Portland passes low-density zoning reform • Hacker News Board

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#181

Post by malandrew » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #151

ogre_codes wrote: post #15

> "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…

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.

> which a 100% rational desire

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#182

Post by GeneralMayhem » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

stakkur wrote: post #13

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…

>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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#183

Post by noodlesUK » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #94

dfxm12 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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 exi…

There’s a big difference between 2500 sqft and 5000+

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#184

Post by noelwelsh » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

likpok wrote: post #148

noelwelsh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45420795#:~:text=The%20U... . https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9732-2…

4 rooms per occupant is huge . Consider a 3/3 with a kitchen, dining room and living room. For 4 people (two kids and two parents) you have 9 rooms, or a little over 2 per person. This family would need to double their house size before maxing out.

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#185

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #86

londons_explore wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#186

Post by specialist » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #173

specialist wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one version. 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.…

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…

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.

Who knows.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#187

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #169

treis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#188

Post by toast0 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #38

jasondclinton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The removal of the off-street parking mandate will also impact EV adoption. Parking is already difficult to find in many older Portland neighborhoods. Edit: You need a place to plug-in your EV at night.

I hope this can be addressed at the municipal level through a program to install charge points in residential areas in response to local demand.

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#189

Post by truth__indulger » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #156

ogre_codes wrote: post #15

> "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…

> 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.

Wow, White Supremacist much? Defending one's home or property or feeling entitled to "Safety" from "Crime" is White Privilege.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#190

Post by cptskippy » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #171

cptskippy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

A friend of mine has four kids and three au pairs. Plus frequent overnight guests like grandparents. That's not going to fit in 2500 sq ft.

Would you say that's the norm? One au pair is a luxury, 3 seems lavish.