> "It shouldn’t take six years for any city to agree to give itself permission to build the sort of homes that every city once allowed."
This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.
>I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.
Increasing density has definite externalities. Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested. Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property. We do need some way of balancing those concerns with development. IMHO, we've swayed too far towards one extreme. We should relax those restrictions while being cognizant that we don't swing too far back to the other extreme.
We need blanket legislation outlawing the notion that by virtue of purchasing a plot of land one is also purchasing control over everything visible from said plot at the time of purchase.
So basically, we need to legally mandate that the only way for people to ensure that they have basic things like sunlight and not staring into a brick wall - or perhaps worse, having an endless parade of other people staring into their rooms and garden from the new multi-story art gallery across the street - is via sprawl that makes existing suburbia look positively compact?
The problem with this kind of thinking is that the denser housing is, the more its livability relies on things outside of the homeowners' direct ownership and control. So long as YIMBYs keep pushing this idea that keeping access to things like sunlight cannot be a shared act, it doesn't matter how many pretty drawings of wide sunlit boulevards of townhouses or towers in parks they produce to claim that density doesn't have to mean dark, dystopian hellscape - because the moment there's money in it, someone can just slap a big tall building right in one of those crucial empty spaces, and according to the YIMBYs the people affected would have no right to complain because they didn't personally and individually own them.
In most cases this really isn’t a problem though. The fantasy of “big tall buildings” being slapped everywhere is just that. NIMBYs are fully mobilized just to stop stuff like duplexes, townhomes, or the neighbor putting a pop-up 4th story on their existing row house, not imaginary 100-story skyscrapers going up in the middle of a suburb.
The standard solution to this is called an easement, which basically means I own the air rights over your property so that I can ensure my views are unobstructed.
Getting rid of the idea of owning the neighbors airspace entails figuring out how to fairly allocate easements that generally don't currently exist because of legacy reasons.
The issue (from a government perspective) with easements as opposed to zoning is that cities won't profit (as much) off the sale of easements. Governments make a lot of money from development, and they're not about to give it up.
Have you been to NYC? Or Tokyo? Or Singapore? Have you ever lived in a dense city before? These things just don't happen.
Developers a profit motived and are very aware of what sells and what doesn't. There are a million mechanisms by which we can avoid having a single story house surrounded by skyscrapers.
Counterpoint - Melbourne CBD. Jampacked full of enormous residential towers that are cheaply/poorly designed, far too close together, offer zero amenities and that block out all sunlight.
I used to be in favour of laxer planning regulations until I moved to Melbourne. A lassez faire approach just doesn’t work.
Indeed. We have people who are suing their neighbors who grew large pine trees in a forested area because it disrupted someone's view. I'm not even sure if the trees in question were planted or just allowed to grow.
What you mention is a different scenario from a developer building an 8-story complex next to a 2-story SFH, and it's reasonable to think we (society) could treat them differently if we so chose.
What you are talking about has absolutely nothing to do with the article. The proposal says that there should be a maximum of 4 units (not stories) per lot plus an additional 2 units if those two units are rented out as affordable housing. The article shows that the neighborhood already has a 6 unit building with 3 stories. It's absolutely nothing new.
Yes, if you give people infinite control over everything visible from their houses, they can build a radio telescope and control half the universe. On the other hand, your proposal is too radical, because I feel like I have a legitimate interest in not getting boxed in by several 100-foot walls spraypainted with obscenities and built one inch away from my property line, lit with daylight-strength spotlights at all hours of the night like that one Mormon temple. There has to be a reasonable middle ground between no control and infinite control.
If you have a legitimate interest, why not buy out the block yourself and live in your own little Shangri La? Otherwise, you are asking the government to subsidize your lifestyle preferentially over that of your neighbors. Believe it or not, the people living in the apartment next door with the spotlights are your neighbors too.
Agreed on the "view" aspect, but what about solar? If I build a house that gets X % of its electrical energy from the PV panels I install, and then my neighbor constructs something which blocks most of the incident sunlight, how does that work?
As a matter of fact, once upon a time, there was a Supreme Court decision limiting property owners' claim on the airspace above their land. Someone was actually trying to ban planes from flying over their house.
> We need blanket legislation outlawing the notion that by virtue of purchasing a plot of land one is also purchasing control over everything visible from said plot at the time of purchase.
We already have that, in the form of urban planning. There are professionals in charge of ensuring everyone's rights are respected by defining and upholding an urban plan and construction regulation.
> Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested
A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.
> Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property.
People get so hung up on this, but that's just how it goes -- cities change. Just because you bought a place doesn't mean you're entitled to the exact same view forever.
> A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.
While that's true, if you don't have a proper transit network, it's a real problem. And many cities aren't in a position to build a proper transit network at the drop of a hat. Don't get me wrong, I wish they did or could efficiently build one. But sometimes you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be, unfortunately.
Do you think they built the MTA before they built Manhattan?
Population growth creates the tax base, density, and demand required for a successful public transportation system. Demanding that the public transport comes first is simply backwards.
They built the MTA when they still had the flexibility to do it. Portland is too developed now, too many entrenched interests, it'll never get done.
Listen, I am on the same page as you - I would love for it to happen. I would vote for it. I would pay taxes for it. But the reality is that it isn't going to happen, and if you densify the city without the transit, you will have these problems.
Or make the bus suck less. Curbed bus lanes with fat fines for violators would do more to change urban America than anything else; a de facto revival of the streetcar. Why drive through the gridlock at 7mph when the bus is going 35mph right past you?
It's not "making" driving suck, it's allowing driving to suck as a result of market forces. We could stop forcing restrictions on property owners that prevent the natural, market-driven move to mass transit as density increases.
densify portland -> improve tax revenue -> improve transit.
nyc certainly benefited from aristocrats and lax labor laws when building the subway, but this isnt something that is impossible for portland. trimet is already huge for a city as small as portland. improving density will only help transit services.
it doesnt have to be subways -- the willamette flood plain isnt great for subways anyway. portland should continue to build out its bus service and cycling infrastructure. portland is already pretty reasonable for living without a car, it will only improve with density.
There is no "stuffing" - people move there of their own accord first. That they move there despite the inconveniences is a hint that the area is already in high demand and denying it won't make it any better. There also isn't anything magical about feedback loops.
To add to your point, even if you were willing to invest in a proper network it will take years to get going. People are set in their ways and so they won't stop driving, even the hard core supporters of the idea will drive everywhere for a while. Eventually something will cause them to try transport, but the first time they will fail to figure out how to ride and so be late to their... Eventually they will figure it out and over 10 years you can get a good ridership for the population density. Then over the next 30 years you can get density to increase to the point where there is enough population density to justify the network you needed to create to get there.
Let me also plug biking infra. This, imo, should be an accessible alternative to balance the inefficiencies of motor vehicles (too much space for too little passengers) and rail/bus (too many passengers and dilated commute time).
> A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.
How do you expect to put together a working transit network, which is very sensitive to urban planning, if you are also argue in favour of ignoring any restriction imposed by urban planners?
You're literally commenting in a thread where people are complaining against building regulation that stops people from building extra houses in their backyard as they please. Worse than that, you're intentionally ignoring half the posts made though out this thread where people complain about urban plans that limit occupation density.
> Those are real, but minor issues. Increased density also brings good externalities, like more services, retail etc.
Not necessarily. Just because you add a residential tower that doesn't mean you'll get a grocery store in its ground floor. If the urban plan specifies high-density residential area then all you can expect is residential buildigs.
In a city there shouldn't be set backs at all. If you want light buy a bigger lot and set yourself back. If you want a garden move out to farm country or put it on the roof (wasted space to most, as it happens I'm installing solar on my roof today, but even then most of my roof is wasted space)
Fair enough. I was thinking about the typical single-use zoning in the US, where single-family home zone is different from row-house zone. I agree that we'd be better off with urban zones not making a distinction. However, I'll gladly take small changes in that direction (allowing duplexes and ADUs) over no progress at all.
Setbacks are required in cities, otherwise many buildings wouldn't receive any natural light at ground level. Two- and three-story buildings don't really need them, the sidewalk is enough.
That brings to mind one crank concept for bureaucratic reform of explicitly embedded purpose formatted laws to slow the spread of fire and perhaps "generally accepted solutions" added after testing to skip design approval.
Thus you could use setbacks as firebreaks, firewalls, or say something exotic like aerogel barricades.
You do own the views in numerous cities due to historical precedent, and cities cant change these laws as it would be considered unconstitutional taking.
I know some mountain and coastal areas actually do have view ordinances, but they're typically very limited (sometimes only to trees, not construction, etc). But, I don't believe that's the norm in most places.
City of Vancouver has a policy of protected public views.
The goal is to make it so that views of Vancouver's mountains are reasonably accessible by anyone, not just those that purchased a north facing suite in a tall condo tower.
It's pretty much the same underlying concept as why we create public parks.
The view cones are scattered around and are usually tied to areas of heavy public pedestrian activity, such as parks.
As a counter, Seattle doesn't have much comparable. You an buy "air rights" to protect your view, but there isn't a general protection for home-owners. It's fairly common for a small home to be replaced with a newer, much taller, structure, taking neighbor's views with it.
A lot of this is more the result of poor planning by the city, and shouldn't be the burden of the property owners to resolve. Congestion is largely the result of over-reliance on cars for transportation which is inefficient. Rather than put limits on how I can use my land, the city should be planning infrastructure that supports more dense use.
Portland has reasonable public transport and fairly good bike/ pedestrian routes.
Lack of density is the ultimate externality: the increased resource consumption caused by the inefficiency of spreading everything out more has to be borne by every member of society.
Everyone pays in life-seconds, in money, in pollution, in reduced societal interactions.
In the city I live in (somewhere in Europe), there are no such restrictions. Every time someone sells their house they split the terrain in two and rebuild because it's more advantageous price wise. As a result terrains got smaller and smaller, we used to have a beautiful city with old buildings, tons of trees, large gardens, a really calm and safe place to raise a family, now it looks like shit and crime has gotten out of control. Now they're building towers downtown for low income housing.
Not a fun experience if you've built your life with your family there.
Areas where it is profitable to do this are areas where housing demand is increasing. Which means that anybody who owns property in such an area can sell it for more than they paid for it, move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble. And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it.
> And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it.
Counterpoint Bay Area. Industry hotspot, liberally allows office development, aggressively fights any new residential develpment and also freezes property taxes at the time of purchase.
Three of those are just other ways of increasing real estate prices. They're additive, not alternative.
Now suppose somebody could knock down your million dollar three bedroom home there, put up five condos that size on the same lot and sell them each for $750K. That'd make the property itself worth more than a million dollars, right?
Prices are high because there is demand. Zoning keeps supply scarce. The reason why you can sell these condos for 750k is because of demand and scarcity. If everyone turned their million dollar home into condos, supply would increase, demand would be met, prices would fall, and suddenly you wouldn't have a million dollar home or 5 750k condos.
On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially. You can even give your house to your kid, and they will pay the tax rate you paid. If you tear out your house and build 5 new condos, suddenly you are paying market rate property tax again.
> Prices are high because there is demand. Zoning keeps supply scarce.
Which is why the price falls from a million dollars to $750k for the same amount of square footage. But now you have five times as much square footage on the same piece of land, which is more than the decrease in price per square foot. And still would be even if the price per unit fell to $400k.
> On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially.
Which is just a facet of existing local tax law. You could get to the same place by just having very low property taxes in general.
Not really. Zoning specifies density limits but demand depends of far more factors. If you replace a mansion with a low density housing project, the reason the price will go down is not due to an increase in supply.
> move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble
People don’t want to leave their homes and move away from family and friends just so a city can grow.
Life isn’t just about money.
I don’t want my city to grow any larger - higher density means lower quality of life for the people who have lived here for decades - aka my actual community.
I understand that most cities also have restrictions like minimum unit size and requirements for every unit to have it's own bathroom and kitchen. In the past people who just started out and poor people had the option to rent such rooms and that way afford to live in urban areas and avoid a crazy commute. To make that work now you have to find roommates and take over a unit that wasn't meant for this use case.
It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have
The silly thing in my opinion is that college dormitories are exactly that type of housing. No kitchens, shared bathrooms. Works perfectly fine for housing large numbers of young people.
Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.
Dorms have RAs, security officers, cleaning staff, food courts, university police, and a wrap of social services that can nudge a person slipping back into line, or send them packing quickly. Landlords, rightly, shouldn't be able to send people packing with little to no notice. Without the security, social services, and cleaning staff I expect any project of the same scale as a large University to catastrophically fail due to public outcry regarding the inevitable decay of living conditions.
The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems?
I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
> The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive.
When did I ever mention housing for the mentally ill?
What I'm saying is I think consenting, functional adults should have the option of living in a dorm-style setting if they so choose.
For one, it's a great way to build community.
For two, it should be a significantly cheaper way to live, which would probably appeal mainly to the poor, but would also appeal to the same set of people that already live with multiple roommates to reduce costs.
Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
I always thought there was a market for "semi-assisted living for non-disabled/non-seniors". If they put a cafeteria (maybe make the bottom floors of the building an open-to-the-public food court) and a centralized laundry service in a large apartment building, it changes the product offering dramatically.
You can monetize the service offering-- I could see charging a few hundred dollars more per month for an apartment that included a meal and laundry service plan. (obviously, some tweaks and fiddling would be necessary, but there's a lot of precedent on the math from college dorm plans out there)
The design of the buildings can be economized: instead of having to give up significant square footage for full kitchens, big pantries, and laundry rooms in most/every unit, you can provide a kitchenette and more livable square footage. You can likely cut out some of the high-amperage circuits necessary for cookers and dryers, and some plumbing for laundry rooms. I wonder if it would be viable to consider as an endgame if remote work hangs around after Covid and we end up with a glut of office-tower capacity, although I suspect the cost to retrofit in enough bathrooms/showers would vastly outweigh the cost of dropping in a dishwasher and stove into each unit.
Maintenance costs likely go down, as you don't have need to install or maintain dishwashers, ovens, in-sink food disposal units, and any sort of plumbing or electrical problems they cause. You have fewer noise, weird smell, and small-fire related complaints.
There's clearly a marketable business around "I'm waaaaay too busy doing Important Business Stuff/Living My Extreme Life/Some Other Self-Aggrandizing Fantasy to worry about the nuts and bolts of living" (See products like Soylent and Huel for people who find preparing food and eating a challenge) and this is just another step on the continuum.
About 20% of the population is living with a mental illness. [1]
Your casual use of "consenting functional adults" is overly simplistic. It is a fact that desperate people make desperate decisions. If you're only allowing such people then we should set an income floor so the poor cannot be preyed upon. Say, the true cost of living in the city? Anyone making less is not in a fair position to consent to such living conditions.
>Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
Hah. Maybe the ones you live in. Can't tell you how many apartments I've lived or been in that had mold, roaches, faulty wiring, dangerous appliances, and the like that went without repair despite repeated complaints over months and years.
So while in theory it's not a bad idea. In practice, because of the same societal problems that make this a serious consideration, projects like this are doomed to fail without massive community support and budgets that would probably rival just giving each tenant a custom ordered bare minimum trailer in a park packed like sardines.
>The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems?
Removal of high-density housing isn't solving that problem, it's just forcing those people into more desperate circumstances.
Who's removing high density housing? I thought we were talking about building dorms? 4 people to a room on bunks with a minifridge and a microwave. Communal bathrooms, showers, and a couple large kitchens per thousand head.
Either you pay for it in full by having them in jail or on the street, or you pay (less) for it by addressing those issues. There is no way to avoid the costs of the fact that we need to help everyone in society.
Boarding houses used to be fairly common, I'm not sure if this kind of regulation or something else drove them out of common use. The idea of not having to deal with cooking or meals out every night has a fair amount of appeal by itself.
Zoning and technology both had a role to play in their demise. Zoning reduced their scope, technology made living outside the city while working more possible and reduced the need.
WeLive apartments are basically dorms for adults. A coworker lived in one for a few months while they got their bearings in NYC. For a slightly inflated rent you a fully furnished apartment with a bunch of people in the same situation as you - instant new network of friends and connections to get you started in a new place.
And we are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses now that some are reopening, these laws were first put in place for related reasons...
Sometimes we need to relearn from the lessons of the 20th century and not go around and build tenements again.
Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.
Consider what we tolerate in the current status quo to weigh whether a tenement is a bad thing, where 90k people live in the streets of LA without running water in a pandemic, ironically camping along surface lots that used to be low cost motels with rooms for rent all over downtown LA, razed in the 70s to make parking for office workers living in the suburbs.
Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and sometimes several family units are packed into a single 1br apartment in LA or in other high COL places as we speak. I've seen bunks for rent that look like they came out of a prison on my local craigslist, asking for $500 a month.
Cheap and communal housing would solve so many ills that currently exist for the working class simply because we refuse to build this sort of housing anymore. Housing that used to dominate cities like LA and gave opportunity to the working poor who couldn't afford a better situation. Housing that we sorely lack, and the lack of which push people into real tenement conditions today, or even on the street, while they work part or full time trying to make ends meet.
False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.
That's a great point! Definitely a negative externality I didn't consider and with this in mind requiring a kitchen and bathroom makes sense. Not sure about minimum unit sizes.
Wouldn't this also be a win for real estate developers and property investors?
- Purchase old home or lot.
- Tear down old structure.
- Build new 4-plex or 6-plex.
- Sell/Rent 4-6 units on a plot.
Example: "ABC" owns rancher on a single plot. Rents out rancher for $4000/mo. Current revenue is $48000/yr. "ABC" turns rancher into modern 6-plex on the same plot. Rents out each of the 6 units for $2000/mo. New revenue is $144000/yr.
Of course, capital required to build a new structure will erode returns for initial years, but as long as the demand to live in Portland is still high, it seems like a more profitable strategy longterm?
Unless I am totally off-base with these assumptions.
This reminds me of what Japan does (or in some cases around the Bay Area). People buy plots not for the house, but for the land. Then they built a new house/building in place of the old one - usually for better efficiency, amenities, and longevity.
I would argue it's a good thing because it reduces sprawl and uses present land more efficiently.
It's better than bulldozing hectares of land to build new developments in these isolated pockets.
Generally, buyers would rather have something new where they don't have to worry about the repairs/maintenance/annoyance that comes from owning older houses, where it ends up being a money pit for future value (not including historical/charming old homes). It's like choosing: would you rather drive a 1990 or 2018 Toyota sedan?
IDK, maybe this is an opportunity for a "home rebuilding" tax credit incentive or some kind of higher tax on developing new land instead of current land?
As someone who moved to the US, I think one realization why this has not really taken effect is that there is just so much land, there is seemingly always more to build on. Thinking about smaller, denser nations, that is just not a feasible strategy.
Yes, that's one of the main goals. They are encouraging affordable 6-plexes in the hopes of making housing in the city more affordable. Note that there is a rent ceiling based on the area, you can't build a 6-plex and charge whatever you want.
This is in fact one of the core criticisms of these sort of policies. The concern is that by increasing the allowed density on land, the underlying price of the land also subsequently increases.
Accordingly the "value" that one gets for their dollar decreases. While before one may have paid 1.2M for an house and full lot, now suddenly 1.2M can't buy a full lot, but 900k can buy a 1000sqft apt part of that lot.
There's an upside for someone that needed more room and could never afford a 1.2M house, or a renter that just wants more apt options, but there's a downside for someone who could afford an entire house but is now seeing the price of an entire house go up.
All this being said, in practice it is arguable whether the land values do increase that much. The fact that these changes are being applied city wide at once may limit the effect.
This would be a good problem to have. Developers are generally not interested in the 4-6 unit buildings. In my city, Minneapolis MN, development is large single family homes or multi-unit (40+) apartment buildings. From my understanding, the problem is generally capital: A 4-6 unit building is too costly for a homeowner or small-time real estate developer to take on, but too small for large well capitalized developer to bother with.
Hopefully, this will change in time. But I think that it'll be large developers building in neighborhoods with homeowners. The equity will end up in the hands of large real estate trusts, and not small time operators.
I think you're right in the short term, but in the long term, if everyone does it, I think it runs the risk of actually providing enough supply to drive the rents down by a significant amount. Maybe enough to reduce profits vs the original $4000 ranch. I feel like this is as significant as the other reasons why denser housing has been opposed.
You do not seem to know what a slum is and therefore I want you to stop misusing that word.
Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all. Because slum residents have to pay for the entire building upfront and build it themselves you can expect the quality of the buildings to be very low.
There are slums in San Francisco. Those so called "tent cities". You get rid of slums by fulfilling housing demand.
> Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all.
Your conspiracy theory makes no sense at all. The role of a government, if any, is to stop people from building shanty towns. That's what building regulation does: stop anyone from building sub-par housing. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that slums pop up because a government stops people from building slums.
> This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction.
And cities were awful due to that, I'm afraid.
> Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use.
There's no need to pull out emotional conspiracy theories. Restrictions are in general due to the need to impose an urban plan that meets the urban planner's established goals for the community and also complies with environmental restrictions, such as traffic and noise levels.
> but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.
Letting people freely build "second buildings on their property" is an euphemism for wanting to build shanty towns with no regard to living conditions or environmental restrictions.
Each plot is defined based on a zoning expectation,which reflects real-world restrictions and an urban plan. If you want higher density construction then just work with your city to rezone and review the urban plan for your neighborhood.
Expecting to be able to just build "houses" in your backyard is how you get firetrap shanty towns that violate environmental and safety restrictions.
Just because you don't know why a fence is placed somewhere, that doesn't mean it has no purpose.
I'm not sure this scans. It would be true if the only regulations that applied were the ones being discussed but Portland goes out of its way to avoid large apartment buildings in many neighborhoods and they have a vendetta against building roads that aren't shit for some reason. If you removed all relevant regulations you wouldn't see the kind of buildings the article is praising you'd see large apartment buildings and suburbs sprawling jnto the woods. Good on Portland for doing something about the situation I guess but it's hard to feel impressed when they created the problem in the first place.
> the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block
Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this? It's not unreasonable for normal middle-class folks to not want to have to live in a problematic, crime-ridden, situation with high personal-security risks and property crime. That's why we pay for police, after all.
> Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this
That's what the article is doing. Lots of people commit crime because they are homeless, or in financial struggle. If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street, and more people would have more money (from spending less of it on rent). That in turn should lower crime.
I think this is a very different approach from subsidised housing and other such strategies by the way. Because those just concentrate poverty in one area, without actually lowering cost of living. Instead it can make things worse, by keeping people who can't afford the area living in it.
> If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street
Lowering the cost of living is probably a good idea, you're not wrong, but there are some people for whom it will never matter how much the rent is, because they're not with-it enough to organize themselves to be able to pay it or to be a reasonable tenant. Mental health programs are the only hope I have for dealing with that, but they're too underfunded and frankly too voluntary presently to make the real difference we seek.
There are a lot of poor people who are not criminals who don't like being lumped in with the criminals. Welcome them, and show by example how to live a better crime free life. Show that education is what made you able to afford fun things. Show that you aren't actually smarter, but a few life choices that they can point their kids to (as an adult it is often too late) can bring their kids to your level.
I’m Appalachian. We have ridiculously low violent crime rates for the levels of poverty we have. I believe that this is a function of population density rather than any intrinsic trait of us hilljacks.
I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that.
There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.
Interestingly, violent crime rates in Appalachia have been increasing over the last 30 years while urban violent crime rates have been declining over the same period (minus the upward trend of the last 3-4 years).
But Appalachia bucks a lot of statistical trends, so make of that what you will.
A pretty good correlation exists between poverty and crime. You see the same kind of reactions in even small cities when there's a plan to build a homeless shelter or halfway house or any other such institutions, nobody wants it in their back yard, nobody wants the negative externalities.
You can call it cold, and it is, but it's also entirely rational.
same holds for sending your kids to a bad school. I had a conversation with someone about how i should send my kids to the neighborhood under performing school rather than private school because I was perpetuating the downfall. I said to him that he was perfectly free to sacrifice his kids on that altar but I reserve the right not to sacrifice mine.
if you want to move to a poor neighborhood with high crime in order to help save it then more power to you. However, I don't fault anyone wanting to avoid it either.
Why, yes; we could bring back a societal safety net and raise the minimum wage, so that it's actually possible for one income to pay rent, utilities, and still have some money left over for saving against a disaster and having some fun. We could take things like "healthcare" or "education" out of the hands of profit-seeking entities and run them with the philosophy that "a healthy population" is a much better profit than "a bigger number in a bank account".
We could even take the money we put into an increasingly militarized, dangerous, and expensive police force and put it into the things that reduce crime by making it a lot harder for someone to fall to the point where the consequences of crime are less than the consequences of being absolutely broke.
We could raise taxes on the tiny fraction of people and corporations who hold the vast majority of the money in the West, and especially the US, and send it back out into the system at the bottom with a basic income scheme, with the actual numbers on these tightly coupled with an assortment of cost-of-living indicators. If companies want to leave places that start taxing them, let them - they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff to fulfill people's needs for whatever they were making, with the profits being shared among the workers.
"But that sounds like socialism! Or even communism!", some will protest. Why, yes, yes it does. The people and corporations who want to accumulate huge amounts of money and power have been telling us that everything that sounds nice is "socialism" for my entire lifetime, and to be quite honest I have been at the point where they are making "socialism" sound pretty good compared to the capitalist hellscape they've turned the world into.
There are, of course, many ways this can go wrong. Utopia's not easy. But the present system sure isn't working either.
I'm probably biased being Canadian, but I feel a lot of Americans talk about social democracy like it's this ideological utopian grandiose dream that's never been tried or achieved.
But in reality, there's plenty of countries who've done it for a long time and had great success with it: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example.
US has crony capitalism, not capitalism. A social safety net is completely viable within the capitalist philosophy, and not considered "socialism". Real socialism is dangerous and people are scared of it for a reason.
> Real socialism is dangerous and people are scared of it for a reason.
Let's be honest: the only reason people in the US are scared of "socialism" is the fact that they've been immersed inanti-socialism propaganda throughout all their life.
Meanwhile, you can pretty much look at any European country to see how millions of people really feel about socialism.
Unless you confuse capitalism with an extremist Ann Rayndian neoliberal framework, and in that sense you can pretty much look at countries such as the Netherlands.
Capitalism is an economic system based on private property on the means of production, and collection of economic rents on the basis of ownership. All European countries have that. The fact that they also tax those rents and redistribute that wealth into welfare makes it welfare capitalism, not socialism.
Although not an expert I've never seen a realistic individual and/or corporate tax rate that would generate enough revenue to enable UBI. Is there one?
Most of those things only work when you have the vast majority of the citizens in the country as net positive taxpayers. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the USA - you're ultimately becoming a "have not" country, full of itinerant people with no employment or prospects, thanks to massive-scale de-industrialization.
> basic income scheme
Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.
Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
> they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff
It's just as likely to be burned to the ground in protest, these days. Much as the computer is more the OS than it is the hardware, the factory is more the business processes + engineering than it is the raw assembly line. Take that magic smoke out and even the nicest equipment will produce nothing. You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
> Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.
How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.
> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e
> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".
The FHA prevented landowners from using peaceful, private strategies to keep poor people off their block (which a 100% rational desire), so obviously they are going to use coercive government-based strategies instead.
Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency.
Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically.
In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up.
It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.
Not all rationale solutions are effective or ethical. Something being rationale does not make it appropriate.
Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it.
So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that.
Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.
> why are the crimes being commited in the first place
Low intelligence, high aggression, high time preference. Mostly heritable. Sad but true. Wish it was different.
> how can we address that
Robust defense of private property (including protecting your community from incursion by criminals) or some way of reducing the number of criminals (most of which are politically untenable in the US, like eugenics, or no longer relevant, like extremely strict immigration restrictions).
> Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug.
No, my solution is keep the dirt physically out of my house.
> So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place?
Poor upbringing and values. It has nothing to do with being poor. Even poor people behave ethically and rich people commit crimes. The common denominator between poor people that commit crimes and rich people that commit crimes is poor upbringing and values.
I can better and more safely prevent myself from being the victim of a white collar crime by performing due diligence. After a crime has been committed, there's often a paper trail and it's easier to seek retribution through the justice system.
The only way to protect myself from street crime and property crime when it already has a foothold in my neighborhood is more policing and vigilantism. The former is difficult right now because a bunch of misguided people think the police are bad and want to defund them. They don't realize that the safety they take for granted is a sign that the police are doing their job. They've never lived in a country with bad policing. With the latter (vigilantism), I place myself and my family at risk. It's easier and far more effective to keep the violence and property crime dirt our of my house and just deal with the white collar dirt.
That's ridiculous, there are other reasons for zoning laws outside of these things. Certain types of housing stock (i.e. condos and townhomes), need to be built to a higher quality than single family homes because it's much easier to tear down and replace a single family home or a rental apartment building should it move into disrepair. Over the long run this very regularly leads to housing units where the maintenance costs are far higher than the mortgage payment.
Multiplex homes also run a greater risk of falling into disrepair over the long term if you have a situation of split ownership.
The solution to our housing crisis cannot be more "missing middle" it needs to be larger scale projects with 50+ units each with strict standards around building quality.
> I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety,
Even these, IMO, are government overreach. Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. Then leave it up to the insurance company to decide what standards will lower your premium.
One insurance company might decide "look at Switzerland - they have very safe houses. Build everything to Swiss regulations, and we'll give you a 90% discount on the insurance price".
Over time, safety and environmental standards, as well as costs to meet them, will get much better much quicker than current layers of government bureaucracy.
The insurance should also cover for things like environmental spills on your land, the cost of pulling the building down and making the site nature again if the insurance is ever not renewed, etc.
If my home fire causes my neighbor's house to burn down and kills his kids, the damage is beyond calculation. If everyone on my block has shitty fire prone houses built to the edge of their property line with no exits, we have a city-wide disaster. This has happened many times all over the country before building codes.
> Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property.
yup, passing that power on to insurance companies is just a different bureaucracy doing similar things, solving nothing more in the process. all parties together and separately need to be involved and invested in maintaining reasonably safe environments, not just an arms-length bureaucracy.
our failure is in trying to pawn off all responsibility to remote agencies and institutions, raher than the parts best-suited for them (bureaucracies are reasonably good at following rules and doing the same thing over and over), and accepting that we can't each absolve ourselves from some of that responsibility.
we want some best-suited regulation, the minimum needed to achieve reasonable safety, and no less, but also no more. regulation isn't good for every tiny tail risk we can imagine, as we see with the housing crisis (in major cities).
> is just a different bureaucracy doing similar things,
A key difference in this bureaucracy is their speed of change. Companies can react rapidly to new technology, new scenarios, and they do so on an economic model.
Gov'ts move slowly and lag technology or current events, they do so on a popularity/political power model.
True, but then companies are only accountable to their shareholders in many cases, and spend money on lobbyists to keep things that way. Economic models can vary widely depending on whether they're based around mutuality or extraction of rents.
> A key difference in this bureaucracy is their speed of change. Companies can react rapidly to new technology, new scenarios, and they do so on an economic model.
Additionally- companies can react intentionally slowly to squander and choke new technologies and scenarios, also doing so on an economic model.
But companies have competitors. If one insurance company requires an unnecessarily burdensome design (or charges unreasonable premiums without it) while another allows a more efficient design which is equally safe, customers will prefer the latter and the former will adapt or lose business.
If the government requires an unnecessarily burdensome design, you're screwed.
Your idea doesn't seem to be thought through -- who ensures the insurance companies are solvent enough to pay out? How do you deal with irreversible damage? Why invest a ton of energy into figuring out the right risk calculations for shoddy work rather than say, "This passes the threshold of really unsafe, don't do it". It's so much simpler, cheaper, and easier to understand to just draw a few lines in the sand.
No amount of compensation can bring someone back if they've been lost to a fire, a deck collapse, a sinkhole, an electrical issue, etc.
The use of lead paint causes irreversible damage to nervous tissue, and lead contamination can lie undetected in soils for years after a property removes all the lead from the buildings.
Why would we want to invest a massive amount of effort into figuring out, e.g., the actual insurance risk of poorly built structures rather than saying, "No, you cannot use highly flammable plastic cladding on your highrise."
Especially if insurance companies can go bankrupt or refuse to pay out. How do victims get made well if the insurance company refuses to pay on some technicality? The last thing I want to deal with is more insurance companies.
> Why would we want to invest a massive amount of effort into figuring out, e.g., the actual insurance risk of poorly built structures rather than saying, "No, you cannot use highly flammable plastic cladding on your highrise."
Wouldn't the insurance company say the same thing? Or rather they would say "we won't insure that thing". Which amounts to "You cannot build that thing if insurance is a requirement".
So now you have a widely distributed system of insurers to deal with making the rules, rather than people I've elected to represent my interests? (Even if said elections don't always go my way.)
Who are those insurers beholden to, what are their incentives to represent the consumer in any way?
I don't mean to imply that this invalidates your reasoning, but I thought it would be interesting to point out that Underwriters Laboratories was a private organization funded by insurance companies and did, and still does, a great job making electrical systems safer.
Some people would like to see more things like that.
> Who are those insurers beholden to, what are their incentives to represent the consumer in any way?
Their incentives to represent the consumer are rooted in the fact that the consumer can switch to another insurance company. Which means that if one has overly strict requirements without charging correspondingly lower premiums, nobody will use them. Then you get the incentives you want: People prefer both lax requirements and low premiums and the insurance companies have the incentive to find a better balance than competing insurance companies.
> Their incentives to represent the consumer are rooted in the fact that the consumer can switch to another insurance company.
Two follow ups:
1) Isn't this inefficient? E.g. insurance is most efficient the larger the pool is. Doesn't this system introduce inefficiencies (and therefore risk) into the market?
2) Do you feel like there are adequate tools to choose between different insurers today, and do you expect that everyone who owns or improves property should be reasonably expected to make an informed decision about which insurance company to go with? It's hard enough now to insure my car, let alone all the individual decisions that go into building a house. (From materials to design decisions to occupancy rates to the health of the occupants, etc.)
The idea that we need a free-market indirection to accomplish what government regulations do just doesn’t make sense to me. If we want fewer homes to flood, we should build homes and communities to resist flooding, instead of giving money to a third-party that takes the risk from us. The problem is the risk, not who holds it.
If you are in a flood plain they do. I assume it's the same for the others. But drainage is really more about dealing with density. In the town/city poor drainage on my lot could flood my neighbors house. In the country there's enough space it's not an issue.
flood plains are usually more to do with elevations. If all of my home's runoff goes to my neighbor, its just runoff now. If their home doesn't have drainage (proper grade, etc), then its getting flooded regardless of your drainage. Your drainage may make it worse, but the reality is that the damage is already done. This may apply for more recent builds rather than homes 50-60yrs old.
As a former Portlandian I’m pretty stoked to imagine where this could take the city! A low altitude densification would beat what’s been done to the inner East side...
Here’s a fun thought experiment... Imagine if most streets became parks/plazas (aside from a few left for utility reasons) and everyone rode (electric) bikes, or similar relatively light transport options. To me that’s be idyllic. Imagine not being relegated to the sidewalk, not having to worry about being hit by some idiot driving way to fast in a residential area.
Edit: What’s with the downvotes? Geez have some imagination. Bikes don’t need to have right of way everywhere either... I guess vehicle-centrism goes far beyond cars.
What you describe requires the elimination of residential zoning completely to allow for small businesses to mix in with the homes. You can't eliminate cars until you eliminate the need for driving to stores and you can't eliminate that without mixed zoning.
I agree with mixed zoning, but you still need to get supplies to the local stores and trash out of the area. Plus you need places for special construction equipment to get in as there is need.
Of course all of the above is a fraction of traffic that we have today. However don't pretend it doesn't exist.
The big requirement for "more cycling", IMHO, is "more errands being within comfortable cycling distance". Mixed-use zoning makes this a lot easier.
(I have never learnt to drive, and rely on cycling, walking, and transit; I find I am generally a lot happier when I live with a lot of errands in cycling distance!)
Before the massive efforts of the auto industry, this is basically what they were. Streets of small European towns still feel this way and the cars feel very much like the interlopers.
That framing as a way to misrepresent the fact auto industry gave people what they wanted. Many newly developed parts of Europe are the same way, because that’s what people want.
Caro's The Power Broker details how Bob Moses was the agent of the powerful forces behind the automobile.
The only stakeholders not represented, or even consulted, were the average taxpaying citizens. Any dissent was ruthlessly squashed.
Urban planners and normal citizens have been critical since the very beginning. The debate really picked up after WWII, with the resumption of peace time economy.
By the 50s, the experts had enough real world data -- more highways creates more congestion, focus on cars to the exclusion of mass transit physically cannot work -- to invalidate the entire premise.
Eighty years later, here we are still clutching at pearls, trying not to faint. As if there's anything left to debate.
I shouldn't be shocked. But somehow I still am. Or maybe just disappointed.
The history of the automobile in America is longer. Until the 1940s you will struggle to find detrimental side effects of automobile adoption. The automobile did for the town what the railroad did for the city. The negative effects of the automobile on American society, as you rightly point, are an effect of the automobiles runaway success. We passed the point where the automobile was a net positive around the 1950s. This is when planners like Moses begin forcing further adoption, that was rightly opposed at the time.
Ya, Caro's summary is very measured, which I think older, calmer me now agrees with:
The problem was never the automobile per se, but the emphasis on the automobile to the exclusion of everything else. Starting with land use policies which only accommodate automobile centric development.
The biggest error in early auto policy, in my opinion, was the emphasis on straight-line speed over continuous flow.
The first cars were not that fast and did not accelerate easily, so it makes some sense that there would be advocacy to get every last bit out of the engine through highway design. Add to that the requisite hype for a new, impactful technology and you get the approach that paved the earth.
But we have gradually come to realize the point of traffic calming, roundabouts, transit-oriented design and other tools that make people stigmergically decide on appropriate trip plans and driving parameters.
If it truly was about reaching a density point where cars no longer make sense we'd have built rail. Why didn't we?
Transportation is fundamentally about time and money trade-offs. Supply goes up and cost comes down or vise versa. If you want cost low you gotta have a lot of supply. It doesn't matter whether the wheels are steel or rubber you just need to have the supply. For an economy to flourish people need to be able to not be trapped going to a job or shopping at a particular store because the cost of getting there is workable but that is exactly the reality that transit scarcity creates.
If it was just about the cars they wouldn't have spent the 60s and 70s killing mass transit projects while also killing highways. Infrastructure development in the US ground to a halt because in the 60s the upper middle class managed to get far away from the poors for the first time in history and they wanted to keep it that way by keeping the cost of living outside the inner city from getting too low.
Moses' innovation was getting the poor to unwittingly fund the segregation, looting the cities to fund the suburbs. An innovation then copied nationwide.
I'd only be guessing, but I think the highways and freeways were then defunded in turn because those same financiers couldn't figure out how to profit from further investment. Or maybe they decided to end their partnership with organized labor. Or maybe cashing in other rent seeking opportunities, like ending usury protections enabling explosion of consumer debt, were more promising.
People didn't want cars, they wanted what the gov't subsidized. Here in the US cars are subsidized and transit, biking, walking is penalized. These dials are turned differently in different countries.
In the UK where I live the government subsidise rail. Rail is very expensive, slow and unreliable especially compared to my diesel car.
I would rather cycle to the train station, get onto the train with my bike and then cycle the other side to work. However it costs me almost twice as much to do and takes me 3 times as long.
Even with all the taxes on fuel, emissions and the price of repairing what is now an old car (my Car is over 15 years old and has done many many miles). Driving is cheaper, generally gets me there quicker even when travelling across the whole country.
Rail tickets keep on increasing in price and the service never improves and the whole experience is unpleasant.
In the rest of Europe cars are just taxed heavily and people still buy them. This idea that people don't want cars just isn't true.
In the UK where you live the government ripped up half the rails, then privatized the rest. Oh, Doctor Beeching! Please, Mr. Branson!
The UK once subsidized a working system, then destroyed most of that system without any resulting cost savings, then sold it to billionaires who it now subsidizes.
This old attempted gotcha. It doesn't prove what you think it does.
I am well aware of the story. BTW British rail stopped being profitable back in 1955 (7 years after nationalisation).
It proves that maybe you shouldn't let government take public ownership of companies. Government will frequently provide the worse of both worlds as it tries to appease everyone and ends up serving no-one.
The result for the UK is that we have a very expensive rail service that is horrible to use and it is simply cheaper to drive.
The automobile was the original "clean" transportation. The alternative at the time of its adoption was the horse drawn carriage or buggy. American cities were literally knee deep in manure. Exercise: Graph the adoption of the automobile to the prevalence of cholera in the United States.
Pedestrians don't mix any better with (electric) bikes that are trying to get places than they do with cars. Reasonably broad and well-maintained sidewalks are essential for everyone's comfort and safety.
In practice, they do. Bikes are much smaller, much nimbler and much slower than cars. Unless the street is completely packed with pedestrians, fully pedestrian streets work well with ebikes.
This is from experience riding bikes and having people ride bikes next to me in fully pedestrian streets as dreamt about by GP.
I have a very different experience than you. I ride or walk everywhere I go.
Bikes may be slower than cars, but -- when they're being used for commuting, not toodling around on a Sunday afternoon -- they are much, much faster than pedestrians.
When I'm walking, I don't want bikes whizzing by me at three times my speed. When I'm biking, I don't want to be constantly worrying about people on foot -- or their kids, or their dogs -- suddenly stopping or changing direction without looking.
There's one bike-and-ped bridge I used to cross for work, and as a cyclist I did find pedestrians very annoying--they take 90 degree turns across the trail without looking at all -- but that's only one very crowded section. (and as a pedestrian, the cyclists were never a problem for me there.)
But that's one crowded bridge. On most roads, people walking in the roads instead of the sidewalk wouldn't matter to me. You could 10x the number of pedestrians and it'd be fine in most of my city (Austin TX). Maybe that'd change if it were pedestrian-friendly and we ended up with 50x the number of people walking, but this is a problem I dream of.
"having a bell, ringing it when you overtake pedestrians, and waving and saying thanks" helps from both sides of this, IMHO. Bonus points if you maybe holler "cute dog!", "great hat!", or some other compliment instead of "thanks!".
I, too, ride or walk everywhere I go, and have several shared cyclist/pedestrian paths that I use a lot. My least favorite thing to encounter on the path, walking or riding, is that asshole with the multi-thousand-dollar racing bike and no bell who just blazes past me with no warning. Fuck that guy, "share the road" works both ways.
Yeah, I will go out of my way to avoid shared paths, so I guess we just have different tolerances for these things. :)
I do have a bell and a voice and I'm ready to use them if needed, but I'm happier when they're irrelevant. I take pedestrian priority and safety seriously when I'm riding (as I hope others do for me when I'm walking), so if I can ride in an area where I have less of that worry, I will.
Sure. Getting rid of sidewalks means that the entire street becomes a sidewalk. This means that traffic becomes much more distributed amongst parallel streets, and that pedestrian density drastically falls as a result by an order of magnitude or more. The result is that cohabitation between pedestrians and cyclists becomes much easier, as I have noticed when my city did exactly this as a result of the pandemic.
When I'm walking with my 8-year-old, we both scramble right the hell out of the street if there's a car anywhere in our vision. Neither of us could care less about a bike somewhere. It sure doesn't feel like we're being irrational.
Well, I think bikers have a lot more incentive not to hit people from a personal damage point of view. I mean they’re about as vulnerable as a pedestrian in a collision. So I think you’re thinking right about the risks.
Not to mention the speeds and mass involved, and visibility that a cyclist has vs a driver (without even starting to consider the vehicles that are popular in the US).
Personal EVs such as scooters, EUCs, bicycles, and non electric options are smaller, have more throughput, and are less dangerous. Imagine a 2 lane road, turned into a park with smaller two lanes for 2 way bike traffic. Just beautiful.
Indeed, a two-way bikeway takes up the same space that car drivers consider to be one lane, so you can take a two-lane road and convert it to a bikeway with spacious sidewalks. As a bonus, such a road will have throughput that car drivers cannot even dream of.
Yes, they do. Do they mix perfectly? No. But a person + 30 lb bike at 20 mph is safer for pedestrians in a collision than 4000 lbs of rigid steel and plastic at the same speed or faster.
Note also that bike paths and rights of way are not designed in mostof the US to prioritize bikes OR walkers.
Imagine if roads and roundabouts were designed exclusively for bikes and pedestrians.
I like almost all of this. I have one minor concern, the maximum home size is dropping from 6750 to 2500 square feet. Which is probably fine for a nuclear family, but in my neighborhood, such homes are largely occupied by multigenerational families. In areas closer to colleges and universities, those homes end up being shared by large groups of students. Both of these populations will take a hit under this policy.
> ...2500 square feet. Which is probably fine for a nuclear family...
Post-War homes (e.g. after WWII) in America were intended for the nuclear family and were typically under 1000 sq/ft. Most 60s and 70s ranch homes were 1200-1700 sq/ft and considered spacious.
A modern 2500 sq/ft house is at a minimum 3 bedroom, 3.5 bath, and a bonus room.
You can live in a 1200 square foot home as long as you have access to outdoor spaces and a third place down the block. I live in an 1100 square foot post-war home with my fiance and it's plenty of space for what we want to do with our lives. Other homes in the neighborhood are much larger but don't have a back yard or trees on the lot. So we're basically in this beautiful thoughtfully-built 40's era home surrounded by cedar trees, while our neighbors are these huge ugly 2-story houses rammed right up to the back edge of their lots with no yard.
You do have to get creative with second bedrooms by installing Murphy beds or otherwise reducing furniture size and floor space. Modern furniture is way too big to fit in the rooms of a post-war house. A stacking washer/dryer is very useful. Basically anything that substitutes vertical space for horizontal space will help immensely. Ikea has stuff that's size-appropriate but very cheap.
The reason most houses are 2500 square feet nowadays is because you have to maintain a space for all the things you want to do inside your house. Whereas if you share space with your community for those things that many people do then you don't have to maintain a separate space for it.
We live in an 1140sqft house, just 2 of us. With just 1 (small) bathroom it is less than ideal, particularly when we have guests, but it works -- just. It is basically a box of a house with 3 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a place to eat. There is no "extra" space aside from the rooms -- no wide hallways, no sitting areas, no extra horizontal surfaces to put junk.
Of course, we have more space than we "need" -- 2 additional bedrooms. But, again, they're just large enough for what they do. 1 has a guest bed (and not any room for anything else, really) and the other is an "office" which is handy during covid-19 for sure.
If we had kids, there would be room for them to sleep, but no playroom, for example. Our laundry is in the garage, as is our "workout room". That space is not counted in the official size of the house, because the garage is converted.
It is pretty "comfortable", but that's to say, "just enough". Each room is 12x12, there's no "free" space. There's no "extra" space in the house in general; for example the kitchen table is where all of the projects happen (wife was making some jewelry the other day, I've soldered and built computers and so on there).
The additional things we'd want are all luxuries.
* Indoor room where we can work out (treadmill, bike, elliptical are all in the garage)
* Master bathroom with an actual walk in shower, space where we don't have to squeeze past each other getting ready, etc.
* Closet space
* Garage that can be used for parking cars and bikes, working on things, etc. (I've had a bike on a stand in the backyard for a month now, as I work on building it, and parts strewn all over a patio table)
All totally unnecessary, of course. But given that we have a decently-sized lot for silicon valley (6000sqft) it would be nice to have more indoor space. Especially since I spent all my waking hours in here now :)
1200 SQF is fine if you have some kind of storage to rely on, don't need two home offices for two people WFHing, have only one kid, and don't need space for a musical instrument of some kind. Otherwise...it isn't workable.
Maybe if we didn't have a kid? Or if I could convince my wife to give up some things? We were just in the housing market and had to pass on these smaller houses very quickly. Not only that, but bigger houses were only 10-20% greater in cost than smaller ones...it was a no brainer to go with 2000 SQF.
Most of your objections essentially agree with parent comment's coda:
> The reason most houses are 2500 square feet nowadays is because you have to maintain a space for all the things you want to do inside your house. Whereas if you share space with your community for those things that many people do then you don't have to maintain a separate space for it.
If you go to an office and keep your instrument in a locker someplace with practice rooms and your kids spend a lot of time elsewhere (outside, neighbors' houses, etc) then it probably is?
But yeah, for my wife and I (who only have one kid, but may want more) it was still the same thought process as you. We've been living in 1200 square feet with an 8 month old and we make it work but we're both working / studying / networking from the living room and going a little batty in the process, not to mention that our kitchen is tiny and probably not ventilated well enough given that the stove and oven are gas.
So we went for 2500 rather than enter the market and incur closing costs again if we want another kid or both wind up permanently remote post-COVID.
I am living in the latter with my wife plus one small child, and it's clear to us that we want more space for children later. 2500 sqft seems pretty large, but not crazy large either, especially with ~3 kids (=just two generations).
Agreed. I grew up in a 2400sqft house, there were 4 of us. Ample bathrooms and bedrooms and an office, and 2 living rooms plus a separate dining room. Not massive, but larger than necessary for 4.
The houses at my local historical center were much bigger. Sears sold many different sizes of house in the early 1900s and some were pretty large even by today's standards.
I have noticed that as houses approach 2000 Sq feet that luxury goes up faster than space, almost as if there is an asomtomic limit in that area. That is people buying smaller than 2000 seem to be looking for more space for the money, while those looking bigger are willing to spend more for the space to make it nice.
Am I correct in thinking that attic space doesn't count as square footage? There are hardly any attics in Seattle, they've all been converted to cramped living space and everybody stores their crap in the garage.
You can put a lot of people in 2500 square feet if you design it well instead of just slapping walls together.
The usual is to count "finished" space. So if an attic has been converted to a bedroom like the house I grew up in, that would normally be counted as part of the house space. Same with basements. My current house has both an attic and a basement but they're very unfinished. My basement can get wet so I don't store much down there but there's a lot up in the attic. Having storage space outside of the living quarters makes a big difference.
It leads to interesting quirks in real estate listings, where identical houses get listed with very different sizes. Example, my house was listed at 1500sqft. Same model one row over was listed at 2000sqft. The 500sqft different is the basement - it's finished in both homes, but was not part of the original building listing (1972).
A lot of these construction companies have figured out that most of the labor is in the walls. In a square room, the walls are sqrt(2) of the area. Bigger rooms = lower cost per square foot.
Another hallmark of these houses are complete lack of trim. They're just big boxes.
A more future-proof way to get around these building code limitations is 1) attic space, and 2) higher ceilings. You get a better feeling of space, and you can get more board-feet of storage in the same footprint.
Seattle is also full of illegal remodels, only some of which a lender will balk at (source: bought a quirky home, the owners had to remove features for us to buy it).
If you don't have a garage, a decent attic, or a basement--and maybe you don't have great closet space--you're now possibly talking about taking up a "bedroom" as a storage area. And, to another comment, I generally like the main area of the house being fairly (though probably not 100%) open. But having big bedrooms and bathrooms may or may not be something you value, but they're not generally super-efficient unless, say, you want your bedroom to also be your office.
It's certainly not the norm. But we're not talking about average house size, we're talking about maximum house size. You're clipping off the edge of the bell curve. People with big families don't get to live in Portland?
FWIW he's a single dad, and au pairs aren't always on duty. It's less lavish than it sounds.
It'd be interesting to take a look at how much existing housing exceeds 2500 square feet, and how it is occupied. It's quite possible that not allowing new construction over that size would leave plenty of it available.
The image near the top of the article explicitly states the previous maximum house size was 6750 sq ft, and new maximum house size for a "1-plex" is 2500 sq ft.
2500 square feet is considered a large house in most of the world. I have lived with a group of students, a nuclear family, and with multiple generations in houses smaller than that. It is definitely fine for all the use cases you list.
Keep in mind that Americans on average have been raised in different environs, and likely different habits from the people you lived with. If you've always lived in close proximity, you've developed ways to cope, which people who've lived in copious space haven't. As an example, people who grew up in the country often find cities to be claustrophobic, impersonal, and uncomfortable. So you can't really say "it works for people in X culture, so it'll be fine for people in Y culture."
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Culture is not a fixed thing. The majority of present day US citizens do not believe slavery is acceptable, but in the past a majority were prepared to tolerate slavery. Yes, changes to housing will bring about changes of attitudes to housing, but so what? That has already happened---US houses have grown by 40% since the 1980s per the BBC article. Why could this not happen again?
Culture isn't fixed, but it can be slow and resistant to change.
To use your example, ending slavery took a civil war that almost ended the US. And we're still dealing with the aftermath (economic equity, police brutality, etc).
My point is that it doesn't seem like you've bothered to put yourself in the shoes of the people that this will affect. You're effectively saying "it's what I do, so it'll be fine for them".
The change in housing size that you're talking about encompasses a 40 year period, your slavery example, much longer. Culture can change, but it doesn't happen suddenly, by fiat, it happens on generational timescales.
Do you think every house in Portland is going to be bulldozed and rebuilt inline with the new regulations? More likely it will take decades before the changing regulations are reflected in the housing stock.
What does "housing poverty" mean here? As far as I can tell it means "houses smaller than I am used to". In which case I have to ask what is the concern with houses less than 2500 sq ft? I can't find any evidence that housing size, above some minimum[1], is correlated with happiness. See e.g.
This desire for extremely large houses just seems to be a combination of prior expectations that houses will be large and status seeking. Expectations can adjust over time and I don't put much value on status seeking.
[1] The BBC article lists "4 rooms per occupant" as the threshold beyond which there is no increase in satisfaction.
Yes, I misinterpreted the article. I assumed it was 4 rooms that each occupant could access, including shared rooms such as living rooms. A better summary is:
* moving to a larger house leads to a small increase in "housing satisfaction" in most cases;
* houses larger than 4 rooms per occupant bring no increase in satisfaction with increasing size.
My family is considered "underhoused" by the US government, because we have fewer bedrooms than occupants. I certainly don't feel it myself. We have three bedrooms for the four of us, and even chose to use the third as a media room until the kids get sick of the bunk beds.
We've lived in both sorts of situations in the recent past. Extra rooms give you flexibility and the opportunity for privacy, which is really nice with young children who aren't sleeping well yet, and might disturb their siblings if they were bunked. There are trade-offs involved in both situations, which one is better for you just depends on what you value.
I generally think that there's too much of a slant toward large houses in the new housing stock in the US, though - they're more expensive to buy and maintain, and generally not the best choice for young people.
Most of the US still lives in really crappy old homes built in the last century, with asbestos insulation, tar shingles, fiber board, and wood rot.
Doesn't really compare with building standards in Europe, even Eastern Europe.
China also has modernized and built some awesome cities.
Middle East, and Asian cities are also pretty modern.
I'm not really sure who you are comparing to? India? Africa?
US homes are relatively new compared to many of the homes in Europe, so I'm not sure why you're calling them 'old'.
Also, Europe's prevalent masonry construction might "feel" solid, but that doesn't equal a high level of "building standards". A whole lot of western safety/environmental/plumbing/electrical/accessibility standards have changed in the past 20-70 years.
Much in the way chrome-adorned '60s US cars "felt" solid, and older people scoffed at the inornate "plastic cars" of the '90s, this perception of quality didn't translate to actual engineering superiority.
1) asbestos wasn't really used widely for insulation in the normal sense of that word.
2) in the right climate, tar shingles are actually extremely effective as a roofing solution.
3) the US does not have large supplies of bricks, and many areas do not have easy access to stone suitable for building (which is also extremely expensive in terms of labor). Hence wooden frame construction.
4) fiber board, when properly isolated from the weather, is an extremely durable and strong material. it is unfortunate that it tends to require environmentally unfriendly resins to manufacture.
5) there is a LOT of poor construction in the USA, but picking on particular techniques isn't the way to describe the problems.
6) there are many cheap houses in the USA that have much better energy efficiency than classic old houses across Europe, specifically because they use wood frame construction and moderate levels of insulation and air sealing.
Depends on the group of students or size of a multi-generational household. I live in a 14-person house, and previously a 19-person one.
Students frequently enjoy larger communities, especially since it's often a lot more affordable to have a large house split 10-20 ways than a medium house split five. ("Medium" is a stretch, since five bedrooms is a large house in the US.)
These aren't the most common arrangements, but that doesn't mean they should be prohibited.
> Which is probably fine for a nuclear family, but in my neighborhood, such homes are largely occupied by multigenerational families.
In that case, build a duplex or triplex designed with easy (but lockable) access between units. That gives you a lot of living area, and the same building is also suitable for housing multiple families if it ever changes hands.
> In areas closer to colleges and universities, those homes end up being shared by large groups of students.
Multi-unit buildings with each unit shared between two people, or (now also allowed by the new zoning) 'cottage cluster' arrangements with a number of physically separate homes sharing one driveway/common area.
These rules (lockable access between units) work well for student-occupied dwellings, but not so much for multi-generation families, that have a completely different dynamics of what "shared" and "private" areas are, and how they are used.
I don't really understand what the drastic difference there is supposed to be. If you want to use all the units as a shared living space, just leave the common-area connecting doors propped open. This is functionality that many duplex and triplex units already have.
Wouldn't joining 2 duplexes needlessly duplicate common areas? I would think a large multigenerational family might want a large family room rather than 2 small ones. Likewise the kitchens. They'd have 2 kitchens, one extraneous and both of them insufficient for the task.
I missed that part. Though both multigenerational families and college students could be served well by multi-structure setups as well. Or in many cases, better served.
Maybe the college students -- but in my experience, rent in large houses is cheaper per-room than smaller apartments. My brother is a professional musician and lives with others near/at the poverty line -- they simply can't afford to live in smaller places. Maybe that will change on the supply side, but more likely, demand will rise just as fast.
Multigenerational families are not better served. If they're doing a new build, it can work. But imagine trying to purchase not one, but four houses on the same lot. That's a helluva coincidence to wait for, for them all to be vacant simultaneously.
I am right now and have done so in various ways for the past 25 years, it is vastly better to have some separation.
I'm not going to generalize. But for us, multi-generational homes happen over time as opposed to moving the whole family at once regardless. Kids grow up and need space, but can't afford to buy a place. Parents get older and move in with kids, etc etc.
No, I haven't. Some of my immediate neighbors do; one household immigrated as a family so they're on the forefront of my mind. I appreciate your perspective; thanks for sharing.
Also, I think the point about big homes and multi-generational families is on-point and wasn't trying to disparage it. I just was pointing out that there is at least some mitigation.
Or, maybe armchair central planners like you and I and the Portland City Council shouldn’t decide what’s best for people we’ve never met and let them decide instead.
> shouldn’t decide what’s best for people we’ve never met and let them decide instead.
I totally agree!
I didn't mean to imply this bit about house size is good. In general, this measure removes piles of restrictions on land use and that's one of the big reasons I like it. I was just pointing out that there are some work-arounds.
I was a little confused by this, but correct me if I'm wrong but the 2500 sq ft limit is just for R5 lots correct? Larger lots, like R10, can have much larger dwellings on them still.
This is an issue in Vancouver. One large house built to house an extended family of sometimes as many as 20 people.
Its a way of depriving city of property taxes, that would have otherwise have taxed multiple dwellings for the same amount of people. So the 2500 sqft limit is to collect more tax.
I live in vancouver and I don't have a problem with high occupancy houses that are actually utilized. It's the jerks in GRVD who have unoccupied mansions that have been blowing up housing costs that I have a real problem with. Vancouver has addressed that, but afaik Burnaby, tricities and north van haven't.
That's just reality. EVs solve a specific aspect of cars but they still have the main problem: they are unreasonably large. The future of urban mobility is also its past: walking.
I would say that the main problem with EVs right now isn't that they're large. You can get an electric Smart or Twizy and those aren't much more than driver's seats on wheels. And don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good: plenty of people who have full-size cars now would switch to something like one of those to save money once it was cheap enough...
...if not for the actual practical problem, which is that for a lot of people living in dense urban areas, there's no way to keep an EV charged up. Street parking and surface lots don't have chargers, old parking garages and almost all new parking garage construction doesn't have chargers, apartment buildings or shared houses with official or ad-hoc parking don't have chargers.
I have that problem myself: I'd probably have replaced my car with an EV already if only I actually had somewhere to plug it in.
The parent comment is saying that all cars, even ones that are small for cars, are unacceptably large. The implication of their conclusion is that they even think the same of bicycles and electric scooters, which, after all, still take space to park.
However I agree with the rest of your comment. My wife and I looked into plug-in hybrids (all the tax credit, none of the range anxiety) but there's no place to charge it so we just got a regular hybrid.
Eh, smaller electric cars don't help in practice because various regulations require buildings to come with a parking space of a certain size. Nobody is out there building smaller parking spaces for smaller cars. Indeed, Bay Area city Sunnyvale infamously outlawed "compact" parking spaces.
Electric bicycles by contrast take up the same space as any other bicycle.
Walking and biking with some public transit to fill the gaps honestly.
Outside of the obvious downsides to a car centric culture, the united states would definitely have healthier people if it were feasible to walk to more destinations. And I don't mean this just on an individual fitness level either. Getting out of the car and actually walking and interacting with people is an important community aspect, which this country severely lacks.
I think this is easy to wish but hard to realize, considering the US population is rapidly aging. There is a balance between prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists while still supporting reasonable mobility for those not in their prime as well as daily freight/parcel services.
That's why you can't have a city based on cars. The very old cannot drive! I don't know why this perfectly obvious and globally well-known fact is so little-known to Americans.
There are entire retirement communities where the elderly use their golf carts and cars to get around (Sun City, FL, The Villages, FL, etc).
Not only do the very old still drive, many prefer it because they’re old.
Go talk to some old folks. I did when I put together a community funded Tesla Model 3 rideshare for them in a retirement community. The pool is their preferred exercise method to walking, especially in inclement weather (you ever walk a mile in the July Florida/Texas/Arizona heat? I have in all three, and I would not recommend it).
EDIT: @jeffbee Responding here as HN has throttled my comment replies.
> That's contrary to all available data. People over 70 are the least-likely group of adults to have drivers' licenses and have the highest public transport mode share or any group, take the fewest trips, and travel the smallest distance per day. The elderly are arguably the people who stand to gain the most from compact patterns of development.
And yet, they choose to live in low to medium density areas that require an automobile versus urban areas. Behold the revealed preference!
That's contrary to all available data. People over 70 are the least-likely group of adults to have drivers' licenses and have the highest public transport mode share or any group, take the fewest trips, and travel the smallest distance per day. The elderly are arguably the people who stand to gain the most from compact patterns of development.
Let's get to the bottom of this then. Propose 3-5 questions that you think would provide sufficient insight into the senior housing preferences of this older/elderly cohort and I will get them to a contact at Pew Research to inquire and provide objective data back (unless you have citations you have not provided in thread).
This is ridiculous. Yes, of course, provide alternatives for the less able but that is a very small population at any age group. My grandmother at age 86 gets around in Germany on foot and by bicycle just fine. She doesn't have a car and has access to the subway for longer distances. We can still heavily pedestrianise while also allowing for deliveries and the less able, there are many successful examples.
I agree that getting rid of government mandated parking will decrease government-subsidized car storage (which is good across the board). Sure that will affect EVs, but it will also affect ICEs equally.
There won't be local demand unless the charge points are already there. If you rely on on-street parking, and your neighborhood doesn't have chargers, you're not going to buy an EV and hope someone installs a charger. Maybe, you'll buy a plugin hybrid for other reasons, and there might be demand that way[1]. Of course, if you do have an EV already, then you have a lot harder time finding a new rental.
[1] although, my plugin has very good range on gas, and next to nothing on a full charge, so I really only charge if it's free, gives me good parking, or to exercise my backup generator.
Then the people who can afford to adopt early get charging stations and the blue collar neighborhoods don't because they don't have as many EVs and then of course the politicians pile on by passing fuel taxes or registration surcharges because a) they're largely unaffected b) the state loves money and c) "only backwards hicks drive ICEs in 2030 anyway" (or something like that) and it becomes yet another regressive tax.
I think the sentiment is good but I see it going wrong quickly unless you have some way to ensure that every neighborhood gets at least enough charging to adopt EVs in the first place.
The market will probably solve this, but it might not necessarily do so in a way you like. No widespread EV adoption and cars running on oil indefinitely because EVs are not viable for most people would be a perfectly valid free market solution to the problem.
That seems unlikely. If people demand off-street parking as part of a new home, they can also demand a charger. Or install one themselves. There is no prohibition on off-street parking linked to these changes.
As for on-street parking, I don't feel particularly inclined to subsidize (via my tax payments) parking for the public's gross overuse of cars. I'd rather my tax dollars go to transit and alternative infrastructure.
Strange that a country that so strongly professes its belief in the power of free markets can't allow said free market to figure out the optimal amount of parking.
but in my neighborhood, such homes are largely occupied by multigenerational families.
In my neighborhood, these are also duplexes (maybe coincidentally, maybe not, I dunno), which are allowed to be bigger.
In areas closer to colleges and universities, those homes end up being shared by large groups of students.
Yeah, but these big houses are probably old. In the universities near me, such large houses haven't been built in my lifetime. I doubt it's too much different in Portland.
As somebody living in Portland, there just aren't many existing homes over 2500 square feet (relatively speaking, compared to other homes) in the first place. We have skinny blocks through most of the city, so there's less places for McMansions to even fit. The ones that do exist within city limits are generally $700K and up - if you want under that you'll need to look in a high-crime neighborhood.
If you want an existing home over 5000 square feet within city limits, expect to pay upwards of $1.2 million if you want to live out towards the suburbs, or $1.5 million for something closer to dense walkable neighborhoods.
Would these groups still choose to share a kitchen, bathrooms, etc if they could find co-located, individual units at a similar, affordable price? I doubt it.
Some of us would, but even if not, why would it be the same price? More housing should lower the cost for both, and paying for 4 bedrooms + 1 kitchen should always cost less than 4 bedrooms + 4 kitchens.
Personally, I'd like a private bathroom, but prefer the shared kitchen, dining room, and living room.
You can still have homes up to the full size you're talking about so long as they're multifamily, if anything that's better for multigenerational homes...
Slightly off-topic, but to me these kinds of articles always offer an amazing insight into how the average (okay, if they're literally average or not is debatable) American thinks cities and urban planning.
If you read a bit through the comment box, about half of the comments are from people scandalized and terrified that Portland will immediately turn into a huge dumpster rife with crime because of the new legislation. The gist of it is that having 3 or 4 apartments per lot (in a few select lots, mind you) will turn your city into a crack den.
That is a really quaint mindset. I can only imagine what those people commenting on the news would think about Paris, London or basically any major city outside the US where having dozens of apartments per lot is the norm and has been for decades or centuries.
> They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning. This forestry zoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.
Honestly, the way this is framed sounds to me as if we were still living in the 15th century where "aristocrats" are trying to live as far away from the "plebeians" as possible.
Parts of London and Paris now do resemble crack dens -- but its less about the density and more about the people living there, notably the changing demographics taking place in those cities in the last decade.
For landlords, you're correct. Rents will go down as more housing floods the market and the profiteering will cease. Look at Vancouver BC, where rents are significantly lower than land prices.
But I don't entirely agree with this point. Regular folks that are getting rich off property are the single family homeowners. Density tends to increase land value. This law makes single family home land more valuable and easier to sell, since a developer can plop townhomes or a second house in the backyard and profit. So now on top of regular people, you've got builders competing for the same properties, hence prices will rise.
I'd be worried if I owned a townhome or condo, since I wouldn't have any empty land to be built on and that's the kind of home that will be built on the now upzoned land. But there are no swathes of empty land in Portland to fill with more single family homes.
Folks that own property the in the (now up-zoned) expensive neighborhoods are NIMBY because they want to preserve the low density neighborhood they live in that are close to everything, not because they want housing prices to soar more. Older neighborhoods like that just aren't built anymore--developers pick off the shelf of 1-5 nearly identical plans and fill a neighborhood with them. Old west coast city neighborhoods have a cool vibe that doesn't really exist in many places anymore, and can't really be replicated. With this up zone that will be going away over time.
That's OK, because these neighborhoods should have been upzoned a long time ago and the land needs to be accessible to more people. But the conversation is more nuanced than "my housing price will go down!!1"
> But there are no swathes of empty land in Portland to fill with more single family homes.
This is a key thing. There is very little undeveloped land within Portland city limits, and the vast majority of it is lots under 1000 square feet. Most of what is there is in places that would be expensive, laborious, or unappealing to work with, like the sides of heavily sloped hills, lots completely surrounded by other lots without road access (have fun trying to work out right of way for a driveway), or waaay out nearly in the suburbs, at which point you may as well go five more minutes in that direction and save yourself some on the taxes.
Good. Kids who grow up in Portland now might have a chance to keep on living there, instead of getting thrown off at high speed because they were more suited to a career other than "programmer" like all my artist friends from San Francisco were.
This policy will make SFHs in Portland an extremely good investment in the long term as you can now substantially increase the amount of rentable units on the same amount of land.
If you have the means buy a cheap SFH lot in Portland while you can.
If we really actually want to make housing not an investment then we need to empower our government to fund the development of publicly owned housing for everyone.
I've never understood the arguments in favor of publicly funded housing. Public funding is used for things that are a common good (e.g. roads, public parks, defense, food safety) or that are important but otherwise wouldn't get funded (e.g. basic research). Housing fits neither of those buckets.
If you occupy a publicly funded housing unit, I can't - it's not a public good. And there are always developers and builders willing to stump up cash to build new housing.
There are literally 300 homeless people living in a tent city in a public park in Vancouver right now in part because there is no affordable housing.
Seems to me that there's a market failure here where the market cannot create affordable housing. It's not regulations alone that have made it so that developers can't make affordable housing. The construction costs are simply too high for a for-profit developer to be able to do it.
Housing these homeless people, thus reducing health costs and emergency worker costs is of course a public good. I would like to be able to use that park again.
But aside from all that I don't agree with your narrow thesis of what public dollars should be spent on anyway. If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends. If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
> The construction costs are simply too high for a for-profit developer to be able to do it.
I don't know about Vancouver's specific problems. Why are the construction costs so high there?
In the Bay Area regulations, and tax laws that incentivize holding on to old housing, are largely to blame for the lack of housing supply.
> If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends
Who in turn pay taxes on those dividends. Maybe increase those taxes, and taxes on the property itself.
> If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
Lots of businesses are a good investment. That's not a good reason for the public sector to get into it.
> I don't know about Vancouver's specific problems. Why are the construction costs so high there?
There's no real reason why construction costs are high. As the amount of construction increases, the available labour pool decreases, and labour costs accordingly increase. There is always lots of construction going on. More highly trained trades would help, but easier said than done.
If anything it's more that construction costs are artificially low in the USA since there is a class of illegal immigrant labour which can be exploited and paid low. That does not exist in Canada.
That just sounds like demand is outstripping supply. As you said, there's still a lot of construction going on but it's having no effect on prices. Either those developers are going to lose their shirts eventually by overbuilding (bonanza for buyers!) or there really are that many buyers willing to pay those prices.
It might be worth digging into why Vancouver has so much housing demand. It's a stunningly beautiful city, but the local economy doesn't seem to correlate with the price of real estate. There are no FAANGs paying senior engineers $400k, so why are people spending so much money?
Yeah an important aspect of supply and demand discussions in housing discourse is that demand is liquid and can be effectively infinite because supply creation is constrained by literal real world factors (ie. how many labourers are there, how fast can home designs be developed and reviewed, etc).
So as I said it actually becomes more difficult to build the more you build.
Vis a vis labour demand there's also competition from non-residential construction projects (eg. Amazon building a big warehouse somewhere, dam construction, bridge construction etc).
Housing is an investment, but it isn't a savings account. There is a difference.
As an investment a house is a place including neighborhood to live for a long time. You should be friends with the neighbors. When you get old it is a cheap place to live (you have it paid for). It is a place to save your memories (little Bobby tables bit the rail there...). A place to make what fits your life.
It isn't a savings account to get cash out of when you want some.
Good. What's good for homeowners and landlords is not necessarily good for society. Indeed, the main reason housing is so unaffordable is that we have privileged the equity of homeowners/landlords above all other considerations. It's long past time for these two classes to have a much softer voice at the table.
A question for those familiar with the passed Portland legislation: Does it contain protections for urban trees, flora, and fauna?
Here in Seattle, the ADU boom, and infill in general, is slowly removing the green from our neighborhoods. As density increases, it is important to ensure that the resulting community is healthy and sustainable.
I'm all for more green in cities but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Suburban sprawl destroys far more environment. Density stops sprawl. This is net positive for trees and the environment.
From where I sit in Seattle, I'm watching the trees around our home disappear in favor of five-over-one cubes. I've chosen to live here, in part, because it doesn't feel like a city. When the trees disappear, we are likely to contribute to that sprawl.
Seattle is a city. If you want to live someplace that "doesn't feel like a city" then....don't live in a city.
While, perhaps, you moving might "contribute to that sprawl" that impact will be more than offset by multiple people moving into the greater density being created in Seattle. Overall it's a significant net win for the environment.
To the degree that Seattle is inherently expensive, then sure.
But to the degree that it is unnecessarily expensive because of laws that make it illegal for people to build sufficient housing on property they own, then those laws are bad.
That kinda sounds like "Yeah no one goes there anymore, it's way too crowded".
It sucks to watch the trees disappear, I love trees in neighborhoods too. But at an urban level if trees disappear that's about aesthetics not the environment. Density is really great for the environment because of reduced commute, better insulation(apt vs house), etc..
Economic growth, dense housing, and nature-destroying sprawl with soul-crushing commutes. Every city must pick two.
If you don't want your city to grow, how about voting for anti-business policies? That will stop the jobs growth and stop your city from growing. Then you won't have to deal with change.
Another option is to go full NIMBY and try to block new housing. This will cause housing prices to skyrocket, which will harm all the young people who grew up in your city, the folks who come to fill all the new jobs, and the poor (many will become homeless).
You must decide by yourself what you wish to do. I hope you will make a decision that reflects your core values, even if it comes with some disappointment.
Where are you experiencing the construction of a bunch of five over ones? Definitely not Ballard, which is mostly townhomes. This seems to be a bigger problem in downtown Bellevue (I didn't know what five over ones meant before then!), maybe West Seattle?
The U District? They've been putting up a bunch of town homes north of 45th (so 3 stories, not 1 + 5s), down near U village maybe?
We considered buying a place out there for like 30 seconds, the U District just felt so depressing. We bought in Ballard which has a lot of townhomes (we bought one), but it doesn't feel depressing.
Nah, the U, I was a couple blocks off the Ave by 50th. When I'd walk a couple of blocks to Morsel's new location in the bottom of one of those on 50th and the Ave, I could see 3-4 more of various sizes (ranging from "filling up one plot" to "two or three entire blocks" while I ate if I got a window seat.
The U was a lot less depressing when I moved in around, what, 2012/3 I think it was?
On one hand, no, there's no new protections. On the other hand, trees already have citywide code protecting them [0]; we can't cut them down or prune them beyond reasonable basics. For example, a neighbor recently had a small fire in their front yard from a tossed cigarette butt; the city examined the surviving trees, put up little fences mandating that the trees not be removed or damaged, and ensured that the trees were safe.
We do need more trees outside central Portland, particularly in the eastern neighborhoods [1], and I wish that they would plant fewer deciduous trees, because their leaves block storm drains [2][3].
Yeah, there's some great stuff in here. Lowering and removing parking mandates is huge, too. That allows for a much more walkable city as we don't have to reserve a bunch of empty space for cars.
It would be nice if cities established redevelopment funds, which admittedly would have to be substantial, to properly buy out homeowners and redevelop large tracts of land. The sort of piece meal, plot-by-plot redevelopment that is possible today is just not sufficient to allow for the kinds of redesign that are needed to remake cities.
Buying out existing homeowners reduces concerns about the externalities of densification. Pay them a fair price for their property and the inconvenience/trauma of relocation and then get on with making a truly livable, dense, efficient city.
That all assumes a government is even capable of predicting future trends(will retail die? will the next generation flee the city? will mfg jobs return? etc). But if we're going to play that game, lets play it competently.
I’m generally against eminent domain in the case that land is being forcibly purchased from one private party and sold to another private party. I’m against it because of its very high abuse potential.
Property rights are essential in keeping society civil. Sure, I pay taxes and give up some of my property in order to provide common good. I’m happy to pay for schools and roads. Sure, maybe the government will need to build a highway over my property, I understand it needs a mechanism to do this for the public good. However, if the government forces me to sell to a private party I’m concerned that the reason will be less about public good and more about enriching the private party. It opens up the government to legitimate ethics concerns. It makes people begin to feel cheated out of their property. This is bad for society as a whole.
One great thing about zoning reform is that it's a topic where progressives and Silicon Valley types, i.e. "the grey tribe" [0], have a lot of common ground. I (and presumably many HN readers) support zoning reform for all the typical grey tribe reasons, and progressives support it because they recognize the racist history of zoning laws, which I also find persuasive [1,2].
The more common ground we can find between tribes like this, the less, I think, it will feel like America is coming apart at the seams.
For anyone interested in reading on density, neighborhoods, and what sorts of things work well in cities, I can't recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs enough[0]. She wrote the book in the 60s and it has really stood the test of time.
Edit: I'd add that the book does a good job about explaining the sorts of motivations there were behind un-densifying cities (or keeping density from rising) in the first place.
> Portland’s new rules will also offer a “deeper affordability” option: four to six homes on any lot if at least half are available to low-income Portlanders at regulated, affordable prices.
For a progressive city that views itself no doubt as "believing science", it's pretty amazing they still stick these types of economic restrictions into law. Maybe we should start saying "believe economists" when it comes to these riders? Please just increase the supply of housing. Increase it at the top and the bottom.
I live in the area. Proponents have couched this as a 'progressive' vs. 'nimby' effort, which like the rest of life is not true at all. Housing is complex, not good vs. evil, liberal vs. conservative, urgan vs sprawl. If you doubt this, watch how much this comment is downvoted.
One thing we know, based on over a century of data around the world: increasing density of housing has little effect on affordability, in the long run. More often than not, it has the opposite effect. More simply, we do it backwards: we claim--based on in-migration 'projections' that are nearly always overestimates--that there's a shortage and we must build our way out of it. Example: 20 years ago, Portland estimated a million new residents by 2025. Growth in that period: 105,000, in large part due to annexation.
This leaves out the realities of how things get built. Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups. If it doesn't 'pencil out', nobody will build it. And this is why 'affordable housing' demands, codes, agreements all get bargained down in the end. They have for decades in Portland, despite repeated promises of 'this time, we really mean it'. Developers hold the cards. I could list dozens of projects of thousands of units.
'But government can build/partner!', you say? No, that rarely works either, especially in Portland. 'But this is law and it must be adhered to!', you say? No, that's not true. When it comes to building, everything gets negotiated, and there's nothing that gets bargained harder on than public entities trying to set housing prices.
First of all, there's a really good chance you have the causation wrong. Some city gets really popular, people want to move there, density increases some pittance, and boom, increasing density just caused a massive spike in prices.
And second, today's luxury condo will almost always become tomorrow's "affordable" housing. Developers build something new and shiny matching all the trends, get their money and leave. When whatever style of countertop they are building now goes out of fashion, that place will be nice and cheap.
And lastly, even if that didn't happen, moving someone out of somewhere and into a "luxury" condo, still opens up the housing below. Even if it's someone new moving to town, they are still moving into the new condo, not fighting for the existing stock.
Not sure what "increasing density" you are talking about. No city has done that. SF rejected it, DC, etc. In fact, I'd bet more places have decreased density than increase it. The increases have only come in the past 5 years (Portland, Minneapolis)
There's only one guarantee - limiting density in a growing city with jobs does make housing less affordable. That has been the status quo in every major city in the USA over the past 50 years.
The striking example that comes to mind is Tokyo. Japan liberalized their zoning after their last housing crisis, and median income families in Tokyo can actually afford to buy homes in the city.
Housing isn't seen an investment in Japan, homes actually depreciate! The dynamics are way different, so housing is more affordable, but you won't make any money on it.
Makes sense for a physical good whose condition deteriorates over time.
People making capital gains on houses (whose values are determined mostly by local government and corporate investment relative to the national average) has always struck me as a sign of government being insufficiently aggressive about a) capturing the value it creates with infrastructure investment and b) wringing subsidy from high-paying corporations externalizing the problem of housing their work-forces.
There has never been a city in the US that has made housing more affordable by increasing density or legislating affordable housing. The 'why' of that is complex.
In times of massive apartment booms, rents have in fact held steady or decreased. Seattle is a recent example. There are only so many people who want to live in a particular city, so supply and demand do play a part here.
Based on your logic, we could build more apartments in a particular city than humans exist and rents would continue to go up, even if most of those apartments are empty. That clearly doesn't make sense.
Your last argument misses the point. As cities become more fashionable, not building more housing is a guarantee of increased costs due to supply and demand. In cities like SF, rents continue to rise faster than most cities. SF is also the hardest place to build anything. I wonder if those two are related.
Wow, talk about missing the point. That analysis looks at the correspondence between equilibrium compactness and price. It does not look at the marginal change in price for a marginal change in density.
I hope you can see the logical flaw in your statement "density increases housing costs".
Density and affordability are independent of each other. Affordability is about supply and demand now. Density is about supply only and says nothing about demand.
I have a master's degree in urban & regional planning. I'm a Portland native, and went to college here and studied the city fairly intently. But I'm not writing a paper here on HN.
I think a serious question for American urban planners to contend with is why the aspects of cities they try so hard to preserve were all established before their profession existed.
>If you doubt this, watch how much this comment is downvoted.
>One thing we know, based on over a century of data around the world: increasing density of housing has little effect on affordability
You're not getting downvoted for disagreeing. You're getting downvoted for asserting something that contradicts established economics with no sources, and backing it up with folksy us-vs-them demonization of such iniquities as "developers", "profit", and "negotiat[ion]". On a messageboard that was originally started for entrepreneurs, this is a particularly poor choice of strategy.
the evidence is in fact clear: zoning restrictions make housing more expensive.
On the West Coast, there is a persistent hope (among some) that restrictive zoning will prevent people from moving to the West Coast, but this is an impossible fantasy; it's simply nicer there, and a net westward migration of Americans will probably continue for another century. The ongoing westward migration may ebb and flow, and obscure the impact of policy changes, but it isn't going to go away, and the best choice for the long-term health of the urban ecosystem is gradual densification.
California has already convinced residents and citizens of other states to leave or stay away- it is only migrants from other countries keeping population growth going:
"Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia lost population through net domestic migration between 2018 and 2019, six of which had losses over 25,000, and three of which experienced losses greater than 100,000. The top states with net domestic migration loss were California (-203,414), New York (-180,649), Illinois (-104,986), New Jersey (-48,946), Massachusetts (-30,274) and Louisiana (-26,045)."
Some of this simply isn’t up to humans. The West coast is pretty brutal nature wise. I do think it makes sense in major metros, rural areas (that are burning right now) probably not. A lot of water and resources the city gets still come from those rural areas. If the Hetch-Hetchy burned last week it could have had a significant impact on SFs water supply.
We also haven’t had a massive earthquake in awhile. Lots of unreinforced masonry structures in SF still, entire neighborhoods will be wiped out when it happens. New buildings will need to be much safer than existing ones.
Density sounds good and I’m all for it, we need to scale up our infrastructure though.
Also in SF pro-density movements are painted as pro-gentrification, getting the voters on board is hard.
This all costs money and convincing the locals to spend money now to support outsiders usually doesn’t work. The money will be spent on affordable housing for existing residents. This continues the cycle of new well off residents buying expensive homes and pushing more locals out of state or into affordable housing.
Honestly a big earthquake might be the only thing that forces the city to rebuild with safer higher density buildings.
I figured there'd be a lot of Googling for counter-arguments and some ridicule.
Despite the inherent difficulty in comparing different countries, I do think Tokyo is an interesting place to study. If you've dug deeper on why Tokyo had a period of flat housing prices, you might have noticed the larger picture.
Accommodating more people at the same, high prices is a benefit you seem to ignore. And historic growth shouldn’t be used as an input to an estimate of demand because growth itself depends on supply.
>>And growth shouldn’t be used as an input to an estimate of demand because growth itself depends on supply
This is famously untrue with housing. Because it's so hard to match units demanded to units built, housing growth nearly always precedes demand. How? By leaning on estimates of demand (in-migration, etc.), which I mentioned above. And those estimates are almost always severe overestimates.
"""This suggests that consumption leads production during neighbourhood gentrification, and that developers are reactive, not proactive, in their investment decisions."""
Do you not know basic economics? If I can build a house for $500000 and sell it for $600000 I'm going to build a house. I don't give single damn if someone makes up random numbers. All I have to care about is whether I can find a buyer. Looking for a buyer is equivalent to looking for demand.
Every time someone talks about something as brain dead as saying housing growth precedes demand they are just showing off their loyality to their political "tribe" because there is not enough ignorance in this world to believe something this stupid.
Do you know what 25 year olds are going to do if housing is too expensive but their parents have a nice 2500sqft house that they refuse to sell? They are going to stay at their parents house or live with a room mate because that's what they have been forced to do. If you build a house/apartment of course it is going to be filled immediately because there are already people in the city who are waiting for you to build the damn house. Not a single person has to migrate or come from a different region.
When you are saying "housing growth precedes demand" you are actually talking about "pent up demand" over several decades but trying to hide it via political speech with an agenda behind it. It's basically equivalent to saying "we have screwed up for 50 years now it's going to take decades to clean up the mess we have created so why bother? Let's just blame the few remaining people who are doing their part to fix this mess for causing the problems we have created.".
I agree. Honestly, my belief (no sources!) is that cities are expensive precisely because there are so many regulations and restrictions about what can be done, and where.
Modern cities and suburbs have ZERO flexibility in how they can adapt to changing times. The reality is that zones of certain kinds of activity are fluid. The economy is fluid. The culture, the weather, and the land are all fluid! So why do we try and harden it into a concrete set of laws?
The way we have conceived of things in the US has created such a separation between us. We see our homeless neighbors and we are powerless to help them. They are homeless precisely because of all the ridiculous laws we created.
Creating property lines, and housing laws incentivizes all of us to build high walls, and protect our shit at all costs. We need a community model for housing. I'm not saying I have the answers at all, but it should be clear that what we have now is failing most of us. I say this as a homeowner myself.
Say we have a city. Currently there are 10,000 old apartments. I decide to go in and build an additional 10,000 new apartments. Why would the price to rent one of the old apartments go up?
I don't understand what the proposed mechanism is at all.
In theory construction costs of taller buildings are higher, in practice housing prices far exceed cost of construction everywhere. Some rich people buy luxury apartments as second or third apartments but don't live in them.
None of these are enough to make the entire cities more expensive to live in but they are highly visible so those who need to justify their selfish actions (preventing housing) seek deniable plausibility in them.
>If you doubt this, watch how much this comment is downvoted.
There are few more efficient ways to make it sound like you're not arguing in good faith than to preemptively claim that all who downvote you are being unreasonable.
>Portland estimated a million new residents by 2025. Growth in that period: 105,000, in large part due to annexation
This is self-fulfilling. If you build no new housing, there will be no realized population growth.
>Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups.
Most people do most work for profit. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Developers will, of course, only build when they can turn a profit. That's what capitalism means. But we should be able to arrange things such that the community benefits. If you remove artificial costs (e.g. bad-faith environmental reviews, meaningless red tape for code- and zoning-compliant projects), then the cost of development goes down, and so prices should settle lower. And when the top of your demand curve moves into those new, expensive housing units, they move out of somewhere cheaper. Any supply removes pressure from the market - you want rich people moving into expensive housing, because it means they're moving out of less-desirable housing, which will then necessarily have lower prices.
> Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups. If it doesn't 'pencil out', nobody will build it
This is a huge reason why the notion that our housing affordability problems can be boiled down to "simple" issues of "supply and demand" is false.
Developers don't over build supply. Why would they? There's no economic reason to. Whenever any sort of overbuilding occurs which would oversupply , it is always by some accident (eg. a pandemic), and the taps are turned off immediately.
We see an example of this in nearby Vancouver BC, where foreign buyer taxes and speculation taxes have cooled demand for expensive concrete condo towers which were often marketed in Asia. Suddenly these products are no longer being produced and housing developers have shifted to other things.
I hope you see the problem in your logic. You've just said developers only build when people want more housing when stakkur claims that people only want housing because developers have built more housing.
The conflict is that you two are saying the laws of supply and demand don't work because of two mutually incompatible reasons.
Those two things can't be true at the same time. So either of you must be wrong. And it's pretty obvious that your comment is the only one that doesn't violate basic logic. However, just because you're not wrong doesn't mean you're capturing the whole truth.
>This is a huge reason why the notion that our housing affordability problems can be boiled down to "simple" issues of "supply and demand" is false.
>Developers don't over build supply. Why would they? There's no economic reason to. Whenever any sort of overbuilding occurs which would oversupply , it is always by some accident (eg. a pandemic), and the taps are turned off immediately.
Building exactly as much housing as needed would still result in lower prices. When you have 10 houses and 20 people only the 10 richest people get a house because they are bidding up the prices. If there are 20 houses and 20 people then everyone gets a house. If there are 25 houses and 20 people then landlords will compete with each other and try to lower the rent they charge to fill their units. Villages with 1€ houses exist for a reason.
Do you know what the worst mistake in housing discussions is that everyone tends to make? Everyone talks about the price because that is what people can see and what people are familiar with. No one talks about housing in absolute numbers. Nobody thinks about the fact that one more house means one more person. Everyone is thinking about how an "evil" house is going to raise housing prices even further because people are only familiar with expensive housing because they made it illegal for inexpensive housing to exist, when policies like this reform are intended to allow inexpensive housing.
> Those two things can't be true at the same time. So either of you must be wrong
Stakkur is wrong :)
> Building exactly as much housing as needed would still result in lower prices
Yeah don't get me wrong here. Cities still need to allow developers to build.
Not building is not the solution and only limits supply and results in price pressure on the poor as we've seen in SF, as when a rental turns over a landlord jacks up the price.
My point is simply that private developer is not a panacea since eventually the profit motive stops them from building.
For prices to really fall you need a developer to build an over supply of housing, which means continuing to build in an environment where rental prices are falling and building more housing is worsening as an investment idea. You need developers without a profit motive.
This means that you need to have a government agency that is constantly building housing to meet a set vacancy target, regardless of whether or not it would be profitable to do so.
I have no idea where you are getting your data. Zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status create artificial scarcity of land resulting in higher housing costs. These both create market failures in housing.
In Japan for 20 years there have been federal laws overriding local law that restricts zoning density.
The result: in Tokyo they have been building 140,000 housing units per year compared with 20,000 in NYC and 90,000 for all of California. The cost of housing as not increased at all in the past 20 years because these market failures (in this case also called "rent-seeking") in real estate are not allowed to occur in Japan.
In Tokyo, builders made condominiums too much in small spaces and gov don't stop them well, so these made too much crowd in train/station at morning and lack of nursery school, meanwhile non-big cities losing population. Centralization is another problem.
This, is corruption, mixed with a dash of good old crony capitalism. Portland has some amazing neighborhoods, and this plan enables developers to build relatively high density apartment complexes without parking in those neighborhoods. The dogwhistles of "low density" and "low income" really just mean "no parking" and "full price for most of you".
Anecdotal example - They're building an ~80 unit 3 story apartment complex at the end of a relatively busy street that serves as a main artery for accessing the light rail - so the neighborhood already sees somewhat higher than average street parking usage - and they're doing all of this on a lot that's barely bigger than the houses next to it.
If you're ever curious about how Portland's city council handles most of their issues, just take a look at where the vast majority of homeless shelters are located in the city (hint - its OldTown-Chinatown), compare that to the demographics of the area (Its as dark as Portland gets), and then take a guess where they intend to add more homeless shelters.
Density isn't really the problem in Portland. There are a LOT of empty apartments in this city. There are also a LOT of "short term rentals" in the city that sit vacant.
Here are the concerns that I do not see addressed with this:
1. Will the City of Portland make the required infrastructure improvements to support more density? For example, will the storm sewers, which currently overflow poo into the river, support all the extra.. poo.
1a. Will the city invest in roads and public transit? Walking and biking are both great, but Portland is cold, dark and wet for 7 months a year. No matter how easy and safe you make it, people won't want to ride in those conditions.
1b. Portland 911 systems are currently stressed beyond reason. I waited on hold for 4 minutes on 911 (not non-emergency) a few weeks ago. This isn't a rare occurrence.
1c. Will Portland address the tent in the room? Homelessness is endemic in the city, and it isn't _only_ due to lack of housing. The city has very few options for mental health and drug treatment. Will the city invest in that? If not, livability will be negatively impacted by this.
1d. Assuming COVID ever ends, will Portland be business friendly enough to attract employers to employ the expected glut of people? Right now, large business are leaving Portland (Google has halted its expansion plans for example).
1e. Will Oregon fund schools in a way that can account for the new residents? Schools are already over-crowded and Oregon has one of the worst graduation rates in the country. Will the city/state commit to building schools to support new students? If so, where? They are in-filling in neighborhoods with few plots available
2. This will disadvantage low-income workers who won't be able to afford the new houses. Though more density does lower prices, it normally lowers prices in the less desirable neighborhoods. People of means buy the new condos/townhomes that are built, leaving the poor to take the less nice houses or continue to live further out.
2a. The Utopian dream of a urban playground where everyone is walking and birds are chirping and there is Trek in every garage doesn't play for a majority of people. People rarely live where they work. This is not normally a personal choice. Other factors play into it. Being around their family, kids' friends, better schools, new job on the other side of town etc. I understand the myopia of the crowd on this site is to picture everyone has a well-connected and well-heeled tech worker, but reality is far different.
3. Tongue in cheek-isg: this is all celebrated within the same week as another story claiming people are abandoned the density of SFO, NYC, SEA to work remotely in towns like BOI, AUS, Bend etc. There is obviously a _desire_ to have land and space and privacy. If we go to a remote-first work world, why do we think that anyone would want to live in this density?
On 3, as much as I hope the trend is true (I'd love more cheap apartments in the urban core) I'm not sure it is. People are moving and changing but I haven't seen any data that conclusively proves any narrative beyond 'people move houses even in a pandemic'.
FWIW I currently live in comparatively non-dense socal and I'm planning on moving to Portland this fall. I plan to move into the Pearl district and work remote. I walk all the time (even when the weather is bad, it doesn't bother me) so I think it will be nice to have more than two coffee shops within walking distance. For context, my current city is just big enough to support a niche ice cream shop and some weird restaurants, but not big enough for there to be enough competitive pressure to force them to actually be good. It is nice when a market can be robust enough to force out poor competitors.
A lot of folks moving from real cities to rural areas may be shocked to find how bad the food, coffee, shopping, and arts scenes can be. There's nothing wrong with Walmart+Target, Starbucks+Dunkin'Donuts, Olive Garden+Outback Steakhouse, but it is IMO worth it to have more options, even at the expense of a large lawn and privacy from neighbors.
The Pearl District isn't too bad, especially if you are not a fan of gardening and the such. However realtors tend to use a very liberal definition of what the Pearl District is, and the closer you get to the river, the sketchier it is. Open air drug use, visible domestic violence, car break ins, assaults etc.. But as long as you are above 10th and north of Davis you should be fine
Do you have population numbers since covid/riots? Despite a few article about people leaving Portland, I suspect the population is overall still growing as it has been for the last 140 years.
I am not from Portland, but the rest of the world did not get a great picture of the city during the last two or three months (yes, the word "shithole" was dropped a few times). I do not remember any images of businesses being threatened by cops, but what do I know sitting at the other end of the world.
Where are you from and which media outlets have you been consuming? From a local perspective, the national attempts to portray the protests are rather futile, since the area under contention is only about two blocks large [0] and it's not on most folks' daily walks. Even only a few blocks away, Portland continues life as normal [3], or as normal as COVID-19 will let us be [4].
To follow up on the grandparent's point, the local and imported police are not really doing their job when it comes to breaking up street fights [1] and are trying to pin blame on recently-elected politicians [2]. We're not a shithole just because the fascists have come to town to have fights, and definitely not just because some of those fascists are employed by the federal government.
So, yeah, where are you from and what have you heard? It sounds like you don't know much of anything of our local situation, from "the other end of the world", although Oregon's antipode is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and you probably aren't quite so remote.
I am from Europe and one thing that I have heard is that your new DA is buddy with Antifa and announced that only major violations will get punished. This is basically a written invitation to rioters and looters to keep going. Oh, and of course I saw the Adam Haner scene that looked like a beheading from Irak until he was kicked in the head by BLM "Security", which then reminded me more of the curb stomping scene from American History X. Also, I did not fail to noticed that your mayor decided to completely ignore this incident. So yeah, from my narrow view, Portland did not look like the posterchild of civilization recently.
On one hand, yes, antifascists like myself intentionally voted for our new DA because we expected him to be not just tough on crime, but also tough on cops. On the other hand, though, the other candidate for DA was explicitly pro-policing and there's just not an appetite for more police in Portland right now.
The current mayor, Wheeler, is trying to walk a middle path. He might not survive re-election, as there are multiple candidates to his left who have indicated that they are more willing to tell the police to go home.
I find it telling that you cherry-pick which street fights reflect poorly on Portland. We have culturally been less and less accepting of street fascists over the past few years. And not all of us are violent, either; I've had heated but peaceful discussions with them up until last year, when the violence became an inevitable part of their platform.
Once the travel ban is lifted and the USA is safe to travel to, feel free to actually come and see for yourself what popular antifascism looks like.
So “One Thousand Lawyers of Oregon” came up with a new scheme to cram people in density after they banned development on millions of acres of land right outside Portland.
I live 100 feet from the urban growth boundary. 20 minutes from downtown Portland. Nearest transit is a quarter mile away and the bus runs once an hour during daylight only. Nobody seems to mind that, houses in this area sell immediately. If you pushed the boundary out another mile it would take no time at all before it would be filled with new homes.
And as far as jobs go, the tech industry is huge out here. The city of Wilsonville alone has Xerox, 3D Systems, Mentor Graphics, FLIR, Tyco Electronics, DW Fritz, and probably more that I’m forgetting — and that’s one of the smaller cities on the outskirts of the urban growth boundary.
This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.