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Portland passes low-density zoning reform

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Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#241

Post by didibus »

malandrew wrote: post #181
centimeter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#242

Post by JumpCrisscross »

treis wrote: post #155
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…

>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…

> views and the light that falls on my property

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#243

Post by egypturnash »

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.

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#244

Post by bluGill »

eikenberry wrote: post #129
jackyinger wrote: post #7

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 rel…

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#245

Post by kube-system »

jeffbee wrote: post #235
kube-system wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People over 70 are the least-likely group of adults to have drivers' licenses Not in the US! It's pretty common for them to continue driving until they have enough accidents that they're dropped by their insurance company. https://www.businessinsider.com/young-people-drivers-license...

I was going by this 2009 data which you have to mentally compute the rates from: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/i...

More than mental computation -- you'd need to find an additional source of the total number of people in those groups to compute a rate.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#246

Post by lkbm »

wool_gather wrote: post #85
sudosysgen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#247

Post by didibus »

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.

> 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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#248

Post by ghaff »

tunesmith wrote: post #139
hinkley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess the corollary is that 2500 square feet can be eaten up very quickly if you don't have a good floor plan, which is pretty common.

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.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#249

Post by pyronik19 »

NobodyNada wrote: post #97
rootusrootus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? 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.

They haven't burned down yet?

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#250

Post by ogre_codes »

treis wrote: post #155
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…

>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…

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.

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