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Portland passes low-density zoning reform

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Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#421

Post by Tiktaalik »

CountSessine wrote: post #394
Tiktaalik wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

City of Vancouver has a policy of protected public views. The goal is to make it so that views of Vancouver's mountains are reasonably accessible by anyone, not just those that purchased a north facing suite in a tall condo tower. It's pretty much the same underlying concept as why we create public parks. The view cones are scattered around and are usually tied to areas of heavy public pedestrian activity, such as pa…

This goes a long way toward explaining the housing affordability disaster in Vancouver.

Not at all. You can look at the map of view cones and see that there's a handful centered around the downtown.

Meanwhile south of there there's about 50+ blocks of untouched single family homes.

The view cones has been no real barrier to development and unlike SF Vancouver is building constantly.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#422

Post by Tiktaalik »

imtringued wrote: post #412
Tiktaalik wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups. If it doesn't 'pencil out', nobody will build it This is a huge reason why the notion that our housing affordability problems can be boiled down to "simple" issues of "supply and demand" is false. Developers don't over build supply. Why would they? There's no economic reason to. Whenever any sort of overbuilding occurs which would oversup…

I hope you see the problem in your logic. You've just said developers only build when people want more housing when stakkur claims that people only want housing because developers have built more housing. The conflict is that you two are saying the laws of supply and demand don't work because of two mutually incompatible reasons. Those two things can't be true at the same time. So either of you must be wrong. And it'…

> Those two things can't be true at the same time. So either of you must be wrong

Stakkur is wrong :)

> Building exactly as much housing as needed would still result in lower prices

Yeah don't get me wrong here. Cities still need to allow developers to build.

Not building is not the solution and only limits supply and results in price pressure on the poor as we've seen in SF, as when a rental turns over a landlord jacks up the price.

My point is simply that private developer is not a panacea since eventually the profit motive stops them from building.

For prices to really fall you need a developer to build an over supply of housing, which means continuing to build in an environment where rental prices are falling and building more housing is worsening as an investment idea. You need developers without a profit motive.

This means that you need to have a government agency that is constantly building housing to meet a set vacancy target, regardless of whether or not it would be profitable to do so.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#423

Post by egypturnash »

core-questions wrote: post #380
egypturnash wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of those things only work when you have the vast majority of the citizens in the country as net positive taxpayers. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the USA - you're ultimately becoming a "have not" country, full of itinerant people with no employment or prospects, thanks to massive-scale de-industrialization. > basic income scheme Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribu…

> Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.

How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.

> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".

dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e

> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?

No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#424

Post by malandrew »

didibus wrote: post #241
malandrew wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, wh…

> Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug.

No, my solution is keep the dirt physically out of my house.

> So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place?

Poor upbringing and values. It has nothing to do with being poor. Even poor people behave ethically and rich people commit crimes. The common denominator between poor people that commit crimes and rich people that commit crimes is poor upbringing and values.

I can better and more safely prevent myself from being the victim of a white collar crime by performing due diligence. After a crime has been committed, there's often a paper trail and it's easier to seek retribution through the justice system.

The only way to protect myself from street crime and property crime when it already has a foothold in my neighborhood is more policing and vigilantism. The former is difficult right now because a bunch of misguided people think the police are bad and want to defund them. They don't realize that the safety they take for granted is a sign that the police are doing their job. They've never lived in a country with bad policing. With the latter (vigilantism), I place myself and my family at risk. It's easier and far more effective to keep the violence and property crime dirt our of my house and just deal with the white collar dirt.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#425

Post by ericd »

noelwelsh wrote: post #255
ericd wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that it doesn't seem like you've bothered to put yourself in the shoes of the people that this will affect. You're effectively saying "it's what I do, so it'll be fine for them". The change in housing size that you're talking about encompasses a 40 year period , your slavery example, much longer. Culture can change, but it doesn't happen suddenly, by fiat, it happens on generational timescales.

Do you think every house in Portland is going to be bulldozed and rebuilt inline with the new regulations? More likely it will take decades before the changing regulations are reflected in the housing stock.

I don't think that, but sometimes people want to build their own houses, and they will immediately start butting up against this.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#426

Post by rumanator »

imtringued wrote: post #402
rumanator wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem. How do you expect to put together a working transit network, which is very sensitive to urban planning, if you are also argue in favour of ignoring any restriction imposed by urban planners?

Nobody is arguing in favor of ignoring any restriction imposed by urban planners.

You're literally commenting in a thread where people are complaining against building regulation that stops people from building extra houses in their backyard as they please. Worse than that, you're intentionally ignoring half the posts made though out this thread where people complain about urban plans that limit occupation density.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#427

Post by rumanator »

BurningFrog wrote: post #176
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…

Those are real, but minor issues. Increased density also brings good externalities, like more services, retail etc. In practice, handing out veto powers against construction has had disastrous results for everyone not already owning homes.

> Those are real, but minor issues. Increased density also brings good externalities, like more services, retail etc.

Not necessarily. Just because you add a residential tower that doesn't mean you'll get a grocery store in its ground floor. If the urban plan specifies high-density residential area then all you can expect is residential buildigs.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#428

Post by rumanator »

asdff wrote: post #352
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three of those are just other ways of increasing real estate prices. They're additive, not alternative. Now suppose somebody could knock down your million dollar three bedroom home there, put up five condos that size on the same lot and sell them each for $750K. That'd make the property itself worth more than a million dollars, right?

Prices are high because there is demand. Zoning keeps supply scarce. The reason why you can sell these condos for 750k is because of demand and scarcity. If everyone turned their million dollar home into condos, supply would increase, demand would be met, prices would fall, and suddenly you wouldn't have a million dollar home or 5 750k condos. On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your p…

> Zoning keeps supply scarce.

Not really. Zoning specifies density limits but demand depends of far more factors. If you replace a mansion with a low density housing project, the reason the price will go down is not due to an increase in supply.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#429

Post by rumanator »

asdff wrote: post #357
zjaffee wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we need to relearn from the lessons of the 20th century and not go around and build tenements again. Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.

Consider what we tolerate in the current status quo to weigh whether a tenement is a bad thing, where 90k people live in the streets of LA without running water in a pandemic, ironically camping along surface lots that used to be low cost motels with rooms for rent all over downtown LA, razed in the 70s to make parking for office workers living in the suburbs. Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and somet…

> where 90k people live in the streets of LA

False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.

Re: Portland passes low-density zoning reform

#430

Post by rumanator »

imtringued wrote: post #405
waynecochran wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be a win for slum lords.

You do not seem to know what a slum is and therefore I want you to stop misusing that word. Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all. Because slum residents have to pay for the entire building upfront and build it themselves you can expect the quality of the building…

> Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all.

Your conspiracy theory makes no sense at all. The role of a government, if any, is to stop people from building shanty towns. That's what building regulation does: stop anyone from building sub-par housing. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that slums pop up because a government stops people from building slums.

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