311–320 of 329 posts
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Sounds like the permits are still cheaper than they should be, though. Presumably if people value the parking such that it's the best use of land an enterprising person could set up a parking garage and make a profit?
That would require the enterprising person to be able to get past the NIMBYism to construct the parking garage
I've been in Silicon Valley for close to 20 years, and I have been concerned about this for a long time. I want to say it was somewhere around 2010 that I began noticing a sudden increase in the number RVs I see in non-RV places, such as large parking lots and along industrial area roads. Now it seems like I hardly go anywhere and not see several RVs that are clearly out of place - they used to only be found in sidey…
There's a very simple solution here: build more housing and pay better wages in the first place , so as to avoid the awful dilemmas of French Revolution-style situations.
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Ha! I'm an anarchist. But yes neighborhoods do get to control things like that and they should. Ever wonder why there are no skyscrapers in DC? Ever wonder why there are home owners associations that can dictate what colors and upkeep you do on your property? My example was extreme, but rules and controls exist for a reason. If you don't like it, then don't live there.
>Ha! I'm an anarchist. No you're not. You believe in private property in views .
The fact that I'm critiquing a poor argument has nothing to do with my philosophical views. Just as I could argue a fascist policy would be poor to implement or is inconsistent (or the opposite), I can do the same with liberal democratic property rights.
While a view may not be property (and this depends on what laws are written etc...) communities in this system of government regularly create laws and regulations for said communities. It's just a normal thing that happens in democratic societies. Being upset about that doesn't change that fact, nor does it make those communities immoral or unethical or anything like that.
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That's nonsense. Seizing property against somebody's will is an initiation of force and violence to deprive somebody of rightful ownership of property. That's far different than a home owners association or a neighborhood ordinance. Now you could go in and vote that ordinance out, but aside from that your analogy here is not good at all. And towns do set rules all the time. People get together, vote in legislators, a…
>That's nonsense. Seizing property against somebody's will is an initiation of force and violence to deprive somebody of rightful ownership of property. Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
Who said anything about Ayn Rand? Are you unfamiliar with political philosophy? Have you read Robert Nozick for example? I find it curious that you're using Ayn Rand here.
But with that aside, I am in fact arguing morals that have grounding in the real world. If you're unable to understand how force is abstracted then I can explain it for you, but you have to be willing to be educated on the subject.
The analogy presented was incredibly poor, one is seizing property, the other is a normal function of a liberal democracy.
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This seems like the sort of behavior which can be disincentivized with steep fines. You, a developer, built a large building not to code? You have to pay to have it re-worked, and in addition you pay the local town $1000 per domicile affected per day it's delayed. Made-up example, but you get the idea.
Createdmall development company, take the contract, deliver faulty building, accept payment, pay out funds to employees (subcontractors) and owners of the company, shut down company if the district comes after them. It would incentivize his sort of behavior too.
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> you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact". My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper)…
If the city/public is funding a building, i would think they are checking if it is built to code before they pay the company in full. If its not built to code, the contractor didnt finish the job and will not be paid until the building is up to code. If its a private investor building the building, thats on them, they shouldve hired better contractors or been more thorough in their management of their contractors
Flooding is a big issue right now in Toronto because we've had a few 'incidents'. You can build a building such that every drop of rain is gone from the property within minutes of it landing, straight into the storm sewers. But you can't have everyone do that, or every rainfall will mean a major flood in the lower-lying areas. And anyone in Toronto back in 2013 remembers exactly what that is like (last week too, nearly).
Instead, regulations now say that new buildings have to retain their water for as long as possible. You can release it, just not all at once, and hopefully not all of it. Green roofs are great to absorb the water. Car washes in the underground parking garage. Options like this exist, but they cost money.
This is only one example (storm water management). There are others. The goal of the city regulating certain engineering aspects of the buildings isn't just to protect those directly living in the building, it's to protect the city as a whole.
Fuck NIMBYism straight to hell, but don't tell me that the developer flooding my property isn't my problem.
One of the long term side effects of this enormous housing shortage and the presence of prop 13, is that 50+ aged people are making up a larger and larger % of the population, as many of the younger people get pushed out (the next generation has nowhere to live). Already just in the last 10 years, % of 65 years olds and up has increased from from 13% to 18%. I'm guessing this trend will continue for the next 10-20 years, until the housing starts to correct.
For a bit of micro NIMBYism: my street in Palo Alto just instituted resident-only parking (I was the only one to object). Thus the people who cut our hair, serve our meals etc will have to walk even farther to work (my house is about 1.25 miles from downtown) while the wealthy shoppers park downtown for free. Yes it was a pain having a lot of cars on the street but I didn't feel it was a hardship that I couldn't park…
If SF housing politics has taught me anything, it's that the nastiest of human behavior is revealed by parking disagreements :( I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway. Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots. Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners. In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area…
Easy. It becomes an endless source of parking ticket revenue for the city.
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"Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco." "Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted." Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across th…
There are a lot of vacant buildings being sat on by property speculators, with very little property tax to motivate use thanks to Prop 13 (and because existing tenants hurt resale value).
These kinds of stories are apocryphal.
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"Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco." "Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted." Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across th…
SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers. Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all…
And so? Is it affordable live in Paris? No, it is not. I just looked up rents there, and a 500sf studio will run you around $1300-$1500USD a month. Given average salaries in the area, this does not compare favorably to SF. (As a matter of fact, the city of Paris has just enacted strict rent-control laws, because rents were seen as unaffordable.)
Also, be more specific: what part of SF are you talking about? If you're talking about the 1/3rd of SF that could be characterized as "city", the density is already quite high. Increasing the density of already dense areas won't meaningfully impact rents. But meanwhile, average density numbers completely ignore that the western 2/3 of SF looks like suburbs:
https://www.google.co.jp/maps/@37.7501516,-122.4626812,3a,75...
That's in the city of San Francisco. I dropped a pin randomly in the west side of the city. You can see Sutro Tower!
When we talk about density in SF, these are the areas that matter. But even if you could build higher density in these areas, you'd still have to buy the land (which would suddenly be much more expensive), build transit, infrastructure, and so on. There is no inexpensive solution to this problem.