411–420 of 1001 posts
Wow that's great news! The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers. Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, h…
Sounds too good to be true. I’m skeptical that cities won’t just add more rules and reviews that end up extending the process 2x or more (plus more review fees!)
Exactly -- have any of the houses in Santa Monica actually been built?
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Where does this narrative about evil greedy developers come from? If the new housing represents a net increase in people, then the developers are filling unmet demand. It’s not that different from restricting the supply of milk and getting angry that milk producers will make more money when those restrictions are lifted. Yeah, they will, but only because there is more demand for their product than they were previousl…
Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. The high density housing community seems to think everyone just needs an efficiency unit in a Soviet style housing block and anyone else is an entitled NIMBY. What the person said was developers don’t care about the community they’re building into. Loosening of community rules means they can move in start bui…
The anti-NIMBY movement didn't come about because people want to override existing communities. It came about because people need a place to live, and NIMBYs were actively campaigning against it for decades with no consideration for the needs of others.
Now, I think it's reached the stage where at least among young people making their lives miserable is honestly seen as a positive.
I don't understand that statement along with the photo. That is a high density neighborhood. The houses are very close to each other, many are double story, and I don't see many green areas in between.
Did I miss something?
There is a developer in Cupertino who has been fighting with the city for years, who got awfully quiet lately. Now I know why. I suspect they have a plan for an absolutely massive high rise behind my house that they will be submitting at 8am tomorrow morning. My neighbors are going to be pissed .
Yes, people here celebrating this don't understand at all that all this does is give developers more power over communities they have no interest in but money. And of course, the politicians that they will fund/bribe to make this happen. We just went from democracy to oligarchy in this case.
Great. Apparently there's nothing _preventing_ mixed-use buildings. But are there incentives? Having residential buildings on top of commercial ones is the secret for walkability in many European cities. Grocery shops and other small businesses are usually very close to where you live.
I get not wanting to suddenly put an extra five hundred families onto a road that was only designed for a hundred single-family dwellings. What I don't get is being so nimby that you'd rather have your streets utterly full of homeless people and human waste.
I dont see why new million dollar condos will help homeless at all.
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> Cities should be able to plan their own growth. They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
Why not? if a low density community wants to plan to remain low density, who are the rest of us to stop them?
I personally love low density living, and I live on a 9 acre lot as a result. But, I can't keep my neighbors from subdividing their lots. Locally, my city (in WA) has places that would be better suited to higher density living and places that are not so well suited; but city council drags their feet on all new construction, so we're not meeting state growth targets here, and I suspect we'll eventually end up with something like described in this article. That would be unfortunate, IMHO, because increasing density in a desirable place to live is inevitable and I think it's better to have (expanding) pockets of high density rather than greatly mixed densities. It's easier to add 30 residences where there's municipal water and sewer than to extend municipal water and sewer 2 miles to a new project site where neighbors are on private wells and septic, which doesn't tend to work well for a 4 story condo building.
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> Cities should be able to plan their own growth. They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
Why not? if a low density community wants to plan to remain low density, who are the rest of us to stop them?
As such, any power your local community has to govern itself is just largess from its state. When it stops governing in a way that the state approves of, there is nothing preventing the state from stepping in.