This gives me very mixed feelings. On one hand I applaud any attempt to build more affordable houses and am sad when those attempts fall apart. The Bay Area especially, but the US in general, needs to take a serious look at how we plan and build cities... and how much they currently suck. These mixed-use communities are a great for creating more walkable, transit friendly, cities.
That being said. The entire concept that tech giants being the ones to theoretically create new real estate empires... gives me a lot of Snowcrash vibes. And yes, I know the real estate megacorps of today are probably worse than Google. Really doesn't help.
The underlying problem is that people who don't yet live somewhere, can't vote. This is why I believe that all of these issues will have to be dealt with on a regional/state level.
Everything is always someone else's problem: density is for other cities (my neighborhood is perfect, no thanks), the bus is for other people (I don't like the anti-social behavior, no thanks), bike infrastructure is for other neighborhoods (we need the street-parking, no thanks), induction stoves are for other kitchens (I like gas, no thanks), we have created a world in which other people are supposed to deal with the burdens of our excesses.
Even the idea that Google was going to "deal with the issue of housing" is just so far down the road of buck-passing that I have no idea whether this is a viable solution, or whether my entire generation will become so fed up that there will just be a cascade of urban density legislation coming from my millinial-gen-z/a cohort that it will become a scorched earth strategy where we just flatly stop trying to negotiate with these boomers. I can see early signs of that in CA, but who knows where it will go. The middling housing legislation that's been passed so far seems like a compromise of a compromise, and won't produce anywhere near the housing we need in the next 10 years... which means I'll be nearing retirement before even considering purchasing a home.
> The entire concept that tech giants being the ones to theoretically create new real estate empires...
I don't think tech companies really wanted to be in this position. It's more that cities failed to build housing, so they started whining about all the workers moving there to work at tech companies. Tech companies caved, saying they'd build more housing, but to be clear, this is a failure of local government.
Am I the only one who thought the core of the society described in the book was more of an utopia than a dystopia?
Then, she added perverted(early on)/misanthropic deviant genius to destroy it, a character that lacked even basic verisimilitude by himself, or in context?
While the plot was enjoyable as easy reading, the background to me was like someone took one of those space-age-futuristic (or maybe modern solarpunk) landscapes and wrote "I disapprove" over it in red ink as a form of criticism.
The core of the society was a privileged elite living in corporate, walled compounds that insulated them from the damaged world, and the damage that their own work caused.
Access to the "utopia" was tied to employment and compliance to a corporate agenda.
> privileged elite living in corporate, walled compounds that insulated them
Given that elite was shown as hyper-meritocratic (even in the dynamic between two main characters), I think that's the utopia-like part.
> compliance to a corporate agenda
The least-bad large entity agenda throughout history. Again they have a pretty prominent example where elites are working on more efficient food production, among other things. It's like the Green revolution (which many people also didn't like because it was unnatural) :)
> damaged world, and the damage that their own work caused
Was it more damaged than real world? I guess I don't remember very well, or maybe I was reading it thru the same lens as I read real-world doomerism, where "Millenials are poor and doomed" articles are contradicted by basic statistics.
It’s been a while since I read it, but if I recall correctly the first book is told from the perspective of living inside the compounds, and the later books tell the story from people outside the compounds.
The corporations and large entities are not really defensible given that one of the plot points in Oryx and Crake is creating a sentient species to showcase genetic options for sale to parents, and another is the creation of a designer drug for those outside the wall with a secret side effect of sterility to address population concerns.
The entire story is told retrospectively from a post civilization world ruined by over extraction and commercialism. I don’t think it really falls into “millennial doomerism” since it was published in 2003 which is when I think we were still in the “gen x nihilism” phase of generational griping.
> creating a sentient species to showcase genetic options for sale to parents",
That is barely wrong at all (is it even worse than animal experimentation)
> creation of a designer drug for those outside the wall with a secret side effect of sterility to address population concerns" How is that their agenda?
It's mostly governments'/people's agenda that they are implementing, just like cheap food.
> ruined by over extraction and commercialism
It was ruined by deus ex machina in the most unbelievable way, that was my original point. Atwood obviously doesn't like the idea of such a society - both a very efficient, very meritocratic elite catering to society's whims and being amply rewarded for it; and the common people acting out their actual preferences. My impression is that she's part of a large "idea space" that thinks that, more or less, elites should rule but altruistically, and the proles should be told what's best for them. In process of creating a "dystopia" of the opposites, she created an utopia in my view. And then she couldn't even credibly destroy it!
Seoul the city? What are Seoul vibes? This story ain't much like the city Seoul.
Korea has lots of conglomerate owned construction but they're not just tech companies building apartments. They have some proper engineering branching.
Also Korean apartments are the best in the world, I wouldn't expect Google to create anything near as well planned.
My god. The comments here are like they're generated by an LLM. "Google cancel project. One more to the dead google project lol"
Even the slightest awareness of local conditions would have improved these comments. The Google developments suffered from the same opposition any residential developer faces in the Bay Area.
In addition, the towns of the Bay also made a big fuss about "company towns".
For those who aren't acquainted with the Bay Area, residents of the region in general strongly oppose any housing. Explanations given range from "The Bay Area is full" to "People shouldn't be living like sardines on top of each other" to "Where will my friends park when they visit". A housing project being cancelled after years of opposition is normal not, out of the ordinary.
I'm very pro-housing, but one valid concern is that residential real estate generally doesn't pay its way, especially with school-age children, and California's Prop 13 makes this problem worse over time by freezing tax rate growth. So any housing in your municipality is a fiscal negative to start that gets worse over time.
Normally I would say that the tax code isn't set in stone, but in California's case, it is in the state constitution.
> residential real estate generally doesn't pay its way
how could that be possible? if residents are a financial drain on a city, then where does it get its income? tourism? industry operated by non-residents?
if true, then by not building residences all you're doing is pushing the costs onto the neighboring towns. but that's obviously not sustainable, because eventually those towns would go bankrupt, or they'd also "wise up" and push residents out from their own town, and you'd have some geographically-expanding bubble of financially-sound towns with 0 residents. i don't buy it.
Sales tax, business taxes, tax on commercial and industrial real estate, etc. These also require services, but don't put kids into public school and are much less emotional about tax changes compared to residents.
And you're exactly right, in California most towns would happily guarantee that no new resident ever moves in, and just continue to collect taxes from workers that commute from farther and farther away. Cities at the edge of the bubble (Dublin, Brentwood, Gilroy, etc) build housing because a) they're turning undeveloped land into housing, and b) new housing construction is less unprofitable for the municipality in the beginning and can be offset by development fees.
With 1 million residents, San Jose is the 10th-largest city in the United State, according to the U.S. Census. But each workday, it drops to the equivalent of the 13th-largest city. That's because residents leave San Jose for jobs elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
That has negative consequences for the city budget. Take sales taxes, for instance. San Jose pulls in some of the lowest revenues per capita in Santa Clara County. Every business lunch bought in Los Gatos, every pair of hiking boots in Campbell, helps to cement a regional imbalance. The smaller cities are pulling in more sales tax income relative to their population base. That applies to hotel, business, utility and parcel taxes, too.
...
San Jose is now the biggest bedroom community in Silicon Valley, but it didn’t find the right balance to create the tax base it needs today.
Well, not "zero" residents. You'd expect to just grow more commercial than residential. And since the ones doing any restrictions are residents, you'd expect them to ensure they are protected.
>The comments here are like they're generated by an LLM. "Google cancel project. One more to the dead google project lol"
I understand why people post such low effort trash: "make number bigger". What I don't quite understand is why people upvote the same dorky joke they've seen others post a million times. It's baffling to me.
Yep, same old smooth-brained takes repeated ad nauseum, while dang is busy posting PSAs about the discussion surrounding Cities: Skylines II performance not being to his liking.[0] What could possibly be more generic than the same trite comments repeated 1000 times? This place feels like a circus sometimes.
And then lament that their kids can't afford to live in the Bay Area. If you don't move away and don't allow building of more homes, where do you expect your kids to live?
"You grew up in the Bay Area and had two kids who don't live with you anymore. Did they move in with their in-laws instead? Did you build two homes for them? Oh your parents are still alive in their own home too?"
> This time it is worse. Real people and their lives are affected.
I don't think that people are affected by not going forward with a real estate project. At most, some had an expectation of an outcome that now we won't see if it would happen at all.
I think they were comparing losing a home to losing a service that your business or income source depend on. The second actually seems worse to me as losing your source of money means you lose your home along with everything else.
If you Google "San Jose Google Construction," you don't even have to click into an article to learn that there has already been a large amount of demolition.
I thought the activists are against this because 'Google is building a company town!' Shouldn't they be happy that Google has ended the deal? Now no one gets to live in houses.
In San Jose, they tore down a bunch of restaurants, razed a bunch of houses that people were living in to build more office buildings, then decided "nah" and stopped building the office buildings. So now we have a bunch of land that the city gave to Google for cheap that they're just sitting on, that can't be used to build houses again. The LendLease houses were an integral part of why city council approved the plan.
"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005),[1] was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."
...
"The final cost to the city and state for the purchase and bulldozing of the formerly privately held property was $78 million. The promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues had not materialized. As of 2021, the area remains an empty lot."
The penalty is that Google now pays 2% of all taxes in Santa Clara County, whereas before Google bought the property it had been vacant and non-productive since 1849.
fair point, but was it vacant and non-productive? i have no idea about this particular instance except for what the original commenter said, this particularly stuck out:
> razed a bunch of houses that people were living in to build more office buildings
The project encompassed locations in San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View, so if people don't specify which place they are talking about the commentary is not very productive.
Do you have a source on this? I'm genuine looking for one.
I work at Google, but more importantly, I'm a citizen living in Santa Clara county and I really really don't support Govt forced evictions (maybe I'm next).
I'm hoping it's either not true, or those families received generous sums of money as part of the deal.
I don't see any residential buildings in that maps link, nor am I able to find any news articles indicating anyone being evicted. Do you have a source or are you just spreading rumors?
"Shit" or not, it was a fairly popular place to hang out while waiting for a train at Dirdon Station or an event at SAP Center. It was only a few steps away, and now there's nothing there (after existing for 88 years).
OK, but the form of my YIMBYism is that of vanilla libertarianism. Is it fine by me if the owners of private property do what they will with it. Governments should not step in to protect the local outpost of alcoholism.
Two things can be bad at once: both "Google choosing to build a company town," and "Google starting to build a company town, getting partway in, then abandoning the project."
It's unclear to me from the article just how far this got, but if it already reached the point of tearing down existing buildings, let alone starting to build new ones, and then stopped, that's definitely bad.
Even if it didn't get to that point, it may very well have had a negative effect on the area simply due to Google's (money's) outsized influence: anyone else who might have chosen to do something with the area would've turned away, for instance, and it might have affected property values as well.
These comments are so stupid because it generalizes relatively small groups of people to a whole area, and adds nothing to the conversation. Better off for everyone if you say nothing instead of this inflammatory bs
So true. It was such a shock moving here from Chicago. People make 50% more money, work less, have better weather, and spend all day in useless meetings where people take turns going on 10 minute long tangential, corporate buzzword filled monologues.
And I'm in an industry that makes essential, life-saving products. Can't imagine what it's like in big tech.
This is why the current high-interest-rate approach worries me. Inflation is high in part because capacity is low. Yet, due to short term demand destruction (meant to "get supply and demand in balance"), long term supply will also not be created, and productive capacity will be permanently diminished. Like in this case, for short term reasons related to "market conditions", Google is canceling construction of 15k homes. It's actually absurd and obscene when you stop to think about it.
Has there been any evidence that the long period of ultra-low interest rates we enjoyed resulted in additional productive capacity? It sounds like a lot of it just went to unprofitable SaaS companies and other virtual endeavors, and not so much to things that exist in the physical world.
> the long period of ultra-low interest rates we enjoyed resulted in additional productive capacity
If there is evidence of that I'd love to see it. If this was true then we'd have a huge supply of homes all over America now which I think is not the case is it? All I hear about is undersupply driving up home prices despite demand being low. I live in Austin where this is very true so maybe I'm in a bit of a bubble?
Even with the ultra-low interest rates, supply was kept low due to nervousness from home builders. Builders were decimated in the housing crisis and, honestly, never recovered. To them, the collapse came sudden and quick, and many housing projects and developments just sit half-finished even to this day.
The focus was turned from single-family housing to apartments, specifically luxury apartments as the luxury housing sector picked up steam quickly as developers and investors jumped on those properties when they were at their lowest prices. So "luxury" apartments were built at low-costs and purchased by investment firms. The main focus was for the builder to get their money back and more as quickly as possible, minimizing their risk, and the investors in the new complex got a bargain "luxury" property that they can increase rents quickly on, while ensuring demand since fewer and fewer single-family homes were being built.
The current issue of supply and demand for housing is, largely, artificially created, possibly accidentally. Single-family housing is just risky now, apartments are less risky. But as people are desiring yards and space again (due to COVID and WFH), we are now seeing the rental model extend to "build-to-rent" single-family communities.
> It sounds like a lot of it just went to unprofitable SaaS companies
U.S. GDP is north of $25 trillion and has grown 75% since 2009. Annual VC investments appear to be in the $200-300 billion range, from a quick search - presumably not all of it going to unprofitable SaaS companies. I'd go with the statistics over the gut intuition here.
> U.S. GDP is north of $25 trillion and has grown 75% since 2009.
Cumulative inflation since 2009 is 42.5%. Real GDP from Q3 2009 to Q3 2023 is up 37.8%[0], and that's with the base effect of 2009 having been a deep recession.
And looking deeper into the sector breakdowns, from 2009[1] to 2022[2], the lion's share of gains in GDP were from the information, finance, professional and business services, and government categories. Some, like manufacturing, have had no growth in real terms over that time.
The homeownership rate is lower now than in 2009[3]. Food is nearly 50% more expensive[4], higher than overall inflation. The cost to produce food is 51.8% higher[5]. Construction materials are 75% higher[6].
So yes, there are a lot of indications to suggest that proportionally, not as much capital was invested into the parts of the economy that are composed of atoms, not bits.
> Has there been any evidence that the long period of ultra-low interest rates we enjoyed resulted in additional productive capacity?
I’d say that the comparatively low inflation rate from 2010 to 2020 [1] qualifies as evidence of this.
> It sounds like a lot of it just went to unprofitable SaaS companies and other virtual endeavors, and not so much to things that exist in the physical world.
A lot of it did, I agree. But it would be strange if somehow no productive equipment at all was purchased based on a low-interest loan.
This current level of interest rates was the norm before the money printing bonanza of 2010-2022. Only that ~decade of ultra low rates was the exception not the norm.
And yet housing was still being built back then. So what gives?
From what I saw from that last decade, ultra cheap rates for too long just leads to a bunch of speculation bubbles as everyone and his dog goes into debt as much as they can and inflating everything.
In my area of the US, you have to move mountains in order to get a plumber, electrician, carpenter, etc to show up. To get work done on my house, it involves leaving messages with at least 10 people, getting callbacks from maybe 1-2, and hoping to god the person actually shows up (when they do show up, it's probably a month after the first call).
(Private equity is capitalizing on this by buying out local plumbing/electrician/hvac companies to merge them into full service companies with a call center, CRM for customers, tech-enabled scheduling and dispatch systems... which is all good, except they charge 2-3x higher rates compared to your local plumber... so the option is <call PE-owned plumbing company and pay 2-3x the price to have someone show up tomorrow> or <call 10 local plumbers and pray that 1 of them calls you back and actually shows up>)
I imagine house builders and contractors have more reliable networks of workers to draw on compared to the average homeowner. But maybe the availability of workers to build a house isn't what it used to be?
Google would not have considered constructing 15k homes had interest rates not been at historic lows. They're not in the construction or real estate business.
And I fail to see what is absurd and obscene, except perhaps the inverse, that low interest rates caused such extreme market distortions that you have a massive company outside of the real estate industry looking into creating 15,000 homes. What is not absurd or obscene about that to you? We don't live in the company-town days any more (not that Google was trying to create a company-town, but they are, again, not in the real estate business).
Prior to the pandemic, Google needed more office space, and it needed workers in the Bay Area.
I don't view this plan as ever being about "getting into real estate". It was just a way to get cities to agree to office construction, and also ensure that workers were willing/able to live nearby.
Anyway, given the amount of office space Google still owns and manages, they are very much "in real estate" in that regard...
As far as I can tell it's a bit of a "these are the tools we have" kind of thing. The institutions that could do effective targeted supply-stimulating policymaking are hobbled if not hamstrung right now, while central banks are less so but only have blunt macro tools to work with.
There's not really much solution other than "people have to care about concrete policy, or at least specifically supply."
> $15 billion for 15,000 homes is about a million dollars a home?
> Sounds... high
It would be high for that, but it wasn't $15 billion for 15,000 homes, it was $15 billion for a Google office expansion plus development of “residential, retail, hospitality, and community development space,”, the residential component of which would have included 15,000 homes.
This is the key here - and it's not just Google - many "large" developments of whatever often require or include housing as a factor, as part of the deal with the city.
For example, a library project is occurring where the developer is getting the land for basically free, and building apartments on the land, but also paying most of the cost of the library.
> "Put it to better use. It's ridiculous. $1.7 million for a stupid bathroom," that was a resident interviewed in Oct. 2022.
Wow
Apparently it went down in price. But my only comment for the "put it to better use" would be that if a toilet is 1.7m, then anything else will consume 1.7m for just the meetings on what the alternative would be.
most parties directly involved benefit from higher total sticker prices. See also Former SF building inspector took bribes headline.. as if only one did !
It's not that high in SF, look up condo and home prices. This also included retail and other business space, so you're probably not including at least 50% of the extra cost&benefit when saying $1 million
This started around 2017. There were lots of plans and tours and proposals. I hear a lot about how this is NIMBYs keeping everyone out, but this was a redevelopment project for a lot of commercial property near a bus/train/lightrail/BART(in the next 5-10 years) terminal. The YIMBYs were the ones who slowed it down with endless demands. I'm generally supportive of their goals, but it was pretty clear to me that by delaying it for years they would get a market cycle turn and nothing for their efforts. To be completed by 2025 it should have started a couple of years ago when financing was cheap.
Now it will be partially demolished empty buildings and blight for the next decade. I hope the city/county just start taxing empty lots and buildings for the lost tax revenue rather than letting the owners sit on it for decades like they did with the old malls from the 80s which were empty till the 00s. Not doing anything with prime land in the middle of a city should have a cost too.
Do you have some examples of this? Given that yimbys are usually definitionally the "yes build it, yes at market rate, yes it can skip the environmental impact assessment" folks, what did they do to block this?
It's the same thing that just happened in east San Jose using the "builder's remedy" to reduce the number of units by 5x. YIMBY's like to think the builders are on their side, but they aren't. They'll take the low cost property and either sit on it for years or turn it into luxury townhomes and empty commercial space with minimal low cost housing, green space or anything else using public transit as an excuse. Privatize the profits and socialize the loss.
One development, initially planned near the Berryessa BART
station, was intended to accommodate up to nearly 3,500
housing units and vast commercial space.
However, the current proposal only includes 451 townhomes,
399 apartments, and 90 condominiums, alongside 45,000
square feet of commercial space.
Google was a little different here, but got treated the same. They wanted to build a transit hub complex for their growing and aging employees. YIMBYs saw this as gentrification (yes it was and would be), but the reason housing there is low cost is because of empty commercial and blight (next to the railroad tracks/highway). Adding 10k+ homes/office would have helped revitalize the commercial in the area and probably raised local prices (people from Google move in). So they pushed hard for lots of mitigation for locals and low cost housing, which delayed it for a business cycle so now you have dozens of contemned buildings and no prospect for building. Or you'll get the most profitable disorganized "builders remedy" instead, which will be fewer units, higher priced, and less integrated into the neighborhood.
> commercial space with minimal low cost housing, green space or anything else using public transit as an excuse. Privatize the profits and socialize the loss.
Correct, and while not perfect, this is good, because it still results in a net increase in housing!
The question to ask is not "is this as good as the original plan" but instead "would this project have proceeded at all if not for the changes to the plan"?
Something we consistently see in SF is grand housing plans with significant low income requirements that sounds fantastic in theory, but are never actually built. The YIMBY response to that is absolutely yes loosen regulations so we actually build real housing today, instead of theoretical better housing in 3-5 years.
> YIMBYs saw this as gentrification
YIMBY's are completely fine with gentrification. Once again, the YIMBY position is that literally only building market-rate luxury-techie-fishbowl-highrises is still progress, because it results in more housing, lowering rates for other properties.
> So they pushed hard for lots of mitigation for locals and low cost housing
This is not the YIMBY position. YIMBY's are against low-income housing requirements. (that is, generally, streamlining permitting and densification to allow the construction of some housing takes precedence over ensuring income accessibility within any individual project) YIMBY's do generally prefer funding and incentives for low-income housing, but that's positive incentives, not blockage.
2500 fewer units, no affordable housing, but more profits for builders and higher taxes for the citizenry because utilities/roads can't be sustained. If that's the YIMBY position, they might as well just say they're funded by builders like the rest of the city council has been for 50 years, which got us where we are.
I give the YIMBYs more credit in that they actually want something good for the place they live. I talked to them at planning meetings. They just aren't always successful and don't often have the best plans.
I think your really going to have to cite your sources here. Based on the studys I've seen the it looks like the Jury is still out. And anecdotally it's been a big boost to most of the places I have direct involvement in.
It's a lazy appeal to authority to immediately say "well where's the study" as though empirical data means nothing.
Everyone I know who is WFH admits they get less done. Yes their quality of life is better, and part of that is working less. A study saying the complete opposite means nothing to me because the world that I occupy says otherwise.
The opposite has been true for me.
Bizarrely having my own desk, not having to wear pants, being able to turn the wifi off (use ethernet), having full control of my sonic environment (I have a good hifi, I play white noise, rain noise, cafe noise, music), not having to shower and not having to commute seem correlated with less time spent browsing HN at work.
For sure, maybe it's my Adhd and/or chronic fatigue, but so often at work, I would not be able to get motivated or focused, and would mindlessly scroll the Internet waiting for the time when it would be reasonable to leave for the day.
Now, I have much better flexibility to just acknowledge it's not happening for me now, take a short break, nap, walk or coffee, and come back to my desk later when my mind has been able to reset. I am much more able to get into the work mindset with that flexibility and control over my space.
I find that in general within my team while many communication tasks are more challenging. The heads down tasks are greatly more productive.
I think that's a misread of my response. I commented that empirically, my experience has been the opposite. And that my suggestion was simply that your assettion that it is so clear, appears to need some serious support, since it seems the data does not support your position, neither empirical or otherwise.
The fact that we need tech companies to build housing on behalf of the city is a huge policy failure.
The city should have just rezoned many parts of the city a long time ago for mixed used. But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. It’s only because of new RHNA mandates that they are required to zone for new housing. This is going to be a win for NIMBYs.
I hope the cities involved will rezone other areas especially in single family neighborhoods such that we can get more housing when interest rates drop. There is a lot of demand still for housing and there are policy tools that can be leveraged to encourage more housing to be built.
> But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing.
Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?
On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?
Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them.
Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area.
One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc.
This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert"
Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too"
Sick!
Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.
K, that was admittedly excessive. My life experience up to now (btw definitely Boomers+Xers who display identical entitlement and offensive conduct) What say now?
If I'm role-playing as a boomer, I just cant understand how I dropped out in grade 10, got the good job at a local factory over a handshake and an all-expenses paid 3-martini lunch the moment I expressed interest in applying, and got a full pension plus zero or close to zero education costs and I have like 3 cars between me, wife, daughter, vacation at least 1x/year, and protested every subsequent development after I bought my house outright for $50k, and now my daughter needs to leave (she's 18, we HAVE to kick them out at that point?!) and she has nowhere to buy that doesn't rely upon me since she has no money and I fomented this monster?
Why me, Lord?
Edit: and even if I purchase nearby properties for fun and profit, she definitely can'tafford what I demand to be paid for rent in exchange for transferring partial use of the property that I aquired purely because I was stupidly financially empowered to have all these opportunities cuz my dad fucked my mom at the right historical timeframe to make sure that the content of mybirthdate took precedence over the content of my character or intentions or worthiness
The people who live there and vote clearly don’t want it, or they’d change the zoning?
I think what you’re saying is ‘people in general want to be able to live there but currently can’t afford to do so, and those jerks who live there won’t budge on making it happen’.
You’ve completely skirted the question with most of this comment
> Whose goals are considered "democracy" here
The people who actually live in the area where decisions are made. People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.
You're missing the point. The people in the area often do support building new housing, they just don't want it where they are. This is a fundamental paradox, as it has to be built _somewhere_, but seemingly none of the people who agree there is a problem want to disadvantage themselves to fix the problem.
Anyways, can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"? Seems like a hysterical reading of the situation.
> Can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"?
Yes, please do say this.
If anything in the system is tyranny-adjacent, it's zoning. Not to say I am against zoning holistically, but zoning is others telling you what you can and cannot do with your property. To characterize a liberalization of zoning as tyrannical is a great inversion.
There's only so much highly desirable real estate. There are only so many beachfront properties. There's a shitload of millionaires out there. There's an assload of multi-millionaires out there. There's quite a few billionaires out there now.
If you make $100,000, you're not living on a beachfront house in Miami. You're not going to live in Downtown San Francisco in a nice home.
That's life. Life's not fair.
Too bad.
Poor people are going to have to reconcile that they can't afford to live in the cities. They're going to have to be content with the suburbs, because the affluent people want to live in the cities, and they don't want people around them that are going to bring down their property values, period.
Those affluent people, especially in places like NYC / SF / LA don't have the goddamn moral courage to just say, "I don't want a buncha poors around me, doing poor people shit, that's going to reduce the value of $4,500,000 home. This isn't just my house, it's an investment, and I cannot and will not allow you to tank my investment just because you want to live where I live."
Now that's the truth.
People should accept it, because you're not gonna change it; you're not gonna change it because it's human nature and you aren't going to change human nature without a lot of pain and suffering.
There's entirely too many people in Big Tech that don't want to accept this. "If we just XXXXX, we can fix XXXXX!"
No you can't. Evolution fixes these issues, not your money, not your regulations. We have to evolve into better angels - there are no shortcuts.
So in this version of NYC / SF / LA, where do the service workers live? Who tends bar? who runs security at the door? who's sitting at the reception desk? Who cooks the food? Who delivers the food? who teaches the kids? who cleans the toilets? Who roasts the coffee? who delivers the Amazon packages?
Those people (clearly you are not one of them) need to live somewhere. They don't need to live in a luxury condo in downtown, but they do need to live somewhere, and if they all need to live in Yonkers / Fresno / Riverside to afford rent, they're not going to commute into your city of aristocrats.
we're seeing this in sf, with restaurants unable to hire, so self-sevice kisoks aren't a choice for the restaurant to use, they're sometimes the only option available. which is neat if you have a technology fetish, but sometimes we want a human person to talk to who understands something that hasn't been programmed into the computer.
Can we just stop with the nonsense about "people wanting to live where the rich people live" as if a good majority of the people who are fighting for affordable housing aren't people who _already_ live there and are fighting against being priced out of where they grew up?
Your only response is an absurd defeatist appeal to human nature and trite clichés like "life isn't fair", ignoring that legislation is very capable of addressing this particular issue. That is currently the plan, and the plan is being executed by the state of California. If you think individual rich homeowners are more powerful than the state, then I think it might be you who is out of touch with the state of reality.
> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.
This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?
Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?
Fortunately we don't just have cities: we also have counties, and states.
Every city needs teachers, firefighters, service industry workers, etc., and if they're not providing a place form them to live that they can afford with their current incomes, then they're not a real living, breathing city: they're Disneyland.
The state is well within her rights force cities to build housing for the people that are required to keep that city running, rather than externalizing their problems and forcing these folks to overflow into neighboring cities and endure inhumane commutes.
Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits. And then the fights amongst city council - ugly at times in social media (Nextdoor). Nextdoor may be ugly itself but sometimes it exposes the fault lines very clearly since you see the same people parroting the lines over and over, after some time you just understand their tilt without anyone having to tell you so.
And this is not just Cupertino. I read stories from Saratoga, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. Wherever you get big money, some people get corrupted, and they don't work in the interest of the society. I mention San Jose but that is an example of city so big that neighborhood complaints can be killed quite easily since mobilizing the entire city to fight in behalf of one corner is not easy, so that's where the cities end up winning - they can do whatever without worrying "much" about the residents. But smaller cities can fight back and IMO they should until they get delivered what was promised.
Why is it the responsibility of a developer to provide public benefits? That's the responsibility of the city. The developers should just be building the actual housing, which the cities by and large do not allow at all.
On the other - real estate/physical locations are the one thing that fundamentally is limited and where distance and control really, really matter for a specific outcome or circumstance to exist.
Rural Idaho, little/no competition, no need for heavy rules to avoid it turning into complete anarchy.
Manhattan? Completely different story.
And there is only one manhattan (and only one of any given spot in rural Idaho, too, but a lot of any given spots).
The way these things tend to work in the cities is heavy rules, and then you have to apply for exceptions. Often, the rules are ‘no, you can’t build without an exception’.
So then, it’s all about making a good case you need an exception. The ‘benefits to the community’ is the ‘bribe’ as to why your good case should get the exception.
It’s hard to see what the alternative is, frankly, when you look at the on the ground reality - there is rarely a rule anyone could write that wouldn’t cause massive problems if applied naively in these dense environments.
And if the people living somewhere want to reduce/avoid certain types of problems, what else are they going to do?
And someone can say ‘fuck ‘em, they don’t get to say no’ - but most people saying that will very much change their tune when they’re on the other end of the bargain.
Manhattan got the way it is today precisely because it DIDN'T use to have all of these restrictive rules prohibiting development. Indeed if those rules had been around a century or more ago, it wouldn't be the #1 city in the country. Chicago would be.
You've got it precisely backwards. The excessive rules are harmful, period, and are significantly hurting housing affordability. The lack of them is what made this city great back in the day (and it's still coasting on that inertia, though only growing more and more unaffordable over time).
The most recent dumb rule that was tacked on recently essentially made it impossible to build new hotels* (see https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-... ). Not a single hotel has been granted permission since that law passed several years back. Now add on top the AirBnb ban and we're making it significantly more expensive to visit NYC, which is hurting our tourism industry. All for completely dumb reasons. Build more hotels, build more housing, let the city thrive.
* This law was passed not because it's a good idea, but because of captured interests, namely, the existing hotel operators who didn't want further competition. It's anti-competitive, not "a good law that you need in a dense city" as you are characterizing things.
None of what you’re saying changes anything or conflicts with what I’m saying, near as I can tell?
Of course the rules are there to maintain the status quo?
Do you think they don’t know that?
The rules won’t change until long after it’s started to be unsustainable either. That’s normal.
The only people who are going to pre-emptively change the rules to make things better are the folks who are competing to be the next ‘big thing’, not the already big thing.
The already big thing is trying to not lose what they already somehow got. They’re going to be fundamentally conservative unless they’re very risk tolerant, which is rare.
New Jersey is much more friendly zoning and taxation wise than New York, for example.
Right, none of that is the responsibility of the developers to provide. That's for the city to provide.
What's going on, however, is that California has hamstrung its ability to charge its existing citizens the costs of the services they are incurring thanks to Proposition 13, hence why expensive taxes, fees, and required public improvements are levied on new development. The wealthy older people who already own property (and aren't paying much for it) are being subsidized by the younger generation, and are paying out more than their fair share.
> Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits.
I live in the state capitol of Washington. I could not agree more. What is even more galling is how open it is. Because I've done a lot with public services here, I have a lot of people on my FB feed who are involved in city politics, and several of them are close personal friends with many of the larger developers in the city. Not just socializing and meet and greets, but "We're going on vacation to Vegas together" and such. And then people wonder why our city is so "developer-friendly".
One way that I've seen this explained (not that I necessarily agree with it or care to defend it) is that the city somehow has an obligation to _future_ residents. Or put another way, to a minimum level of sustainability as a going concern.
Another commenter framed this as ensuring that essential service workers can afford to live in the area.
Because "residents" is a group defined by perspective. If the residents in a city don't want something, but the residents of a neighborhood do, which has authority? What about residents of a city compared to a state?
How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there?
What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.
One role of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is to balance competing desires. Eg everyone wants good roads, but no one wants higher taxes. If you allow people to directly vote on each, people vote for higher costs and less revenue. So instead, we elect representatives to take a mix of popular (give us things) and unpopular (take things from us to pay for those things) positions at the same time.
Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires.
That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.
In this case the democratic model doesn’t really work because the people who need the development to happen are people who will need a house in about 20 years. Most of those people are too young to vote, so are not represented by the democratic process.
If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.
Because we live in a country and state, not just a city.
And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want.
E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents.
The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city).
Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them.
So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.
What are you talking about? Sure you can focus on the state level if you want instead of country-level, but there's still plenty of room for federal policy that supersedes state/local policy.
So it very much is how it works, but there are technical questions about how much and in which areas.
As for migration, I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Most countries don't have a federal structure to begin with, including most democracies.
Think long and hard before you start taking that line - unless you want Trump or Biden or whoever next is in line (or Congress) being able to define your local zoning laws.
Nothing good is going to come from that the vast majority of the time.
Local zoning should be local so costs/side effects/benefits are associated with decisions as closely as possible.
Otherwise, it would be trivial to penalize to the point of almost destroying entire states or regions because they were on the wrong side of some ideological line on another topic. Which would then be paid back 4 or 8 years later, of course.
I'm not taking any line, I'm describing the basic principles of representative democracy.
The US is a little bit of an outlier in having a federal system so there are some limits to what Congress can do, but there aren't to what a state can do, and some of our states (like CA and NY) are the size of countries themselves.
I'm not saying the majority of zoning decisions should be taken at the state/country level -- that would be ludicrous simply from an organizational standpoint.
I'm simply describing that states are perfectly free to override local decisions whenever necessary, with full democratic legitimacy. How do you think the interstate highway system got built?
The US is one of a kind, as is every country I’ve run across.
Typically, zoning rules are the way they are (everywhere, and they are almost everywhere) because the benefits of them outweigh the perceived costs for the folks in power over that locality.
Changing them is not taken lightly because a lot of money is at stake and disruption is high.
Lots of people complain of course. But money talks, and bullshit walks.
I’m curious when things will switch from talk to actual change. Next 5ish-10ish years maybe as the boomers start aging out?
How do you think the interstate highway system got built?
> How do you think the interstate highway system got built?
The federal government appropriated a ton of land whether local people liked it or not.
Obviously the government didn't want to provoke massive unrest so it did some negotiating, but at the end of the day it did take whatever land it wanted, regardless of local opinion.
Also, regarding states ceding control of zoning to localities -- of course. That's just practical. But what the state gives, the state can take too. I'm talking about basic democratic principles, not what happens to be current law.
Nope - and it isn’t clear the federal gov’t even could. There would be hell to pay if they tried. The constitution allows some wiggle room, but ‘eminent domaining’ large swaths of state land is definitely not one of them! It might even cause a civil war, frankly.
There was widespread national (bipartisan) support for it, a clear national military/security need, and it took the political capital of a very popular and trusted president to make it happen - and continuing support by his predecessors. Over 20+ years.
The federal gov’t basically proposed the overall plan, helped co-ordinate between states, and funded about half of it with the states using a cost share program (eventually increasing to 90% in some cases). The states did the actual building (and continue to do the maintenance too!) and things like right of ways, specific plans, eminent domain were handled by them.
No federal forced appropriation I’m aware of. Just co-operation and money.
I appreciate the details, and I'm not an expert on the history of the interstate.
But for the purposes of my argument, it's irrelevant whether the states did the eminent domain or the federal government. My point is this whole thread is that a higher power did, and localities couldn't do whatever they wanted. Your town couldn't veto the interstate passing through it.
And when the federal government is doing the planning and incentivizing with federal funds, the question of whether the eminent domain was "really" done by the federal government or the states is somewhat academic.
Again, my original point still stands completely: as a general democratic principle, when a higher level of government makes policy that conflicts with lower levels, the higher level wins. The US federal system happens to have more limits around this than most other democracies, but it's still a general principle.
The only reason the cities can do what they do now is because they are expressly granted the scope to do so by the same states.
The interstate detailed plans (which towns, for instance) was drafted by the states. If a state wanted to move around a town, they could (and did!). They had to roughly follow the federal plan and connect at specific points to get their share of the money, but there are tons of state level highways that have no Fed involvement - and places the states said ‘nope’ to the Fed money and did what they wanted.
It isn’t irrelevant if the states or the fed did the eminent domain - it’s a critical distinction. That it was the states is because the states are the ones who control their land and it’s usage - there is no (actual) higher power for zoning that isn’t already okay with it as-is!
That’s my point.
Now, the states can be convinced to change the rules of course (per state), but that is an entirely different situation no?
The supposed saviors have been the ones in charge the entire time!
Ok, gotcha. So then it is perfectly fine for a state to overrule the local town zoning regulations, and give back housing freedom to the individual who owns the property.
Problem solved. A state can democratically ignore the local zoning requirements of the town, and force them to allow more housing.
They’ve not only always been able to do that, they explicitly had to go out of their way to make it any other way.
That it is delegated to the local towns is because that’s what they (as in the state and the towns) wanted.
And it’s likely to stay that way unless extreme effort is put into changing it, because otherwise the local folks will usually get very angry, as you’re taking away their self determination and ability to control their immediate surroundings. And everywhere is local somewhere.
So why don’t you ask the state legislatures? They’re the ones who have always been in control here on this topic.
> So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.
Why stop there? Why not: So the moral authority comes from universe-level democracy, and planet-level, being able to rightly supersede national, provencial and local level.
There isn't any reason to stop there, except that we simply haven't gone beyond it yet, except for the EU to some degree.
Absolutely nothing stops a planet-level democracy, except that you've got to get all of the existing countries to democratically choose to join it first. Which is a gigantic historical undertaking that might happen someday, or might never happen at all.
But if you're asking why stop there now, in 2023, it's because a planetary democratic body simply doesn't exist. While countries do.
Well, the simple fact that if they don't, they literally have no reason to exist. It's not so much a moral question, so much as that this was the decided policy when the smaller units chose to join together into a larger one. It's moral because that's the decision the people made when they joined together.
There are various names for the concept over higher-over-lower power in a democracy -- supremacy, preemption, paramountcy.
If smaller units want to accomplish things together that can't override their individual sovereignty, then they sign treaties, form alliances, and groups -- like NATO or NAFTA and so forth. The thing that distinguishes a grouping that makes an actual state is precisely the fact that it can strike down the laws of lower organizational units when they conflict.
Now, nobody's claiming this power is unlimited -- that would be fascism. There are still rights that exist precisely to limit state-level power. But the general principle of supremacy/preemption/paramountcy still exists.
>>> So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.
>> Ok, what is it about larger aggregations make them have more moral authority than smaller aggregations?
> Well, the simple fact that if they don't, they literally have no reason to exist.
This is circular reasoning. You made an assertion. Either defend it or declaim it. What is the specific moral authority that you claim larger aggregations have over smaller ones?
1. Many people would have no problem with not stopping there.
2. If we do want lines, we can say people decide on local matters. Which is the primary argument for why this kind of NIMBYism should not be allowed -- it is negatively impacting the surrounding area, and this deserves to be controlled by the larger group (city, state, etc). Beyond the state, and certainly the country level, it is fairly easy to argue for a line at that point under this logic, as the impact is far less direct.
The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).
Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.
> The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state
So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?
No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process.
Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)
And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway.
Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.
Because the nation-state is constantly using the democratic process to decide which powers should be delegated to which part of the hierarchy.
This thread is about that abstract process, and indeed whether "housing crisis" is enough justification to start overriding local autonomy.
For example, in California the state government recently restricted the power of local governments to regulate ADU construction. This was a case of state democracy overriding local decisions because of their negative externalities when taken in aggregate.
Basically the whole point of a government hierarchy is to resolve the multi-agent coordination problems that routinely occur. The government is the equivalent of the mob boss in the prisoner's dilemma, and without it we will devolve into a tragedy of the commons.
Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do.
Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!
I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority?
I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it.
That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.
"democracy" can mean a range of things, and, in addition, it's not really clear who the relevant group of people are whose collective will we should care about.
For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority"
"Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.
But it's not all residents, or even most residents. It's _some_ residents who are overrepresented in city governance. Many, many people in the Bay Area want more homes built.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Most of the actually important housing policy isn't decided by direct vote, it's handled by an unelected committee which uses in-person feedback provided during open sessions to make decisions. A quick review of The Discourse turns up plenty of evidence that these types of arrangements often result in uneven participation in local planning decisions across demographics. If we want house policy to be "democratic" we need to consider how to plausibly canvas the local community and balance their interests against the well-being of the wider region.
If there was a large portion of the electorate that organized and wanted more housing, all those other changes would happen, as the controlling elected officials would be replaced.
I’ve seen it. Rent control too. It’s rare though, as the segment of the population who does has historically poor turnover and is chronically confused and disorganized.
Pro ‘keep it the same’ groups (and pro landlord groups) tend to be composed of retired professionals with decades of experience generating (and wading) through red tape, and have no issues rallying the most consistent voting block in any area - retirees who don’t want their largest assets and (literal) roof over their heads screwed with.
What you’re talking about is that the governing structure gets setup to diffuse blame and obfuscate responsibility so activists don’t have any obvious individuals they can easily attack. That’s by design, but not the ‘problem’.
I don't find your "if people wanted it, it would happen" argument very convincing, nor do I understand how the situations you describe in your second and third paragraphs are (a) different from each other and (b) different from what I'm arguing is undemocratic. As far as I can tell it seems that we agree that different interest groups have different capabilities for manifesting their political preferences in local government. Is there an actual difference between our viewpoints? Like are you arguing that people don't actually want more housing? Or are we just quibbling over semantics?
I’m arguing that the voting blocs who actually show up consistently don’t want more housing, yes. At least anywhere near where they live.
Because when you get down to the details, more housing would;
a) cost many of them a lot of money (they get income from renting out, and higher rents == more money) or hurt the value of their assets (more stock == less value for the house(s) they own).
b) lead to significant quality of live impacts they don’t want. More traffic, busier stores, more noise, crowded parks, more crime, more expensive cost of living, etc.
The gov’t structures follow that and produce the outcomes they want, and insulate them from blowback. Or the people in charge get replaced until someone does do that. The gov’t structure is the symptom, not the cause.
Grandma doesn’t like looking like the bad guy. Grandma wants to be comfortable. Grandma’s kids long ago moved out and live somewhere else, so fuck all the younger folks making noise and keeping her up at night. They should go live somewhere else and be someone else’s problem.
At least until the demographics have shifted enough that another group is able to tell the retirees to shut up and sit down. Which always happens eventually.
It’s pretty obvious frankly if you watch how things play out.
The us is in desperate shape with the housing policies that we have leading to a tremendous lack of housing availability in many large cities in the west where it's harder to spread out. California but also Seattle is another city. There's a shortage of housing, the housing that exists gets more expensive because there's more competition to get in, people are pushed farther out, the high prices push many to eventually living in cars, there's no place for low income people to go. This contrasts with Chicago where there's apparently a lot of low income housing.
This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.
> Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?
From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).
The federal government has priority when the relevant power has been granted to it by the states. See the Tenth Amendment, which is unfortunately read/followed only slightly more frequently than the Third.
FWIW, that's not correct. The tenth amendment is a limitation on unenumerated powers. It says nothing about precedence of conflicting powers where those are enumerated. That's what the Supremacy clause is about, and it's abundantly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
Not that it really matters here, since the relevant conflict is between state and municipal law. But the 10th amendment tends to be pretty badly misunderstood by internet libertarians, so it was an interesting digression.
I agree with everything you wrote except your first sentence. What of what I wrote was incorrect in the context of the unbounded claim that “feds win”, particularly on a thread dealing with real estate zoning issues?
High-income, low-density suburban areas are actually economically sustained and subsidized by low-income, high-density downtown areas. This is why residents of such areas should not be the sole voice of democracy here.
Interesting video, but it's all from the pov of the city's tax revenue and nothing else. Taking the first example, if they don't build the new food complex and keep the old one, less people will want to live in that city, and eventually the tax revenue will go down. Plenty of ghost towns around me that prove that point, you have to stay modern or you go under.
As far as the suburb part, if those high income areas spend all their money downtown, then tax revenue downtown goes up but the source of money is still the suburbs. You have two sources of tax revenue in downtown (business + residents), but only one in the suburbs. So naturally tax revenue is lower in suburbs, but without them the downtown businesses wouldn't survive at all. It's a relationship, and it's odd they don't address this point. Also in the southwest there are plenty of suburb-only cities that grow rapidly without a downtown district playing major part.
>The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.
That's not democracy though. Can you give an example of where the minority overrode the tyranny of the majority in a democratic society? The major changes in the US regarding tyranny (civil rights act, 13th, 14th, 15th amendment) were due to the majority forcing change and overriding the tyranny of the minority.
there's a power imbalance between the homeowners and the renters. i'd be curious to see the makeup in the bay area of city council members who own vs rent. also there's discretionary zoning in the bay area which is a large driver of the problem imo.
the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.
homeowners (some of whom are corporations, or use their home as a rental business and not a domicile) vs (renters and homeless). Even if homeless people don't directly get to move into new housing, it still benefits them. I think if the homeless were mobilized to vote, they could work with renters and become the majority.
i'm a renter and i vote like hell. so do my friends, who are also renters.
a homeowner can sell their house if they don't like something. it's more of a PITA but this is simply a false statement: "And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do. "
not to mention, as a renter in a tight renter market, it's very hard to up and leave and find some place in a similar budget.
If you look at the stats, you’re very much outliers.
And if you’ve ever owned before (I have) and also rented (I have), the difference in ability to move and sensitivity to market conditions is dramatically in renters favor the vast majority of the time.
No renter is going to be looking at losing hundreds of grand trying to move in a downturn, for instance. Or like in ‘08, being stuck for years in frozen real estate markets or losing hundreds of grand or more.
No renter is ever going to get hundreds of grand in cash money on sale either, if things go well.
Just the paperwork involved in selling (let alone the other logistics) takes longer and is more involved than renting a new place, even in the tightest markets!
yeah i'm aware of all that. i'm in the process of moving and have thought on a few occasions that i'm glad i also don't have to worry about selling a house. i wasn't saying that it's not hard to move for an owner, was directly responding to your statement: "which is something the owners can’t do."
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a real estate slump. People forget.
I expect over the next year or two you’ll see what I mean. If you thought ‘thank god I wasn’t owning’ before, wait until the bankruptcies start and the market is forced to ‘move’ again.
Orders of magnitude more pain than most people even think possible until they’ve lived through it.
>If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?
This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.
Is there any data that suggests such a loaded term is appropriate? It seems more likely that people were taking advantage of the new economic benefits of remote work.
Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.
>Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them.
That's not accurate. The birth/death rate is up-side down (more people die than are born), so they can live in a previously occupied house like I do. Also, people who retire often move to a lower cost of living city. I'm not against gradual, planned growth, but BUILD BUILD BUILD, like people in the Bay Area seem to want isn't what I would want either. It's happening in my city too and it sucks.
>Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town.
I suspect they'll live where they want to and/or find work. I don't really have much say in that once they're adults.
>If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.
There's a big difference between gradual, natural, planned expansion and rapid, explosive expansion. I want the former, not the latter. I suspect the main reason of the overpopulation of the Bay Area is directly related to the tech companies that reside there. Maybe they should spread out their workforce some more.
>Can you provide any examples where rapid growth has occurred in the Bay Area in the last 20 years?
Sorry I meant what the people outside the Bay Area want. It hasn't, but that seems to be because the residents are blocking it.
For me, it seems people who don't live in the Bay Area want the people in the Bay Area to build "affordable housing," which really means "subsidized housing," which is subsidized by the residents that live there. I mean call me crazy but the people who live there don't want more building and they certainly aren't going to pay higher taxes to subsidize housing for more residents that they don't want in the first place.
Since zoning and all that is controlled by the mayor and city council, the only people the mayor and city council are beholden to is the residents, not people who want to be residents. I don't think affordable housing has a snowball's chance in hell of happening there.
They could come to my city, they're building like crazy here, road capacity be damned. It's been bumper to bumper during rush hour like never before. They're building a 1.5x0.5 mile strip of packed condos on a 2 lane road right by my kid's school. Those condos are right across the street from an even larger tract of apartments. That will be fun.
If the town population doesn't grow (100 deaths each year, 100 births, equal immigration and emigration) then new houses aren't needed. Sure you have kids needing a new home, but then your parents die, freeing up an old home
The reason we need more housing is
1) Concentration of living in certain areas more than in the past
2) Smaller households (more common to have a family unit of 2 parents and 3 kids being divorced, with both parents wanting a house large enough to keep the kids on alternating weekends)
3) Increasing population (both from longer lives, more births, and net immigration)
The people on the zoning board are homeowners in the city! Of course they are going to zone things so that their neighborhood never changes. This is how it works in 99% of cities in the US and it’s terrible.
It's weird b/c in most parts of our day to day lives we have no say. We live in a democracy but for the most part none of us can vote on anything meaningful but in this one particular area everyday citizens have a ton of power and they're voting to protect their owns means. I don't know man I look at the decisions made by politicians and they piss me off but when everyday citizens get a chance to make policy if you will they do shitty stuff like this blocking affordable housing. If I come across as bitter it's b/c I am. My town tried to build affordable apartments and NIMBYs blocked it.
I'm a homeowner and I want more housing built. But I also want improvements to transit and for both bike & car commuting. It's great that a lot of the current crop of apartments are being built along Caltrain & light rail corridors, but those still mostly only keep people who work along those corridors off the roads, creating more congestion for everyone. 87, 880, 101, 85, and 280 (until you get past Cupertino) are all already basically parking lots during rush hours, and it's because people can't live near where they work. This was the entire point of companies like Google & Meta including residential development in their broader campus development plans in Menlo Park, Mountain View, and San Jose ... and if it doesn't happen, then which municipalities are going to pick up the slack to incentivize developers to build near those campuses?
If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.
zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.
Maybe it would be best for Google to just go build them somewhere else.
There's no actual rule that says we have to stack every human being in the country in Silicon Valley. Software engineering in particular is a business that lends itself being done from anywhere.
by definition, the bay area real estate market is a free market. housing is a problem across the entire country because of low supply as a result of underbuilding (among other things). and yes, the underbuilding is even more extreme in places like the bay area due to zoning.
i should have been more specific: capitalism will not solve the problem of housing. it had it's chance to build housing to meet demand during the low interest rate environment and yet it didn't provide. this underbuilding happened in places with both lax zoning and prohibitive discretionary zoning. all the while, rents keep raising in the free market due to low supply. capitalism will not build to meet the needs in a high interest rate / high inflation environment because the payoff won't be worth the risk. there needs to be some government intervention on the scale of the new deal if we want to solve our housing crisis.
can somebody give a good argument why capitalism will solve our housing problems, with an emphasis on how it will work in a high interest rate inflationary environment? i'm genuinely curious to hear an argument for that. and use examples where it addressed problems in an area with both lax zoning and bay area-like zoning, since imo reforming zoning regulations is only one part of the puzzle.
Banks, developers, and realtors are not a unified cartel, they will totally undercut each other if they can, and they are humans that do not have the power of prediction.
Generally speaking, the mechanism by which prices decline is that overzealous building in the boom phase leads to overleveraged people losing their shirts in the bust. The most spectacular example of this is the Japanese asset bubble which has never been returned to; at its peak, the Imperial Palace had a valuation more than the entire state of California. But where I live in Seattle, we are starting to see the effects of the high interest rates; homes are staying available for longer, I am seeing 10-20% valuation drops compared to a year ago and further price cuts in my neighborhood. A particular source of pain this cycle will be people who bought for AirBnB who can’t afford the interest payments anymore.
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Zoning is not free in the Bay Area. One major difference is “by-right” development, where buildings that meet predefined codes are automatically approved without political review. For example, most development in New York is by-right. By-right development is not the norm in California, which leads to an expensive, extractive review where people attempt to get their pound of flesh on every single project.
i don't think you're listening to what i'm saying, i feel like we're talking past each other at this point.
i know how discretionary zoning works. it's a huge problem in SF. but other housing markets are underbuilt in places where discretionary zoning isn't a problem.
my point is that we'll continue to underbuild to a much worse degree in a high interest inflationary environment. it's a compounding problem that gets worse over time. i'll be dead by the time we have enough housing if we wait for private developers to solve this problem. there needs to be zoning reform + government intervention in my opinion, since clearly the status quo isn't working. (i define the status quo as the current zoning regulations + the profit driven mode of building, both of those contribute to this problem)
my argument is simple: profitable opportunities will become more rare in the current macro environment, thus causing even less building and making the lack of housing problem worse. so there needs to be another solution, like government subsidizing private developers or something, idk, there are a ton of ideas but i'm not trying to argue about it on hacker news.
It depends on how far you overbuilt in the current boom. The hangover can last quite a while depending on how far overbuilding has gone. Like I said, the Japanese bubble was entirely market driven and the real estate prices there have never recovered from the last spate of overbuilding 30 years after the fact. And like I said, I'm observing rental and price drops beginning now where I live. There's also the fact that right now, anyone still working on a project is going to try and complete it to be able to sell something rather than to sell nothing and still pay their loans; right now there are multiple 40 story residential towers in Seattle still chugging along despite the start of rent falls.
You can't have this excess if you never built rapidly enough in the first place. And at that point you've missed your shot.
I think public building is an important part of a long-term solution. However, I also think that local and state governments can't do it alone, and the feds are very unwilling to help, so in terms of the realism of getting 60 senators on board with funding publicly built housing, it's a bit of a fool's errand.
lol love a good out of context data visualization, those are great sources.
but really, that's some data worth examining, thanks for sharing! i didn't say that building housing won't solve the problem, that's literally a universal truth for housing advocates. i'm suggesting that the government needs to intervene, especially since private developers have underbuilt during the best low interest rate opportunity of our lifetimes. i'm skeptical that trickle down economics will work for housing, especially in a high interest rate inflationary environment where it's too expensive to build profitably.
basically, we need government to help add supply since private developers dropped the ball during the amazing opportunity of a decade+ of low interest rates.
I don't see how this specific site can be an example of the failure of the private developers. The land was owned by the city itself for decades. They didn't do anything with it and failed to zone it for development.
Google is like the CCP in the respect of consistency. They say they'll something, but history shows that they're erratic and unreliable and change their mind on a whim. Saying one thing and doing another. It's the reason why so many companies are pulling out of China, and it's the same reason why Google is floundering.
That's why you don't leave stuff as important to the people as housing, to a for profit corporation who's accountable to it's shareholders not to the taxpayers.
This scenario feels more like the fictional OCP in Robocop.
Did we read the same comment? The GP is criticizing Google and a government. It may or may not be ideal to "leave" housing to private developers, but "that's" not why.
That being said. The entire concept that tech giants being the ones to theoretically create new real estate empires... gives me a lot of Snowcrash vibes. And yes, I know the real estate megacorps of today are probably worse than Google. Really doesn't help.