Hacker News Reader

Comment by etjossem | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed it tends to hinge on whether you own a single-family home.

I own a SFH and am a YIMBY. Higher density is better for the neighborhood, my family, and the planet.

Ya emphasis on that. California is one of the lowest footprint places you can live. Everyone we squeeze out is potentially another person blasting AC at 11 cents a kWh in Arizona.

Even cheaper than that - I paid 6 cents/kWh last month in AZ.

The guys blasting AC in AZ is also in a solar panel hotspot.

How much would solar panels on the roof offset your AC energy usage?

I own a SFH and I am a YIMBY. But you are probably right.

I can't speak for LA, but I know many apartment-dwelling renters who are also NIMBYs. It's a general fear of change us humans have, coupled with in many cases for property owners a direct financial reward for resisting change.

Rent control is partially to blame for this, in that it creates a huge de facto landlord class out of a group of people who would otherwise have a strong incentive to keep housing prices affordable. They can even reap financial windfalls from rising housing prices by negotiating buyouts.

(I say this as someone who personally benefits from rent control. It shouldn't exist.)

I think it's partially a California thing. Coming from New York I was profoundly baffled to see people trying to stop trains from coming to their neighborhood.

Moved to LA from Chicago. I will never for the life of me understand anyone who can be against trains. The train system in Chicago was great, I lived without a car for four years, and never had a problem. Now I'm stuck in traffic to get anywhere, and it's miserable.

Oh most people in California are very pro-train, they just don't want them close to their homes. We like the convenience, environmental friendliness and you might even say Europeanness of trains, but no one wants to put up with the noise and lower property values that go along with having them run through your back yard.
Tell the truth...when you were in Chicago, did you want to live next to the "L"?

with the caveat that the SF-LA HSR project seems to be a boondoggle that will cost the state billions more than it probably should.

did you want to live next to the "L"?

Yes. I only wanted to live next to the L train. If I were apartment hunting, and it wasn't a quick walk to an L stop, that apartment went straight to the bottom of the list.

And when I sought roommates, my place being steps to a blue line stop meant I got literally 70 emails within the first few hours of posting the ad.

I think a lot of people in California have literally never seen the inside of a train. As a result, they can't imagine ever incorporating in to their lifestyle, and it represents, more than anything else, a change in life that might, someday, threaten their ability to drive everywhere. Of course, they have a hard time seeing how their driving everywhere affects everyone else, because it's all they've ever known. (E.G. killing loads of walkers and cyclists, emitting horrible pollution linked to myriad diseases, forcing songbirds to change frequency, demanding that land be used to let their car sleep instead of letting people sleep, and generally destroying street atmosphere and liveliness).

Growing up in the central valley I took Bart ONE TIME as a kid, and it's still a highlight of my entire damn childhood. I suppose I may like trains more than most, but after that my goal in life was mostly to escape suburbia.

It's fortunate that you only rode BART once as a kid, otherwise you probably would've suffered life-long hearing loss. That thing is loud...

Yeah that's a serious flaw. I commuted on it for a year (Berkeley->Fremont) and ended up using ear plugs.

It is basically a chicken and egg problem. We all own cars because we don't have viable trains like Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc. No one supports trains because we all already have cars and don't want our taxes going to trains we won't use.

For the record, Boston's mass transit is not always 'viable' - it pretty much hates 'weather' and we do get that here :-)

In the US, many people associate trains with 24/7 whistles. Remove that noise pollution, and living within 30km of the tracks becomes much more tolerable.

I've said this before but... I really do not get California's obsession with cars. Of all the places you'd want to be walkable, one that is nice outside almost all the time and gets no real winter to speak of seems like an ideal spot. But no... all the walkable cities are in areas that get run over by a glacier for six months out of the year.

Oh God no. Try to build something, anything in Manhattan. Ever heard of air rights? Those don't exist anywhere else but developers will pay millions just to add a single floor to their building.

That's a real thing. But I don't hear the anything like the passionate, reflexive, absolutist, paranoid anti-development attitudes and the corollary mental gymnastics from common people. It's that attitude I find baffling.

If you own a sfh, you want development around you... The denser your lands zoning is, the more it's worth. Add infrastructure and the value goes up too.

You're getting supply & demand wrong.

You want offices near you but no more housing, so that people work near you and are forced to live closer to you, and have to buy houses near you for ever-increasing prices.

And people who own homes (older than most of the population) are used to driving everywhere, they don't want people constantly walking in front of their houses. They all want their own cul-de-sacs.

... no. If your single family lot gets rezoned for a high rise tower you are likely now much wealthier.

It's more complicated than that. Yes by increasing density, you are increasing supply of housing units, but you are also increasing the demand for your property - as now it's not only a single family that would be looking to buy it but but someone building a highrise. Also, counterintuitively, because your allowing houses to be torn down for apartment buildings etc, the supply of SFH actually goes down, and there will always be demand from some for SFH over condos etc. And since most cities can't keep up with the number of people who want to live in them, by allowing more young people to move to the city in apartments, your also increasing future demand as they grow up.

> Yes by increasing density, you are increasing supply of housing units, but you are also increasing the demand for your property

So both remain in balance, prices don't increase and you get little or no financial benefits. Also, a house surrounded by high rises in a very busy street has far less relative value than a house in a quiet street where your kids can play around. Cities bring strangers, crime, pollution, noise, etc.

But if you increase job density without increasing housing density, then you reap massive financial benefits from increasing housing prices.

Without bringing job density into the equation, the demand is much much higher from the land value increase when zones move up. Is not at all unheard of for a SFH that was worth max 500K on the SFH market to be bought for over a million by developers when an area has gotten upzoned. Now, going back to jobs, in practicality, allowing upzones, also tends to bring way more jobs - more coffee shops / corporate towers etc.

"Is not at all unheard of for a SFH that was worth max 500K on the SFH market to be bought for over a million by developers when an area has gotten upzoned."

Yes, but that's only for holdouts, which is a game of chicken. And after the developers build around you, you're done, your home value plunges as you're surrounded by traffic and apartments.

"Now, going back to jobs, in practicality, allowing upzones, also tends to bring way more jobs - more coffee shops / corporate towers etc."

The two are unrelated. Cities have a lot of exclusive-use commercial or residential areas. You can increase the same jobs without having more residents, which increases value for the home-owners.

Which is exactly what is happening in the US.

So you think, having more retail space, more office buildings, more construction, etc is unrelated to jobs. Yep makes sense... What do you really think is more valuable a block of houses in San Francisco among many other blocks of houses, or if there was still any, a block of houses where a highrise could be built in Manhattan? Note also what's happening in the US is cities are disproportionately getting more expensive, people want to live near density. Jobs that used to be out in corporate parks, are moving, because non of the younger generation wants that life style. This is also why one of the cities that's increasing density and rezoning the fastest, Seattle, keeps having the highest increase in value for single family homes.

Can you point out concrete examples of home values plunging? Because every time I've heard it mentioned, starting in South Carolina when some black families moved into my white neighborhood, it hasn't happened.

Actually, you want to maintain scarcity to keep supply low relative to demand.

No that's not how it works. Most SFH owners are more concerned with quality of life issues (traffic, crime, noise, school access) than with property values.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com