281–290 of 299 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lived in several US cities over the course of my life, and the only constant is that whoever you talk to, the problems are caused by the people who moved there after them.
The two most populous states in the US are California and Texas. One demonizes immigrants for moving in and destroying the local culture / way of life. The other, of course, is home to The Alamo.
It strikes me as a simple solution to turn abandoned malls into homes. Many malls are centrally located, near transit, and have plenty of parking. For the ones that are indoor style, you could even have easily accessed amenities like a gym or something. I wonder what the issue is besides zoning laws?
Industrial buildings are built to very different codes and requirements than residential buildings. Off the top of my head, I think that a dearth of insulation and water pipes would be an issue, along with the ratio of exterior to interior space (no windows leads to depression fast). It reminds me of industrial loft apartments that sprung up when Midwestern small manufacturing died. I knew some people who lived in on…
That unless the density demands residential towers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's handy to say "nowhere is building" but it's not really supported by the data. Look at Dallas and Houston compared to San Francisco. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Tc
Those cities are much larger, both in size and population. DFW is 8x the population of SF. According to Google, at least. Meanwhile those new building numbers are NOT 8x.
As of 1990 (the point where the graphs diverged), DFW had 3.8M people, Greater Houston had 3.3M, and SF/Oakland had 3.7M. They were pretty comparable then; subsequent growth has been simply because the Texas metro areas have added more housing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in a single-family zoned, suburban community. The proposal was to add more people there, presumably without also adding a 24x7 subway system. It would be immensely unfair to the people who purchased homes with the expectation that plenty of free parking would always be available. Also, not that it matters for the fairness issue, I disagree that those other transportation modes are more efficient. They are defini…
>They are definitely not acceptable alternatives. Not in suburbia, but they work in dense cities.
They work for some people. Those people are the only people willing to live in cities. Thus it seems that "they work in dense cities" but that is only with the exclusion of many people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would help a lot if the dense housing being built wasn’t so hideous.
No, it really doesn't. SF tried that with neighborhood commissions. It turns out that higher density housing is hideous to existing residents, regardless of the shell it's in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. You are naive about how this process works. SB35 has already led to thousands of new units of construction, including - finally - the construction of 2k units at what was formerly Vallco mall, despite lawsuits and general objections by Cupertino city council. That is only the beginning, because it was paired with reforms to the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process which has 10x'd the planned minimum requireme…
I missed that you specifically asked for legal standing. The basis of SFH zoning was created in Euclid, which required it be necessary to uphold safety and be reasonable. There are strong arguments against it on both grounds: https://ij.org/sc_podcast/148/ In that case, standing was any landowner holding land zoned single family. A Phoenix landowner of a SFH subdivision could screw it for the whole country. Not narro…
Near as I can tell, your counter-argument seems to be 'but there is stuff that could change it!' which.... could be?
Your arguments don't really seem cohesive or coherent enough to me to indicate how realistic or likely any of those would materially impact our current situation more than say the generation currently benefitting the most from this situation (boomers) slowly dying out. For instance the Phoenix vs SF argument seemed to go from a 'Phoenix has the right to demand SF change what it's doing' (not trying to strawman, that's what I read) to 'sfh rezoning is entirely possible!' and 'we can change conforming mortgage rules!' - which hey maybe - but why should they, and why should anyone with the power to do it care right now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I missed that you specifically asked for legal standing. The basis of SFH zoning was created in Euclid, which required it be necessary to uphold safety and be reasonable. There are strong arguments against it on both grounds: https://ij.org/sc_podcast/148/ In that case, standing was any landowner holding land zoned single family. A Phoenix landowner of a SFH subdivision could screw it for the whole country. Not narro…
No offense, but you're a bit all over the place? Near as I can tell, your counter-argument seems to be 'but there is stuff that could change it!' which.... could be? Your arguments don't really seem cohesive or coherent enough to me to indicate how realistic or likely any of those would materially impact our current situation more than say the generation currently benefitting the most from this situation (boomers) sl…
> if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is!
(For starters, that is not how American democracy works. There are plenty of policies that are not allowable and should not be allowable merely because they have popular support. I'm sure you can name a few.)
I pointed out that "enough" people only want SFZ if you control who the relevant population is. In aggregate, Californians are perfectly happy with ending SFZ, and policies to do so like SB50 poll quite well. You are simultaneously claiming: if a cul de sac by popular vote prefers SFZ, it should be able to impose it on any objecting landowner in the cal de sac, but if the residents of California by popular vote prefer that San Francisco zone for more housing, they shouldn't. These are inconsistent at face unless you specify and defend a distinction between immediate and regional neighbors, which you haven't.
Next, I pointed out that the residents of California are already dictating what gets built in the SFBA. I gave you an example of a law supported by the state legislative representatives from Modesto that forced Cupertino to increase its housing stock by nearly 10% with a single project, over the long-standing objections of Cupertino city council members and voters (the Vallco project went to the city ballot in 2018 and was voted down). Your response to this was that a 10% increase in Cupertino's housing stock does not solve a 50 year shortage so it's not a meaningful example of state policy dictating what is built locally. Not only is this irrelevant (your argument is invalidated by an existence proof, which I provided), but wrong: I gave you a reference for how state policy on land use will be increasingly more important than local policy in coming years.
You also asked why it's fair for "all the citizens of California (or the USA)" to have a stake in local land use. I pointed out that: (i) they interact with the local economy (ii) they have a stake in the consequences of those policies (iii) they may even _want to_ live locally but cannot because they are priced out (iv) SFZ is justified legally in Euclid by its ability to mitigate a small set of very specific issues, none of which include "neighborhood preference." These are all separately great arguments for why they should. You have not engaged with any.
I went ahead and made a stronger claim that land use is a national matter. You asked how that's the case. I pointed out that suburban subdivisions are Federal policy, and anyone who can influence how Fannie and Freddie guarantee loans implicitly dictates what type of home is built locally. You responded by saying that is a future hypothetical even though this policy is the status quo.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to conclude that you're the one who has strayed from defending the your original point (which was, roughly, "the immediate neighbors of a property should have the exclusive right to decide what can be built on it - that's democracy!").
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't both say "I would be happy if home prices in my neighborhood went down" and "I am confident that my area will always be one where rich people want to visit." The former will only happen if the types of amenities which make rich people want to visit go away, at which point you likely will want to go away as well.
> The former will only happen if the types of amenities which make rich people want to visit go away No, the former will happen when fewer people, for whatever reason, want to buy real estate here. This was a nice place to live even (perhaps especially) back when the main industry in the surrounding area was orange farming.
You’re trying to express your preferences for lower home values with an all else equal argument which is not very meaningful in a dynamic system. The realistic alternatives where fewer people want to settle in the Bay Area all involve hypotheticals where it is simply a less attractive place to live in ways that likely impact you as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, there is an inverse relationship between prosperity and child-bearing.
Only if you make improper global comparisons. Within comparable American populations, wealth is positively associated with fertility. "Examining data from 1985 to 2007, Lovenheim and Mumford use short-run home price variation over time within cities as their shock to family wealth. They find that a $100,000 increase in the value of one’s home results in a 16% increase in the probability of having a child." https://ww…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
What happens when homeowners (a subset of Americans) come into an extra $100k is tangential.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The former will only happen if the types of amenities which make rich people want to visit go away No, the former will happen when fewer people, for whatever reason, want to buy real estate here. This was a nice place to live even (perhaps especially) back when the main industry in the surrounding area was orange farming.
The people who found it a nice place to live when it was undeveloped thought it was so nice that they decided to build a university with a huge endowment nearby which then decided to attract funding from the Department of Defense which then... You’re trying to express your preferences for lower home values with an all else equal argument which is not very meaningful in a dynamic system. The realistic alternatives whe…
In between the wilderness and Hoboken NJ there is a broad range of possibilities. Somewhere in between those two extremes is a nice middle-ground where things are not too sparse and not too crowded. The San Francisco peninsula has been close to that happy medium for a long time, so I'm pretty sure it could stand to lose a few people and still stay in the desirable range.
Yes, density has all kinds of societal benefits. The problem is, not everyone wants to live that way.