YES. I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.
People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.
All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings
The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".
This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.
> I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.
The homeowners are making rational choices. That's the problem. As the most expensive asset a typical homeowner will ever own is their home, it makes rational sense for them to support any policy that supports it's value and oppose any policy that undermines it's value. Building more housing undermines it's value.
And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
> And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
If you start giving "hypothetical people" a say, you stop having democracy. You can invent as many hypothetical people as you want to force any outcome.
And real democracy requires local control. A distant democratically-elected government making centralized decisions may just as well be replaced by a tyrant, given how unresponsive it will be to your concerns.
The "hypothetical people" are in actuality all the other voters in your country. Lots of people are "pro-development, just anti-development near themselves".
Do you think that the Japanese system where permitting is centralized away from local government antidemocratic?
But aren't there other salient factors? Is energy policy any less "big" than zoning in its effect on your local environment? The thing is, it's just really hard to get certain policies to work right when they are set at too small a scale -- even if they have a big effect at a small scale.
When I consider the housing situation, I am starting to think that land use policy seems to be that kind of thing.
Ultimately, cities are granted a charter by the state. It's not a given that they can control zoning, the location of people's garage doors, &c. We can think about these things and decide.
no it doesn't, high density allows more value to be extracted from the same plot of land since the volume of units offset the individual price reduction of each one. as a result, developers regularly offer homeowners 2x or 3x their market value to incentivize selling.
Yes, it more efficiently utilizes the land. But, if you are not the person who owns the plot that gets developed, more housing being built next to you harms you.
My impression is that "home value" is often a dodge that sounds better on paper than "I don't like change". You generally can't sue over hurt feelings, but if you can attach some kind of monetary value to it then the courts may take your case.
As you note home value is an extremely nebulous concept as it is tied to whatever people who currently do not live in the community might pay to buy a house. No matter what someone sells for they can always say "it would have sold for more if every single house was painted exactly the same shade of beige, you miscreants with your off white, ecru, and oatmeal houses have cost me tens of thousands of dollars!"
Density will make their home value go up. They are perhaps making rational choices if what they want is for the neighbourhood to stay the same -- but then they are accepting a lower value, by retarding economic growth.
> What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway?
They did. Google Robert Moses for details.
Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
It seems to be having houses function this way is just causing too many social ills to ignore. It's why private equity is holding tons of houses, during a housing crisis, and refusing to sell. It's a cornerstone of the 2008 financial crash. It's why few in my entire damned generation can HAVE a home, not to invest in but to simply live in.
IMO a house can be a need for life, or it can be an investment. It can't be both at the same time.
> Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
There's no one cause. Even if homes weren't "an investment vehicle," I don't think it would change much. Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.
Perhaps it's a failure of my ability to empathize then. I have owned a home for 8 years, I have never once been concerned with anything going on nearby. Buildings being built of any sort, of any height, at all. And I genuinely struggle to enter the mind of someone for whom this is top priority, something they put time into.
> Perhaps it's a failure of my ability to empathize then. I have owned a home for 8 years, I have never once been concerned with anything going on nearby. Buildings being built of any sort, of any height, at all.
You don't really have to empathize all that much. Can't you imagine anything you wouldn't like built near your home?
> And I genuinely struggle to enter the mind of someone for whom this is top priority, something they put time into.
OK how about this: you live in a quiet neighborhood, where kids are safe playing in the street. Your house gets a nice amount of sun in the afternoon. You like it.
Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
> You don't really have to empathize all that much. Can't you imagine anything you wouldn't like built near your home?
A data center or sewage treatment plant (but I repeat myself)
> Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
Okay? Why am I entitled to dictate who builds what near my home? Because I bought a 0.25 acre plot there?
Maybe the 20 story apartment block will contain a new friend. Maybe it'll bring a bunch more kids to play with the neighborhood kids, who btw aren't plants and don't require constant sunlight. Maybe the block will come with a pool I could use for a reasonable fee, or basketball courts for the kids. Maybe that block going up will increase the overall local population enough so we get better restaurants in the area, and it'll almost certainly increase property tax revenues to local schools.
Like I dunno if you find this situation absolutely intolerable, you could always just... move?
> Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.
Only this is just a thing that really doesn't happen much at all. Very few developers are putting up 20 story apartment buildings in the middle of an existing SFH community in the suburbs somewhere. Most of those such fights are people fighting the 5 over 1 development built greenfield just outside the current SFH neighborhood in question. And for those such people? They should have zero say.
If they are doing so, it's typically in very dense city cores that support the density and thus investment. If someone wants to put up a 20 story building next to me in my Chicago neighborhood, sounds good to me! I am upset there are not more of them and that zoning has effectively made them illegal to build here, as I'm roughly 500 feet away from a rapid transit station and two arterial roads with high frequency bus routes. It's a crime that they are illegal to build.
I'd be an asshole if I bought a house in such an area and wanted my little conclave to be protected at the expense of everyone else in the city. I should rightly be overruled and told to pound sand and move the hell out if I don't like it.
Instead, laws have enabled such people to effectively veto such buildings. Or even simply stuff like 12 unit 4 floor apartment buildings that already exist due to predating zoning on my block.
Many areas of the US are effectively retirement communities by zoning. People who moved in 20-30 years ago who demand zero change and have captured nearly all political power.
Robert Moses held a lot of different offices at once, and many of them were a kind of local government: parks commissioner for New York City, commissioner for certain bridges in New York City, &c.
He is not really quite what you would get if zoning, &c, were handled at the state level.
I keep saying that permitting should be - broadly - same as driving.
You get handed a nice set of rules, you get tested on them.. and then you can go ahead and build within those rules without asking anyone for permission.
If you break the rules - we break your piggy bank to set everything straight. You can buy insurance (which will have its own set of rules) - or not.
Maybe in some jurisdictions you need to buy insurance, while in others you get to have a choice.. after clearing it with your financier.
Zoning is actually rule-making. Permitting is just bureaucracy. Keep them separate.
This is called as-of-right development or by-right development, which is how things (nominally) work in several states. That is, as long as a project adheres to the zoning and other regulations, approval is as-of-right or a so-called ministerial process.
It's not necessarily a black or white approach. In theory as-of-right is supposed to be the rule everywhere as Due Process guarantees mean government can't act capriciously. And there's actually pre-existing SCOTUS precedent regarding how zoning plans are supposed to be applied, and how community input processes aren't supposed to allow mobs to subvert the rule of law with a de facto but informal veto power. In practice, non-as-of-right municipalities and states basically have zoning rules and approval processes that are fuzzy and ambiguous, effectively granting regulators significant interpretive leeway and discretion.
Federal and often state courts are extremely reticent to jump into the fray and defend the rule of law. In fact, there's SCOTUS procedural jurisprudence designed to make it difficult to "make a federal case" out of zoning disputes. NIMBY battles are just too politically fraught and courts are afraid of falling into the bottomless tar pits of adjudicating public grievance, which is what politicians are supposed to be for.
California is especially bad for multiple reasons. First is CEQA, which allows literally anyone in the state to erect legal hurdles to any project (modulo some very recent carve outs). Second is home-rule principles enshrined in the state constitution, which makes it difficult for Sacramento to force municipalities to behave a certain way or even abide many mandatory state regulations--the state often has to rely on indirect means, such as contingent funding, to cajole cities. Third is California Supreme Court procedural principles that demand state courts entertain law suits in a way that allows interlopers to drag out court cases, e.g. CEQA cases, for long periods of time.
I’m aware of this - what I’m curious about is whether we can go a step further and skip the “as by right” process.
This is similar to the difference between “shall issue” and “constitutional carry” states.
In the former you still have to deal with the system to exercise your right, and the system has to have staff to deal with you.
In the latter you’re approved - without anyone being on a taxpayers dole and having an incentive to keep themselves employed by enacting more laws and keeping the system inefficient.
Imo this should be the biggest political issue. By-right zoning and permitting accross the board. So much graft, corruption, waste, and stagnation from discretionary approval/denials.
Don't want factories zoned next to elementary schools? Perfectly reasonable rule, but then you don't get to pass a variance for the mayor's nephew's cousin's factory. And vice versa.
And how do you build more land for single-family houses? Around 80% of people in the US would prefer to live in a SFH.
But even putting that quip aside, you physically can't keep up with the demand. Large cities physically can't grow fast enough to keep up with the demand.
A typical apartment unit now requires about 2 work-years of labor to build. So if you're growing your city by 5% a year, then 10% of the city will be apartment construction workers! And then you'll need to keep upgrading the infrastructure, and this is usually exorbitantly expensive.
To give some perspective: one mile of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway.
Very much disagree. Plenty of people would be fine living in multi-family housing. Everything from apartments to 2-family houses.
74% of people live in SFH right now in the US. How many of those have actually never experienced living in multi-family homes? Probably most of them. How can you prefer something you've never even tried?
Also, keep in mind that in many places SFH is literally the only choice right now.
Given real estate prices in places like Boston and NYC I think multi-family housing is doing just fine
> Very much disagree. Plenty of people would be fine living in multi-family housing. Everything from apartments to 2-family houses.
Yeah, and you don't even need multi-family houses. A bunkbed would do, like in Singapore!
> 74% of people live in SFH right now in the US. How many of those have actually never experienced living in multi-family homes? Probably most of them. How can you prefer something you've never even tried?
They also did not experience living in buildings without AC or heating. Remove them.
> Given real estate prices in places like Boston and NYC I think multi-family housing is doing just fine
Then invert your argument. Can a person in NYC who hates living in a multi-family home have an option to NOT do that?
That's not a universal truth. I grew up in the suburbs and I've lived in a city for my whole adult life. I feel a MUCH stronger sense of community in the city. I know so many of my neighbors that it's hard to leave my house without running into somebody I know.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
I live in a city similar to NYC (but not quite as dense) and IMO it's far better for kids than the suburbs.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
My experience is literally the exact opposite. Suburbs were lifeless, soulless places and the city is where my social life got measurably better. There's no way I can ever go back to the suburbs now
Space to play, but nowhere to go. Everybody has their own private space which isn't great for social interaction. Kids have to be driven everywhere which isn't great for families
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
Kind of disagree, suburbs I see most of the kids literally played in the streets or alleyways. Usually it only stops in winter and mostly because it gets dark shortly after school and the extreme cold.
Plus the actual article itself is commenting on a decline of socializing that's occurred in the last 30 years. But suburbs have been predominant the US for around 60 years. And there's similar declines occurring in more dense cities like NYC and Washington. If it was strictly a suburb problem then someone living in Manhattan shouldn't have been affected but last I heard even those cities are affected.
I'd say there are upsides and downsides. The kids have room to play, but do you have to drive them to see their friends? Or are they close enough to walk or ride their bikes over there? It depends on the neighborhood.
Another problem with the suburbs is car-dependency. When you're in a car you're not interacting in a positive way with other people. In the best case scenario you're just isolating yourself and in the worst case scenario you're angry and frustrated at other people on the road.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
I don't think anybody would call me extroverted. I'm a typical introverted engineer. humans are social creatures!
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
I swear so many societal problems have their roots in the attitude of "I've got mine, screw everybody else"
I've seen people completely change their attitudes about things once they own a home. I know a self-proclaimed liberal who claims to care about people suddenly go all NIMBY because they are buying a $2M house and now they don't want duplexes in their neighborhood and don't like the idea of more housing being built ("we're full"). They feel entitled to a high (and increasing) property value in a desirable area.
But isn't it understandable? You work your whole life to buy a piece of property. But not just a piece of property anywhere. It's a specific one, in a specific neighborhood, in a specific zone. All of these things tie into the $ that you paid for that property. Regardless of the change in value, a change there impacts how you perceive living there.
If all of the sudden the neighborhood behind you gets rezoned to industrial and you get a datacenter nearby, everybody understands you're up in arms.
If at the same time the neighborhood behind you gets converted from 200 single-family homes to 200 8-plexes, complaining is NIMBY. Even though it has the same dramatic impact on the quality of life you bought into. Way more noise, way more street parking, cars racing late at night etc.
Why should society value stability of your quality of life (which is a pretty nebulous bundle of your preferences and environment—neither of which we can bet on being stable in any event) over the interests of all those people who want to live on land that can readily support them—and without putting any true undue burden on your ability to do the same on your land?
Because you would be upset if a developer bought every house on your block and converted them to eight-plexes and rented them out to Section 8 tenants, and we should provide some level of protection against that from happening.
I can be upset, but why should I expect the government to “protect” me from that feeling? It’s a free country.
We’re not talking about a sewage treatment plant or even a data center, we’re talking about fellow members of our community living in code-compliant housing.
Because we have decided as a society to protect people from bad outcomes regardless of whether they want to be protected or not. See also unemployment insurance, social security disability insurance, requiring drivers to carry motor insurance, Medicaid, etc.
This includes zoning laws that protect incumbent property owners from loss of property value by massively changing the character of the surrounding properties.
As much as I would love to live in the free country you describe, it’s not the one we get to live in. And since that’s not the America that exists in reality, there is nothing wrong with people using these rules to protect themselves.
I would add that these aren’t one sided restrictions. They’re reciprocal. A typical property owner can’t convert their property to an eight-plex, and conversely, they can and should expect the same level of protection.
One version of policy sets limits on how many people can live on a parcel of land that is well below the number that could happily and healthily do so.
preference implies choice. Most people these days don't get much of a choice.
Maybe if trickle-down economics works and benefits spread to renters we wouldn't be in this mess. But we are, and the universal answer to lower property value so people can afford shelter is competition. Not the only answer, but the most acceptable one.
You need extremely high levels of trust and community to incentive the kind of behavior you are asking for. That is not reinforced or taught at any of our schools or government institutions. It only exists in small family or religious communities.
So absent of that, I think your personal incentives also lead you to your current housing policy preferences. Don’t you?
I'm of the opinion that these people are short sighted to begin with. I don't own a home and rent in the city, but I am strongly against high density development. I believe housing development should be spread out and the best way is to break up commercial and financial centers. Too many cities focus around a single "downtown" area that becomes the ground zero of high property prices.
Do you also support legalization of hard drugs? Why not have a heroin store in every town. The customers are very loyal. Let people waste their money on drugs, it's not my place to tell people what to spend their money on. Who knows, maybe we'll get heroin ads on the subway. In fact, let's let cigarette companies also advertise again! what could possibly go wrong?
Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
but it doesnt say that. you paraphrased the book in a way that makes it look sloppy but it was your paraphrased version which is sloppy. if you read through the book when it defines this stuff, it introduces accidentals as "characters that can be placed before notes to raise or lower them" and then in the section on the major scale it says "All major scales use the notes of the musical alphabet in order; no notes are skipped and no notes occur twice." i dont think this is ambiguous
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
How much of this is because that's where the jobs are? Take that away and where would people choose to live? Wasn't there a notable exodus from SF, for example, during covid when many jobs went remote?
Most of the stuff people do in cities was shut or severely degraded during Covid, not just the jobs. If you can't take a quick walk to your favorite cafe in the morning or stop by a cool art event in the evening, yeah, city living gets relatively less appealing.
I'm genuinely surprised that you don't know lots of people who enjoy living in a city for its own sake and not only because something is keeping them there.
Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.
People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.
All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings
The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".
This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.
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