truth for most children.
>> there’s less kids out and about in the neighborhood when I was a kid
I would have to agree with this.
I live in the same neighborhood I skateboarded in 35 years ago. Packs of us roamed the streets. We were all over and we got into all sorts of trouble.
Not only can't I remember the last time I saw a kid skateboarding around here, I can't remember the last time a saw a kid in the neighborhood doing anything outside without an adult present. I know there are still kids around because I get the property tax bill every year that's supposedly paying for schools, but kids don't roam the streets around here no more.
That world is gone. Which is good, because if there was a bunch of kids on skateboards fucking up the handrail on my front steps I would have to go try to run them off like the oldsters tried to do to us circa 1988.
We also now call CAS on parents if their eight year old goes biking on their own. Two generations ago it was okay for a kid of that age to roam several miles on their bike. Now they need parental accompaniment at all times.
US suburbs are more bike friendly than ever. In 1950 the car was the future and they quit building sidewalks in the suburbs. Today in new suburbs people want to see sidewalks so they build them. The roads are no wider today than the 1950s, and the lots are smaller. (in the 1950s people remembered the depression and still demanded large enough a lot for a large garden)
The above is of course a generalization and thus there are exceptions all over. It is still fairly true though.
I'm raising my kids in a subdivision that has a pool, a playground, and several parks close by, this is very standard for the subdivisions around here. My subdivision is full of kids unsupervised riding bikes, playing on the playground, riding scooters. All the subdivision roads have a low speed limit and its very easy to go miles on dedicated bike lanes that aren't just painted lines on a busy road but instead are separate paved areas off the roads. It helps that I live in one of the safest states in the union and that until relatively recently this was a very affordable place to buy a house and have a family.
This exists in a lot of the newer larger metros, places that have seen lots of growth in the last 10-15 years.
My hometown is much more bike friendly now. It wasn't an issue 30 years ago when I was a kid, but now there are major bike/jogging paths cutting through town in a few different directions, bike lanes are wider and clearly marked, sometimes with barriers.
As many of the other posts point out, helicopter parenting happened. Instead of forming a bicycle gang with other kids in the neighborhood and rarely even encountering adults, now kids are dragged to structured activities by their parents. They have to be dragged by their parents because if they were sent on their own, most would find something more fun to do on the way and skip their training lessons. This is orthogonal to whether people live in cities or suburbs.
> Speeds in residential areas are high, so dangerous to play in the streets.
Speeds on trunk roads are ridiculous, but the streets with the actual houses on them are not the nightmare you describe.
That stopped happening in the 90s, where you would get reported to child protective services for letting your under 12yo children play outside by themselves unsupervised if it was outside of your property.
Other parents hear it and it creates a huge chilling effect. As a result, there are no other kids outside to play with, so for the few parents willing to buck the trend, it doesn't matter anyway and helicopter soccer mom has to play chauefer and sign them up for a million structured activities and play dates so the kids don't go nuts inside their houses with not being allowed to do anything.
I feel bad for people who live like ants crammed in small depressing apartments. I’m not in a rural area by any means but I have so much nature and wildlife around me I could never live in a concrete jungle.
People are different. I have friends that live in Miami and NYC, both absolutely love it there but whenever I visit I always want to ask why in the hell they are paying so much rent for so little. Likewise my friends visit me in Colorado and wonder why I'm so obsessed with going outside.
I grew up in a dense urban core and can’t imagine putting kids through it.
Little to no green space, no riding your bikes down random streets until it’s get dark. No exposure to nature. Cramped in tiny $1M apartments immersed in the rat race.
There are plenty of very livable US college towns with medium-density downtowns, condos for far less than $1M, plenty of green space, and streets I'd feel comfortable letting my kids (if I had any) ride their bikes around. Bloomington, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, and Davis, California (granted, that last one isn't as affordable as the others) come to mind among places I've been to. I imagine places like Ann Arbor, Michigan and Champaign, Illinois rank up there too.
Those aren’t suburbs to you? Sure the main commercial street (maybe a few blocks total) isn’t, but Ann Arbor is 90% suburban single family homes.
It’s like San Mateo. The Main Street is more dense but very few choose to live there. It’s mostly endless single family homes.
Hell, I’d call a good part of SF “practically” suburban. Sunset is mostly block upon block of single family homes with maybe 1 corner store within a 10-15 min walk. Transit is easy on a narrow strip, otherwise you’re screwed without a car.
I personally don’t see much difference between that and what people rail against as suburbs.
You mean American, crappily designed urban cores. Plenty of cities around the world that are safe, have plenty of green space, and are much more affordable than those in the US.
I spent time in Singapore. Incredible transit system, carefully designed "Garden City" with plenty of outdoor areas, modern, efficient, affordable public housing.
And what did people aspire to? Single family homes, with their own yard and a car. What HN sees as "people are forced to live in the suburbs", is in reality, people just choosing what they like best.
Same in all the other countries I've lived in. Sure, 20-somethings love living in "hip" cities with "trendy" restaurants and "fun" bars to go and are willing to trade all that for tiny apartments. I don't deny that.
But a very substantial part of the population don't want that. They want space, quiet neighborhoods and are willing to have to drive to get that.
I think what he means is that, given the choice, people there would opt for a good class bungalow (essentially your 'detached home', but most will never be able to afford it).
That is an obvious statement, but the analogy breaks down a bit as in Singapore, whether you live in a GCB or in HDB (social housing), everything is relatively close by regardless. Hence, there isn't really much of a trade-off at all - living in a GCB just affords more space and privacy (at an exponentially inflated cost).
Good class bungalows are not your typical single family home. They are on huge lots even for a US single family home.
There are townhomes (shophouses), duplexes, single family homes as options as well.
“To qualify as a GCB, the property must have at least 1,400 square metres (approx. 15,070 sq. ft.) of land area, and the bungalow itself is limited to a maximum of two storeys in height”
People in HDBs want to live in condo, condos want to live in shophouses, shophouses want to live in detached freehold homes.
Everybody wants more space. And despite the great transit system, parts of Singapore can be more remote to the point a car being almost a requirement. And that’s what many people strive for.
That may be true in some countries, but it's not true in the US or Canada. In fact your comment is just bizarre when you look at the numbers.
The US has enough land to give every single person (man, woman, child - not household) almost 7 acres of land.
The idea that we need pack ourselves in to <1% of the land mass in dense urban cores or else, as you put it we can't live "meaningful lives" (do you decide what's meaningful?) or "destroying nature" is just wrong.
And the best part? We can afford it! We don't need the federal government backing "jumbo" leans for $1M apartments in San Francisco - instead they can back mortgages for 5 homes in the mid-West.
And this is a big shocker - a lot of it's already developed because we need places to grow food!
How do you economically electrify all those those evenly-spaced 7-acre plots of land? How do you build roads to all of them? How do you deliver mail to all of them? How do you get water and sewer lines to all of them (wells don't work everywhere, and septic tanks pollute and just generally suck)? Hell, what company is going to lay down fiber or even coax to all of them? How do you build grocery stores such that people don't have to drive 90 minutes to get one, but there aren't so few customers per store that most of the produce spoils before it can be bought?
I know you're exaggerating for effect, but every degree that you spread people out means greater and greater investments in infrastructure and utilities you need to build and maintain, and some things we take for granted today just become infeasible.
And I agree that it's ridiculous to pay $1,000 per square foot (or more!) for housing in San Francisco. But that's not because of some sort of natural consequence of things, it's actually because it's not dense enough, and the political will to force more building just isn't there. Housing is so expensive here because, despite all the bad things about the city, despite the alleged COVID exodus, we still have far far more people who want to live here than the available housing can support.
Like sure the space exists (ignoring the fact that most of that land is inhospitable and/or already used for agriculture), but maybe we should leave something for the other species?
But hey, maybe your 7 acres is at the top of the Sierra and you can get some good fire insurance.
Even well planned Urban cities provide very different opportunities to the rural situation. You can't go casually hiking or mountain biking or camping in the afternoon after school
Dense cities can offer this too when there's not much in the way of suburban sprawl.
One thing I miss since moving to San Francisco from the UK is now I need a car to access nature. There was something very pleasant about taking a train to the edge of the city to go on a hike and ending up at a pub for a few beers before taking the train home again.
In Oslo in the winter you'd see people with cross country skis on the metro since the forest trails at the edge of town were easily accessible.
You absolutely can. Especially hiking (even living in Paris of all cities, you have two dozen trails you can get to by train). Mountain biking idk because I'm more of a sea guy, but i was doing a lot of river kayak after work in my previous city, and now I'm windsurfing a lot.
I live in very central Berlin, and regularly go 'mountain' biking after work. You can ride from the city to endless forests in like 30 minutes in relative safety. There's also a huge amount of green space in the city itself.
I'm glad you put "mountain" in quotes, because we sure as hell don't have anything which counts as a mountain in this town - and no, that tiny hill in Humbolthain where the nazis built anti-air guns doesn't count.
A 12–year–old can’t drive 15 minutes out of the city after school in order to go hiking. In a rural area the fields, farms, woods, streams, ponds, and other such attractions are all right within a few minutes walking distance. Indeed, that kid probably has to bike right past all of those things in order to get to his friend’s house to play Contra. Even in a suburban area some of those things might still be reasonably close by.
When people talk about how wonderful it is to live in a dense, walkable city, they are thinking about all the nightclubs they can go to, the bars, the restaurants, art galleries, libraries, etc all within a few minute’s walk. But that’s not everyone’s vision of an ideal living environment.
Folks who move to a suburb want more stability, less noise, fewer people, more open space, nice lawns, a pool in the back yard, a deck to sit on in the summer while you watch the kids swim, etc. They don’t want a nightclub on every block. Even a convenience store would not be very well regarded (especially if it’s really a gas station that also sells candy bars; Japanese–style stores that are part of the owner’s house would actually fit much better).
I don’t know much about what folks living in very rural areas like, but some of my relatives who live in a quasi–rural area value the fact that nobody in the area mows their lawns. Instead the local farmers bring their tractors over once or twice a year to harvest the grass out of everyone’s back yards to make hay.
> When people talk about how wonderful it is to live in a dense, walkable city, they are thinking about all the nightclubs they can go to, the bars, the restaurants, art galleries, libraries, etc all within a few minute’s walk.
Sort of, but that's not all of it. I like that there's a corner store a half block away, and a small but well-stocked grocery two blocks away. There's a hardware store four blocks away. There's a park four blocks away, and another six blocks away. I can go for a six mile run without having to drive myself to a gym (and my partner can walk to her gym). My partner walks a couple blocks to get her nails done or hair cut. If I need to see my doctor, I walk 20 minutes to get there. Sure, I have to drive sometimes, but it's rare.
I wish there was a way to get the best of both worlds. I do have to drive to go on a hike or find a forest to wander around in. I don't feel safe cycling in many parts of my city. As I get older, I go to bars less and less, and nightclubs pretty much never. I cook at home more often. I get annoyed rather than smile knowingly if I hear a pair of happy-drunk people walking home from a bar at 2am on a Friday night when my windows are open and I'm trying to sleep. But damn, I love being able to walk everywhere to get normal everyday things done. I hate driving for simple things; it just adds so much overhead to everything.
Not trying to say dense urban living is objectively better, just trying to point out that "I like walkability" doesn't merely mean "I like bars and restaurants and clubs". I agree that my particular city might not be a great place for kids to grow up, though, frankly, I don't see many kids out and about on the occasion that I need to drive into a residential area of a suburb, so I feel like in general it's just not the same as when I was a kid in the suburbs.
I would also like to see suburbs become more walkable and abandon the strip mall concepts. I would like to see more, smaller grocery stores and other commercial intermixed amid residential areas.
But I personally feel trapped in a dense urban environment. Going out to restaurants and bars and shows are neat experiences, but they aren’t fulfilling for me never mind the enormous expense of it all. I would rather live where I have access to nature and visit the city for its attractions on a weekend when the mood strikes. I want a house that my wife and I own and can do projects in without worrying about the condo association rules or disrupting my neighbors. I want at least a little bit of yard so my elderly dog can lay in the grass off-leash. I want less crime, a saner politics, and a local government that isn’t so dysfunctional. I really think a little bit of space is good for the soul, but I also think the American model of suburbs can be improved to get more of the benefits of urban life.
i live in a rural one-stoplight town and all of those things are the same distance if not closer. even if i lived in an outlying suburb none would be more than 15 min away or maybe 30-45 min on a bike. 'nature' is about a 90 seconds walk from my doorstep.
there certainly isn't much of a nightlife though.
it feels like the whole NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy loses sight of the fact there are other development models besides midtown manhattan or the exurbs of tuscon.
My city had more dog parks than kid parks. As the lone parent raising a kid in the city when I can make it to the city planning meetings I’m usually drowned out by the dog park “lobby”.
Living in the city is great; access to museums, art, culture, food, and transit is tops.
Like most cities, yours has pushed out parents and the concerns of kids.
Suburbs are more welcoming to kids in general because here we have more parks for kids than dogs. Here we don't have museums - but we don't miss them because we know from experience our kids can only stand being in one for about 10 minutes before they start doing that will get us kicked out if we don't leave first. A good portion of your art not kid friendly. Culture is everywhere, we don't get the "high culture" of the cities, but we have our own culture that works for us. We do a lot more cooking at home as we can't afford eating out as much, but I will grant when we do go out there is a lack of choices. All you really have that we would even use is much better transit.
It doesn't have to be that way. I'm told NYC is still welcoming to kids. Most cities though are not places where they have things for family.
> Here we don't have museums - but we don't miss them because we know from experience our kids can only stand being in one for about 10 minutes before they start doing that will get us kicked out if we don't leave first. A good portion of your art not kid friendly.
As a kid, I loved going to the natural history museum and the science museum. There's plenty of museums that caters to kids and that are really great with kids (not sure in the US to be honest but at least that's true in Europe). Museums doesn't mean art only.
Likewise for theater plays, that's the kind of things that are only available in bigger cities but can be tons of fun with kids.
We have kids museums in the US too. As a new parent I just discovered 2 nearby that have been here for decades. They have old donated vehicles like a police car, city bus, ambulances, or science stations, things like that. Things like plays exist, but it rural places they tend to be limited productions, either school or a traveling group. It may not make financial sense to have a play offered 6 nights/week all year in a small town, but a couple weekends throughout the year is common.
Be careful though. Until we fill all the demand of people who can afford to pay for those $1MM apartments nobody will be building cheaper stuff. That there is demand for tiny apartments says we have a problem with supply.
I totally relate to this. I once had to stay in suburbia with far apart houses (Dallas). Nowhere to go without driving. It was very very lonely (I was single, to boot).
I went on a business trip to NY, and I immediately felt alive. The 'energy' of people even though you don't know any of them, seeing so many faces, late night hustle & bustle - all very invigorating.
> only being able to go where my parents take me and finally growing into driving age so that I can go from parking lot to parking lot.
Part of this is because we hover over kids and let them do less. I'm from middle America, and when my dad was a kid, he and his friends would bike 100 miles round trip and it was fine.
Yeah it's isolating, though the internet was an incredible improvement in access to new information and interesting/smart people to learn from. There are major benefits to being in or at least close to a more populated hub.
this describes my childhood. I was growing up in a bigger city, and then moved to the suburbs when I was a teenager, it was horrible. Growing up with the autonomy of a big city kid, I couldn't handle the dependencies, only relieved when I had my own car. Now I frantically hold on to my big city life, even we live in a very dense place with ridiculous rent.
God forbid that kids have yards and empty lots to play in, ponds to go fishing in, and the woods to go hunting in. I could tolerate New York as an adult. I'd rather jump off one of those skyscrapers than live in one as a kid.
Consider that your current beliefs and preferences exist specifically because of your experience as a kid, when your brain was developing and assimilating its environment as its worldview.
I know plenty of people who grew up in NYC and have happy memories of childhood (and as an adult, I know several people raising kids in NYC, and they seem fine). I grew up in the suburbs and have happy memories of a lot of the things people are praising here. But my mom also took my sister and me on the 45-minute bus ride to the city a few times a year, and that was a different kind of adventure. Ditto for tagging along on my dad's business trips to Baltimore and DC.
Neither is better, neither is right or wrong. They're just different, and we establish many of our preferences and attitudes toward things based on our experiences as kids. That doesn't make those preferences correct or incorrect. It just makes them preferences.
If all you know is living in a cage, and you're told that being out of the cage is a bad thing, then you're going to make a value decision that being caged is actually okay. Just look at all the people on HN who can't believe that there are people who don't want to be stacked on top of other people in tiny, expensive caves. Making trips to the city isn't the same as living in one.
The growing up part was good. As a late teen, not being able to get to anyplace that mattered was maximally soul crushing, yes. The sole source of my suffering for several years.
Everyone assumes multi-family development means 10-story apartment buildings, but SFZ rules prevent duplexes and town houses from being built too, and some of the most charming, walkable, vibrant neighborhoods in the country are defined by those kinds of buildings.
If it's me, I'm authorizing all the 10-story buildings too. But we don't have to rip the band-aid off all at once; municipalities could start by letting up just a little bit and letting two households share a lot.
Something I don't get about America (and most of Europe) is that 10-story is seen like "wow, too big".
I live in the 14th floor of a 18-story building (4 apartments per floor), and next to me there are other ~20-story strictly residencial buildings. Life is amazing here, I have swimming pool, gym and sauna in the condo and it costs me next to nothing since the costs are shared between all residents. And it's never crowded. But the best part is that there's a positive side-effect: since I have everything at hand, I don't need to leave my home often and that made me switch to remote work full-time (the office started to seem boring).
It means, I'm living in a densely populated building and commuting less than I was when I lived in a smaller apartment complex.
I really think cities should consider this for their future: taller buildings with built-in amenities, ready for remote work. Make people want to live there and also don't want to commute. You get the density without the associated traffic congestion.
This sounds horrible to me. I don't want to share hallways or lobbies or parking lots or pools. When I lived in an apartment someone hit my brand new car. No such problems at my house. My house has a pool and hot tub. I can use it at 3 am if I want to and I don't have to even think about it.
I have family in Europe too. They live in a 4 story townhome in a small German city with their own garage and driveway and front door very similar to American townhomes. It's the middle of town next to a three story American style mall built right into the town center near a castle tourist destination. But it's also so rural there's nothing if you drive even 10 minutes out of town. And there's nothing to do at night.
They also own a small piece of land nearby where my grandparents hang out all day and grow food. In essence it's not much different from an American lifestyle just with excellent walkability and a train direct to Berlin or Hamburg
I'm not a fan of that either; I'd rather live in a townhome or small condo building. But I'd still prefer that apartment in the 20-story building over a single-family home in a neighborhood where I have to drive everywhere.
You’ll be forced to buy an expensive car, pay for insurance, maintain it, get in car crashes and become maimed, pay for gas, and advocate for politics that require massive amounts of death and destruction to secure your oil supply and you’ll be happy.
The first problem is that we don't need to frame this discussion as "cars vs no cars". I'm not advocating for getting rid of cars because that wouldn't make sense and would be wildly impractical. Instead, what is being advocated is not having car-first infrastructure.
The second problem is that this preference, like other "decisions" is done without complete information or a feedback loop besides a monthly payment and gas prices. You don't feel the weight of the maintenance and taxes that go to paying for new highway construction. You don't really experience climate change in a feedback mechanism. You also aren't presenting equivalent options. Would someone prefer to walk over to the neighborhood grocery store to get their groceries or drive 5 miles away to a big-box retailer? I bet if you actually polled people you'd get 90%+ preferring the former. Framing it as "I want a car" versus not having a car presents the person being asked a question which implies taking something away from them, which is bad practice.
The third problem is that people prefer to own cars because we intentionally design our cities such that owning a car is the only choice. There's no competition. But you can clearly see that this isn't society's actual preference, because walkable neighborhoods across the country built before cars were prevalent usually have higher property values than the suburbs in the same city. If there was a mechanism such that people could choose neighborhoods they'd vote for or buy medium-density mixed-use neighborhoods where they can have a car with street parking or in the garage behind their house for less frequent activities and then they'd walk to the local grocery store, let their kids walk themselves to school, etc.
> Would someone prefer to walk over to the neighborhood grocery store to get their groceries or drive 5 miles away to a big-box retailer? I bet if you actually polled people you'd get 90%+ preferring the former.
Would they? Because I have actually had it both ways and I much prefer driving to a huge supermarket. Prices are lower, quality is better, selection is better.
> But you can clearly see that this isn't society's actual preference, because walkable neighborhoods across the country built before cars were prevalent usually have higher property values than the suburbs in the same city.
Per acre of land, sure, because you can cram in tons of apartments in the same area that one house would take up. That doesn’t mean more people actually prefer to live that way.
It is nice to be able to walk to school or church or whatnot, but when it comes to commercial retail, my experience is that suburban car-bound freeway mayhem is pretty fucking great. From my current suburban house in Texas I can reach almost any retail or commercial business I need within 5-15 minutes, and those are full size, full service retailers. Instead of a “neighborhood grocery store” that’s barely one step above a convenience store, I can go to H-E-B and get almost any kind of food I can imagine for extremely reasonable prices. Instead of a neighborhood hardware store I can go to Home Depot or Lowe’s. Either one. I used to live in an apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, close to an actual supermarket (which kind of sucked), and even then I had nowhere close to the same access to retail. Maybe the biggest point in favor of walkable neighborhoods was that it was relatively cheap and easy to go to bars, but at some point I realized I could save money and drink with my wife at home (especially if we can drive to a cheap big-box liquor store!)
I do understand the appeal when it comes to things that are more community oriented than commercial. For instance, I understand that Orthodox Jews tend to live within walking distance of their synagogue because they can’t drive on the Sabbath, which means they live within walking distance of everyone else who goes to their synagogue, which means they can have physical communities. And that sounds really nice. But for the typical secularized, atomized American, what’s the point? Living cheek to jowl with total strangers and learning to ignore homeless people fucking sucked and I’m glad that part of my life is behind me. And the reason most of this country is built out the way it is, is that most people actually feel the same way.
I go grocery shopping once a week for my family. I'm not carrying home all of those groceries. You can count me in the < 10% preferring the latter. Our very good grocery store is about a half mile away. I drive about 5 miles to get a majority of our stuff at Costco, and on the way home I stop at the grocery store for the very few items that make sense to get there.
Ok so why would we design all cities and all infrastructure to cater to a small minority of people and use cases to the exclusion of all others? And the worst part is that if we designed for the 90% you’d still be able to do the thing you want to do, and it would be cheaper and faster for you. Instead we all have to drive to Costco.
I'd greatly question your 90% figure. I live close enough to live like you want. You could easily move within walking distance of a store, which is next door to a pharmacy, a couple of local restaurants, a barber, and a laundry mat. The reality is that people that live nearby still don't predominately walk to these places. Occasionally, sure. I'll go for a stroll.
The reason for that is because the infrastructure is still designed for cars. Roads are hostile to walk next to, people literally throw things at you. You can't ride a bike half a mile because there's either no sidewalk, or if there is you're supposed to use a painted bike lane and ride alongside traffic going 40-60 MPH. At least that's what keeps people in our current suburban area (and pretty much every one that I've ever seen or visited) from walking anywhere. It just comes down to infrastructure, which is extremely weak and fragile in America by design. You can't protest what your government does when you have to find parking first. You can't boycott Russia when you depend on them for your livelihood.
You can see that this is true because when you visit an actual neighborhood there are lots of people walking around and bikes and greater levels of economic activity. I'm not sure what metro area you live in but if you live in one I bet you have an area like I'm describing. It's probably where you and your friends or significant other go out for a nice dinner. Most of the country could be like that and you could still drive your car to Costco once/week.
You're literally inventing problems to explain why people in my town don't walk to a grocery store. We have quite a few grocery store spread out. Most of the city is easily within walking distance to one. It is not hostile to ride bikes here, we have sidewalks on every street, and I've never had anyone throw anything at me. The streets aren't clogged with traffic. I even see plenty of people walking and riding bikes, they just look like they're doing it for recreation.
Well I can't speak specifically to your town without knowing where it is, but it sounds like you live somewhere similar to where I currently live, and both areas are pretty hostile to anything but driving to participate in society. One of the red flags to spot is walking for recreation and only seeing people ride bikes for exercise versus day-to-day activities.
Even if you disagreed with some or all of the things I've said, dismissing them as an "invented problem" is pretty unfair.
For most people a car is the best compromise. There are cost is worth it, but the car is just a tool for getting around. There are a few collectors who own a car for other reasons, but most it is transportation. If they lived someplace where public transit was enough better they wouldn't own a car.
Enough better for transit is complex. It is a factor of cost, how nice it is, ability to get places when they want to, traffic, and a few other factors. The denser the city the more likely it is that transit is better.
I've lived in Hong Kong and Kyoto for a long time and most people here do prefer not to have a car. Even though it's relatively affordable in Kyoto, out of 15 people in my company only 2 had a driver's license.
10 stories is expensive. 3-5 stories is less than half the cost while getting you halfway there to a 10-story building. My parents live in a condo in a 20 story building, and the fees to maintain the condo are more than a brownstone apartment costs in some areas.
I live in a three story, single family home located at the top of a hill, with views for miles, surrounded by wooded acreage, in an area zoned “forest”.
Life is amazing here. I exercise outside, explore the landscape and the hiking trails surrounding me, and not only is it never crowded, it’s also safe, quiet, and beautiful.
The best part is that since I have everything at hand, including natural beauty, I don’t want or need to leave my home often, and have worked remotely for a Bay Area company for several years.
I often walk out my front door and go for a hike before starting my work day.
Living in an 18-story building surrounded by 20-story buildings would be, for me, a hellish existence.
You couldn’t pay me enough money to want to live there.
It does coexist in some cities, Hong Kong has amazing hiking trails less than 15 minutes from where I live while being one of the densest city in the world.
Likewise Kyoto is a relatively big city, 30 minutes away by public transit from Osaka which is even bigger but there's easy access to nature (although in the last 5 years before covid it was overrun by tourists)
Electricity and water are usually close to 100% paid for by the bills and if not it's not exactly a big difference if they are. The roads and the occasional big investment in something like a water treatment plan are paid via taxes. The money taxes a circuitous route to get there since so much money goes to fed and state taxes who then fractionally fund these sorts of infrastructure upkeep things. Unless a community is exceptionally rich or poor the people living there pay roughly what it costs +/- a few percent. Rich communities get less because their taxes get redirected to poorer communities to a larger extent. If poorer communities were not benefits of this wealth transfer they find ways to make do with less but it wouldn't be the financial devastation that many here like to imply.
Schools are an infinite money pit. Their expenses grow to consume what is available. Likewise their expenses can be trimmed if the money is simply not available. As we've learned from pumping poorly performing schools full of money, expenditure is only loosely correlated with results.
Children need to be schooled whether they live in a large house or are crammed into a tiny condo.
True, but doesn't seem relevant to the discussion. GP said homes pay as much in taxes as they receive in services.
I disputed that by pointing out that even with very large homes, the people in the home receive far more educational services than their taxes pay for.
Your response to that is to say children need education?
Most of the suburbs, small cities and towns I've been in are predominately single family homes, yet they somehow all have schools paid for by taxes. People that tend to live in very large homes tend to pay disproportionately larger shares of taxes.
small cities and towns I've been in are predominately single family homes, yet they somehow all have schools paid for by taxes
That somehow is because they tax people that don't have kids in school. In fact, municipalities can nudge this.
Approve a 55+ community and it will give the community a net tax benefit. Same thing with a condo community. But approve a plan for a community of single family homes with 4+ bedrooms and you will have a huge drain on the tax base literally forever.
It seems to me that's where most of the world is going (except America?). I moved yesterday in a similar setup in Istanbul. I could take the elevator down and in a 100m radius there is a coffee-shop, convenience store, gym, food places, and other commerce. There is also a co-working space in the next building. I've been in similar places in Bangkok/Kuala Lumpur.
America is seriously the only country that seems to think single use zoning is a good idea. Mixed use has always been the default in the rest of the world.
I think the problem is that buildings like you describe don't contribute to the city at street level. If the residental buildings are smaller then the gym, sauna, swimming pool will have to be in the neighborhood available to everyone.
I wouldn't swim in a "neighbourhood pool", doesn't seem hygienic.
A neighbour gym would also be crowded all the time, all my friends that have to go out for the gym always complain about that.
The public sauna seems ok, but I've never seem any of that in the streets besides "erotic saunas" that are not really intended for the same purposes...
> I wouldn't swim in a "neighbourhood pool", doesn't seem hygienic.
It is as hygienic as any other swimming pool. Unless you literally have your own pool in your backyard, which overwhelming majority of swimmers dont, you are not getting more hygiene.
> A neighbour gym would also be crowded all the time, all my friends that have to go out for the gym always complain about that.
This may depend on locality, but fair solution to that is allowing simple capitalism and more businesses. Someone gonna build second gym.
> It is as hygienic as any other swimming pool. Unless you literally have your own pool in your backyard, which overwhelming majority of swimmers dont, you are not getting more hygiene.
(Former) private pool owner here. I'd bet most public neighborhood pools are much more hygienic than a private pool where we'd only test the water when algae started growing. Public pools have proper maintenance and much better systems for chlorination/salt cleaning.
One thing I learned from friends in Panama: a pool comes with a pool guy and if it doesn't it'll quite literally convert into a cesspool all by itself. Pools need regular upkeep and that's a lot of work.
It’s not “affluent and sheltered” at all. My cousin just moved from Bangladesh to the Dallas suburbs, after having lived in Queens. I bet if I asked her how she feels about having a house with a pool now she’d say the same thing.
See, I've never actually heard about these sort of high rise mini neighborhoods here, I think we only have a handful of buildings that count as skyscrapers at all. Most building are actually 10 story or less and we have a huge amount of small terraced houses for one family.
There is hope. Wheaton just approved a ~330 unit 7 story apartment complex downtown on a 2 ac parcel, which came as quite a surprise considering the housing composition in the area.
We've had some successes in Oak Park, too, and I'm really grateful to our board for navigating the onslaught of negative commenting and campaigning to get new multifamily developments approved. But the fact is that it's too much work, and not reasonable to expect sane, pro-development people to be permanently vigilant and organized against the too-powerful default of saying no to these things.
The other way of looking at zoning changes is as a gift for the future. It's unlikely to ever be subsequently down-zoned (network effects of utilities, tax revenue, etc), so it's a one-time battle. Even if per-parcel.
And those fighting for YIMBY need not do so perpetually; tap out when you’re weary, and the next folks are up to bat for the next project. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The multi-trillion-dollar national real-estate investment firms thank you for your service towards growing the permanent rental class from which they will extract wealth in perpetuity.
The progressive position in the 90s was anti-gentrification, anti-greedy rent-seeking developers; “the evil developer” was a common trope in pop-culture.
Now? Dust off your ceremonial hard hat and golden ground-breaking shovel, because apparently, facilitating a massive and permanent wealth transfer to those same greedy developers is now progressive orthodoxy.
You know that people own townhouses and apartments right? It’s not always just companies.
I don’t know about America but in Germany apartment buildings are often owned by the residents and they have to work together in a financial collective for certain things like roof repairs, city negotiations, fencing, etc. But then internally to their unit they are able to make many permanent alterations within limits.
I don’t list these constraints claiming them as benefits. No these are the hardships one must endure but the benefit is of course property ownership. The benefits of property ownership in general are well known, it’s primarily a matter of accessibility to those benefits that is being discussed.
Exactly. If there's an issue with ownership, then that's a completely separate topic from density.
I do think we should encourage individual home ownership, even in dense developments. And would have no problem with legal nudges towards this. I.e. upzoned for density only if units which will ultimately be individually owned.
Furthermore, in the majority of desirable areas, creating high-density, individually-owned homes would increase access to home ownership, as the unit economics would allow lower pricing than equivalent single family homes in the same location.
(And before someone pulls out the construction cost economics / high-price-only rebuttal, that's yet another topic, with a different set of fixes)
I spoke to a housing advocate who worked for a city government in the Bay Area some time ago, and he said that one of the best ways to convince people to allow for upzoning was to actually give them pictures of what their neighborhoods could look like. Showing them pictures of walkable neighborhoods with boutique shops and restaurants, space in the streets and sidewalks for children to play, musicians to perform, art to be displayed, etc. makes them believe that increasing density can lead to a more livable community.
Some of the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in the world are also some of the densest. NYC’s Upper East Side, for example, is it’s most densely populated.
> Honestly, having had lived in mixed-income neighborhoods, the wealthy are missing out.
I cannot understand why cities in the US are built the way they are.
I live in a relatively big city in Germany in a somewhat dense neighborhood (most buildings have 3-5 stories). I have two grocery stores within five minutes of walking, a great Italian restaurant around the corner. If I want to go to the city center it is a ten minute train ride, going to the lake is a 12 minute ride. I can quickly get around the city center by using the subway and all of this for a fraction of the cost of owning a car.
I grew up in a more rural area and personally, living in a denser cities feels more "luxurious" than living in a town where I can't get anywhere if I don't drive. The cities are still far from perfect, but this is mostly because they desperately try to accomodate the car obsessed public (but not as desperately as American cities)
The car dependence in America is so strong, that I think 99% of the population doesn't realize what is possible even with slightly reduced (not eliminated) car dependence.
I grew up in the suburbs and felt *trapped* until I was able to drive. Legitimately didn't feel like I could be independent.
This is most people's experience, whether they realize it or not. I only became aware of what car-less life could be like when I lived in Chicago (the city, not the burbs). Even then it took me a year to realize how convenient everything was because I could mostly walk or bike to what I wanted.
IMO - the resistance to developing density in the US is because people associate independence with the automobile; and it's a very, very deep association. I don't think people understand that density can actually make you more independent because they haven't really experienced it.
And to be clear I don't want to ban cars. More so, just want to see our country have more options for actual cities other than NYC and Chicago.
> And to be clear I don't want to ban cars. More so, just want to see our country have more options for actual cities other than NYC and Chicago.
I don't think banning cars would even solve the issue. Cars are legitimately a good option for many people. But governments many governments want to pretend cars are a good option for anyone, which is just not true. Transportation modes should be treated equal, depending on the starting position this would necessitate taking back space dedicated to cars.
Some of it is just how pervasive car ownership is in the US, how young of an age you can get licensed, and the degree to which parents are expected to drive children under the age of 16.
I did an exchange to a rural village in Germany, and anything other than going to a party at someone's house in the village involved convincing (or bribing) one of the 18 year olds they knew from two years previous at the Realschule, so the most common evening event was drinking beer (or Diesel which was half beer, half cola) with friends.
This place was not even remotely rural by USA standards, being maybe 20 kilometers from the state capital, and even closer to another city.
> anything other than going to a party at someone's house in the village involved convincing (or bribing) one of the 18 year olds they knew from two years previous at the Realschule, so the most common evening event was drinking beer (or Diesel which was half beer, half cola) with friends.
This has been my experience growing up as well with the only difference that we had a somewhat decent train connection to the next bigger town (30 min train ride, but last train departured at 10 PM). Anything that was out of the (small) village required either an expensive (and unreliable) Taxi ride or someone who loosed out and became the dedicated driver.
I would prefer we did not do that. Just personally. As an introvert and someone with a general distaste for being around most of the public, I'll keep my not-so-dense living situation. Whether it's mixed income, mixed familial structures, cultures, the last thing I ever want to be - if I can avoid it - is on living on top of people.
Speaking only for myself - and yes, I am keenly aware of the injustices many groups have faced here over the years - at least some of the American dream was to create an environment for both of us to share these mutually exclusive stances in harmony. I am grateful for the ability of some percentage of Americans to have more space between their neighbors than simply one wall, even if that percentage is much smaller than it ought to be. And I grow increasingly resentful of the mechanisms both internal and external that keep that number so small.
The natural response to this might be that, of course, you should be able to live on an SFZ lot with a big yard and lots of distance from your neighbors. You just shouldn't be able to enforce that condition within walking distance of Palo Alto.
I agree. I’m not even defending Marc here, which seems to be how my comment is perceived so obviously I didn’t articulate the way I wanted to. I was responding to the GP’s sentiment of density becoming the new desired standard. I’d prefer availability of less dense neighborhoods in at least some capacity.
Right. And then the obvious continuation: and if you can't afford it, maybe you're trying to hoard space in an area where too many people want to live, and you need to move further out.
Have you tried living in rural areas close to surbubia? Can get your own large property which no one will come near, no randoms walking down the street, and lots of privacy.
Yes, that is where I have lived most of my life - grew up in a town of about 4000 people. In Massachusetts though, so calling it “rural” feels a bit of a stretch, haha. But definitely feels as you described.
Not in my experience. If my neighbor now has a house party, I don’t hear it. Not so anytime I lived in an apartment. In an apartment building my dogs would have to be taken to a community dog park (often small and neglected in many apartment complexes). They have their own small yard here to do that in, and I don’t have to deal with people who bring an entire breakfast meal to the dog park and start fights. I like barriers between me and others.
It's not a super useful comment but I feel like I need to reply every time I see a corresponding opinion-only comment ;)
Many people apparently disagree. Why try to "rebrand" it for them? I have grown up in Moscow, lived in Yaletown in Vancouver BC, Richmond BC, Bellevue WA, and in SOMA in SF (all slightly different types of walkable, dense places), and I hated suburbs. Then I moved into suburbs and realized they are so much better! I wish I'd moved earlier, and to suburbier suburbs instead of the still-walkable ones that I have chosen. I've lived in dense neighborhoods for 34 years and now I don't think they have any advantages for me, other than perhaps it's more convenient to be drunk, and it's more convenient to be a kid who cannot drive.
Oh and yeah, mixed income. I've heard quite a few middle class and higher immigrants say that one major advantage of the US compared to <their home country> is that you can move away from poor people. In Russia/Mexico/... the poor are fellow Russians/Mexicans/..., so it's not based on race either. I grew up surrounded by "mixed income" (well to be fair we were lower middle class if that, ourselves). Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather live in the cheapest house on the best street :)
Driving is better than walking (I do outdoor stuff a lot, so 10-minute walk doesn't really count as exercise for me, it's just a hassle), except when parking is scarce, but that is specifically a problem of dense areas. Driving is also much faster than transit in most places... this was actually a "mind blown" moment - I was surprised it takes so long to get anywhere on a visit in Moscow, then I realized this used to be my "normal" to take 30-60mins to get places by transit, after starting to drive everywhere I think 20 minutes is kinda too far away. Weather is also less of an issue when driving.
I used to buy groceries by bike or on a walk from the bus every 2-3 days, turns out buying a bunch of groceries every week or two is much more convenient.
It's much quieter and somewhat safer (could be safer yet if I moved further away from town). One of my apartments was on a busy street and it's kinda funny how I notice a single car rolling by now when I used to have to tune out constant hum of traffic, sirens and honks.
There is much more greenery, birds (from hummingbirds to eagles), trees, animals even. My friends who live in a really distant suburb had a bear in their backyard once, I guess that could be a disadvantage :) More space for the same amount of money (that actually translates into even less need for density - e.g. I have a squat rack at home now so I don't need to go to the gym).
One hassle is that if I go somewhere to drink I need to take an uber. Also house is more pain to maintain than a flat, that actually does kinda suck, I am particularly averse to that kind of stuff... I wish there were condos in suburban areas, or e.g. some company where you pay a fee like a HOA and they have to keep track and do all the maintenance :)
I grew up in NYC with these dense mixed-income neighborhoods you speak of.
It just means all classes share the same problems equally (emphasis on equally)
The history of my youth in the city is knowing practically a trail of dead friends lost to drugs, abuse, murder and suicide. And I went to private school.
When I was in middle school some kids I knew at the school behind mine made national news for murdering a guy in Central Park. During the OJ Trial.
IMO anyone who raises a kid in an environment like I grew up in is insanely wreckless.
I didn't say that NYC is unsafe. Most of NYC is rich neighborhoods, comparatively.
I was specifically referring to those described dense mixed-income neighborhoods where every classes's tragedies end up being spread equally. If you have means ans you raise your children in one of these environments, you're stupid.
I somewhat agree, it’s a delight for the wealthy or middle class. But the lower class often have a much more negative view (having come from said lower class). The reality, is the upper and middle class dominate in politics and try to do things that are the opposite of “good”. Take for example, “cheap housing for everyone”. Nah.. they want the opportunity to own a nice house, not a hand out. Frankly, you’d be right, if I had any faith the upper class wouldn’t have a god complex to try and “make things better”.
"Cheap" isn't a great word to use there, because it means something more negative than the reality I'd want. I want affordable housing for people. Good, quality housing, with sufficient space, but something that people of all income levels can afford. It's possible, but the political decisions that could allow it are hampered by the NIMBYs.
I grew up in a highly segregated area, so my elementary school cohort was roughly 80 white kids 5 Asian kids and one Latina kid. There was also a single black kid, but he got kicked out in first grade when it was discovered he was using his grandparent's address to go to a better school.
The junior high, however, drew from a larger geographic area so it was far more diverse. Junior high is always a bit of a culture shock, but I can't help but feel it was more-so for us. A white kid got suspended for bringing in a hunting knife because he was afraid one of the black kids was going to beat him up -- kind of a mini racism-in-action lesson for all of us, though we didn't know it at the time.
Now my daughter just finished seventh grade. Her elementary school cohort had one Spanish-speaking kid, in a district that is 59% Hispanic and 18% English language learners, and had a bit of a similar culture shock. I checked if I could have done better in retrospect, and found that, while I could have done slightly better, the public schools were all either over 75% Hispanic or over 80% non-Hispanic, with the one exception being a school that required a lottery to get into.
The only real diverse schools I found were the parochial schools, which are a strange combination of your traditional Hispanic Catholics, and "white flight" of kids at schools that were nearly entirely Hispanic.
Not a delight if you’re raising a family, in my experience. I loved living in densely populated areas when I was single. You end up having to subject your kids to mountains of homeless folks’ garbage or explaining the irregular behavior of the local crack head to your curious 5 year old.
Then again maybe that was just my neighborhood and no other densely populated area has ever dealt with such things.
You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing; it probably wasn't densely populated enough then.
(Homelessness is caused by most of the old cheap forms of housing like SROs/boarding houses being made illegal, causing locals to fall out of the system when they can't afford the nicer types - this is why you see it in cities and not in, say, West Virginia.)
This is a great lie, since homelessness is - often and especially in San Francisco - not the result of lack of a home, rather the result of mental illness and drug addiction. This is also reinforced by the great amount of non-native homeless people that travel cross-state to cities like San Francisco.
Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs.
It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.
No, it's what I said. The reason I said "not West Virginia" is because I knew you'd reply this way ;)
Homelessness in the US does not correlate with drug use, or else the homeless would be in Appalachia with meth and opioid users. It's in SF because housing is expensive there. And they're locals[1]. Now, they might be getting into drugs, but that's because there's nothing better to do when you're homeless and the police keep taking your stuff.
NYC does better because they build more shelters, but more importantly because New Jersey is next to them and is good at building affordable housing to make up for New York's NIMBYism.
[1] Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
> Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students.
That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation.
A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes.
That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC.
> The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south.
The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything.
UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.
I think people need to sit down a bit. Why do _all_ places need to have affordable housing? It’s not as simple a question as you might think.
I am actually asking: why shouldn’t the San Francisco’s of the world spend $12 on a banana to ensure that their grocery baggers make $60k a year? This is how we actually fight the problem rather than having arbitrary amounts of low income housing courtesy of Title IX.
If you want to live in an expensive place, be prepared to spend some goddamn money. Or let’s hurry up and get to a post scarcity world. I don’t honestly care how it happens. Just pick and stick.
The great lie is that there's greater mental illness or addiction in San Francisco than other places. There's not.
What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home.
And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.
'What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness'.
This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses.
You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?
People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand.
When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
'You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?'
It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently.
What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.
I don't know any YIMBYs who live in Pac Heights. They'd love to put apartments there of course, but transit-oriented development means we have to start where the BART stations are. Housing is something, but it's easier to get back into society if you can commute to your job.
I know plenty of YIYBY advocates who live in wealthy parts of SF that have clean streets, no homeless and own large properties. a good example would be 'democratic socialist' district 5 supervisor Dean Preston https://twitter.com/DeanPreston
Preston talks all about progressive housing on Twitter all the time, so does heroin Haney. Neither of them can get it together to practice what they preach so it's all useless YIYBY performative posturing anyway. In the past SF has wound up building disasters like Geneva Towers based on somewhat similar utopian ideals
The language he uses makes him a left-NIMBY, but that’s just what they look like in cities. Found in NYC too. In suburbs the same people switch to talking about property values and 50s rural neighborhood character.
Dean Preston is one of the most virulently anti-YIMBY politicians out there. He is constantly lying about YIMBY positions and starting fights over nonsense on Twitter.
You and he agree 100% on building new apartments, Preston hates them, and as a rich man living in a very expensive single family home in one of the most expensive cities in the world, he fits right into the NIMBY mould.
However, Preston also believes that homeless people should still be treated like people, a position he shares with YIMBYs. Due to that commonality, but also having irrational hate for YIMBYs, he is sometimes called anti-YIMBY rather than NIMBY.
To be more exact: homeless are people priced out of their home.
I've been a month in WV. Huntington and Charleston are plagued by visible users, but not by homelessness. Even daily users there haven't been priced out yet.
'Pandering' to who?! local residents who are sick of the city getting wrecked? Like so many people these days Shellenberger thinks the two dominant political organizations who control everything are morally and ideologically bankrupt.
It's only fantasists who believe the slow motion SF disaster is a good thing, and they also appear to think they have some sway with the DNC.
> You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing
Ehh I think it has just a _little_ bit more to do with it than just “lack of housing.” If you think the only thing keeping the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk and shoots up heroin in broad daylight from being a functioning member of society is a house, you are being quite naive.
San Francisco’s housing costs don’t help, but people waaaay underestimate just how much having a permissive attitude towards “the homeless lifestyle” (for lack of a better term) plays a part in attracting people who are incapable of living within the margins of society.
You don't know his life story or how representative he is, so that's not very useful for anything. A lot of homeless people live in cars rather than shooting up in the street and are respectable looking people who just can't afford rent.
Mixed-income neighborhoods are great, but fragile. We are definitely not low income, and living in mixed part of town is so much nicer tgatn thise, supposedly, high income parts. The thing is so, by livng where we live we are actually gentrifying the neighborhood. Whether we want or not (we don't), it is just a matter of fact. Which is said, because despite being by no means hip or artsy of so, the neighborhood is really doverse and colorfull. Despite being mainly housing, there still are small shops and bars. And it is great for kids to be exposed to different social circumstances, our older one went for day care reaons to a school in a more affluent neighborhood, our smaller one to a school just across the street. And the differences are stunning and subtile at the same time.
I'm not sure you can really avoid any sort of gentrification, even if the same people would stay and no one moved away. Guess it's more about the speed and the actual breadth of the income band, or it's the vanishing middle class, when before your kids would maybe move up one notch or two if they got a good job, now it's either "the amount of money feels rich, but still can't buy a house" or continued descent into low income...
It's not going to be mixed income. It's going to be segregated incomes living near by each other, both resenting the other. In Las Vegas suburbs you can sometimes see the various neighborhoods with Drastic obvious cost/value differences right next to each other. The lower cost one is hellish, and the nicer one is basically brought down by the worse one. If you could afford it, you'd never choose a neighborhood next to a bad neighborhood. So why build more of these bad ones near nice areas? Can't we just build more in bad areas? It's supposed to be cheap so why not build in cheaper areas?
The problem here in your comment is associating dense neighbourhoods with bad neighbourhoods. The other problem is thinking all cheap neighbourhoods should be bad neighbourhoods.
I was trying to figure out why I equated cheap with bad which you pointed out to me. I think it's because I figured if someone built cheap housing, and it was actually nice and somewhere you wanted to be, it wouldn't stay cheap for very long at all. If someone built and sold condos for 250k in a town that usually sells for 1 million.... Wouldn't the buyer soon sell it for 750k? If it's cheap, it basically has to be much worse than other options or it'll soon become the price of the expensive options.
I'm not dimissing your experience which comes from the current situation. But the current situation came about because of intense gentrification and the housing prices rising faster than society could cope over the past few decades.
I don't really get it. Stockton CA is a bad place because housing prices rose too fast? The average house there is now probably 300k. If they were 100k still, Stockton would have less murder and car theft?
I'm a brit, that spent a year living in USA. That term, "bad neighbourhood", is a term that I learned refers to a predominantly black neighbourhood. I was told things like "Don't go past this road junction on foot, that's a bad neighbourhood". The neighbourhood in question looked exactly the neighbourhood I was standing in, but with black people.
That it is black is not racism, there are real factors that make them bad areas. You are far more likely to be accidentally show in those areas (even though the good neighborhoods may contain as many guns, they are not used in those areas). You are far more likely to be assaulted.
Those are also the cheap areas, and black families tend to move there just because they are poor. Of course the gangs in the area thus can recruit young local black kids (not being a member of the local gang can be dangerous). It isn't racism though, it is just reality - one that is very hard to escape for black people.
There is racism in the US as well, a lot of the current problems are rooted in the historic racism.
Did you check any crime stats for the neighborhood, or were you expecting to see burglary, rape and murder as you drove by that second? Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
> were you expecting to see burglary, rape and murder as you drove by that second?
Nope.
Actually, I was standing on the street, not driving. This "bad neighbourhood" was 50 yards from where I was standing. If they wanted to rob people, they'd have found better pickings where I was standing than in the "bad neighbourhood".
I didn't have a car; we were visiting my sister-in-law. I'm accustomed to walking everywhere, unless I have an inter-city journey. The town was Charlottesville, VA, but I was told much the same when I settled (briefly) in Richmond, VA.
> Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
What I noticed was what's obvious. In a majority-white city, the so-called bad neighbourhood had exclusively black people on the street. And I noticed, for example, that every time I drove to work, there was a car pulled over on the freeway, with two black guys lying face-down, with cops pointing guns at their heads. I never saw this with white guys. My drive to work was just 15 minutes, but I saw this daily.
Do they actually do block-by-block crime statistics in these places? Because what I find shocking is that the granularity of this "bad neighbourhood" thing appears to be the block.
don't brits use 'council housing' with pretty much the same pejorative connotation?
also there are absolutely bad neighborhoods in the us, you can usually spot them because of all the bullet holes.
"Council housing" denotes a sort of basic utility housing. But a typical council house was (a) a house fit for a family; (b) usually had a small garden; (c) was good enough that there was a lively market in them during the Thatcher years.
Also, council housing wasn't all concentrated in one place; typically you'd get a block of council houses embedded in a neighbourhood, which might be poor or prosperous. Basically the load was spread around.
The neighbourhoods that I like least are where a large-scale greenfield estate was built on the outskirts of a town, far from the centre and the shops. These estates were typically under-equipped with pubs and shops (but they had schools).
We don't build council houses any more, since laws were introduced requiring councils to sell such houses to their tenants at a discount. The closest thing now is housing coops, which buy and do-up individual houses. Coops don't build estates.
Ok I guess bad is not nice. But they're clearly not as safe nor as nice as the more expensive neighborhoods of the same community.
And I wasn't saying they should be this way. I guess I was just going from basic observation and some memorable stats.
> So why build more of these bad ones near nice areas? Can't we just build more in bad areas? It's supposed to be cheap so why not build in cheaper areas?
Ah yes, let's make sure to put all the new poors who want to move in with all the existing poors. Can't let them live anywhere else, or they might start getting ideas.
Everyone has equal opportunity I believe. Equal outcome? That's Bs. I'm a hard worker and decently smart. Do I get to own a single family home with a large yard in Malibu?? No? Why not!! That's not equitable is it!
What does "building housing for poor people" even mean? I assume you mean building housing so inexpensive that even "poor" people can afford it.
I just don't understand how you build housing in Malibu that is so cheap a McDonalds employee can afford it... Yet somehow this McDonald's employee doesn't just sell it to a rich person for 10x next year. If a McDonalds employee can afford a $100k mortgage (can they?), And they somehow get this condo for $100k in Malibu, wouldn't they sell it to someone like me ASAP and cash out? Because I'd buy a condo in Malibu for $300k cash tomorrow, but I'm sure others would bid it up to well above that. How do you make houses so bad that no one bids it up?
That’s pretty much how Phoenix is laid out, good neighborhoods next to not so good neighborhoods with straight up ghettos strewn in for good measure. Just the way things worked out as the city grew.
I recently discovered the very very wealthy neighborhood of SF in the north west corner of the city and boy, that sure is a low density use and I would LOVE to see that area turned in to high density affordable housing. But then, those people must control the city so it doesn’t seem like that would ever happen.
And hey, I honestly want all low density parts of the city densified. But it’s striking how big those houses are in that neighborhood and how low density it must be.
EDIT: I think what bothers me about this neighborhood is what it represents. While so many people in the city are struggling to get by, these people have these huge homes with elaborate finishing work, huge gardens, fountains, the works. It feels gratuitous to me. And if you know anything about the history of red lining in this country, this would have been one of those areas with racial covenants in the deeds to their homes. All the power brokers of the city past and present must have lived here, and all manner of political maneuvering and disenfranchisement would have come from this place. I’d rather see it torn down, and used to build affordable housing for those in need. I just can’t find myself sympathizing with people who feel they need this much for themselves while so many people struggle for the basic necessities. I wouldn’t mind if no one had that. It doesn’t seem justified to me.
EDIT2: Someone asked me what neighborhood so I looked on google maps (it's Sea Cliff) and was reminded that they also have THEIR OWN GOLF COURSE adjacent to this neighborhood. Yikes.
I honestly don't necessarily want any particular area to be densified.
What I want is:
1. Anyone be able to build any type of housing anywhere.
2. Really steep land value taxes
I have no issue with a clique of hyper reach folk living in a low density neighborhood, as long as any of them is be able to defect and build a tower if they feel like it _and_ they all pay their LVT.
Exactly… no zoning is the best zoning! You wanna be low density, but out all the land and pay for it. If the market supports low density, so be it.
In terms of property tax, I thought there was some research that the best way to do that was actually irrespective of the development on top of it? I think the idea being that would encourage development because you’re not taxed on the improvements? Or maybe I’ve got it backwards.
Yes, that's the whole point of Land Value Tax, you tax only the value of the "unimproved land". This incentivizes density since the tax can be distributed among all the tenants.
Honestly CA should propose replacing the mess that is property taxes, prop 13, and it's follow ups, with a LVT that is a net neutral revenue for the state. For 90% of people that would be a tax cut, for those who wish to underuse valuable space, they can pay for it.
> Honestly CA should propose replacing the mess that is property taxes, prop 13, and it's follow ups, with a LVT that is a net neutral revenue for the state. For 90% of people that would be a tax cut
I think it's close to “for 90% of people who pay property tax that would be a tax increase”; the people it will be a tax cut for are the people with relatively high improvement value on their land compared to the bare land value, like corporate HQs and landlords of high density apartment complexes.
Prop 13 is very difficult to have an exit strategy for because people feel entitled to their feudal (and inheritable) tax rates. The idea that a $2 million home should be treated as a $100,000 one for taxes is laughably wrong, but the people who have enjoyed that benefit for years will be permanently against any politician who changes it.
I disagree with the 90% number for the LVT switch on multiple fronts: for starters all the people with historical discounts will pay more. Secondly, the typical SFH pays more and there is a lot of SFH in California.
LVT is still worth doing but making it actually happen is politically difficult in the best of states and California is the worst one due to Prop 13.
It is a tax cut for property owners and a tax raise for land owners, yes that is the entire point, to make housing cheaper by taxing it less and taxing the location monopoly more.
Of course anyone who speculated on higher land prices gets screwed over, that is the point as well.
You seem to be ignoring that the presence of the corporate HQ raises land values across the entire city. Landlords of high density apartment complexes should be applauded for not wasting precious land in locations where many people want to live in, using land wastefully increases rental payments and causes homelessness.
> It is a tax cut for property owners and a tax raise for land owners, yes that is the entire point, to make housing cheaper by taxing it less and taxing the location monopoly more.
But...California has a tiny overall property tax rate. A revenue neutral change to an LVT (unless it's revenue neutral on the far side of the Laffer Curve) might better meet some abstract concept of fairness better, but isn't going to have a meaningul impact on price of... anything.
I don't know about the percentages, but I think the majority of people who would see a tax cut are those who bought property in the past 10 years at inflated prices. The people hurt the most will be those who've been living in the same home they purchased 40 years ago, and are clinging to their tax assessment that's orders of magnitudes behind what the current assessed value would be.
There are ways to fix that too with gradual phase-ins, not allowing people to pass their tax assessment on to their heirs, etc. But anyone who stands to inherit property will vote against such a move, and most people who will be passing along that property will vote the same way.
Is the idea of taxing land to discourage ownership or is it to fund local services to insure that the rich have the best schools, police, fire and utilities while maintaining an air of equality?
Why is regressive property tax better than the progressive income tax?
The idea is to encourage people to use land more efficiently. Sure, you can buy a 2-acre plot and put a single-family home on it, but you're going to pay handsomely for the privilege. If you put a duplex on that lot and sell the second unit, your tax burden gets cut in half. Or put a 10-unit condo building on it and each owner only has to pay a tenth of the total.
If you also tax the improvements to the land, you discourage people from building denser housing on it, because the tax itself goes up the more you build.
> And if you know anything about the history of red lining in this country, this would have been one of those areas with racial covenants in the deeds to their homes.
I know people in Berkeley who own homes in neighborhoods where those kinds of covenants are still on the books, even though they're illegal and unenforceable. It's so weird, and disgusting.
"I recently discovered the very very wealthy neighborhood of SF in the north west corner of the city and boy, that sure is a low density use and I would LOVE to see that area turned in to high density affordable housing. But then, those people must control the city so it doesn’t seem like that would ever happen."
Same with parking. In LA there is the popular Runyon Canyon. On weekends it's parking hell because so many people go there. Interestingly one block down there are some side streets with huge houses and (not surprisingly) street parking isn't allowed there.
You are joking, right? Sea Cliff hardly takes up any space at all. Sure the houses look big from Google Map - but how many apartments do you expect to cram in there if they were bulldozed?
Did a quick look via street view. There are some very nice houses indeed. I might even say it’s the perfect location: golf course, beach and huge park adjacent to the neighborhood. These people will probably not actually visit the beach nor the park as these seem to be public areas.
Checking google maps, looks like Sea Cliff. And I remember now... they even have their own golf course! A looot of land dedicated to a small number of families there.
To me they are disgusting. Monuments to extravagance. All I can think of when I see homes like that are the thousands of people across town huddled under awnings begging for housing. And in this one neighborhood enough money was spent to house all the city’s homeless 100 times over. Appalling. Disgusting. Inhuman.
If art has meaning, these “works of art” represent oppression and selfishness.
Sure I get that perspective. But this is a small neighborhood. The problems that plague the city are not because of this neighborhood.
The reason more housing doesn't get built is not because of this neighborhood.
Prop 13 that was passed in 1975 is not because of this neighborhood.
I get that you see the neighborhood as a symbol for something that angers you, but this is a nationwide problem where we do not build enough housing in general.
I lived next to Sea Cliff in the Richmond for a very long time. I’d say that it’s basically less than 3 blocks away from higher density solidly middle class housing at almost all points, and except for a few blocks, much of the neighborhood is more modest than you’d think (by Bay Area standards). The golf course is public too. As far as exclusive rich people places go, it’s incredibly relaxed.
Lincoln Park Golf Course. Obviously it’s accessible to a lot of neighborhoods not just the wealthy one I mentioned. But when I see golf courses I think of all the affordable housing that could be built on that land.
Oh of course it's public. Why would these people want to pay for their golf course when they can get the city to do it? Obviously it is accessible to a lot of other folks, but it's bordering this high end neighborhood ostensibly so they all have a nice place to play golf. Actually there is ANOTHER golf course on the other side of this neighborhood, in the Presidio.
I get what you're saying, but golf courses usually take up a lot of space that is used by a proportionally smaller group of people. Those other things you mention can be enjoyed by many many more people in a much denser fashion.
I definitely agree that golf courses are inefficient uses of land, but even if we built mid-density housing on all of them here, it wouldn't solve the problem. There are plenty of other low-density areas that need to be upzoned if we're going to solve anything.
"calls for more housing from the wealthy and business class are disingenuous; more often really a call for more apartments to be built exclusively in neighbourhoods dominated by the poor and working class and a continued ban of apartments in the low density single family home areas that the wealthy business owning class live in."
That's the case with a lot of the initiatives coming from wealthy people. Le'ts reduce carbon footprint but we still need private jets and multiple huge houses for ourselves. We need privacy but obviously we still need to mine our users' data for profit as much as possible. We need to do something about homelessness but certainly not close to where we are living. The free market is better than government as long as the government protects our IP so we can make profits.
There's different kinds of NIMBYs and they all have different motivations.
There's ones like Marc that are pretty classical.
There's also ones that will push back on the kinds of property people can own, but fully support saturating an area with rentals.
I don't think there's a challenge for voters here either. As the author points out, the real problem is listening to community feedback at all. It's undemocratic. Someone else needs to be in charge of how to fulfill the demands of the community at a higher level.
There's also the kind that bought into an area when it was already quite expensive, stretching their finances to do so, and are terrified of the idea of their home dropping in value due to density increases.
In reality, the kind of density increases that would actually meaningfully lower their home's value is well beyond what is required or feasible. But most people aren't economists or real estate experts, and don't know or believe this.
Which is ironic because no matter how much money I have I would want to live in a location with dense population of people from all strata - it just means shops and food of all levels are just a walk away the moment you leave your house. One of the benefits of living in many places in india, and in some locations in New York City.
> more apartments to be built exclusively in neighbourhoods dominated by the poor
Specifically, apartments to be built in poor neighbourhoods exclusively next to busy highways, where the residents can enjoy chronic exposure to toxic gases, tire dust, and car honking sounds.
The community that lives and pay taxes will not have a voice about what gets built in their community? Then HOA s should not exist either and neither should business and first class in airplanes. City planners need to thoughtfully rezone as needed and strike a balance to preserve the interest of the tax payers of a neighborhood as well as allow new population housing needs. But to simply demonize a set of residents who live in a particular place for voicing their opinions is middle age witch burning mentality.
Looking for a modern apartment in SF recently it was annoying that 95% of them are only allowed to be built on busy noisy dirty streets. Market, Gough, Franklin, Octavia, etc... If they're not on a busy street then they're within ear distance of a freeway like all the complexes near the design district and any of them near the 280 in the Dogpatch. The only big exception is some of the complexes in Mission Bay, but even there, many of them are on 3rd.
There are very few allowed to be built on quieter streets
I think housing advocates are simply advocating for cheaper rents and more affordable, better housing, and environmentalists are advocating for walkable communities. It's not necessary to build a 20+ story tower to achieve these things. You could have a compact walkable community that houses a lot of people with 4-6 story buildings too (I mean Paris is..).
I'm not really expressing a preference here, but in my comment noting that with the Grand Bargain it's not likely to result in the outcome of a broad amount of low density apartments, but rather the situation of extremes where you have ultra low density single family houses and then in slivers of downtown where apts are allowed, ultra tall 20+ story residential towers. This is commonly seen in Toronto and Vancouver.
I think the criticism is it leads to not enough housing being built.
If the city needs 10,000 new homes a year to keep up with population growth, and I support building 10 new blocks of 100 apartments downtown but oppose everything else, am I a hero or a villain?
Is there data for how small of an area (i.e. they are arguing for)? I think Seattle has a good approach with urban villages (that are also easier to connect via transit), they just need to be somewhat taller and bigger until they eventually merge. The rich typically live in tiny areas and small cities; not wanting those tiny areas upzoned (to be clear, I personally oppose any zoning - let the market decide; but I can see where they are coming from) is not the same as wanting to squeeze the apartments into tiny areas.
If we posit that there are people who would like to live in high-density neighborhoods and others who would like to live in lower-density areas (which seems like a reasonable assumption and matches my lifetime observations), encouraging high-density buildings to be near each other seems to serve both groups better than to have the outcome appear to be the result of randomness.
"Would like to" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here. I'd argue that a large fraction of people live not where they "would like to," but where they can afford.
There are people on this very page who could well afford to live in a high or low density area and are arguing the benefits they experience and their preference for high-density.
Building more housing units would lower the price of housing units. The question is, within that, how should we approach it. I don’t think plopping randomly placed high-density buildings into low-density neighborhoods is optimal compared to planned development.
When cities ban apartments from entire neighbourhoods, they're banning people from living there. It ensures only the very wealthy can. This means people have to go somewhere else. This could mean longer commutes for the poor and worse living conditions.
There's nothing stopping someone who wants to have a SFH from buying a lot and building a SFH. The problem is when cities impose housing bans that limit people's ability to live in these communities.
The real problem is that we have run out of infrastructure. The wealthy don't even have enough money to build it. So we fight over housing policy that involves areas with existing infrastructure.
Why doesn't Marc and his lovely wife just build a house far away from the plebs? They can't!
You seem to be confusing two distinct objectives: 1) more housing, 2) everyone should live in the same place. How wanting 1) is disingenuous because we don't necessarily want 2)?
> ... calls for more housing from the wealthy and business class are disingenuous; more often really a call for more apartments to be built exclusively in neighbourhoods dominated by the poor and working class and a continued ban of apartments in the low density single family home areas that the wealthy business owning class live in. ...
If you densify the wealthiest areas instead, people will complain that you're "just building more luxury housing for the rich" and not fixing the pricing problem. You just can't win!
(The simple truth, of course, is that both are good things to do. Every little bit helps.)
I honestly can't understand what's wrong with this. Obviously, wealthy people want to live somewhere the there are no poor people. Class divides, including very physical divides, are a necessity in any society where there are well, classes. Only way to make it unnecessary is to destroy the concept of classes as it is by making it almost impossible to get rich. In any society where there are no losers, no poverty or homelessness, there are also no winners, you can't have the cake and eat it too. Yes here in Europe we are much less likely to face a stinking meth addict in a bus, but we are also almost unable to start a startup and win it big, and these are two sides of the same issue, you can't possibly separate them. To "fix" the problem of class divide and poverty, not just you need to introduce a cradle to grave social support system and overwhelming taxes to fund it, you need to also make the very idea of becoming rich morally unacceptable in the society.
> Class divides, including very physical divides, are a necessity in any society where there are well, classes.
Really?
Britain is a country noted for its class divides; and yet there are very few class enclaves in major British cities. Most people live in a mixed neighbourhood, with renters and owners all jumbled up, and with social housing mixed in. Sure, there are some pretty nasty social housing "estates" (groups of apartment blocks); but those estates are liberally sprinkled around - they occur in more prosperous neighbourhoods as well as cheaper places.
The USA used to claim it was a "classless society".
That one is super easy! That "renting" is actually, a form of ownership where you "own" the rental contract. It's impossible to get in for a new person without decades of waiting, if ever - because there is no free lunch, if rent is many times lower than market rate, there will be a queue (or gatekeepers from who you simply buy your place in the queue). It's not a solution, just a way to keep outsiders out not too dissimilar to redlining: probably if you grandfather wasn't born in the same city, it's all but impossible to get in.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with your ownership point. Renting is renting, and of course you're a party to the rental contract.
Vienna is constantly building new Social housing and new people get in all the time.
To your grandfather point: A third of people living there weren't even born in Austria, so it's not really a generational thing like you misrepresent it to be https://www.diepresse.com/69243/migration-gemeindebau-ein-dr... (in German, use Google translate)
Actually all you need to do is let people help themselves by taxing liquidity and giving everyone a fair share of the land on this planet. The moment money and land ownership doesn't tie people to specific economic hubs the idea of a class based society becomes ridiculous.
What am i missing here? There's plenty of free or almost free land everywhere including in rich countries. Just not where someone wants to live. Drive one hour from where the jobs are in any direction and you get almost free land. But people are leaving those places, not going there, for some mysterious reasons.
What do you mean by "taxing liquidity", i don't even understand. Negative interest on bank deposits? It's already effectively there for about a generation.
Fun fact: the town of Atherton is also singlehandedly responsible for delaying and almost derailing Caltrain's electrification project, because the electric poles needed would, and I quote, "compromise the quaint character of our neighborhood" (shock horror).
And of course: "Other speakers protested the aesthetic and safety impacts of the taller, and heavier, poles, saying they would also reduce property values."
The town also voted to close their own Caltrain station, because they clearly don't want the kind of riff-raff who use public transport there.
Oh yeah that's Atherton. Taller heavier poles like what are they going to tell Caltrain what the neighborhood requires the impedance and resistance be such-and-so?
I lived there, they hate pedestrians, hate new construction, hate public transport (never saw anybody at the Atherton Station, nobodoy getting on, nobody getting off, nothing, it's on for decoration), to diffuse NIMBY accusations. Nothing there, not one business, it's only utility is a discrete place to jump into the tracks.
Yeah Atherton is that place. Atherton is the spirit of NIMBY, the spirit of Landlord, the spirit of all those things.
Looking at these complaints, how did the government ever get all the land needed for major infrastructure projects in the past - like the interstate network?
The first bit of infrastructure that gets put in produces huge economic benefits.
Back in 1760, it made economic sense to have canals dug by hand because they were so much more efficient than transporting coal by horse and cart. It was incredibly expensive, but the thing that came before it was even moreso.
And in the 1830s, private investors could expect to make a profit building a railway because it as so much faster. And compared to hand-digging a canal, the costs weren't that bad! It was incredibly expensive, but the thing that came before it was even moreso.
Government willingness to piss off people combined with the fact that the wealthier people were mostly unaffected. Highways destroyed the poor areas of most cities and enabled the suburban housing boom.
There were a few successful attempts to stop the encroachment of the federal highway system into cities. I think the Bay Area was one of the first such victories.
I've served on a city Planning Commission, and I can say categorically that you never truly know who someone is until the city tries to re-zone the property around their house.
Being fair to Andreessen and his family, they likely bought their house knowing that the property was zoned single-family residential, as was the entire neighborhood, and that it's relatively difficult to change land use policy. That is, until the Legislature of the State of California decided it knew better than every incorporated city, and wrote a housing density law that superseded local zoning regulations.
I've always been surprised that tech billionaires don't spend money influencing State Senate/Assembly races. Maybe that will change.
It's going fine. Housing isn't intended to be fixed by a single bill, there's new ones every year and SB9 will be easier to strengthen now that it's actually passed.
"going fine" vs "Despite uproar, few seek to use California’s new housing-density law. What’s stopping them?"..."In San Francisco, 14 property owners have applied to build SB9 projects"
Here you go. Here is actual data showing that housing is expensive which in turn leads to not many people being able to afford them which then leads to a "housing crisis".
You have cherrypicked the time period making your point without showing the 2020 spike driven by Covid has been zeroed out most and oblivious to the point the knife is still falling fast.
Random Spot check on a single family home in highly impacted San Mateo. Surprise, list price is $2.08mm($2.2MM Zestimate) down $600k from March 2022 Zestimate of $2.7mm for a 22% drop from peak in less than half a year. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4241-Bettina-Ave-San-Mate...
Cherrypicked 70 years of data? up until 2 months ago? So take that May data that I posted, reduce it by 22%, you're still at 1.5 TIMES the 50 year average, or ~7 times the median income. That house needs to go down A LOT more than ~20% to get back to the "cherrypicked" > 50 year average.
If you have those two most recent months (June, July) that I left out of the 70 year picture please link to some data that includes them
Even before covid we were over we were over the average. This is national average btw. Not "a random sample" in SF that also proves my point because most people cant afford a ~2 million dollar home.
I feel like if you're index on 2 million dollar homes no wonder you don't think there is a housing crisis. You can afford anything you want
Payments have spiked 50%+ in about the missing time period thanks to rate raises. And that 1.5 times average about in line to well below the delta in money printing average in the same time period.
The story here is NIMBYism, California Real Estate, Tech, and the "housing shortage". Your data is honed in on the Nation Average and emphasizes the 2020 spike in prices that reflects an exceptional supply constraint in conjunction with a massive(exceptional) migration driver and breakout money printing(none of which speak to a localized housing shortage which would interface conflicts with NIMBYism in a material way). NIMBYism is primarily focused on affluent communities, so low income communities and national averages are fairly irrelevant in arguments pertaining to such(most communities can't lawyer up for long property battles). Most arguments conflating NIMBYism to other issues are calls for Government housing support.
Unfortunately most of the data I'm working on is derived from Zillow, which is specific to markets, lagging, and not open for export. Look at the Zillow charts of the average homes in most of the real NIMBY markets(San Mateo, San Francisco, Orange County, Marin, Etc) and you will see a fast dropping Zestimate that is well above the average transaction prices actually conducted in the last few weeks. All while supply is accumulating well outside averages. Debt bubbles pop fast. This one is the beneficiaries of government pumping debt with low interest rates into homes surrounding the growth companies that rode its wave. Tides out, so boats are hitting the shore.
The median house price in my city is $3m, that’s pretty absurd based on prices 10/20/30 years ago. And that’s not even the issue, when a house does go on the market it’s sniped by the ultra rich - like Zucks housing complex he’s built from single house properties to get around planning rules.
Depends on "working out" means personal financial gain on a single asset, or "working out" means a good community that is welcoming to new people. Sounds like this poster is more community minded and less greedy.
And this is not an anomaly, it's the norm. The $3M communities are just the leading edge, and every area with any economic opportunity will be there soon unless we do something to address this desperate shortage of houses.
The mathematic improbability of 1% of US communities with "any economic opportunity" reaching an average home price of $3mm in the next few decades is <1% without a total collapse of the dollar, thus likely any economic opportunity it brings.
Yet this crazy capitalist rent system allows people from anywhere in the world to come rub shoulders with their billionaire neighbors of 1/999,999th the investment and possibly make immense fortunes while changing the world, while both wear sweats. The tragedy of it all. Duped of the opportunity to live happily and congruently in somewhere like North Korea where they would certainly find the same opportunity and influence.
FWIW, this is also an own-goal caused by dumb zoning policies. Regardless, the point that "we need to legalize the construction of residences to bring down prices" stands.
I live in a condo complex that used to be a high school.
We all have electric heating and cooking, because there wasn't gas connections (which is annoying, but tolerable). We all have 14 to 16 foot ceilings (which is actually kind nice). The bathrooms were all somehow renovated and some plumbing rerouted. We have shared laundry downstairs (which sucks, but not as much as living in a tent city).
Someday there should be an actual HN article by an expert breaking down what's involved to renovate an office into apartments. It's clearly not impossible.
Nothing is impossible given enough money. But on the whole, it is much easier to convert hotels, motels, and I suppose high schools given that they are already subdivided into rooms of a decent size and each room has natural light.
The issue with commercial offices is that the buildings have gotten larger and larger, but residential building depth will max out at around 45 feet, leaving a massive unusable interior.
That's CRE vacancy. $300k will barely get you a condo in Oakland; $200k won't, it'll only get you random patches of dirt.
CRE vacancies are unsurprising. You may not have noticed, but we just had a huge multi-year pandemic that moved huge amounts of work out of offices and into homes.
"Not easily reusable" What does this even mean? Will settle for even a rough rounded up ballpark conversion cost that we can break down on a square foot basis.
> The cost to convert offices to an average apartment building is about $100-$200/SF[4], although that cost could be significantly inflated now. If we assume $150/SF of hard and soft costs plus a 15% profit margin of $23/SF, a developer will need to seek offices available at $262/SF. Exhibit 1 below shows that the median New York office transaction price was $542/SF in 2021, with about 20% traded at $262/SF or lower.
> First, we looked at office rent per SF. The median apartment asking rent is $55/SF in NYC[5]. As Exhibit 2 shows, about 36% of NY office properties fall below or meet the median apartment rent per SF. A developer would likely seek offices with rents much lower than $55/SF because of the amortized cost of conversion, but again this is a rough exercise to broadly understand potential scale of the conversion trend. We also considered vacancy rate. Typically, developers would seek prospective office building conversions with above average vacancy, both because it’s easier to buy out or relocate fewer office tenants and high vacancy may reinforce that office space isn’t the highest and best use of a property. Of the 1,066 tracked NYC office properties, only 12% met our vacancy rate threshold of 30% or higher. When apply the two limits of $55/SF rent and 30% or higher vacancy rates, only 0.7% of Class A buildings and 6% of Class B/C buildings make the conversion reasonable.
> The size and shape of typical office buildings also limits potential conversions. Office buildings typically include deep floor plates and limited natural light for interior offices and storage rooms. However, natural light throughout is essential for dwellings, so apartment depths tend to max out around 40-50 ft. Much of the office building may be rendered unusable (or of very low value) with deep floor plates beyond 100-120 feet wide, after accounting for elevator and mechanical cores.
> An office building with a floor plate of less than 14,000 SF may be a good candidate for conversion, depending on the building shape. In the worst case the building is square (where both sides are equally as deep), the floor plate will be roughly 120 ft by 120 ft, resulting in just about the absolute maximum depth of 50 ft of apartment on one side and 50 ft on the other, with at least 20ft of elevator core and mechanical between. Of course, there may be other orientations of buildings (and creative solutions of designers and developers) that either allow or preclude profitable conversion, and that can even vary up and down a building’s stacking plan. But once again, this is a “rough justice” analysis. Without detailed information on all NYC offices’ floor size and shape up and down the buildings, we assume a convertible building to have an average square floor plate size of 14,000 SF. Layering in the 14,000 SF floor plate threshold on top of our vacancy rate and asking rents limits, only about 3%, or 35, of NYC office properties would be convertible via our (crude but reasonable) methodology.
35 converted office buildings is hardly a dent in housing demand for all of NYC.
"However, natural light throughout is essential for dwellings, so apartment depths tend to max out around 40-50 ft. Much of the office building may be rendered unusable (or of very low value)" sounds like that problem is actually the solution to these arguments to me.
Given the high cost of conversion, those interior spaces will not command the rent to cover their conversion costs. And to leave it alone would force rents in the rentable areas up even higher.
"developer would likely seek offices with rents much lower than $55/SF" we can easily see some at $25-35/SF given ~25%+ a yielding $0/SF. Depress the building costs as well. Too many models hung up on the pandemic and tech bubbles.
Additionally, Moody's, not exactly the guys you want to stand on for downside real estate projections.
Commercial real estate in SF is in its worst straights yet.
Let's see how all these numbers average out after valuations continue to reset in both forms of real estate, tech, local construction, etc. Commercial owners are on course to paying people to sleep in buildings to look occupied.
The bottom-line is the sheer volume of commercial square footage, rapidly dropping residential values, tech layoffs, will eliminate the "shortage" story butting up against NIMBY'ism and Socialism faster than cases with high power attorneys and rich landowners will give up legal ground in California.
A "vacant building" means nothing; there is no reason to believe it's in the right location, will still be vacant next week, or is even habitable. Under construction and condemned units are both considered vacant. You gotta build.
> David says of those 40,000 units, about 32,000 of them fall into categories that would most likely be exempt from a vacancy tax.
> For example, properties that have been recently bought or sold and the new tenants haven't moved into yet, or ones where landlords are currently doing renovations or upgrades.
> "It will not move the needle on our affordability or displacement crisis in any meaningful way," he said.
> David says what the city really needs to do is build more housing.
> "In order to keep the cost of housing to just be increasing at the same rate as inflation, you need to be adding about two percent to our housing stock per year," he said.
> David says that comes out to about 5,000 new units a year.
> But for the past 30, we've only built an average of 1,800 annually, leaving us in a 100,000 unit deficit
Sounds like we need a loooooot more vacancies, like maybe 100,000-150,000 in San Francisco.
The only vacancies that are a problem are all the vacant, unbuilt units above small, 1-2 story single family homes all throughout San Francisco. Those are the vacancies that are killing the city.
Embarrassing comment. Do you not live in California? Or are unaware of the state of the housing market there? From homelessness, to the average cost of a house, to the declining population because middle class people can't afford to buy or event rent...
Conflating NIMBY'ism and homelessness is self defeating if you actually want people sleeping in rooms with beds and keys; in California.
Call the right Marc(Benioff). He can house the majority of the SF homeless population in the open space in his tower...
"Salesforce Giving Up 350K SF In Downtown S.F. In Latest Blow To City's Office Market"
https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/office/salesforce-west-...
A 19% decrease in housing prices, even assuming that that number were true (it's not even close to that for the SF property I own, for example), is not nearly enough to make SFBA affordable. Your argument was stronger when you were simply expressing your aesthetic preference for lower density instead of denying the existence of the housing crisis.
May arguments stem around letting communities make their own decisions and abiding by the laws, as silly and antiquated and biased as they maybe, make their own decisions. I am heavily pro-building, but I don't want a jail built next door. There are nuances.
But we don't have a housing shortage in California, any longer.
> But we don't have a housing shortage in California, any longer.
You keep saying this, and yet home prices are still unaffordable for a median earner. What magical economic factor aside from demand greater than supply do you think is driving these high costs?
> I am heavily pro-building, but I don't want a jail built next door.
And no one I am aware of is seriously promoting changing zoning to allow something like that.
How about we go one step further and allow individuals to make their own decisions about the land that they own? Perhaps individual freedom is an alien concept for many Americans?
That's nice. Go to Zillow right now and search for properties in Palo Alto. Set no minimum, and then set a $500k maximum (the lowest Zillow will let you set for Palo Alto). See what you get. Then try $600k. Still nothing! Keep dialing it up until you find something.
We live in a democracy in which most people think that the government should step in to ensure commodities necessary for survival, like housing or food, remain affordable. Given that in California (and many other places) every community severely restricts multi-family housing, the state has to force some otherwise-unwilling municipalities to zone for denser residential. It would be unfair for the state to deliver mandates to some cities while letting the richest places, such as Palo Alto, off the hook.
In other words: it'd be one thing if it were just Palo Alto that were unaffordable, but because it's a statewide problem, fairness demands that every city should chip in to the solution.
" in which most people think that the government should step in " ! Really? Proof?
Housing is affordable; just not the housing you'd like.
Food is inflating but starvation in the US is rare.
Considering California's housing costs are astronomical compared to the rest of the US, isn't its approach to restriction a sign of the model working? If not why is there so much market based demand driving up the prices?
And since many people can and do leave the state as a result of being priced out, where is the "statewide problem"?
This sounds more like an opinionated list of the way you wish things were. Also makes me curious how much you have vested in the state / community. As things are increasingly so, when in California, do as the ("Romans").
Horrible cherry picking. Take the average family income in the city and go from there. Also, there is an exceptional dirth of supply relative to the transactions as a result of rapid fed rate increases; with real estate always being a slow mover in reflecting market prices.
...What a revealing week in Bay Area Real Estate...
- SF has least competitive rental market in state, report finds
Occupancy rates and rents are up, but the city has less demand than elsewhere
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. If, as you claim, demand has dropped, home prices have dropped, and we no longer have a housing shortage, then there's no need for a crash, because everything is just fine.
I feel like the flawed consensus is mostly in your own head.
I don't think anyone really has much difficulty understanding his argument or why he's making it; the rank hypocrisy of his long-standing and consistent statements around building more housing is at issue.
[Bilal Mahmood](https://www.bilalforassembly.com/) (ClearBrain founder, YC alum and former Amplitude Head of Product) recently ran for state assembly. Some tech people are getting involved in politics, but most do not.
Sadly, most tech folks don't vote or have zero interest in local politics.
> Sadly, most tech folks don't vote or have zero interest in local politics.
It's more that transient populations usually don't bother. If your plan is to move to an area for 4-6 years in order to bootstrap a career, earn some money, build a resume and reputation, and then move out to somewhere lower-cost, then you're not going to see the need to get involved in local politics or even vote.
At least the random couple with low income that lucked into a house 40 years ago is semi sympathetic. They don't travel the world and may not be able to move somewhere else as nice after selling (especially with prop 13 tax lock ins)
My opinion, as in I think this is true but I can't claim it's an immutable law of nature: You don't get a billion dollars by leaving pennies on the table. You need a ruthless focus on money über alles. And that focus never turns off, and doesn't exclude anything. Everything is an investment. Everything is about how it can make you more money, or potentially make you more money. Everything is about increasing that lifetime high score. So it's not that you care about your property value per se, it's that you care about every value, obsessively, all the time.
Yes this is actually the problem. In theory, once you have enough you just stop working and enjoy leisure for the rest of your life. This is why Keynes predicted a 15 hour work week, people are so obscenely wealthy they don't care anymore.
In practice, becoming wealthy is alost a social darwinist selection process where you need an extreme adaptation to your environment to end up at the top, anything less and you end up in the upper middle class at best. Once you have structured your entire life around becoming wealthy it is hard to quit.
This is problematic because human wants and needs aren't actually infinite. One workaholic can do the work of four people, making three out of four people redundant, but the workaholic would never give up the wealth he obtained this way, so three people end up unemployed instead of everyone working 10 hours a week. Because of this all or nothing mentality, everyone feels compelled to outdo the workaholic just to stay in their job, not because they actually need all of the money.
The absurd part though is that the workaholic blames others for not doing their share, while he himself insists on doing everything, in fact, he absolutely despises anyone taking his workload off his shoulders. Somehow charity i.e. doing others work for them turned into a one sided relationship where the recipient is now the sinner through no fault of his own. People start hating each other for no reason.
I don't think it is. Or that's not the only reason, because I've seen rich people waste vast amounts of money on frivolity and vanity.
It's power and superiority. It's not that they care about a relatively insignificant amount of money they might lose on paper, it's that someone else might have caused that or might have gained from it. Doubly so if that someone else is a little person.
It is power and superiority, and hyper focus on making all values go up is a part of that. Frivolity and vanity are social signals that have value, albeit not in a monetary way.
Regardless, Andreessen probably doesn't care about his property value all that much. But it's a lot more socially acceptable to say that than to say he doesn't want poor people too close to his neighborhood. (Or even just mere single- and double-digit millionaires.)
As I said, I don't think hyper focus on value is always what it is. Some people sure have that optimizing mindset, but far from all. In any case that's not part of the power and superiority complex as I see it. For some at least, that's not the driver, the driver is exerting their power over others and preventing someone else getting one over them. These people would happily lose money if it meant preventing that.
>
Doubly so if that someone else is a little person.
Maybe true in some cases, but I don't think this is generally true. I think the typical behavior is to focus on oneself and not think about the little peoples interest at all.
Wealthy people hoard money. It's an obsession. If it was food, newspapers, boxes, or old clothes, their homes would be overrun with stuff and would likely be considered a problem. But because it's not (usually) physical junk, it's not apparent. Remember the end of Citizen Kane, where the workers toss piles of stuff into a furnace?
I knew a guy who had to know the price of everything and calculated everything by its monetary value. Whether or not he ended up really wealthy I don't know, but he was already pretty well off when I knew him.
I know a man who isn't a billionaire but probably in the 50-100 million range. He sat down with me at a recent party we were at and talked about saving money on fuel with dockets via apps he uses when shopping. I was polite and interested. It was not a thing I expected to hear.
My take away was to just keep driving my small car, and not require such hustle to fill up a Range Rover. :D
This is basically the Silvio Gesell argument. People don't hoard excessive amounts of potatoes, etc so in a barter economy there wouldn't be an absurd level of wealth inequality as there is a limit to how much wealth a single individual can store by themselves.
Meanwhile money doesn't spoil, takes up almost no space even if you hold it as cash, it is also risk free, it can be traded and turned into almost anything. There is no downside to having money, there is no upside to not having money, not having money is a terrible thing actually. So anytime you earn money, you just keep it until you die and then you give it to your children.
The fact that money is actually meant to be a medium of exchange, not a status symbol was completely forgotten.
I wasn't aware of Silvio Gesell, although I can't quite pin down where or how the idea of wealth as money hoarding came to my attention. Thanks for pointing me to him. Are there any works I should consult for and introduction to his ideas?
You seem really angry at your employers. Because they whine and don't give away their money? Is it really partly because of their race? Hardly seems that serious. Or was it the contrast with your own wealth that hurt so much? Perhaps better for poor people not to live too close to rich people, for their own sanity?
I agree, "the rich" should be segmented from wider society so as not to induce social discord. Since one is clearly a highly productive individual to have earned such money, I have no doubt they will manage to look after their own needs and desires without the poors.
They mention others' property value as a rallying tool to stop the neighbourhood changing. I think it's less about the property value to them and more about the status and type of neighbourhood. Living in a neighbourhood reachable by people other than their peers isn't going to impress the people they want to impress.
Not only about value, it's also about power. It's viewed as if those people rob him of his asset. If he let it this time, there will be next time and soon he'll be powerless to prevent anything to be taken away from him.
Billionaires see each other as predator that will eat them and seize the assets given a chance. They see lower classes as worse, since logically they'll need more assets than billionaires.
I would be curious to compare land value in Manhattan with that in Atherton. It's hard for me to believe that in the long run density lowers value in the US. Less dense cities and cheaper cities go hand in hand - look at all the less-dense-and-cheaper cities people move to from more-expensive-denser coastal California.
Atherton is a bit of a weird case and seems to derive its land values almost exclusively from lot size (and maybe inertia?). The peninsula in general tends towards low density and high property values and Atherton is just really on one end of the spectrum. However, it doesn't have something like walking distance to downtown Palo Alto or the views of Saratoga, Los Altos Hills, or Belmont. It has... big lots. With big houses. I honestly have no idea why it is so coveted.
Atherton has zoning that, for the Bay Area, is both very restrictive and very permissive, in a way that makes it a sweet spot for rich people to realize a specific but wide-spread American dream.
The restrictive part is that lots have to remain gigantic, but the setbacks from those lot lines are gigantic as well, and this is rigorously enforced, but within that build-able footprint the homeowner has nearly complete free reign. The result is a near complete isolation from having to see or contemplate neighbors, let alone "the poors", and yet it's within driving proximity of pretty much everything; that is, it enables the real-deal modern day version of the "country manor" of which the neighborhoods that comprise over half of American housing stock are merely cheap and shitty knockoffs.
Big lots and big houses are rare in suburban areas. Space between them and neighbours. Room for pools and tennis courts and ornamental gardens and large garaging, etc.
> Also, why the hell would you care about your property value as a billionaire?!?
The people that become billionaires are disproportionately people inclined to care about the value of their properties beyond the point where it makes any reasonable impact on their lifestyle.
In my experience a lot of YIMBYs are actually NIMBY but YIYBYs - Not in my back yard, but yes in YOUR back yard. A classic example is so-called progressive Robert Reich who has many times opined about the lack of affordable housing, eg,
Throwing in my few pennies regarding my experiences living in cities.
Having lived in a few well known places, with different urban planning characteristics:
- Tokyo. Very praised for its successes, and there are quite a few: extremely liberal zoning (it seems), based around mass transit rather than cars (great!). Despite the small living space sizes for some, reportedly still very affordable, wide low/med/high density options for at various price-points spread all over. On the other hand, rarely worth having more than prefab buildings (earthquakes), masssssive sprawl, and legendarily horrendous commutes for those living in the suburbs. More than half the city is really quite ugly, grey and concrete.
- Berlin. Lots to like based on good previous planning decisions, and that war-time destruction and reunification somewhat provided opportunities to modernise. The city centre is mostly medium-density 5/6 storey apartment buildings. This seems to be a great sweet-spot that packs in a lot of people, but still leads to a strong community feeling in neighbourhoods. Even in the city centre, extremely green, and very accessible nature thanks to effective public transport. On the other hand, the last few decades of success may have had a lot to do with its historical anomalies, and now that it's normalising in lines with other similar cities, feels like these benefits have been drying up.
- London. Creaking under the legacy of its historical city centre. Planned under the assumption that of course everyone is living in multi-million Pound townhouses in Zone 1. Everyone else is SOL; the rest is low density suburbs with transit that forces most journeys to be via the centre, since there is no outer ring line (great in Berlin, not so great in Tokyo). Seems hardly any medium density: endless neighbourhoods of single family homes, or skyscrapers.
Anyway, none of this is new. It seems pretty clear that the political inability to fix these issues are a massive drain on economies already, and this will only get worse in the future with increasing urbanisation. Frankly, seems the only solution is building entire new cities. Asia has certainly benefited from this in the 20th century...
Well, this is terribly disappointing. I always liked Marc's Is Time to Build essay, it felt like the right sort of spirit. And now it feels like utter hypocrisy.
Most of Marc's investments went into crypto/fintech, social media and such. He dabbles in some hard, physical, even socially useful investment... but it's a 1/50 ratio.
The same is true of Peter Thiel. He talks an incredibly big game about atoms & bits or the power of entrepreneurship while doing the opposite.
The weirdness comes from the intersection of believing/espousing in the possibility and necessity of A, while also negating A. I'm not necessarily that annoyed by the straightforward hypocrisy. Everyone does that kind of thing. But once you start evangelising for A... either shut up about it or embody it. There's a difference between the minister moonlighting as a stripper, and a parishioner doing it.
Peter Thiel's a particularly onerous example. He's all talk about Bits & Atoms, objectivist ideals of productive billionaire industrialism. His post paypal investments are in: (1) fintech (2) paper trading (3) social media (4) data analytics for governments. He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all.
Hell, Peter Thiel is himself one of the clearest negations of the claim that billionaires and bankers perform the necessary and crucial function of capital allocation. None of Thiel's investments are in capital constrained businesses at all. There aren't really any investments one can point that lead to something happening which wouldn't have without him or his money. I suppose Palantir wouldn't exist, but I don't think that affects much.
> He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all
What are you talking about?
Just from their website (https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/) Founders Fund invested in SpaceX, Anduril, Varda Space, DeepMind, Synthego, 8Sleep, Oculus and ScaleAI, every single of which are deep tech startups.
Hell, the only other VC that have kept pace with that level of 'Atoms' investing is Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital.
Scale. How much, relative to the whole is (a) Thiel's contribution to this fund (b) the portion of the fund's investments which live up to above ideals.
Also.. IDK that even the best are examples of investments living up to the ideals Thiel projects.
Oculus is/was interesting, sure. It's hardware, but still pretty far from factories ports and "atoms". It also flipped to FB and is now a foundation stone for the Meta project.
Besides, "friends with Elon" there's not much there there.
I'm not saying he's a bad investor or that these are bad companies, but it's all pretty standard fare. Potential for fire "moat" in emerging industry, and minimal need for hard capital investment by the primary growth phase. He's trying to get a piece of the next Zuck. That's all.
Ah, the classic guy writes about how to solve a problem, said problem shows up on his doorstep, guy decides not to solve it, problem continues to exist and guy continues to wonder why.
Waiting for the follow up "It's time to build in places where people allow it"
Honestly, Andreesen's understanding of the underlying cause for new housing is really poor, I'm not surprised that he is also a hypocrite, or his ignorance has lead him, perhaps unintentionally, to a hypocritical act.
This probably sounds harsh, but if anyone doubts me, I urge you to actually read Andreessen's “It’s Time to Build”. It's shockingly naive. An entire essay written to convince us of "the need to build", without the awareness that the obstacle to building is not the lack of a SV visionary pointing out the obvious, but the tangle of policy and political incentives. Read Ezra Klein's rebuttal for a more comprehensive review of why Andreesen's essay misses the mark completely[1].
I do want to highlight one positive attribute about him though. He actually had the courage, and intellectual sensibility to write out his argument and publish it in a public forum for others to read. That's the first step towards getting your ideas challenged, and, in the back-and-forth of criticism, strengthening your ideas. As far as I know he didn't engage with the more robust criticism of his ideas (i.e. Ezra Klein) and so that second step is missing, but I at least admire that he took the first step. It's frustrating to me how much society idolizes wealthy "visionaries" who don't actively publish or debate their ideas, like Musk, or Thiel (with regards to his political activity), giving them the benefit of doubt that there's nuance and intentionality behind their actions without any evidence of such.
It's interesting that 'decreased home value' is considered a coherent argument.
Imagine I come to you and say you need to stop making positive changes in your life because others compare you to me and I don't like my 'value' being decreased by your improved lifestyle.
Also, can you move out of my neighbourhood? You're causing noise pollution and traffic.
The flipside is equally ridiculous. Consider the homeowner who happens to be located along a newly proposed subway line. They may see their home values double or triple as construction completes, without spending a cent on improvements--in fact purely on the public dime.
Yep, I'm a believer in the two pronged approach of land value tax replacing all other taxes and reduced zoning restrictions. Henry George had the remedy over a century ago.
This is the common case, but even if you get two upzoning advocates to discuss someone else’s neighborhood, they STILL likely won’t agree on what kind of housing, often disagreeing about if the housing (or how much of it) should be market rate, whether removing existing green space is acceptable, what form of density should be allowed (eg towers vs midrise), whether there should be restrictions on style to match the existing neighborhood character, and so on
I live in a townhome in a street single family homes on a street with apartment buildings and duplexes, and it's amazing. My children's friends live in homes ranging from 4000sqft palaces to 800sqft apartments, all within a few blocks. Mixed housing types in a community can be great. Too bad Atherton will never know the benefits.
I just want to say, one great democratizing thing about the internet is that is lets every one spout off their mouth and be discovered, even the supremely rich.
In an age where people can hire shills to act for them, create fake companies, lobbying firms, etc. at least we still are able to rely on someone's inability to control their temper and expose themselves for who they really are. No more having to guess whether under the do-gooder curated front, you're being taken for a ride underneath. Now you can know.
Dude's Dad was a property tycoon. Quoting wikipedia:
Arrillaga established his career as a real estate developer starting in the 1960s, partnering with Richard Peery in acquiring California farmland which they converted into office space. Their partnership took off with the growth of the semiconductor industry and other high-tech businesses, such as Intel,[2] in what became known as Silicon Valley.[6] Arrillaga and Peery converted thousands of acres of farmland into office space in cities such as Mountain View, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to meet the industry's needs.[2] Over a period of 50 years, their partnership, Peery Arrillaga, built over 20 million square feet of commercial real estate, becoming one of Silicon Valley's biggest commercial landlords.[9][5][8] In 2006, he sold over five million square feet of his real estate holdings for roughly $1.1 billion to the real estate division of Deutsche Bank.[6][2] In 2020 Arrillaga ranked No. 339 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.[6] In October 2020, his net worth was $2.5 billion.[6]
Marc may personally feel one way, and credit to him for writing that essay; his wife and family may have a different opinion, and in families, we "disagree but commit" all the time
The letter was signed first by Laura, who did not co-author the essay.
If you actually viewed NIMBY-ism as a major societal problem you don't just "disagree but commit", and if you do, you deserve to be called out as a hypocrite.
If I moved into a neighborhood with a culture that I liked, and developers threatened to build a sub-neighborhood that changes that culture while making my property less valuable and harder to get out of, I would be pissed as well, especially if they can build on empty space elsewhere nearby
This outrage happens all of the time at HOA-run neighborhoods
Imagine being worth multiple billions of dollars and complaining about your property value being decreased by someone building townhouses in your zip code. Just last fall they spent nearly $200 million on an estate in Malibu.
Everyone always talks about what people in the suburbs want as if urban life is so terrible and suburban life is amazing. I’m not a huge fan of the suburbs as positives are few and far between. I choose to live in one because finding a great school in the core of the city is next to impossible and when it occurs it’s next to $5 million dinky bungalows because the land prices are insane. I’d be thrilled to own a decent 3 bedroom condo in a good school district but under 10% of condos are 3BR and almost all condo buildings aren’t sending their population to good schools.
I know somebody who blocked development of houses that would have disrupted their view. But rather than blocking it through lobbying, they banded up with their neighbours to buy the property that was going to be sold to developers.
This seems like the only legitimate form of NIMBYism to me. OK, you say that building housing here will disrupt your quality of life - then put your money where your mouth is. Andreesen no doubt could afford to do this as well, but obviously it is cheaper to lobby the government to stop it for you.
But building enough housing won't happen because people rationally conclude it's in their best interests. It will happen when the decision-making levers are removed from local government.
I don't understand why "enough housing" can't be in people's best interests. Removing voice in local decisions will not increase loyalty.
There are too many countervailing forces. People are loss-averse and disengaged from local policy; they only peek out when they get wind of some aspect of their lifestyle being threatened, and their natural response is to say "no changes, further study required". They don't have the time or the energy to think through the long term issues. They're concerned about their property value. Or they're concerned about parking. Or they're concerned that there's too much parking. Or they're concerned that utilities buildout will raise their taxes. Or they're concerned about shade. Or they're concerned about crime. Or they're concerned about noise. You can keep rattling them off, and the point is that everyone's got a different set of idiosyncratic issues and so, as an advocate for development, you've got a bursting dam of random public opinion to push back against, and it's just a nightmare.
The result is that almost everything in wealthy suburbs is SFZ, because there's never concentrated objections to SFZ, but there's organically concentrated objections to multi-family zoning even if people don't actively work to coordinate it.
It won't fix itself, you can't advocate or educate your way out of it. It's a powerful default that just naturally works to keep the most valuable/useful real estate in the country reserved for sprawling houses for wealthy people. It's easy to say "no" and risky to say "yes", so everyone says "no" to new development.
Hence the current proposal du jour (which I buy into): stop letting municipalities cordon off all their lots for SFZ, at the state level, where nobody's specifix ox is getting gored by policy decisions, which can be made in the abstract and in advance.
I kind of don't give a shit about Atherton zoning. No zoning rule is going to make Atherton economically diverse. If Atherton wants to exempt itself from statewide multifamily zoning requirements, it could simply be taxed dearly for the privilege. The residents there can afford it.
Everyone on earth is a NIMBY when they believe they won't be sufficiently compensated for the negative externalities of a new development. Everyone on earth is also a YIMBY when it comes to developments with positive expected externalities.
This is not a moral problem, this is an economic incentive problem. We need to debug capitalism so that externalities both positive and negative are internalized, and everyone becomes IMBY-neutral.
This just happens to have the side-effects of removing deadweight loss, rewarding builders and penalizing squatters, encouraging development and discouraging speculation.
It's not an exaggeration to say if it were successfully implemented globally to fund a humanity dividend, it would solve poverty without demanding more from any individual unfairly.
Prop 13 is a crime against economics and public finance.
Atherton home values per Redfin in June(so when average levered payment costs were about 35% less, RTO was still imminent, and tech layoffs were just budding)...
- Median sales price -4%
- # of homes sold -36% year over year
Valuations are in a free fall, followed by the calls for filling shortages in the true NIMBY areas that define them. See the Job report release today for more Fed food for the next 0.75% raise.
https://www.redfin.com/city/820/CA/Atherton/housing-market
The only thing surprising here is that he conveyed his views via a public letter.
Such views are usually conveyed over cigars, brandy, and prime rib, in private rooms (where smoking is not frowned at, even in CA) in very expensive restaurants.
I just want to say, one great democratizing thing about the internet is that is lets every one spout off their mouth and be discovered, even the supremely rich.
In an age where people can hire shills to act for them, create fake companies, lobbying firms, etc. at least we still are able to rely on someone's inability to control their temper and expose themselves for who they really are. No more having to guess whether under the do-gooder curated front, you're being taken for a ride underneath. Now you can know.
You can never really know who someone is. Only what they’ve chosen to share with you. With that in mind, this is just one more data point to form your own opinion around.
I personally propose the removal of ALL restrictions on building; zoning, HOAs, deed restrictions, housing covenants, etc. should all be eliminated (Personally I think this goes against the 14th amendment and that Euclid V Ambler and the Slaughterhouse cases were both ruled wrong, and as such these are all illegal against the constitution).
But, this sounds like Marc Andreessen's wife is a NIMBY, and Marc Andreessen didn't sign this, or didn't feel like arguing against his wife in public.
You might enjoy this book: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines - he makes the case that we should get rid of zoning. Of course, there's some nuance to it, but it's worth a look. He's got a lot of expertise.
Why is it that we always get absolutely ridiculous hypotheticals like this? 24 hour motorcycle repair operations? Really? Do we need to ban companies from making unsafe car tires out of earwax and chicken bones too? Or maybe could we just understand that that shit isn't gonna happen for a myriad of reasons?
All of the theoretical protections that zoning affords us are already granted to us via better mechanisms. For example, noise ordinances. Why ban motorcycle shops when you can ban noise above a specific threshold? When you combine nuisance laws and environmental laws and market incentives, you've already ruled out every possible boogyman coming to ruin your quaint bougie neighborhood. All of them except the poors living in apartments.
I know this is tangential to your point -- but that place really doesn't exist.
I've been taking my dirtbike and street bike to various repair shops for over a decade - I can't think of a single one that was even open on Sundays. Maybe the sales floor had Sunday hours, but the repair guys took the day off.
I was surprised by how out of touch and un-self-aware he seemed on the recent Sam Harris podcast episode. Never heard him speak before. But having heard him in his own words, I am now completely unsurprised by this article.
I listened to that episode too. Not sure if he’s out of touch or simply only cares about his own agenda. Certainly freaked me out a little when he was speaking fondly of what I would describe as the cryptocurrency dystopia.
> But building enough housing won't happen because people rationally conclude it's in their best interests. It will happen when the decision-making levers are removed from local government.
> More on why community input is bad.
This honestly strikes me as kind of insane. Community voice in community matters is bad? Local community decision-making should be removed from local governments?
- "we need to take community input into account" gets transformed to "a small handful of people acting in bad faith can stop any process"
- homeowners tend to have more access to these, but are not the only people affected by these decisions (you think the teachers or cops having to live 90 minutes away cuz they can't afford to rent in these areas are showing up here?)
- Home ownership in particular just generates a perverse incentive to try and profit off of your home. That might be great for homeowners, but there's a reason rentseeking is its own economic term.
I believe that the specific thing here is that community input on planning as it exists in the US is bad, for the same reason that deciding everything by referendum is bad. If you put every part of urban development up for line item veto, then you can't make much of a great plan!
I personally think that public comment and the like is ... fine and good. But I do think it should be possible for a city government to lay out requirements for building a thing, and for people who meet those requirements to be able to do the thing, no matter how much others whine. If there are issues, change the requirements for future projects!
We already deny communities "community voice" in all sorts of issues. The list of issues communities aren't allowed to determine for themselves is called "state law", and there's a lot of it. Demsas (Twitter has stripped some of this context off, which is probably part of why it seems insane to you) is advocating for blanket SFH zoning to be added to the list of things communities can no longer decide for themselves, because when you let communities do that, they naturally and with near-mathematical inevitability (literally, as in the forces that lead to this are almost mathematically inevitable and have nothing to do with equity or justice or privilege or anything like that) work to exclude multi-family housing.
Yes, local communities across the United States have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with control over local zoning, so the power should be moved to a regional political body. Voters will of course vote in their own best interest, and everyone wants their property values to increase, resulting in every local government restricting housing construction and a general lack of construction across the board. This creates regional-level economic problems that should be addressed by regional-level government bodies.
>Community voice in community matters is bad? Local community decision-making should be removed from local governments?
Yes, pretty much every country that has sane housing policies and gets shit done, like Japan has elevated this to the national level with the power to break down obstructionism. Local decision making is notoriously corrupt. Be it the police, school boards, some union run rampart, the mob, homeowner associations or some business cartel, it's always local.
In fact if you want to pinpoint the central issue that paralyzes development in America it's the parochialism.
What California is moving towards strikes me as eminently sensible: the local community may decide where to place the housing, but it must zone for enough housing somehow. This preserves "community voice in community matters" and "local community decision-making" while eliminating the ability to be exclusionary.
Community input is a product of 60s anti-development protests; the idea is essentially that anyone can stop anything from happening, but nobody can make it go faster.
As a result, nothing ever happens, except in suburbs where not enough people care to stop you from building SFHs, so we get sprawl.
Other countries don't do this stuff. It's fine to not do it.
This puts outsized power in the hands of incumbent homeowners. What about people who work in Atherton or nearby towns and need to commute hours to get to their jobs? They sure would like to live nearer to their workplace. They generally aren't considered "community" and have no voice.
Zoning has to be done citywide if not nationally, because otherwise it's a tragedy of the commons: everyone in a city benefits from increased density, while the costs fall disproportionately on those neighbourhoods that do densify. We need to set fixed standards just like we don't let each neighbourhood set its own tax rate.
According to Wikipedia, Palo Alto to the south is twice as dense as Atherton, and Redwood City to the north is almost twice as dense. And both those cities are not entirely residential, which Atherton appears to be.
Also, neither Palo Alto nor Redwood City are particularly dense by urban standards.
How disappointing from a self-described "libertarian". Freedom for me but not for thee.
This is a good example of why local government doesn't work beyond basic service provision such as garbage pickup. You get negative sum decision making that is locally good but globally bad.
Using government to apply force onto an individual and violate their property rights is the unit of analysis here. Whether that government is local, state or country is besides the point.
Going to lobby my local government for total police surveillance and summary execution for those who partake in the devil's lettuce. It'll still be a libertarian paradise, though.
So, I get that there's a major hypocrisy here... and that this demonstrates NIMBYism and such. Personally, the passive-aggressive tone of the tweet makes this especially aggravating: "purported concerns about..."
That said, I think we just have to accept that affordable housing concerns are always hypocrisy-laden.
Home owners, have an interest in high prices. Home ownership overlaps significantly with active citizenry. Banks want higher prices. Mortgage solvency depends on it. Bank regulator regulators too, for the same reason. All that translates into entrenched political hypocrisy. You can't beat it by yelling at it.
FWIW, I'm personally not sure that increased density is the actual answer anyway... or what is. Are there any demonstrative examples with increased housing density making meaningful price impacts on an already expensive city. Do we even have examples of cities becoming significantly cheaper, that aren't a crisis?
In any case, I think we should call this kind of behaviour the "Andreessen Effect."
> FWIW, I'm personally not sure that increased density is the actual answer anyway... or what is.
The truth is the materials and labor to build what most people consider “housing” is out of reach for a lot of people and these people don’t know it. There’s a reason that nearly all new multi-family development is “luxury” - it’s the only profitable way. Anything that’s “affordable” is government subsidized. Not to mention upkeep.
So we need to change what people think affordable housing is. It’s a lot closer to a trailer than it is to a fixed structure. I don’t know if a lot of people are willing to accept that.
Density is just a side effect of building more homes (housing supply goes up in a given area -> density goes up). The effect of supply on price is, well, unambiguous.
This isn't barber shops and orange juice. Real estate is a far more structured market. Limited space. Price-pegged debt availability. Transport/infrastructure. Long term asset inflation trends. This creates a lot of ambiguity around the effect of supply on price... within realistic boundaries.
A simple supply and demand curve rarely models most urban real estate markets usefully.
I don't get it. He lives in Atherton, which already has insane rules about lot size to house size ratios, no public transportation, no sidewalks, nothing that even remotely hints at letting normal proles afford property there. It's very clear that the town is for rich people, and that's presumably why he lives there in the first place. What's wrong with this? It's not like he's moved to Palo Alto and bought up half a dozen houses around himself, or purchased an entire block, installed ridiculous, childish (and now seemingly permanent) decorations that lead to an insane rush of revelers every halloween and massive year-round light pollution that inconveniences neighbors or something.
That may be so, but if the town is set up on the premise of being a home for rich people, then it's not an individual's fault for wanting to keep things that way. That's the "General Plan" mentioned in Andreessen's comments. What he's saying is that the General Plan needs to be amended, which is correct, because drastically changing what type of housing is to be allowed is a long-term decision and should be taken in conjunction with other elements of the General Plan, which covers these matters.
America is a country of laws. If there is a desire to make policy changes, then it has to be done with the consent of the governed. The majority in Atherton does not and likely will not consent to such things, and Andreessen registering his discontent is just a citizen exercising his legitimate rights.
> if the town is set up on the premise of being a home for rich people
Yes, the fundamental political argument here is whether “setting up a town such that some small group gets to decide what kinds of buildings a property owner can build” should be a thing. There are clearly other premises that nearly everyone agrees cannot be enforced by a town (say, “a town set up for white people only”), so it’s not good enough to simply provide a premise and say “we’re a country of laws therefore the premise shall be enforced.”
No, the focus of the article on the individual, Marc Andreessen and vilifying him for arguing for density in cities like San Francisco while voting against density in his suburban town. The underlying idea is that billionaires should opt for the exact same living standards as people who make orders of magnitude less than them if they write articles commenting on housing, and if they do not do so, they are hypocrites, while conveniently ignoring the fact that these very same billionaires single-handedly sway government revenues because of the taxes they pay and drive ginormous GDP increases that enable governments to solve housing problems, for example, by creating efficient transportation networks, or providing incentives to companies to locate themselves in ways that alleviate or avert housing crises.
The real culprit is not Andreessen complaining to his mayor, but the Bay Area and California politicians who have squandered the enormous revenues of the past 10 years and have literally nothing to show for their housing efforts.
The argument that there is 'insufficient housing' in the area is a bit rubbish.
There will never be 'sufficient housing' as there will always be demand to live there, until it's a a terrible place to live ... after which demand will drop and it will be 'cheap to live'.
There will always be 'high demand places to live' and the reality is no everyone can afford to live there, too bad, that's not how it works. There's plenty of wonderful places to live in the US.
The use of the term 'NIBYISM' is wrong, people have a right to control how their communities are developed.
If someone buys a home on a big acre because they really hate traffic, noise etc. then that's the whole point. Collectively, it's their choice - not ours.
The logic of 'Build Everything Until it's Manhattan' because you or I want to afford to live there is a bit absurd in a country with vast and open spaces, especially when 'Building Like Manhatten' often doesn't seem to solve the problem anyhow. NY, the 'densest' place, is one of the most expensive.
If people believe there's a housing expense problem in the area ... then:
How many Googlers does it take to 'Screw In A Lightbulb' and by that I mean 'Build a High Speed Commuting Train' ? - that connects Santa Rosa, to Pleasonton, to Morgan Hill and further? There's a lot of space. Connect it better. WTF are all the geniuses doing that CalTrain is so slow, doesn't loop around the Bay? SF Bay is not 'terrible' but it's nothing compared to good cities for transportation. That's something that needs to be invested in.
Get rid of the very bad idea of 'Everything Being in One Place'. Literally get some of these companies out of the Valley. Take 5 companies and set up shop in Portland, or Petaluma, or Sacramento - and spread it all out further across the US. Stop bringing everyone there, making everything there. Yes, there are some advantages, but there's also advantages in creating other centres.
All of that said: Andreesen's use of 'all caps' is a bit ridiculous, seriously, I don't ever write in 'all caps' it feels a bit childish. I can just see him huffing red, slamming his fists on the table. My god, is this what happens to us when we get a bit of money and turn 55?
NIMBYism and hypocrisy aren’t traits exclusive to wealthy people.
I would object if someone tried to build low income housing next to my home. I think that what I find offensive about Andreeson is the apparent hypocrisy, eg “let’s spend mostly other peoples money for a cause I like but don’t let it affect me.”
I don’t really care how wealthy he is, douchebags come in all flavors.
It’s easy to espouse a basic idea of “build more housing”, but the truth is that when you get to the nitty gritty of doing it there’s suddenly disagreements from all sides.
Get a room full of engineers who “want a consistent style guide” to agree on the particulars of one and you’ll see this dynamic in action.
This isn't a "nitty-gritty" issue. Wealthy suburbs forbid the construction of any kind of multi-family dwelling through single-family zoning rules. The "disagreement" is simple: everyone says they want more housing, as long as it's least 30 minutes away from them. There's a simple fix: stop dignifying those objections, and mandate relaxation of zoning rules statewide.
Exactly this. This is a cultural issue, more than anything else.
Countries like Japan have taken a profoundly different approach to urban development, and have more mixed-use zones (single-family, multi-family, high-rise, etc).
This is obviously not true in a variety of ways, and it inevitably won't be true in the way we're talking about here either, because the status quo doesn't work: it guarantees that every viable suburb is overwhelmingly SFZ, almost mathematically.
In the same way San Francisco allows ice cream shops (or any business) to object to new competitors in their area, yes many “communities” also write rules that monopolize land in order to keep their property values high.
Sadly, no. If you're a community of people who want to develop your land in Atherton you won't be allowed to because a whole bunch of others (including Andreessen) want to stop you.
No, housing isn't expensive in Japan, certainly nowhere near how bad it is in US cities. Housing prices are more or less flat in Tokyo over decades, even, because they constantly build more of it. (It's cheap in the rest of the country, but that doesn't mean much because nobody wants to live there and there aren't jobs.)
Not saying it's great; Japanese wages are too low and their landlords are abusive (moving is expensive, you have to pay a lot of "key money", and they're free to discriminate against foreigners). But the housing crisis is an Anglo problem - it's bad in the US/UK/Canada/Australia.
Not sure about France specifically, I was just saying Paris is a nice city.
How is it disingenuous? OP asserted that communities are "allowed to decide how they are composed," and they obviously are not. Which decisions we allow communities to make is the entire question.
Protected classes are already protected, so it is absolutely disingenuous to try and suggest that if we allow communities to have a say in their own composition we would have to allow them to discriminate based on race.
This is literally what happens to California’s (particularly SoCal and LA’s) public infrastructure all the time. Liberal California will vote for extended mass transit, homeless housing, low cost/public clinics, etc and then when it comes time to build them NIMBYism leaves them in perpetual limbo.
I love my home, but this is easily one of it’s biggest hypocrisies and the thing most strangling it.
All analogies are flawed but this one doesn't even register to me as useful.
Style is inherently subjective so obviously there's going to be personal preferences, and consistency means enforcing one and only one version of preferences onto others.
That's not exactly the problem with more housing. It's not a question of style or character. People use those words when they talk about "the character of their neighborhood changing" or "these ugly concrete monstrosities", but really it's always the same thing:
1. I don't want my housing prices to go down. I want my house prices to only go up.
2. Lower priced housing will be populated by more poor people who are more likely to bring crime, and I don't want crime to increase in my area.
The thing is, they're not even wrong. They exaggerate, sure. But you can sympathize with both factors.
On 1: The American dream has been sold to everyone that housing is a guaranteed investment that should always go up. For many people it's the only retirement hope they have or any inheritance they hope to pass to their children.
On 2: Income IS inversely correlated with crime. Because our modern capitalist culture decided not to optimize for a social safety net, the only solution we've thought of so far is deep segregation (not racial, but economic)
So, in isolation, individuals making the classic "I want more Housing but Not In My Back Yard" argument is entirely logical. But in the aggregate, it only contributes to a vicious spiral.
And there is NO good reason for a billionaire to dare make that argument. He can afford a small dip to his housing value. Holy shit, leave some crumbs for the rest of us.
I'm amazed that commenters are defending this quite insulting behavior.
What a joke. A system is what it does. Andreesen is a hypocrite.
You know what would be fucking incredible? If he had taken the opposite stance and put his money where his mouth is. Instead, he plays the coward, unwilling to embrace his own advice.
Most incredible thing to me is that this is his main point of contention :
>They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values
I get that mansions, like SFHs, are seen as investments. And I suppose this is just how they want to bring locals/voters/officials (who might not be as uber-rich?) on board while muffling the quiet part ("quality of life", i.e. mixing classes). But if it's even a remotely honest sentiment, how damn much is enough? He's a (multi-?)billionaire and still gives two shits about his house's appraisal? So shallow, but I guess in character for someone who just bought a $177M palace ("priciest home sale ever in CA") with the money of retail bagholders.
> You know what would be fucking incredible? If he had taken the opposite stance and put his money where his mouth is.
That is one thing I really enjoyed about George Lucas v Marin County.
Lucas bought Grady Ranch to build an extension of the nearby Lucas film studio. Following the backlash he decided to develop the property (zoned as residential) as low-income housing, paying for it out of pocket (after 3 years getting the runaround from housing grants and regulatory boards).
Sadly a decade later the project is still blocked by Marin NIMBY.
It’s amazing how little inefficient land use/NIMBYism is discussed in American politics. It is actually even more important than healthcare as a cost of living issue. Especially for young people living in major cities.
well it's not discussed much because it's handled at a strictly local level. you don't get a national or even state-level conversation about what goes on in town hall public planning meetings.
the article advocates for bringing housing planning under state jurisdiction:
>The hypocrisy itself is galling, if informative. Andreessen might well support legislation upzoning neighborhoods across California. This macro-micro disconnect should push policy makers to grasp that they cannot reason with NIMBYs on a project-by-project basis. They have to eliminate NIMBYism’s veto power by moving decision-making to the state level.
I mean it's basic "got mine, fuck you". The story of history, then we rewrite the narrative to paint the rich as virtuous and self-sacrificing after the fact. The assumptions that others would swallow such narratives is the amazing bit.
Why the words of rich people are important is beyond me. It's like you guys put these wealthy assholes on a pedestal and then act all shocked when they're looking to enrich themselves even more. Take money out of politics. It's that simple.
I totally agree with this goal, but the core problem is deeper and won't be solved by banning political contributions and so on. Homeowners will still have a financial incentive to vote in NIMBYs, even though that's not directly "money in politics" (albeit it is so indirectly). We need to somehow take negative sum self-interest out of politics through systemic change. I have no idea how one would achieve that, though.
You need to correctly align incentives - anything else won't work. The way you align incentives is through a Land Value Tax.
Currently lower supply means higher prices, which benefits existing owners, so they vote for that. Under a LVT, lower supply means higher taxes instead of higher prices.
You can resolve this issue through a 100% LVT. A 100% LVT would set land prices to zero. You would still need to pay for the building on top of the land.
A good way to transition to this system is by giving everyone land tax credits equal to the value of their land. This is beneficial for everyone right now because the Fed is raising rates, that will yield lower land prices, and thus by zeroing out the risk of lower housing prices as we move into this recession through a one-time credit, everyone is better off.
If you want to preserve those bubble prices, you want to quickly vote in a LVT.
It's not that simple when "money in politics" looks very similar to just "paying for political speech." Good luck making the latter illegal in the US without an amendment.
I don't know what the point of personalizing it is. This is probably the most normal-person thing Andreessen has done in decades. Does it cut against a viral post her wrote a while back? Sure. But that post was still right about zoning!
Personalizing helps highlight the hypocrisy of wealthy, influential people like Andreesen.
I agree that the post was right, but it discredits the author when they act so diametrically opposed to the words they write and, specifically, the action they call for.
Did he not mean those words in earnest? Is there some other play he is angling for? It begs everything to be questioned.
I'm not sticking up for him! I think that's pretty apparent from my comments on this thread (this is one of my hobbyhorse issues). I'm just saying, in this particular situation, Andreessen is behaving like the overwhelming majority of suburban homeowners.
Most suburban homeowners will vote against anything that they believe will reduce their home values. It doesn't matter if their home value is $200k or $200M. Same result.
You'd actually think that a multibillionaire who owns a mansion would be less sensitive to fluctuations in home values, since their wealth is usually contained in other assets (unlike the average American homeowner, for whom their home is likely where the majority of their net worth is). If Andreessen were to accidentally light $200M of his own cash on fire, he'd come through it, lifestyle unscathed.
Well, I'd have expected that most suburban homeowners are planning to stay put for a while (i.e. they're not renters). So I'd expect them to value the health of the neighbourhood over property values.
Where I live, property is expensive, and I live in a neighbourhood that seems to be dominated by investment property; many empty properties or short-let properties. There are no kids here, even though the neighbourhood would be fine for kids.
Anyway, that's apparently not the way the cookie crumbles; owning property so you can live in it seems to have become unfashionable. I hope the fashion changes, because I have no plans to sell.
I think the semantics of NIMBY got lost recently where I’ve read tweets about YIMBY’s who are against building that effects them. People forgot the acronym NIMBY refers to people in favor of liberal policy until it affects them.
I think most of us had a lot of respect for Marc because of the Netscape days but hopefully we can now all agree that he’s become a total fraud motivated by greed. His whole-hearted embrace of everything crypto despite being obviously smart enough to know most of it was a Ponzi was the last straw for me. He’ll do anything to win the VC game.
At this point when I see that a company got Andreesen Horowitz money I think about it as one step above SoftBank money in terms of negative signals.
A ponzi happens when a return is promised, and then is provided to early investors from funds provided by later investors, rather from productive enterprise.
That’s an almost exact description of most crypto “projects” including the one referenced here, Axie Infinity.
Sure, it works for some. But for most the return is not (officially) promised and if you want to actually access the money, you have to sell the asset on a market. With Ponzi, you can just collect dollars and run away. Some Ethereum scam coins do work like this, ETH in place of USD, but Ponzi as a generalization for the entire crypto space is simply incorrect.
Disagree. I think it's almost an exact description.
For the most part pyramid schemes have some sort of productive enterprise in there somewhere. Like Avon actually does send people makeup, LuLaRoe or whatever did actually send people leggings that were at least somewhat popular and useful as clothing.
There's at least some actual business going on where a product or service is being delivered. Like at least some of the money going into the system is people who just want the leggings.
There are a small handful of crypto projects that sort of fit that description but not really. For the most part all of the money that's going into the schemes is coming from people who want more money returned to them. A lot of time there's some kind of sheen of a "product" to try to make it look less scammy but there's nobody who actually wants to just consume that product. Literally everyone is hoping that at the end of their engagement with the system they'll have more actual money than when they started.
That's the literal definition of a Ponzi scheme. There's no actual way for people to profit without getting the money from other people who themselves were hoping to profit.
Not long after a16z was founded, I was excited to meet Andreessen while I was working at a startup he invested in, 100% because of his history at Netscape. If I knew then what I knew now about him... would not have given two shits about getting to shake his hand.
Compared to public hearings where I live, which often devolve into shouting with people forcibly removed from the room, this seemed very mild. They even said "please" and "thank you".
It's "violent" in the sense of "I violently agree with you". I read a lot of public comment (I'm peripherally involved in local government) and language like "please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily zoning overlay projects" is unusually forceful; it's not even attempting to persuade, but rather making a direct demand.
At any rate, none of this is any kind of woke words-as-violence drama; it's a word being used in a colloquial sense that people here happen to have an unproductive hair trigger about.
Why is The Atlantic pointing the finger at the likes of Andreessen? Does he magically (cough cough) have more influence over politicians and regulators than he is supposed to have? Or maybe it's not fashionable for the media to look at who has been in a position of power a long time (e.g., Pelosi) and yet the needle on a known issue doesn't move?
When friends get on such a witch-hunt train, I suggest that they watch the film The Candidate (with Robert Redford). Why? Because - with rare dialogue exceptions - you could remake that film today and you probably wouldn't notice it's 50+ yrs old. 50 yrs is a long time for the needle not moving.
Andreessen might be a participant and a symptom but he's not among The Root Cause. He's not the tone deaf holding the 6 Jan hearings. He's not jetting to Taiwan. Etc. Let's not allow The Atlantic to distract us from The Root Problem.
The dots here are simple. We have long standing elected officials (start at the WH and work you're way down) who insist on doing a lot of things (read: grandstanding; just two recent examples given) except for the things they should be doing. But we're to believe The Root Cause is Andreessen? Or maybe it's Trump? Sure, let's play the age old game of distraction and deflection. But let's call that journalism???
Did you miss anything? Yes, apparently the pile of stink that's sitting right in front of you. The irony of you questioning me (i.e., stating the obvious) should not be overlooked.
No it isn't. The timing of it is that Jerusalem Demsas just wrote a widely circulated piece about why we need to take away control of SFZ rules from local communities, and she just got an excellent case-in-point. Demsas could give a flying fuck about people appearing on Rogan's show.
On the one hand I’m in favor of building more affordable housing but I can understand the viewpoint of keeping the culture of your local community intact. See what Google did to Playa Vista, it’s a really jarring, sterile contrast with the rest of LA. Primarily soulless buildings, almost Soviet Style, to house their slaves.
We all need to push back against multinational corporations who would turn our local communities into the company towns of old, if given the chance.
If you don't like a building then change the building code so they can't build it. But make sure it's an objective standard, otherwise there's a law (the HAA) that says you can't block it.
SF still runs on a system (discretionary review) that basically means people like you get to show up with subjective complaints about anything anyone anywhere does. You'll find the only way to satisfy you and someone else with different taste is if nobody builds anything.
Urban wealthy YIYBY types are typically either driven by political ideology, a profit motive or plain old simplistic virtue signaling. Most of the big western world metropolises infrastructure is exhausted and creaking at the seams, yet the desire to pack more and more people into environments with massive issues around water, sanitation, energy and transport is sold as a human right.
Far better to create new cities close to natural resources and stop 'old world' cities becoming swamped by overpopulation imo
There are huge economies of scale that come with density that lower the per-capita cost of water, sanitation, energy, and transport; and accompanying gains in per capita productivity. And, for reasons that should be obvious, the places "close to natural resources" in which it makes sense to have cities tend to already have cities in them.
Historically this is correct but once you pack too many people in, whether a tent, a car or a city quality of life breaks down and things get worn out fast unless you are wealthy. Density and lower per capita cost doesn't mean quality of life as many third world cities and Favelas illustrate
Atherton was going to build 130 housing units over the next 8 years. I'd wager that the evaporative loss from the pools and fountains in that particular community consume more water than 130 people living in townhomes. Not to mention the lawn sprinkling.
As you point out clearly, people who complain about water for housing don't care about water, they are just going to switch arguments without acknowledging that they were wrong. This is a very dishonest way to discuss anything, because their true motivations are not what they lead with. The true motivation is that this person thinks more housing will make the place "a dump".
In reality, water usage goes down as we build more housing, because people don't take much water at all. Landscapes take tons of water. Old appliances take tons of water. Take a house built in the 70s and replace it with 8 modern homes, and total water usage probably stays the same.
Marc may personally feel one way, and credit to him for writing that essay; his wife and family may have a different opinion, and in families, compromises are a norm.
It was also signed by Marc. It would be perfectly fine for him and his wife to have a difference of opinion, but if Laura holds a view that Marc holds to be actively harmful, as he has argued in the past, it's still hypocritical for him to endorse that view. Though I think it's more likely that Marc is just the more typical "Yes In Your Backyard" kind of hypocrite.
Or they just went with Alphabetical order when signing the letter? Order doesn’t mean much to be honest in this context - you don’t put your name on the letter unless you really agree with what’s on the letter. Now it maybe possible that Marc never co-signed this in which case he will speak out hopefully and explain his stance better.
> Or they just went with Alphabetical order when signing the letter?
The letter starts out, "I am writing". A spouse will usually use "we" when contemporaneously speaking for both themself and their partner.
> you don’t put your name on the letter unless you really agree with what’s on the letter. Now it maybe possible that Marc never co-signed this in which case he will speak out hopefully and explain his stance better.
Also possible his wife included his full name for the cachet without first asking, but upon finding out Marc decided this wasn't a hill he wanted to die on. He wouldn't have been the first spouse to make that choice.
The letter would evince the fundamental problem with NIMBYism even if Marc didn't willingly sign on--people who oppose projects are typically far more aggressive and outspoken than those accepting of new development, who tend to be more passive; and this dichotomy and one-sided paralysis manifesting between members of the same household only makes the contrast more stark.
It's far more important that people appreciate that dynamic, whether it existed in this case or not. There's absolutely nothing new about people being hypocritical, and righteous indignation about hypocrisy, however sweet, doesn't lead to people affirmatively advocating for development, or any other policy for that matter. People will relinquish veto power not as a consequence of others' hypocrisy, but when they realize and accept that they, themselves, are not up to the task of counteracting NIMBYs, and the only practical alternative is to make their own, personal sacrifice (i.e. relinquishing a not insubstantial measure of power and control) for the greater good.
The reality is, often times, some for profit real estate developer with zero skin in the community want to parasite off of and compromise communities(past & future) with no regard for anyone. They often yield extreme gains where they are successful, often in proportion to the challenge of achieving that end. Additionally, property values, that serve as the basis for taxes, are derived in no small part, by the laws that define property in that community and the bounds of the community itself. The desirability of communities is a derivative of their value and the value they offer participants, is the most material factor in determine supply / demand imbalances; why for example, there is no shortage of remote deserts offering plenty of room and approval to build. Throwing those out the window obviously has instances where it is best done with caution. Out of context acronym label assignment, especially for clicks, is not always the best path.
I hope that parts (not all) of the political left that focus on this "exploitation by profitable property developers" narrative soon realize that this is a harmful framing of the situation.
The left underwent a transformation in the early 1900s, when they first wanted to ban alcohol sales because they viewed the situation as greedy alcohol producers exploiting vulnerable alcoholics. It was part of the activism behind the prohibition movement in the US, according to Smashing the Liquor Machine, and it was the policy of the Bolsheviks early on to ban vodka for the same reasons. The narrative was a social justice one.
Eventually they correctly realized that prohibition did more harm than good to vulnerable people, and the social justice stance nowadays (which I agree with) is to decriminalize.
Building affordable market housing is not parasitical. If developers are making abnormal profits, then sure, look at ways to regulate (or deregulate, if barriers are the reason for monopoly profits) and improve competition. But do not prevent building market rate housing. You can even build public housing in addition to market rate housing, if you want to. As long as you're not putting up barriers to construction.
I don't need real estate developers in my town to have "skin in the community". I don't want them over for BBQ or at my block party. I want them to build modern buildings to code and to perform in their role of dialing up density where there's demand from it. If they want to fuck back off to their wealthy real estate batcave after they do that, it's no skin off my back.
I don't think you're going to be able to checkmate-atheist me into sticking up for the Champlain Towers building. You said that developers don't have any skin in the community. I'm telling you: I do not need a personal, durable relationship with the developers building in my town. "Skin in the community" is a silly thing to expect. I need my car not to explode or lose its brakes while I drive it, too. I don't need Audi to have skin in Oak Park; in fact, the less they know about me, the happier I am.
Communities of millionaires extracting ever-greater home equity windfalls from the lifetime productivity of young adults trying to establish their lives in the area are unsympathetic characters behaving badly. It is great when entities from outside these little circles of defection-against-society can disrupt them. Even more so when profits can be redirected from extractive activities (owning land) to productive ones (creating homes).
Not only do urban uses generate more property taxes, the services they require cost much less per taxpayer to provide. We have an entire country of suburban sprawl. Those few places dense enough that their connective tissue is reasonably called a community, rather than a car sewer, are ruinously expensive because they are under extreme demand.
All types of built environments are essential to a country as diverse and dynamic as the United States. And the way we make built environments in this country is, you betcha, capitalism. This postwar obsession of ours with hyper-local veto power unreasonably arrests every village at the village stage. All our great cities were villages once, and they surely contained some stakeholders who opposed what happened next. Should we have never built a city? If it is right for New York to exist, why is it wrong for the next New York to emerge?
Serious question. I understand if you cannot afford a single unit, sure. But why would anyone actually want a multi-unit?
People are noisy, smell on occasion, etc. if a city is too crowded, find somewhere else. You’ll be better for moving where you can afford. Moving somewhere just to be in the “hot spot” or something is silly. Go move to a single family residential neighborhood and you’ll be far happier. You can have a garden, put a hole in the wall and expand a room, get a dog.
Beyond personally never wanting to live that he’ll again; I personally would never want a multi-unit home in my neighborhood. I don’t want the density of people. Don’t need the problems that entails, don’t need lower property value. It makes a worse quality of life, that’s why the value drops.
People who want these units want to live in a particular location, but don’t want to pay prices. And the location is more important to them. I get it. That location will be ruined by those homes; at least it will change the dynamics. That’s the unfortunate part.
For the tenth time in this thread, even if one agrees with that point of view, the issue isn't that Andreessen holds that view, it's that he's gone on record many, many times espousing the exact opposite of it.
It's insanely hypocritical, and points to him saying one thing in public to gain the kudos of like-minded people while in private being something completely different.
Is this a serious question? Because the density afforded by multiunit housing allows for urban amenities, walkabiliity and useful public transit. And well-built multifamily won't have noise issues.
I agree with the first points, but we need to stop lying about the noise issue. No matter how well built a place is, noise is always going to be a potential problem. People do like opening their windows, especially noisy people.
If we want people to accept density, we need social norms and legal enforcement on the noise front, not pretending.
Had a flat in London on the Thames. Beautiful new build. Close my balcony doors and I couldn't hear a thing from the outside. Quiet as a church.
Open the balcony doors and the sounds of the river and Gabriel's Wharf will flood in. And that one time there was this crazy guy yelling. Doors closed, nothing.
I think US construction is just lower quality in comparison, which is a fair complaint. With only access to inferior manpower without the skill and techniques from the UK, you'll likely end up with the noisy apartment and then you're fucked. So I understand the concern.
Granted, I live in a vintage office building that was converted to condos, but it has pretty good sound isolation (it kind of would have to since the L runs right by it). The main things I can hear with windows closed are sirens and those assholes with super loud motors that for some reason never get arrested for noise violations.
Noise doesn't have to be an issue, there are building technologies that can make a room quiet which aren't used because they cost a more money, but it always is an issue in the end because of lax regulation. Both lax regulation in the general environment (e.g., loud motorcycles and leafblowers), and lax regulation in the building code. Regulations are currently in the wrong place -- focused on preventing construction, instead of enabling and encouraging quality construction.
There's a huge difference, to most people, between natural sounds and the noise of other people being other people. It's just not the same and we need to stop pretending it isn't an issue.
I lived in an amazingly solid, all-concrete, incredibly sound-isolated complex for awhile. In the bay area, so it's nice to have fresh air and not live like you're in a bunker. And then the neighbor with the parrot moved in next door, and the neighbor with the kids who loved playing CoD late at night with a subwoofer moved in above.
In short, I will _never_ share walls again. Never. Enjoy the density.
If you can clearly hear adjacent units then that sounds to me like improper sound isolation. Typically condos tend to have much better sound isolation than apartments in the US (apartments will typically cheap out on the party walls).
Sorry I misunderstood. I don't normally open my windows since it's often too hot or too cold outside and also air pollution from cars/buses on the street below. Probably in a milder climate open windows would be a bigger problem.
Usually many sounds come from street. But then again I take that in these single family housing neighbourhoods in USA there is absolutely no one loud. Kids don't scream at their yards, no one uses loud tools, plays music outside and so on. I wish entire world would be such paradise of quiet.
I like living in multi family housing, and I like living in dense neighborhoods. I don't give a single shit if you don't like it, and I don't have to justify it to you.
I can agree to leave his property alone. He doesn't own his neighborhood, though. And anybody should be able to build multifamily housing on their own fucking property. Even if you don't like it. And if you really don't want it to happen, then buy the whole neighborhood. Nobody will force you to put apartments on your own property.
It does affect mine. High housing prices have ripple effects across entire regions. I know people that spend 4 hours of their lives in a car every day because of those ripple effects.
Again: Marc does not own his neighborhood. He owns his house. He can do whatever he wants with his house, but the moment you grant him control over the neighborhood, you grant him rights over everybody else's property.
But his neighborhood owns his neighborhood, and they vote to continue the multifamily zoning ban. Clearly if this was only Marc’s preference, it wouldn’t be law.
Surely the solution is to build more places for people to be employed rather than overcrowding existing ones and forcing people to commute from far away. COVID showed us the office centric commuter world is not necessary. I understand some people must be onsite, but still, drastic commute reductions and spreading out of people is a good thing.
It wasn't law. That is why they are objecting to it...cause the law doesn't ban it.
And no, the solution is to build more housing where people want to live, and let all the whiny nimby chucklefucks move to the places where nobody wants to live. That is, after all, what they want. If Marc Andreesen really hates people living near him, he can easily buy 100 acres in the Nevada desert where nobody would ever dare to build an apartment building.
I would consider zoning codes law. To argue otherwise is pedantic.
Sorry, just because you want to live somewhere, doesn’t entitle you to enough units built there for you to afford it.
I’d love to live in Atherton. But I can’t afford it. I don’t try and get more units built there when the community clearly doesn’t want that, so I choose somewhere else.
But this apartment building wasn't against the zoning code. That's why it was being built. It was just not part of some ambiguous plan created by some random dude. To argue that a completely non-binding plan is law is obtuse.
Just because you live somewhere does not entitle you to control your neighbors property.
By that logic, the country owns the country, and the country should be able to force any part of the country to do what the broader country wants, and that is not considered force because, well, the country owns the country.
You've got it backwards. NIMBYs are the ones doing the forcing through government regulation. NIMBYs want to dictate what I can and can't build on my private property.
NIMBYs (the community and vast majority of single family homeowners) don’t want to see their neighborhoods overcrowded and changed completely by density, because they moved to such a neighborhood to get away from density. So they vote as a group to keep their neighborhoods nice low density places to live.
Meanwhile, YIMBY people in dense areas think they should have the final say over what SFR neighborhoods feel like and how they develop, even though they don’t even live there.
It’s never the other way around. No single family homeowner NIMBYs push back against another apartment building in an already dense area in the city nextdoor. Yet YIMBYs feel so strongly about controlling low density townships they don’t even live in that they advocate for state preemption. That preemption forces those places to change to adopt the YIMBY vision of walkability, density, public transport, and less cars, something few to none of the residents in that community want.
Nimbys don't own their neighborhoods. They own their houses, and they are free to do whatever they want with those houses. If they don't want density in the property that they don't own, the they shouldnt move to places where people want to live. Reno is calling out to them.
The neighborhood owns the neighborhood, and they vote to keep it low density. It’s not like there’s a single homeowner voting to control what the entire city builds.
No, actually they don't vote on zoning. No city has zoning votes...they have city planners who are hired by an appointee of someone that is voted in on a platform that is always way bigger than land use code. We're talking several degrees of separation between votes and land use code.
The closest thing neighborhoods have to votes on density are "town hall" style meetings where the crankiest asshole in the neighborhood shows up and pretends to speak for the entire neighborhood. And inevitably they're wrong, because there are always people that don't want to stay for whatever reason, and they rightfully want the highest price for their property, and that price is always going to be higher if they can sell to a developer which will build high density apartments in high demand locations.
Believe it or not, we actually do have a legal mechanism for entire neighborhoods to vote on density, and it actually has more power than zoning boards...it could prohibit density even where upzoning happens, because it can prohibit the density at the level of a deed covenant. They're called homeowners associations. They suck, and everybody hates them.
If Andreesen can't convince his neighborhood to form a homeowners association, and willingly introduce density-restricting covenants to their deeds, then you can be assured that density restrictions on zoning are actually minority rule...not some community decision.
Sure, YIMBYs want to force NIMBY communities to stop forcing individual homeowners from doing what they want with their own land. It's a justified act of force to prevent an unjustified act of force. If a small community got together and tried to legalize murder (an unjustified act of force on a victim), the broader community has every right to force that community to not do that (a justified act of force to prevent the unjustified force).
Single unit zoning in Atherton means at least a one acre lot. Have you ever heard of semi-detached housing? That’d count as multi-unit zoning here. Half an acre lot with a good sized house seems pretty nice to me :)
> I understand if you cannot afford a single unit, sure. But why would anyone actually want a multi-unit?
There are definitely circumstances in life where a multiunit is great -- single people early in life trying to meet people and make friends, for example. But even outside of that:
Anyone can afford a single unit, it's just a matter of where. If you're the wealthiest of the wealthy, you can afford it basically anywhere. If you're extremely poor, it might be a shack in the middle of nowhere. Everyone else is trading off the variables of price, type of housing, and location.
I know a lot of poor people. None of them ever said “let me get that one bedroom”.
They all did the same thing, move somewhere cheap. Live in a one bedroom, and work until they can buy a house.
My point is no one wants that one bedroom, except those well off who want to live in the city. Which by definition creating apartment complexes will destroy the aesthetic and overwhelm the city resources and utilities.
You’ll be better for moving where you can afford.Go move to a single family residential neighborhood and you’ll be far happier.
A lot of let them eat cake in this comment..Have you hear of "people who work at the restaurants you frequent"? They would tremendously benefit by living near where they work.
Often this is called the "Grand Bargain," that new housing can be allowed, but only if it is constrained to a tiny area (which becomes increasingly dense), while the bulk of single family homes are left untouched.
The challenge for voters is to discern between those that are calling for more housing that are genuine YIMBYs, that want to build more housing for everyone more equitably, everywhere in all neighbourhoods, and those like Andreessen, which merely want to continue on with Grand Bargain thinking, and want to continue the status quo by which the poors live as far as possible away from him.