The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing • Hacker News Board

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#201

Post by davidw » Tue, Aug 16, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #200

davidw wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, some of those people would be happy to sell in order to let denser housing be built. They're the minority. I think there are things majorities should not be able to decide: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s... Not that I think most people there or here in this thread are motivated that way, but ... sometimes you should not be able to tell other people how they can use their prop…

> Presumably, some of those people would be happy to sell in order to let denser housing be built. Maybe, but they surely knew what they were getting into when they bought their houses. So what right do they have to complain? It's not like PA's zoning is a recent development. I might be able to make even more money if I build a chemical plant or a toxic waste dump on my suburban property. Should I be able to do that?…

I'm actually happy to have people move here. I wouldn't be able to live where I do without people having moved up from California. The problem is that a bunch of people from a state with nearly 40 million people moving to a place with less than 4 is that it makes for some difficult adjustments. I'm still ok with it, but California is very much exporting people because they cannot afford it.

The more the merrier for me, but I guess having lived in Europe, living with other people does not bother me to the degree that it seems to for many people in the US.

The racism thing just goes to show that everyone thinks there are some limits to what majority rule ought to be able to do, just as many of us that take a dim view of zoning think that there is probably a line somewhere (your nuclear waste example).

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#202

Post by vasilipupkin » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #27

vasilipupkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city. I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? why does Palo Alto have to shoulder the solution to this problem? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I certainly can understand current homeowners. They want to keep their…

> I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?

so you think that a town should have no say whatsoever in deciding what should be built in its borders? By this analogy ?

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#203

Post by vasilipupkin » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 2:45 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #15

vasilipupkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city. I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? why does Palo Alto have to shoulder the solution to this problem? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I certainly can understand current homeowners. They want to keep their…

> Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city How far away does said land need to be before you think current homeowners shouldn't have a say anymore? Should someone who lives on the border of Palo Alto and another city be able to prevent housing being built in that other city, or just in Palo Alto? It's pretty…

so, should a town be allowed to decide what kind of zoning it wants to have, or should it be decided by a decree from Federal government? So, suppose people in a town decided they want their town to be a town of 2 story single family homes. Should they be allowed to make that decision or not? Suppose all of New York decides to move to Palo Alto within the next 5 years. Should current homeowners in Palo Alto have the ability to decide how much housing and what kind of housing should be built to accommodate that demand?

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#204

Post by vasilipupkin » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

natrius wrote: post #17

vasilipupkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city. I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? why does Palo Alto have to shoulder the solution to this problem? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I certainly can understand current homeowners. They want to keep their…

It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing. It directly causes economic segregation. Only the wealthiest get the homes allowed by law while everyone else gets pushed further out. The market does not do this. Our segregation laws do. If it were legal to build fourplexes anywhere in Palo Alto, merely wealthy families would be able to outbid some of the insanely wealthy with their four rent payments combined…

"It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing" for which government? federal, state, local? Is it really that unreasonable for homeowners in a town to exercise some measure of control over their own town?

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#205

Post by lisper » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 6:06 AM UTC

davidw wrote: post #201

lisper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably, some of those people would be happy to sell in order to let denser housing be built. Maybe, but they surely knew what they were getting into when they bought their houses. So what right do they have to complain? It's not like PA's zoning is a recent development. I might be able to make even more money if I build a chemical plant or a toxic waste dump on my suburban property. Should I be able to do that?…

I'm actually happy to have people move here. I wouldn't be able to live where I do without people having moved up from California. The problem is that a bunch of people from a state with nearly 40 million people moving to a place with less than 4 is that it makes for some difficult adjustments. I'm still ok with it, but California is very much exporting people because they cannot afford it. The more the merrier for m…

> there is probably a line somewhere

Fine, then we agree. But the question you still have not answered is why your opinion of where that line should be drawn in PA should override the opinion of the residents of PA as expressed through their democratically elected local government.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#206

Post by tachyonbeam » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 1:30 AM UTC

geekbeast wrote: post #77

tachyonbeam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is not just an app... I'd like to see someone mass produce stackable prefabricated units out of pieces and assemble them into multi-floor apartment buildings, increasing the number of aparments on offer very fast and driving costs down. Unfortunately, I think the problem here comes down to regulations. It's hard to acquire land. Much of the bay area has laws preventing you from building new housing much highe…

Like this? http://www.abc10.com/news/local/sacramento/modular-apartment...

Yes, like that, except I think you could make the process even more efficient. Make the modular units more "plug-n-play". Maybe even make them replaceable, so if an apartment is old and damaged, a new unit can relatively easily be swapped into its place and the old one recycled.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#207

Post by maerF0x0 » Wed, Aug 24, 2016, 10:09 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #160

mjmahone17 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship is not usually linear, though. With density comes efficiency in services. Though some of that efficiency is eaten by the additional cost of doing the work.

Not really teachers are linear with population size. An overpass is vastly more expensive than a stoplight and still cheaper than a subway system. So, yes for small changes to population size a city need not spend more an can simply degrade services slightly, but doubling population size quickly gets really expensive.

I would have thought that the linear system was still more expensive than the dense system (within some reasonable limits). Consider the single family home as the null case, everyone lives in single family homes as far as the eye can see, the distance that family must travel to get to the core of a city is greater than any other existing family (that is new homes are on the outer ring of the city and thus progressively further and further from the core). So that family consumes more road miles daily. Vs if you grow in density you do not create anymore miles of road because those people only have to travel a shorter distance. And when the inevitable overpass comes, instead of needing overpasses from 1/2radius of the city you may only need them for 1/4 etc because the people are already in the core and do not need to come from as far.

just some thoughts on efficiency of density vs dispersement

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#208

Post by jhanschoo » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 6:51 AM UTC

bufordsharkley wrote: post #62

jhanschoo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of hearing the ideological position that government interference is absolutely bad. I live in a city-state where government housing and policies and strict zoning at once makes housing affordable for the middle and lower class insulated from fluctuating rents, and protects public spaces from overdevelopment in a land-scarce island.

I'm curious to here more about how this policy works. I would be skeptical that the claim that a land-scarce island should be wary of overdevelopment-- I would think sprawl would be more dangerous (and density would be welcomed). In practice, strict zoning tends to create sprawl-- when density is outlawed, the displaced people need to live somewhere... and thus the footprint of cities grows wider and wider.

Sorry for the late response. The city in question is Singapore. The homeless population is extremely tiny in Singapore, but the homeless choose to live in public spaces and parks near urban centers due to the proximity of services.

When I say zoning, very little space is zoned as low-density in Singapore. Where there are buildings, they are almost high-density. However, the government owns a large proportion of the land, and this preserves and protects common pool resources like parks from being developed on.