
California, and the US, shouldn’t be afraid of density and upzoning - oftenwrong
https://www.curbed.com/2019/12/6/20998974/california-real-estate-housing-zoning-density-affordable
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adrianmonk
Wake me up when the Bay Area (and California, and other places) becomes
community-minded enough to care about solutions.

My experience has been that it's a bunch of factions who can't/won't work
together toward a common good.

Until that changes, you can create all the smart, rational, reasonable, fact-
based, win-win proposals you want, but they aren't going to happen if people
aren't even trying to cooperate.

~~~
sieabahlpark
SF seems only concerned with political issues. Ensuring that convicted felons
are "justice involved persons" and that they have no change in privilege than
someone who never broke the law in the first place.

~~~
colejohnson66
When someone has served their debt to society, they _should_ be treated
similar to someone who was never in prison. If you want to punish someone
further, keep them in prison; Don’t let them go.

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patagonia
The flip side of density increases is the changes in culture and required
increase in shared resource organization.

I’ve lived in NYC and in the country. You can’t simply increase housing
density and have it work. You have to learn different ways to interact with
people. You have to create shared transportation and parks infrastructure. And
you have to admit there are trade offs.

You do lose a lot when moving toward very high density cities. The night sky.
Quiet. Calmness. Yards.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> The night sky

There's no night sky in any suburb though ?

~~~
cgriswald
You can generally see more of the sky in the suburbs and there is about a 1
mag difference. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale)

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thorwasdfasdf
California, firstly shouldn't be afraid of building: period. I mean, I'm
looking at the voting pamphlet, at the mayors and the local politicians: all
bragging about how many construction projects they've stopped and all the
building they've prevented. It's sickening. I couldn't find a single candidate
that didn't brag about preventing housing construction.

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rb808
This is fluff. Sure if you build a few multi families in 10% of lots it wont
affect neighborhood characteristics much because you're only adding 10-20%
more housing.

Its doubling and quadrupling (even 10x) the number of housing units that is
really needed and that affects everything - more cars, more schoolkids, more
water, more trash, more crowds.

~~~
magduf
>and that affects everything - more cars

This right here is the root problem. If you increase housing density in
America, everyone expects a place to put their car, and to be able to use a
car to get around, so you don't improve stuff that much. We need to get rid of
cars altogether as a primary people-mover; then you can really build things
closer together, and not have to waste _so_ much space on parking lots.

Trash and water aren't problems; they don't take up a lot of space, though you
do need a source of freshwater to supply the city, but unless you're in the
desert that shouldn't be that big a problem. Schoolkids aren't a big problem
in urban areas: people aren't having kids any more.

~~~
milkytron
I think attitudes will change when owning a car becomes more of an
inconvenience than a convenience.

Dense housing is the start of making it more inconvenient. Then, once owning a
car is less convenient than other modes of transit, will we see alternatives
that are better for those areas.

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cgriswald
At least in my Bay Area town, the people already live here.

We have serious problems with people living in RVs taking over entire streets.
They don't just live in the RVs quietly. They spread their stuff (furniture,
garbage, sometimes large collections of stolen goods) all over the street.
They harass nearby businesses and homeowners. They park in ways that are not
just technically illegal, but dangerous to drivers, bicyclists, and
pedestrians. Crime has gone up in nearby areas. I'm not saying RV people are
all responsible for the crimes, but I'm aware of several instances where the
crimes have been committed by the RV people. They're not all homeless, either.
Many of them own homes in the East Bay or further afield and just do a week
long commute to their $100K+ peninsula jobs.

Single family houses are housing 6-10 adults. Their cars are all over the
streets. Some neighborhoods are can barely be navigated, and its dangerous for
driver and pedestrian alike.

We'd _all_ be better off if there were affordable apartments (with parking
garages) for people to live in. We'd see an increase in city revenue. We'd
reclaim our streets. We'd have a cleaner city. We'd have fewer accidents and
safer walks. We'd no longer have city council members hiding behind
'compassion' when it comes to removing the RVs.

Yet _every single development_ is opposed.

"It will make traffic worse." Not conceivably possible. Every development
includes requirements of $$ to improve nearby streets and appropriate parking.
Parking has gotten so much easier since one major development included public
parking. (One guy argued that the amount of money a business was willing to
offer wasn't enough to fix a problem area. As if it is not the responsibility
of the city, county, and state to fix the existing problem. Or as if $X
million is worse than $0 million for fixing a problem we already have.)

"That area is already a mess!" Yes. It is. That's why it needs to be improved.

"It only adds X homes!" X is better than zero. They're also generally trying
to add them near downtown and public transport.

"It will bring more people to the area!" I don't have the numbers on this, but
I suspect this is largely a red herring. Anecdotally, several of my friends
have left the area, many still live with their parents after graduating, and
my girlfriend wants to leave.

"They're only building luxury apartments!" So? It means more houses. It means
all the houses get more affordable because supply is trying to meet demand.

"But the town will be so different!" Different than when you grew up in 1965?
It's already different. And it's trash. It'll be different from now and it
will be better because it will actually be meeting our needs.

"But my property values!" Just kidding. No one ever says this, but they all
mean it.

~~~
tehlike
Mountain view is kind of good in this regard. Few years ago they gave a bunch
of permits to apartments, and now they started to being built. It is making
city look much more modern, and house values will end up increasing due to
that

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JohnFen
In my city, they've been making a strong effort to do exactly what the article
recommends.

My observation is that it absolutely does change the character of a
neighborhood. Whether that change is bad, neutral, or good depends entirely on
what sort of character you prefer. But there's no getting around the fact that
greater density means that the area will be very different.

Personally, none of this scares me. I consider it unfortunate, but it's also
probably inevitable.

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bryanmgreen
I think this is a terrible argument.

Talking about being "afraid of density" shifts the argument and action away
from progress. The discussion should be that *we should try to avoid density"
and we're failing at that.

We need:

1) Faster and more efficient travel to/from hubs.

2) Organizations to embrace remote work.

~~~
mikraig
Why should we avoid density? Societies get more urban as they progress.
Density _is_ the way of progress. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be smart and
thoughtful about it, but ultimately density should be the goal.

~~~
swebs
>Societies get more urban as they progress

I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase. Though as we've
seen over the past few decades, the most advanced societies tend to have a
decrease in birth rates after a certain point. I don't think we should be
striving to turn the entire Earth into Kowloon.

~~~
milkytron
> I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase.

I don't think so.

Cities are much more efficient for the masses.

If you have 20 people that all evenly dispersed within 20 square miles, or 20
people within a square mile, more progress can be made in the square mile.

~~~
andy-x
That depends entirely on your definition of a progress.

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isthispermanent
Who are the decisions makers for how a lot is zoned? Is it home owners, city
council, etc.? Is it neighborhood based, city based?

~~~
tehlike
City. Residents vote for council

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sdinsn
Zoning laws should just be removed entirely.

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throwawaysea
People are allowed to make their own local decisions about how they want to
live and govern. The notion that either California or the US should override
local zoning laws is authoritarian, and does away with the agency of voters.

I think there is a place for dense communities as well as non-dense ones.
Different people need and thrive with different environments. Recently the
focus on pushing only high-density (usually from the new wave of 'urbanist'
blogs) looks to demonize anything that isn't high-density urban, and frankly
it feels very us versus them.

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DataWorker
Building won’t fix the problem. A significant proportion of existing dwellings
are unoccupied or under-occupied. They are unoccupied because we allow people
to speculate on real estate. Much of the real estate is bought by rich foreign
investors and multinational corporations. This is a problem in many places of
the world and just another aspect of globalization.

Given all that, who benefits when new units are built? The developers
obviously make money. The local government gets some mad money to play with.
But mostly the real estate finance industry and big multinational
corporations.

Economists have run the numbers, the little guy doesn’t benefit at all from
efforts to increase the housing supply. It can’t be increased enough to lower
prices, it merely expands the speculative market, adding more wealth to the
bottom line of the big winners in the game.

~~~
helen___keller
> A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-
> occupied.

Source? I can't imagine this is true given the ridiculous rent that a dwelling
commands. Why leave cash on the table?

