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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

The Bay Area is 7 million people. That’s not even top ten in the US, never mind the world. It is no way, shape, or form full.

Ya’ll need to start acting like a major city rather than stamping your collective feet while shouting “I won’t grow up!”

And if you refuse either Sacramento or Washington DC should force the issue for the good of the state and country respectively.

Almost the entire country is filled with places to live in detached houses on significant fractions of an acre (or more). The NIMBYs can sell to developers for huge amounts of money and move to any one of them.

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I live in SF and face daily the eldritch horror abominations NIMBY's brought upon this world. It's getting increasingly hard trying to keep my sanity. Their nextdoor incantations against a 24 hour bus schedule because it will degrade road quality (true story). The little leaflets they put in my mail inviting me to join their cthonian ceremonies of opposing and punishing a neighbor's hybris. The heretic wanted to remodel his parking space, but construction will raise up dust which their kids will breath while playing outside (true story). Trying to reason with them is impossible, it only results in madness..

Ok now, joking aside (though the 2 examples I mentioned are 100% true, they opposed a late-night bus because it would cause noise + somehow degrade road quality. Who can reason with old-bitter people with too much time on their hands?).

The issue I am seeing with them selling to developers for huge amounts of money, is that the developers will want to make that that amount of money++ back. Current zoning laws limit the height of buildings, so... their only option is to only build small insanely overpriced condos and grant permissions only to super-upscale businesses, that only rich or rich-young-tech people can afford and want. Perhaps the market will correct that in time, but powerful people as aways will fight for that to not happen.

I feel we need more relaxed zoning laws, let people build bigger and higher.

> I feel we need more relaxed zoning laws, let people build bigger and higher.

Bingo. If there is currently a detached house of 1500 sq ft that can be torn down and in its place can be put up a six story building apartments totaling 8000 sq ft of livable space, there’s plenty of room for profit for the prior homeowner, the developer, and also for the new units to be more affordable than what was there before. Increasing the supply is a win-win-win.

As I said, if necessary—-and it looks like it is—-higher levels of governments should step in to prevent local, narrow minded, parochial interests from killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

What about parking, traffic, water, sewers, electricity usage, etc? You are now putting 6x the amount strain on the public infrastructure in that single area. Building more buildings is the naive, first order solution.

What about them? Is it no longer possible for America to build public infrastructure? Have we just given up?

Sure upgrading infrastructure is possible but the costs are huge. It's subject the same inflation as everything else, plus city worker unions have a lot of political power. Once a sewer line reaches capacity we can't do a minor increase; the whole thing has to be ripped out and replaced which is tremendously disruptive.

A real-world example to support your comment that my civil engineer buddy recently told me: in Columbus, one of the main streets past Ohio State University into downtown is completely at sewage/rain water capacity. Decades ago when the street in question (High St) was being built, the only buildinga along it were single/multi-family homes. Now there are large student dorms and apartment complexes. During intense thunderstorms, the gutters along the street which feed the sewage system reach capacity and the whole street floods. And I mean floods.

This is an "easy" fix in theory: gut the previous system and just build anew. The problem is, that would be such an enormous undertaking (b/c you have to divert sewage during the whole process, etc) that the city is effectively forced to apply what amounts to band-aid fixes in its place.

Yeah but if you live in a detached house that will no longer get any sun in its backyard when the six-story building goes up, you too are most likely going to be down at City Hall or wherever one goes, fighting against this one six-story building, even if you're a well-known advocate for taller buildings. Because it's My Back Yard, right?

It's definitely not win-win if that shadow falls on your beloved back yard, ruining your legal cannabis plot. Or if you live in the top floor of the five-story building that was built prior and your view will now be of the six-story building.

NIMBY works ("works") because most people put their own specific self interest before community when the former is threatened. They do this pretty reliably, and on the individual level it's usually pretty rational.

(Also, I might have reasons other than economics to keep my 1500 sq ft house from being torn down.)

There’s no reason the guy with the cannabis plot shouldn’t be outvoted by all the people that will benefit from the new building. The issue there is some combination of a collective action problem and what amounts to corruption.

The answer, as mentioned, is go to a higher level of government where there are even more people to outvote Mr. “But Muh Views”.

In the case of CA there’s seven million people in the Bay Area and 33 million in the rest of the state that would benefit from continued growth there and don’t care at all about shaded backyards in Palo Alto. That sounds like a referendum waiting to happen to me.

I agree the cannabis-plot guy could (maybe should) get out-voted, but I'm pretty skeptical it could happen by doing a ballot proposition.

That would come up against the same forces that fuel NIMBY-ism, i.e. the relative political clout of home owners and the power of the story that it's my back yard today, but it's gonna be YOUR back yard in the next shadow.

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