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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is a general problem, where property owners in an area have both the power to influence the local government's land use policy and an incentive to limit new construction in order to create artificial scarcity and drive up the prices of their own property. Is this guaranteed to exacerbate any housing shortage anywhere'

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If you're property owner you want things to improve around you as it increases value. Problem is there an older class of people who vote and attend city council meetings that don't want things to move forward. They squash things like building high density housing right next to a metro stop. They fight things like extending metro lines and almost killed the purple line extension. In our case, they fought fiber(FIOS) in our neighborhood and won because they didn't want the streets dug up.

Its so bad that some wealthy municipalities spend a significant fraction of their budgets lobbying or fighting development in court. The government of South Pasadena, for example, a town of about 25,000, spends millions of dollars a year in legal fees to block the 710 freeway expansion. This expansion would break a huge bottleneck in the area and LA county went as far as coming up with an underground freeway plan costing a billion dollars a mile (paid for by the state and TARP!) but even that was shot down. I think they finally gave up after decades of court battles and all of the houses bought along the planned expansion are being sold by the state.

Meanwhile, the school district cuts millions from its budget every few years (from five schools), road and other infrastructure maintenance is years behind at best (roads are crumbling and El Nino took it up another level), and the emergency services have turned to donations to meet their stagnant budgets.

Hmm .. Mountain View is an interesting example. The area near whishman park has no grocery stores or restaurants. I ran into an old timer in an Uber recently and he mentioned people did some of this zoning on purpose .. I.e. the need for a car to survive. As a young person, it seems weird that I bike home from work, and then take uber to get groceries. But yeah .. things are messed up in zoning big time.

And here I have the reverse problem in Willow Glen. The commute to Mountain View is terrible, but once I get to neighborhood streets near my house there is 0 traffic and all the local services I need within about a 2 mile radius. I can't bike to work, but I think the tradeoff is personally worth it for all the benefits of living in a walkable/bikeable neighborhood.

I've been told (including by current members of the Mtn View city council) that the lack of a grocery store in this neighborhood stems from city staff who are convinced that the neighborhood can't support one. Many people in the neighborhood are skeptical of this, and expressed a desire for a grocery store (along with restaurants and more retail) at a neighborhood planning meeting this past summer:

http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...

I believe there will be future community meetings, so if you live in the area, get involved!

The need to explicitly allow retail spaces is one of the great absurdities of US zoning standards.

Why not let grocery store execs or entrepreneurs determine if the neighborhood can support a grocery store? I don't see why government would be concerned if a private entity is successful or not (and I'm about as far opposite of libertarian as one can go). Would they prohibit say a Senegalese restaurant for opening for fear there wasn't a large enough makrket?

I live in the suburbs of south bay, and near my house used to be a Mervyns -- a clothing store that had a relatively large building but went out of business nearly 10 years ago. A few stores came and went, but for the majority of those 10 years, it has been sitting vacant. It's too big for the average brick and mortar entrepreneur, but too small for a big chain. Someone should section it off into smaller units, but maybe the construction is not profitable. There's not that much foot traffic in the shopping center for most retail stores to stay in business either.

Makes sense for the government to intervene if the free market can't identify a sustainable business to utilize the space.

Or make them pay extra taxes for abandoned properties. If they can't afford the taxes the government gets the land and building, and can then auction it off to someone who can put it towards a better use.

Direct democracy doesn't work.

One problem is who is actually represented. The dozens or hundreds of families that are priced out of the town, can't vote, because they've been prevented from living there. By definition, local elections are going to favor the people already living there.

I agree with this. The correct way would be to make the entire metro area a 'city' (or maybe a 'megacity') and absorb (and remove) all lower levels of governance.

This way voter representation is on the scale of the locality. It would encourage factoring in the needs of all citizens within that economic zone, instead of factions of shards that battle each other.

Yeah, look at the chaos that is Switzerland: one of the best life expectancy and education in the world, with so low taxes that rich French move there to pay less.

1 success out of how many failures? The people of California are not nearly as intelligent or forward thinking as the people of Switzerland.

Well, Switzerland had centuries of focus on education.

But California seems to do OK according to my metrics: higher GDP per capita and life expectancy that the average in USA. What makes you feel California as a failure?

Switzerland has had many propositions that would have worked in favor of the majority but were actually voted down. Meanwhile, in California, everyone votes in their self interest without caring or considering the consequences.

A lot of things that work in the small don't scale.

This is exactly what the opponents of democracy said during the 18th century, and exactly what China says now "we are too big for democracy".

But well, we have a proven implementation at 8 million people. Let's promote it to all countries of that size or smaller then.

Seems like a local governance 'problem'. Are homeowners more likely to vote than renters? Or do homeowners and landlords outnumber renters and get the rational outcomes they want?

Retried & unemployed people have the time to participate in local politics compared to the employed people with young families. On top of that they have the highest financial incentive to NIMBY to reduce their personal risk in their house equity since they have fewer earning years left and more value to capture.

Over a large amount of people, this imbalance leads to older NIMBYs to become a naturally occurring political force in local politics.

This is very much true.

If renters and young people were more engaged in local politics this wouldn't happen.

It's baffling to me how engaged people are with Federal politics, where many of the issues are distant and may never affect peoples' lives, while at the same time they have zero interest in local politics, which affects their lives closely, directly, every day.

Additionally municipal government is so approachable and citizens have incredible access. You can just email people and they'll get back to you. You can go to meetings and address council directly. In my town of 600k+ I've coincidentally came across a councillor on the street multiple times.

Federal politics is very much like sports, while municipal politics feels like a boring necessary tar pit that sucks up time.

These people won't be engaged as retired people, simply because of time. They make the personally rational decision to do their jobs. Also people don't want to necessarily invest in local politics if they feel they may be gone in a few years. A retired person if fairly likely to be in the same town many years from now, possibly the rest of their lives.

I see comments about how approachable it is... Just go to the meetings, etc.

Unfortunately digital participation is still not a big thing yet.

I'd love to attend meetings in Redwood City where i live but many start at 6 during the week (think there may even have been some as early as 5 or 5:30).

I don't typically leave the office till 6 or a bit after that, and then I get home to things like needing to eat dinner and other family obligations.

If they truly wanted higher participation among younger and less wealthy demographics they would have these meetings on the weekend where people can have a much greater chance of avoiding conflicts with work and other basic life needs during the work week.

Or make digital participation in these sessions a priority.

Many local political events such as voting, council meetings, townhall meetings, school district meetings, etc. are usually scheduled to allow for the desired audience of the event holders. If such meetings are scheduled at times that younger, working adults cannot attend, it's because they don't want you there.

Oddly I've noticed many of them are poor renters who have snagged a rent-controlled place, and it's "up yours" to those behind them in line.

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