191–200 of 256 posts
I am a huge housing advocate who lives in the Bay Area, but I feel like the only pro housing people I meet are online. All my neighbors turn NIMBY as soon as they buy their home
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If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota. People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecomm…
Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmenta…
World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.
I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.
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>Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then. I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majorit…
Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood. Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is beco…
But essentially this basically comes down to gentrification vs preserving culture. Do we value cities as money-making assembly lines where all the workers are replaceable or do we value cities as a living thing, with the culture(s) as their bloodline that makes those cities what they are and gives them their appeal? Do I want to keep my neighborhood as it is, for my children to grow up as I did, or should I just let anyone come and change it, for better or worse?
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There's a substitution effect. If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property. It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall.…
> If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property. That's not completely accurate. Yes, demand might fall, but even so price and value will still rise regardless. If you build a 50 unit complex next door, as long as some of those 50 units…
I could imagine something like making developers pay for blocking views/sky/sun, or for creating noise, or making them pay for the change their development causes in the market value of others' properties. Not exactly that, but something along those lines. I'd bet it could bring some NIMBYs around. They'd no longer lose out when beneficial change happens.
Are there policies anywhere that compensate people for the externalities brought by change? Like, if Alice buys a sunny place with a great view of wide open sky and a park, then Bob buys the places around her, bulldozes the park, and builds 20 story buildings, Alice is now in the dark looking at concrete 10 feet away. It objectively makes Alice's situation worse. Are there any frameworks that compensate Alice for the…
If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
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There I was, thinking I was the only one. It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned. I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone wh…
I moved here from Boston. It honestly didn't seem all that insane to me, because Boston is crazier in nearly every dimension. The peninsula at least has 3-lane boulevards with a reasonable road hierarchy and traffic light timings. Boston has cowpaths branching off in every direction, controlled by stop signs that can literally back up for miles. The peninsula has block after block of Eichlers on 1/4 acre lots. Boston…
https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/how-does-...
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I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacen…
It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...) Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced. Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people…
"I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo."
These two sentiments are in direct conflict though. Your options are to either build up or to build out. Building up will preserve the nearby wilderness; building out will see it turned into low density housing, roads, and terrible traffic congestion.
Are there policies anywhere that compensate people for the externalities brought by change? Like, if Alice buys a sunny place with a great view of wide open sky and a park, then Bob buys the places around her, bulldozes the park, and builds 20 story buildings, Alice is now in the dark looking at concrete 10 feet away. It objectively makes Alice's situation worse. Are there any frameworks that compensate Alice for the…
You don't own the view. It's unrealistic to expect that owning a single parcel of land would grant you broad latitude to stop projects anywhere within sight. If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
Not verified but what I was told by arch.