Granted...this particular situation was unique as the development was market-rate units, not low-income, in a communal living layout. There were other concerns on part of neighbors (some real, some silly, and others just simply obstructive). This, along with CEQA in California have been constantly used by existing members of a town/city/neighborhood/etc to reduce additional development of any kind, not just low-income.
This is at a point where NIMBY isn't even the only acronym anymore, BANANAs is the new one the kids use these days - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Thanks for introducing a new (to me) term, i.e BANANAS. Upon searching i discovered a few others:
NIABY: Opposition to certain developments as inappropriate anywhere in the world is characterised by the acronym NIABY ("Not In Anyone's Backyard"). The building of nuclear power plants, for example, is often subject to NIABY concerns.
NAMBI: ("Not Against My Business or Industry") is used as a label for any business concern that expresses umbrage with actions or policy that threaten that business, whereby they are believed to be complaining about the principle of the action or policy only for their interests alone and not for all similar business concerns who would equally suffer from the actions or policies.
BANANA: is an acronym for "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything" (or "Anyone").The term is most often used to criticize the ongoing opposition of certain advocacy groups to land development. The apparent opposition of some activists to every instance of proposed development suggests that they seek a complete absence of new growth.
NOPE: (Not On Planet Earth)To leave an uncomfortable situation, usually quickly.
LULU: Locally Unwanted/Undesirable Land Use planning.
NOTE: Not Over There Either (meaning is same NIMBY)
SF real estate is just bitcoin HODLing with real life homeless camp attached. The entire property value is propped up by artificially voted on rules greatly raising the mining difficulty to entrants and it's getting exponentially more difficult with time.
There are reasons for that, but they are generally bad ones involving people not wanting to live near other people who look like the author of the article, even if they won't say that part out loud.
Higher density housing is a massive component of building lower carbon footprint cities, as well as making our cities more financially resilient. It's also something that can increase equity a lot by giving people with lower incomes access to nicer areas and schools.
In the UK social housing has a bad reputation because poor people are far more likely to just be nightmares to live nearby.
I lived in one throughout my entire childhood. Around half of people were OK, the other half just generally dickheads.
That has 0 to do with racism. Many UK towns have trivial populations of non-"White British".
The problem is mostly that over time (years or generations) poverty gradually turns people into a shell of what a well adjusted human could otherwise be.
You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty does cause some problems. Which is why you should do your best to spread all kinds of housing throughout a city, including plenty of upzoning in wealthier areas.
And then what, you expect rich people to move in? They won't. Poor people are going to move in. And the rich people who made that area nice in the first place are going to flee, because it will turn into a not-nice area.
And your nice, quiet suburb is unlikely to get many high-rises if it’s actually far enough away from the nearest city center, because it doesn’t particularly make sense to build towers in the middle of nowhere.
By contrast if your suburb is nice and quiet despite being right next to a city because decades of policy have locked it in place and it’s pricing people out… too bad? Other people need housing too and outward from an already dense city is where it makes the most sense to build them.
Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like you know what's best for everyone else. If I wanted to live like you, I'd live where you do. And no matter how much you want my area to change (because you clearly can't stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with) it's not going to.
> Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like you know what's best for everyone else.
So the side advocating for upzoning (allowing people to build what they want on their own properties) is "acting like they know what's best for everyone else" while you, advocating for strict limits on what others can do on their own properties according to your desires, aren't?
I guess we can make this consistent if you admit you're doing something you know isn't best for everyone else, and aren't even trying to. Which would be fine if you weren't using the state to support your aims.
If we don't do that, and both sides are trying to do what they think is best for everyone, this is a difference in degree not kind. There obviously need to be limits on any zoning.
> because you clearly can't stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with
You are in support of using the coercive power of government to restrict your neighbors from living in ways you disagree with, if those ways include building more housing!
We should stop pretending it's a choice between single-family houses and 30 story high-rises. There are lots of seattle neighborhoods, for example, where people bought single family houses 20, 30, 40 years ago because of the character of the neighborhood and now suddenly the yimbys have changed the zoning to accept seven story buildings. A good friend of mine has lived in and cared for his home for 25 years and now the houses bordering him directly to the south have been sold and a 7 story apartment building is going up 5 feet from his property. Once it's built, he will literally never get direct sunlight again. That's pretty significant.
What your friend has observed is what happens when you keep it bottled up for years and years.
Instead of gradually moving to 4-plexes and 3 story apartments and narrow townhomes, when all that demand finally gets unleashed, it's a larger change.
Change can be disturbing, so we should aim for more frequent gradual changes than 'quantum leap' type stuff. That said, at least your friend has options in that their land is probably worth a ton of money now and they do have the possibility to get out and go somewhere more to their liking.
Tons of people in high cost cities like Seattle have no home at all due to housing costs.
The fact that the change is “sudden” is a direct result of the fact that the ability to build has been restricted for so long. If building densely had been allowed all along, things would get built out whenever it made financial sense to do so, and you’d be able to see the trend coming gradually from a mile away. But now you’ve got all these low-density areas right next to (or in!) cities that have had artificial limitations on building for so long that when you do upzone a part of it it’s like letting out pressure all at once. The demand has grown with the population all this time but it hasn’t been met.
It’s more important to me that people have places to live than that existing homeowners everywhere can have a neighborhood that never changes. The two are incompatible. It would be preferable for that change to be gradual, but given the current state of things I don’t see how that’s possible.
The public transit infrastructure will make a huge difference, in my opinion. The light rail heading north into suburbs where there's tons of space to build will make living outside the city itself much more bearable for people who work in the city. A modest single family home may still cost $1.5 million in the city, but at least people will have better options that don't mean a two hour commute.
Good idea. We'll start with where you live. You get to put up with the noise at all hours, the high crime, and the generally shit condition lazy people keep their neighborhoods in. After living in it for a few years, you can come back and tell us how great it is.
"You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty does cause some problems."
What differs between it being concentrated or spread out? I see you're making the argument that it should be spread out, but I don't see any explaination of the benefits.
You're never going to win anyone over with the tired "if you disagree with me, you're a racist" BS.
Low-income, high-density housing attracts problems. It has literally nothing to do with race. You could guarantee that the high-rise apartment building you want to construct down the street from me would be 100% filled with people who look like me, and I'd still oppose it.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. Your comment was a noticeable step hellward. You can make your substantive points without swipes, name-calling, and flamebait, so please do that instead.
Americans spend zillions of dollars every year visiting Europe, which is full of high density housing. And come home raving about how much they love it. It does not 'cause problems'.
There's a correlation between crime / neighborhood blight and low income residents.
That correlation may be because of historic and current structural racism, lack of access to mental health services and a social safety net, or a myriad of other socio-economic issues, but it doesn't change the fact that it exists.
Insinuating that anyone who brings up those issues is racist isn't helpful.
It would be more productive to say "Yes, I understand why neighborhoods might be resistant to denser, low-income tolerant development, and here are some ways we could incorporate that fact into a productive plan..." E.g. building more mixed-income developments.
Of course, they love visiting and perhaps the idea of it. Then they realize they can't have their larger houses, cars, etc that they want. And that government will be more involved in their lives (zoning, policies, prohibitions), which is fairly reasonable given the track record in many places in the US.
This always strikes me as an unsatisfying response. What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here?
Every time I’ve seen this type of argument brought up, it’s fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built here because it does end up working. We’re really not so unique.
> What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here?
And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID when voting, I’d get an endless stream of replies about why that’s fundamentally impossible in the US (and racist, naturally). And that’s a FAR easier problem to solve than pie-in-the-sky “make everything more dense and have high speed rail everywhere and European-style public transit in every city” daydreams that are so popular.
Maybe some things really aren’t that easy to do in the US.
Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches, community recreation centers, and schools.
The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress turnout under the guise of "election security".
Well Sweden has a lower population density than the US and there is still plenty high density housing, so your argument is?
I think it would be good to do away with these simplistic this or that doesn't work here because... The US society was remodelled quite dramatically to be very car centred over a very short time and now people say that it can't be any other way because of the geography? The US was literally different 70-80 years ago.
Which doesn’t mean much as a comparison point in the US because much of that land has zero or approximately zero residents, and nobody’s talking about building high-density housing in the middle of nowhere anyway. Upwards of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas and those places certainly are comparable to much of Europe.
>Upwards of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas
Look up the US Census definition of "urban." In the town where I live, three houses around me are on 100 acres collectively--not to mention even more adjacent conservation land and that's classified as urban because it's near a smaller old mill town and only about 50 miles from a major city.
Yes. Most people see urban and imagine at least a 2nd or 3rd tier city in terms of population. Not a 5K person town that may or may not be within a not too long a drive of some sort of population center.
Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your expectations.
Yeah the census counts urban as “a cop or ambulance will show up in decent time” and rural as “you could detonate a cow and nobody would be around to notice”.
Without knowing exactly which town you’re talking about, I would posit that that’s likely still dense enough to have some pretty direct comparison points somewhere in Western Europe. It’s not like all of Western Europe is a city.
Which doesn’t mean that the same infrastructure you’d see in a dense European city would make sense in your town, mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren’t as incomparable as some people seem to think.
Well, it's a typical more rural New England town. There is zero public transit of any sort. Essentially no businesses in town except barely when they merge with an adjacent small old mill city. So even in the town center where there are some sidewalks basically nowhere to walk to other than the library or post office. About 7K population total.
About an hour drive from a major city.
Though not that different really from small English countryside towns I've walked through.
That's one thing that fascinated me about CT when I was up there.
It seemed bizarre that even "one strip mall" towns didn't have certain categories of business. Down in the south, you can't measure a mile without hitting two serviceable Tex-Mex restaurants.
Up north? The nearest Tex-Mex is often 30 minutes away, and the nearest pizza place (which often isn't great) is 20 minutes.
I'm not sure how much decent Tex-Mex I've seen in the Northeast generally. I do have a few decent pizza places around where I live west of Boston. But generally speaking I find I'm on my own with respect to food. Which is a reasonable tradeoff I make.
Even if you ignore the racist roots mentioned in a sibling thread (and I maintain that you shouldn’t), we will need low-income housing as long as there are people with low incomes! And it’s best for everyone involved if that housing is commingled in every community rather than being concentrated in one place. It’s well documented that the neighborhood you grow up in has a huge impact on how upwardly mobile you’ll be if you’re in a low-income family.
Look to Vienna’s social housing program for an example of this done very well. That doesn’t look like it attracts problems, now does it?
I don't know what to tell you. I just don't want to be surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. I didn't buy a nice house in a nice suburb to stare at giant cement buildings. It's that simple.
The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure, investors won't want to build a 30 stories building.
But they might want to build a 3-4 units building, something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY densification is impossible.
You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see giant cement buildings. But you do see livable neighbourhood with buildings that are just slightly higher than the norm and can house multiple families.
I'm not building a strawman at all. Let me make my position even more clear: I don't want to live near multi-family housing. I want it to remain illegal for it to be built near me.
Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people infect with your ideas turns to hell.
Maybe Im naive, but whats wrong with building entirely bew towns and cities? Last time I flew across the US, I saw vast wilderness with a few tiny populated places here and there.
There’s nothing broadly wrong with building entirely new cities, but it’s incredibly difficult to do for a variety of reasons. Most attempts to do this fail. Expecting new cities to absorb all of the increase in population is unrealistic.
If you’re talking new suburbs of existing cities, well, that’s basically the only expansion we’ve done in many places. Some problems with that:
- It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right now).
- If the implication is that you’re building outward because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to live in (which will happen if they don’t densify at all and the population grows), then you’re basically forcing most kids to move far away from their parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won’t want to live near their family but many do, and being able to maintain those close family ties feels important.
if you run electricity, water, sewage, fiber optics, and roads to it, absolutely! The problem with suburbs is that they demand the same utilities as dense areas without paying the increased cost of that infrastructure.
Who builds the roads and power grids for suburbia? Is it city dwellers or rural folks? Where do they get raw materials and construction equipment? Who produces food? Who makes furniture, cars and all other stuff? So what do city dwellers actually do to subsidise suburbia and rural country?
Where I live, the hospital is struggling to hire nurses due to the lack of housing options. That's not even the 'low income' bracket. Teachers struggle to find housing as well. Those are both things that high income people need, especially the former.
Restaurants are shutting down for want of workers. Because they can't afford it.
Low income workers provide valuable services in our communities. Telling them they can't live where they work creates all kinds of problems, both social and environmental - they often drive in to do those jobs, creating more pollution and traffic.
Especially along the restaurant line, it seems the rich people would rather be stingy than pay people enough to perform those services and live in the same community. It seems that being able to pay the lowest possible is still a benefit to the rich, even if it's detrimental to society.
That's good for society. I doubt that many of the moderately wealthy would really be a cause of this. It seems the ultrawealthy are the main cause in the downfall of empires, as they hold the most influence and become leeches off the people working. And now we democratize those negative decisions via things like REITs, so everyone's 401k is part of the problem.
It promotes empathy with and reduces bias against those of different racial and economic backgrounds, for one. It’s easier for stereotypes to take hold in highly segregated environments because you don’t get much interaction with those outside your own groups.
When there's no more food to eat, the poor will always turn to eating the rich, if we want to take this to the extreme (or, well, when there's nowhere left to live, they'll live inside the rich, I guess?).
I don't want higher density for the same reason I don't go on vacations on cruise ships and don't use public transportation. People are gross and assholes. The more people the more chance of tragedy of the commons, and once it sets in it is hard to stop. Most college educated Americans lived in college dorms, and went on to NOT want to live in shared building environments. It's not about racism, it's about not wanting to live in high density areas, hence buying homes with ZONING LAWS that guarantee me I can live how I choose. If I want high density, that is what cities are for. Stop trying to TAKE my (property) rights away(that is what zoning laws are, guarantee of my RIGHTS as they related to THE LARGEST INVESTMENT I WILL EVER MAKE IN MY LIFE). It's great to have an opinion, but to project onto others in order to make yourself feel superior and manipulate power dynamics is why this country is falling apart. Every action you take should BUILD and add value, not simply tear some 'other' down. But that would be hard, and BUILDING society is hard, and you would have to endure others having a right to their opinion. To quote Julius Caesar “It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.”. You are a fine soldier for your cause, but your argument shows signs of a poor citizen.
Actually, zoning laws are not part of your property rights. Zoning restriction dictate what you can build on your property, but ownership interest in your property does not entitle you to 'buy' zoning laws. This is easily seen as you cannot sell zoning laws.
Zoning laws ultimately restrict your property rights as you lose the right to do what you wish with your property. They ought to be abolished to protect property rights.
Most societies did just fine without zoning laws for the entirety of human history.
Note, that I don't approach this from the YIMBY or woke side of things. Rather, as a pretty staunch free market advocate, it is painfully obvious to me that we should not restrict people's rights to do with their property as they see fit.
As an example, I was recently going to buy land to develop into a business. However, zoning laws in this area of the county (in the middle of nowhere mind you) meant I would have to jump through endless permit and red tape. Any so-called supporter of property rights should be livid that this goes on in this country. Buying the land should be enough to give me rights to do what I wish with it. Environmental laws should deal with actual human health hazards, not how much shadow I'm spilling onto a neighboring property or how much view I'm blocking.
A lot of the issues with zoning is people attempting to own that which they don't. You don't own your neighbor's property.
Nobody is talking about buying or selling zoning laws. However, the value of property and the taxes paid on it are very much impacted by zoning laws. So people absolutely do make decisions on buying property based on zoning laws.
The value of my house would be decimated if there were a pawn shop next door to it. I wouldn't have bought my house if that were even a remote possibility.
Zoning laws are meant to protect ownership interest in your property (not that they're always perfect).
A totally free-market approach allows one party to reduce the use or value of another party's property. E.g. in the above, the high-rise blocks the sunlight, which will could kill any plants on the property and preclude a backyard. That combined with the lack of sunlight could dramatically diminish the value of the property. Meanwhile, the highrise increases in value because they got X extra floors that get sun.
There is absolutely utility in the sun; in the most obvious form, it can be used with solar panels to generate electricity which can be sold for cash. My neighbor shouldn't be able to build a solar array that blocks all the light that would hit my property.
Zoning laws, to me, are just a shortcut to avoid having to enumerate and manage those rights individually, per property. There's a lot of things that can contribute to the value of a property, and it would be a mess to manage them individually.
Um.. the qualifier is very broad. I would posit that the owner of the house ( and therefore part of a given community ) is in a very good position to judge whether or not a given project is, or is not, beneficial to that community. There is nothing to be quiet about. Neighborhoods that house predominantly black population tend to have houses with lower dollar value. As a result, chances to transform the owner's local habitat to one that that does not benefit the owner is highly irrational, regardless of current political winds.
<< It's also something that can increase equity a lot by giving people with lower incomes access to nicer areas and schools.
They are not nicer as a matter of fact. Part of that niceness is being funded with higher prices ( and taxes ). You take that away by adding some things NIMBYs are fighting about and the result is a neighborhood whites will flee. And cries of racism will continue.
That's not it though, really. People with a bit of cash - the kind who show up to planning commission hearings at 2 in the afternoon on weekdays - can very easily go buy some land in a remote place and do just that. They like city amenities though.
Maybe? Some of us have significant others, who believe staying close to family and whatnot is of some importance. I don't, but I am biased since I left mine thousands of miles away and have not looked back much.
If it was up to me, I would already have moved somewhere with lower taxes, but "kids, school and so on" currently takes priority over my selfish needs.
<<They like city amenities though.
Yes. I pay for them. I better like them. Otherwise, I will be the one complaining during next board meeting.
Also, inevitably, more fingers per square foot, more calories consumed per acre, higher water usage, and more conversations per minute in the neighborhood.
things that people do increase when there are more people. really unclear what your point is here, and the way you said it really makes you look mean.
In my middle- to upper-middle-class mill town there's a proposal to turn a disused historic mill building into luxury apartments and residents are fighting hard against it. The main stated reason is traffic, although it's unclear to me if having a bunch of apartments will generate noticeably more rush-hour traffic than when the mill was operational. I think some folks are also put off by the term "luxury apartment" too, as this area is becoming less affordable than it once was. So they counter-productively fight against increasing the housing supply, which would actually create downward pressure on rent, even for non-luxury places, as folks in more modest apartments might be tempted to move to these fancy new places, creating vacancies for others.
I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they fight it - they want their town/neighborhood/whatever to be just the way it was in the "good ol' days", which just isn't realistic. The mill jobs aren't coming back, but we do have white collar workers willing to pay for attractive places to live. Why not re-use the damn mill building?
Traffic from housing is generally fairly minimal. Traffic and parking are the big NIMBY fears and are generally unfounded.
"Luxury" apartments are, 9 times out of 10, just brand new apartments that happen to be in an expensive location.
It's kind of like cars - a brand new Toyota Corolla is not the cheapest car out there. A 20 year old used one is going to be a lot more affordable. But you don't get old ones unless you build and sell the new ones to people who have the money to buy new cars. If there are not enough new cars, those people will drive up the price of the used cars.
Indeed, this is exactly what happened during the pandemic.
As someone who lives in a former mill town myself, feel free to write if you're curious about organizing in favor of housing. It's a lot of fun!
> I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they fight it
This is it, hilariously. Locally the railroad started building a rail yard, and everyone got up in arms and the city and county was howling and a meeting was called and the rail company politely explained that they're regulated federally and are building a nice berm around the rail yard, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.
And everyone stopped complaining, the yard got built, and nobody cares.
We need more of the straight bribery that used to happen around nuke plants - if the plant is approved, everyone gets $1k off their property taxes for X years or whatever.
Mid and high density housing for the high-income earners get opposed across the entire economic spectrum. On one hand, you have NIMBYs that place strict zoning restrictions and mandate bullshit environmental reviews to stall the development that does occur. On the other, you have affordable housing advocates opposing gentrification by blocking cement trucks and refusing to be leave their apartment that got bought out unless if they get paid $1 million. At the end of the day, developers can pull through by simply throwing enough money and time at the problem, but that's a cost that ends up being passed to the future renters.
LOL that is total bullshit. In SF, they oppose high-density high-income housing too. It's total motte and bailey shit. Here's the real algorithm:
if density == low:
return "This won't solve the problem"
if income == low:
return "This ruins the neighbourhood character"
if density == mid and income == high:
return "This is gentrification and soulless coffee shops!"
if density == high and income == high:
return "This is for Arab/Chinese/local-xenophobe-target-du-jour investors only"
return "This ruins the neighbourhood character"
The absolute bullshittery around this nonsense is really something.
This pretty much nails it. The way I saw it put which feels fitting is, “Everybody who moves into San Francisco wants to be the last person to move into San Francisco”. Of course this isn’t a practical desire in any city, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to make it happen anyway.
>> “Everybody who moves into San Francisco wants to be the last person to move into San Francisco”.
Person moves to SF and puts down life savings as down-payment on 1:4 leveraged home...not a surprise they want to ensure they arent wiped out. A 20% decrease in value wipes out the life savings. The whole system is designed to perpetuate itsself.
I disagree, I've seen plenty of people outraged about high-density high-income housing saying that it doesn't have enough low-income options (unsurprisingly, these people are not fans of the low-income housing either). In general, I think people just don't like change- there's likely a reason they moved to that neighborhood and don't want it to be disrupted.
What about a good person who was born poor, grew up poor, worked from the age of 16 supporting their family, and remains poor? There are many such people in the USA, and very few seem to support policies that would make housing more affordable to them.
What makes them good reasons? Plenty of things are real without being good.
There is no ethical framework in which "I don't want to live next to the poors" is an ethical sentiment - even though it is understandable in some ways. Well, maybe in Objectivism, or "Fuck You, Got Mine". Though even an Objectivist would be hard pressed to argue against someone else's right to build whatever they want on their own property.
Right, it's harsh - pointlessly so. If your ethical system values the right of rich people to not interact with poor people over the right of everyone to have a roof over their head, that ethical system is evil.
