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Comment by oxide | Hacker News Reader

The more I learn about this situation the more surprised I am.

George Carlin had a great bit about NIMBY-types, but in that bit the NIMBY-types, who don't want a prison built near them, have a "logical" viewpoint that he deconstructs: criminals don't hang around outside of a prison. Inmates who escape want to get as far away from the prison as possible, that's the point of escaping, after all.

From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns? is that really what is keeping housing from being built? concerns over an eyesore? I don't see the "logical" viewpoint that can be deconstructed here, no wonder it's such a headache.

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It all comes back to money. People who've seen 20x returns on their property value want to keep the money, people who've spent $5m on a small house want to justify that investment, and landlords want to keep renting their shoebox studio for $3k/mo. Arguments about neighborhood character are just trying to obscure the obvious greed.

I think that is an overly simplistic view. There are plenty of people who live in a given city, or a given neighborhood in a city, because it was a good fit for the kind of place they wanted to live.

In many non-tech fields jobs aren't concentrated so heavily in just a couple of cities. You can decide what you are looking for in terms of climate, commute, recreation, culture, transportation, and so on, find a city and neighborhood that has that, and then go there and find a job.

These people often pick a place to live, with the intent of staying there for the rest of their working life, and raising their families there.

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with greed when they oppose changes to the factors that led them to be there in the first place, especially when the people who want that change are people who came there not because they particularly wanted to live there but rather because some company they wanted to work for requires its employees to live there, and those people have no intention of staying long term.

Next time I move, I'm going to be looking for a place with reasonably dark sky, good bicycling, a climate that is warm enough that I mostly don't need to turn on the heat, low enough density that if I want to listen to music or watch a movie at 3 AM I won't be bothering my neighbors (and vice versa), a decent chess within 60 miles, and good internet access. You can bet afterwards I'll vote against change that would change any of those, even if the proposed changes would raise the value of my property, because I'd be buying the property as a home, not as an investment that I can incidentally live in.

Just a random opinion from someone who doesn't live in SF: I like to visit SF because of the architecture. It really is what makes it unique in the United States. It would be a shame to lose that.

Nobody is asking to bulldoze the Painted Ladies or Lombard.

The problem is more about the Sunset, the Richmond, Forest Hills, Excelsior -- just these huge sweeping neighborhoods which are incredibly underzoned and underdeveloped. Or the people who fight development in SOMA because it blocks part of their view.

Sunset is the strangest place I've ever seen from the air. A totally regular grid of housing with no almost no open spaces at all. Maybe you can't see it from the air but are there even community spaces where people gather? I can't even see any shopping or restaurant areas. It's all just regular roads.

I can't imagine how you could make it any more developed. There isn't an inch of breathing space is there? If you built up how would anyone get around? In higher rise places even like London there are parks and a variety of spaces and variation in the layout to get around the extra vertical density.

I live in the Sunset. We have plenty of small parks and the Sunset runs the entire length of the enormous Golden Gate park, which stretches across half the city.

There are plenty of restaurants and shops, most of which is not yet gentrified, and they just fit into the regular grid as mixed-use urban buildings (restaurant on the street level, apartments on the floor(s) above. There are no strip malls, big box stores, etc.

Like much of the city, developing it further would likely mean building "up", yes. There are also an enormous number of single family homes in the Sunset, some of which could be converted into multi family apartment buildings to increase density.

All that said, I'm not clear on how you'd actually accomplish the above. My family and I live here BECAUSE we wanted a single family home, a backyard, etc. SF obviously needs a vast increase in residential availability, but I'm certainly not the guy to ask about how to make it happen.

I'm sure it must be nice on the ground in reality as so many people want to live there, but it looks positively dystopian on a satellite image. Hundreds and hundreds of identical crammed blocks on a rigid grid with no green spaces in them. It looks like in some places you'd have to walk six blocks to reach any kind of open space.

Other big cities like London are crowded as well but at least no two streets are the same and there's always some breathing space.

There is some good architecture in San Francisco, but there are many areas with absolutely terrible architecture. I can't imagine this proposal will produce worse architecture than what already exists.

It's possible to have municipal deign standard for public facades, but still build new stuff.

One person's greed is another person's "just trying to cover the mortgage".

That is staggeringly presumptuous of you to claim, lacking a shred of evidence (or, for that matter, empathy).

There's a financial interest. Cheaper homes means your home is worth less. There's a tipping point, however. There's a point where you can no longer afford your home or the neighborhood.

There's also a question of quality of life. A prison is one, extreme example. But an apartment building aimed at college students or young professionals might be another. High density housing might create more traffic, noise, parking problems, property issues, mess, and so on. As someone who recently moved out of a "low rent" neighborhood, I had my property thrown up on and vandalized multiple times, and been woken up in the middle of the night more times than I can count. I was not sad to move to a neighborhood not far away, but significantly quieter. I realize these problems are not related to the property per se, but certainly people chose a neighborhood for a variety of reasons that are not aesthetic.

This isn't to dismiss the need to improving access to housing. I don't want to be NIMBY, but we seem to have this immovable dichotomy between liberal "expand access" policies and conservative "if you don't like the neighborhood, move" policies and no real way to reconcile them.

EDIT: I have a short anecdote to try and illustrate my point. In my former neighborhood I was lucky to have a small, one car garage on an alley. Parking was at a premium and most residents in the converted rental housing (houses that were turned into multi-unit rentals) did not have parking. At least a handful of times per year, I would find a car blocking my garage. Perhaps I didn't leave for work until later in the day or something, but whoever needed that spot thought they were OK there for a while. This is not a trivial problem for me. I needed that car to get to work and now I either have to track down the owner or wait for a tow truck (and incur the owner's wrath which usually involved yelling at me from my yard or smashing my mailbox) and be late for work or wherever I was going. The problem is that this wasn't a serious issue to most people reading an article on HN (or even the local paper). It's not an issue that you make policy based on, but it is an issue for everyone who lived in the neighborhood, including the people who were forced to block my garage for lack of other parking. I can't call the cops and tell them I think my irate neighbor smashed my mailbox or call my city and tell them to do something about parking. I'm stuck with that problem until the slow wheels of planning fix it, and by then I've been late to work a dozen or more times.

In my experience, NIMBYs are far more motivated by quality of life concerns than by real estate values. The most active NIMBYs have lived in a particular neighborhood for years and aren't planning to sell any time soon, so a decline in property values is abstract. But increased traffic congestion, school overcrowding, and heavier use of other local infrastructure has a real and immediate negative impact.

Why should the interests of potential future residents outweigh those of people who already live there?

> Why should the interests of potential future residents outweigh those of people who already live there?

If all the residents agree to not sell or build more densely or whatever, fine, but once someone does, why should their right to do as they see fit with their own property be trampled?

Most people would agree there's a line somewhere, but 1) no one actually wants to build a nuclear waste dump in the middle of a suburb and 2) we've gone way over the line to the point where people freak out about a little bit more housing in an area full of housing like it's the end of the world.

People don't have an unrestricted right to their property, because actions on your property affect the property rights of others.

That's what I meant about there being 'a line' somewhere. No one much wants to see a toxic waste storage facility near housing. People seem to mostly be ok with the law not being used to prevent people with children from moving in to a neighborhood though, even though kids can be noisy and "change the character of the neighborhood". Once upon a time, it was pretty normal to restrict black people from moving into a neighborhood too. That's no longer acceptable.

I think modern zoning is way too restrictive. Central planning was best left to die with the Soviet Union.

There are age-restricted communities which don't allow people with children to move in. I don't know whether this is a good idea, but it is legal in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age-restricted_community

Certainly, but those are private in nature, require buying in, and do not cover nearly every major city, as zoning does.

"Rights" have been stretched to mean, whatever is profitable or desirable for some group. In fact, owning the property is as far as it goes. Enjoying it. The interpretation that your neighbor's use of their property affects your 'enjoyment' of your own is a stretch.

I disagree, especially if a property creates negative externalaties. Smell, noise, parking issues, etc. are all quality of life problems. I shouldn't be able to tell a neighbor what color to paint their house, but I think it's ok to make sure a neighbor mows their lawn or shovels their sidewalk. Both of these issue impact me directly, and not just in preference.

The problem with not having zoning is that you end up with a two tiered housing system. People who can afford it move into private communities where standards can be enforced, and people who can't just live wherever they can find, despite their neighbors. Since I can't afford a private community where I can distance myself from my neighbors, I will support zoning restrictions, thank you.

Except that in a lot of cases the rise of property prices isn't just pushing out potential future residents, it's also pushing out people who grew up in the area and people who've lived there a long time but never managed to get on the property ladder.

In those situations, high property prices are directly impacting the quality of life of a lot of people who have the same justification for being in the area as the NIMBYs do, but have less of a voice.

>Why should the interests of potential future residents outweigh those of people who already live there?

Because otherwise the people who own land in that area get to extract massive rents from everyone else for no reason.

For most owners, there is no tipping point. Their house payments are fixed based on when they purchased the house, not on its appreciation since then.

Property taxes.

In most places where property value growth is fast, tax relief does not keep up. And it can become a significant part of your home's upkeep, especially if you own it and have been there for some time. Rapid growth in value disproportional effects residents on fixed incomes. This is not a problem unique to San Fransisco, but to all "boom towns", large and small.

Additionally, services you once were able to afford such as parking, grocery stores, restaurants, etc. become expensive quickly. Think having your bodega replaced by a Whole Foods.

Aren't property tax increases in the state of California limited by Proposition 13?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

Thanks to California's Prop13 that caps how fast assessed property values can be raised to 2%/year, this isn't much of an issue in SF - once you're in your house, property tax is not going to make it unaffordable.

That's good for California. But if we are to generalize this problem, many states don't have that.

Still, it's a good policy and I wish my state would pursue it. The oil boom priced many people out of their homes.

Many people see it as bad for California. We're foregoing tons of tax revenue and warping real estate markets. There are always trade-offs.

Here's one article:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_...

There are plenty more.

Only if property taxes remain constant (which I guess may be true in parts of the country.)

> From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns?

They also often have economic concerns, to wit, that increasing the supply of housing will, ceteris paribus, reduce the market clearing cost, reducing the value of the housing that they own.

There are also quality of life concerns relating to expected effects of increased density on crime, on transportation and other infrastructure, and other things, as well. Those and aesthetic issues are more likely to be cited in public debate than the economic issue above, but I suspect for homeowners the economic issue is actually the overwhelming one.

A good friend of mine recently was able to purchase a home in the Bay Area (we're in our late 20's). It has been absolutely fascinating the last few months watching his views towards housing supply do a complete 180 from "We need to build more housing" to "If they can't afford it maybe living here isn't for them".

Eh, criminals don't hang around outside of a prison, but that could mean they break into your house to steal a getaway car. I don't know. But I can understand people not wanting the possibility of a desperate escapee convict who has nothing to lose, loose in their neighborhood looking for a way out.

as I understand it, the argument is that "bad" construction will make the neighborhood less desirable and cause the value of their property to drop

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