
Everything You Think You Know About Housing Is Probably Wrong - mancerayder
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/arts/density-housing-skyscraper-museum.html
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mancerayder
_This is a big problem. To address the country’s monumental housing crisis and
also become less automobile- and carbon-dependent, America needs to densify
its job-rich metro areas so that more people can afford to live there and
walk, bike and take public transit to get to work and back. According to a
much-cited report by the McKinsey Global Institute, California is 3.5 million
houses short. Housing shortages exacerbate home prices and homelessness and
cause all sorts of other ripple effects on commute times, economic
productivity, health and family life.

But opposition to density has only stiffened as the gulf widens between the 1
percent and everyone else. Well-to-do NIMBYs, congenitally opposed to new
developments, have lately been joined by anti-displacement tenant activists —
advocates for poor and working-class residents who might ordinarily want more
housing but have come to fear that nearly all development brings
gentrification that prices the most vulnerable out of neighborhoods. In cities
like New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, this new alliance means even
initiatives promising some subsidized housing have become lines in the sand._

Interesting bedfellows.

In NYC the anti-gentrification crowd currently has the upper hand and is
derailing up-zoning and other initiatives. It sounds like, in California there
are the NIMBYs as well as the anti-gentrification crowd.

