Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

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junkscience2017

but NIMBYs still have not had their core claim dismissed: that new residential capacity is not being augmented with better transportation infrastructure or even schools. most NIMBYs gave up on neighborhood parks, they seem just impossible now. amusingly, even retail is being shunned (residential is build, sell and move on, which is why places like Silver Creek in San Jose only have one tiny pathetic market for 5k homes). most cities now have to force retail components on to developers

if you live in the US, chances are you attended a public school built by a developer in exchange for development rights, and the school was accessible by a road also built by the developer. the park was set aside as such and not filled with homes; instead the developer paid to put in a swingset and a tennis court

now developers refuse to augment transportation infrastructure or build schools (and it is illegal to decline a development due to predicted pressure on local school), and NIMBYs want to know why. all they get in response are downvotes on message boards or personal attacks

thousands new rental units are going up along Lawrence Expressway in Santa Clara...but no new road capacity and no new schools, and no parks or open space at all. what kind of a community would you like to live in? in a few years the same urban professionals who are the core of the YIMBYs will be freaking out about no schools or parks, because they are going to want them.

That's a total misrepresentation. It's people proposing things like Measure S in LA, which would have put every single construction project, including schools roads and parks, all of them, on ice for two years.

It's people like the residents of Beverly Hills who held up the construction of a Subway for 15 damn years. They are anti-mass transit and pro-traffic. Literally, yes.

It's people like the one lone nut that fought in the courts to make the LA expo train slow down to 10 miles per hour passing through his neighborhood. Oh joy!

It's people like the group fighting Against putting new green parkspace over the 101 freeway and reconnecting the neighborhoods.

It's people like the damn group in the sunset hills who got a Frank Gehry affordable housing project With park space cancelled in favor of keeping a strip mall from the 50s. Anti-park, anti-housing...

So no, this is the actual reality. They are anti-everything. Anti infrastructure, anti parks, anti schools, anti housing, anti everything.

They're not leftists or activists, they're just greedy stubborn dick waving assholes with lawyers. They've got zero interest in building a community, they just want to control everything.

One of the most important things we can do for more livable cities is organize against these foot dragging campaigns.

And they're everywhere! Our daughter's school bought an old golf course to create some athletic facilities and a nature preserve for the kids. (We're not talking a football stadium, but a few fields surrounded by parkland for a non-sports-oriented K-12 school with less than 800 students). They were tied up in litigation for years. http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/schools/ph-ac-cn-key-scho.... After losing at trial, the resident group appealed it all the way to the state supreme court!

Residents gave the stupidest reasons for it too:

> But that doesn't go far enough for Geri Nicholson, who lives on Carrollton Road and across the street from the park.

> "The roads aren't safe, and the project as planned is not going to make them any safer," Nicholson said.

> Association President Tom Bodor said a price can't be placed on safety.

> "How much is safety worth? It is priceless," Bodor said.

This is the "unsafe road" we're talking about: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9497613,-76.4821034,3a,75y,5.... It's idle suburbia.

If this is actually NIMBYs' core claim, I'm overjoyed, because it can plausibly be worked with.

Building literal greenfield subdivisions is a little different from infill/intensification in a city. Where one developer is building all the homes, of course he needs to provide all the infrastructure and amenities between them, or no one will want to live there.

Urban intensification is one site at a time. I hope no single developer is doing so much of the construction that it also makes sense to make him responsible for schools and transit. The whole angle of YIMBYism is to reduce landlords' pricing power through competition. So if ten different developers are operating simultaneously, who pays for what?

If only there were some sort of institution for solving these coordination problems. We could call it... municipal government. If only there were some sort of mechanism for it to skim off of real estate value and use the money for public goods. We could call it... property taxes.

Maybe "our side" isn't campaigning loudly enough for increasing public investements in public goods, but the support is there. What you're probably seeing pushback for is arguments like, "well, I don't see a school in this proposal for 20 condos, so get lost" and other stuff that looks like a rhetorical strategy for a decision you already made, rather than your actual objection.

Road capacity is an interesting one, because people who live in dense walkable environments close to their offices need less transportation. Killing projects in SF based on their traffic/transit impacts sends their potential residents out to Walnut Creek. That's not better.

EDIT: I will also add that huge multi-buildings sites developed all at once have a tendency to feel fake. There's a very real risk of uncanny valley when a developer is trying to bootstrap a neighborhood all at once. Organic, incremental growth is something we should celebrate and encourage.

I'm 100% with you, but unfortunately residential property taxes aren't going to be able to cover necessary municipal infrastructure in California until we get Prop 13[0] repealed. It may have been passed with noble intentions (although from the outside it sure looks like existing property holders transparently exploiting newcomers to the area), but the net effect is a systemic underinvestment in local infrastructure since the 1970s.

The YIMBYers would love to kill off Prop 13 and return to sane levels of local funding, but it's state wide and still far too politically sacred to be attacked directly.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

As far as I know prop 13 suppress property taxes of old buildings, not new ones. New buildings should therefore have an outsized impact on the ability to create infrastructure.

There's actually a proposal for a ballot measure next year to end Prop 13 for commercial properties -- definitely a start. It would bring $11 billion in revenue every year.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia...

"If only there were some sort of mechanism for it to skim off of real estate value and use the money for public goods. We could call it... property taxes."

what schools? land has to be set aside for schools. no developer makes this sacrifice anymore. it doesn't matter if revenue is generated if there is NO SCHOOL because no one would build one. and yes this is becoming a problem in the Bay Area.

"Road capacity is an interesting one, because people who live in dense walkable environments close to their offices need less transportation"

maybe like 0.1% of people in SF are candidates for walking to work, you can't be serious

If one developer is doing a single project so big that they can spare a school-sized plot of land... that's concerning in itself. The model of production that worked for cookie-cutter subdivisions isn't the only or best one.

Public money can and should be used to acquire and develop sites. The city can negotiate with developers to get schools incorporated into large multi-use buildings the same way we got museums/arts centers around Yerba Buena.

We don't need developers to plop down entire fully-formed communities all at once to get these things, and we shouldn't necessarily want them to. More, higher-value activity to tax only increases the city's ability to build what is needed collectively.

> maybe like 0.1% of people in SF are candidates for walking to work

Everyone says SF is seven miles a side. Walking speed is maybe 3mph. If you want a commute of 40 minutes each way, you need to live at most 2 miles (straight line) away from your office.

0.1% seems low. Divide walking speed by sqrt(2) to be conservative about directness and you get about 20% of the peninsula within 40 minutes walk, and 40% of it within an hour.

100% of people in a condo tower next to a cluster of office towers and a Muni stop should be very serious candidates for walking, bicycling, or taking Muni. This could create more transit riders and therefore require more transit (which we’d be happy to approve), but also take some existing longer-distance drivers or transit riders down to shorter and less resource-hungry commutes.

Here in seattle we are building like crazy. I moved into a 1 year old residential skyscraper across the street from my office for the 4 minute door to desk commute.

I don't know how it is in SF, but if you are building sensibly, you would mix high density apartments/condos with offices so that people can live close to where they work.

Why the heck should developers build schools? That's what people pay property taxes and impact fees for. Here on the east coast, I've never even heard of a developer building a school. In my county, there is a law that halts development when the local schools reach 100% capacity, but other than that the county takes on the burden of buying land and building schools to keep up with development: http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/schools/ph-ac-cn-old-mill....

If developers build out suburban neighborhoods creating an integrated plan like this make sense, but what developers are building now is individual infill properties. nimbys that ask for infill developers to should infrastructure costs for a neighborhood is either not up to date on what is being build which by effect means that they living in the past or are intentially stalling development. Both has the same outcome, and with our dire housing situation this deserves a negative reaction if the person refuse to cooperate in creating workable solutions that add significant housing supply.

With regards to who should build infrastructure developer fees and property taxes are there to fund public construction of infrastructure; roads, schools, hospitals, etc. Why do you think requiring developers of individual buildings to build these is reasonable or even a workable solution?

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