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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it could work. Nonsense local policies to encourage "affordable" housing like inclusionary zoning have been huge failures. In big cities, we just need way more housing. Yet NIMBYs fight it at every step, esp in SF.

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You can’t just add in “moar housing” in a vacuum and declare mission accomplished. Let’s say SF doubled its housing. Where are all these new residents going to park? So, now it’s housing and parking that needs to be fixed. Assume none of these new residents have cars? Ok now it’s housing and public transit that needs to be fixed. Where are their kids going to go to school? So we need more school capacity, too. How much more water, sewage, electrical capacity will you need? How many more grocery stores will you need? Restaurants? Gas stations? Where will all this new development go?

Chicken-egg problem though. If you say transit doesn't go places or doesn't run often people claim the density is too low and we need more people to use it. Can't have the same excuses just used to block everything. Just start building everything, high density housing, dedicated bus lanes, multi-level parking garages, better utilities.

>Just start building everything, high density housing, dedicated bus lanes, multi-level parking garages

I'd advise against this. We did that in Madison, and before we even got very far doing this, Mother Nature started to hint to us that it might not be a good idea.

Maybe there are places where you can just build Willy-Nilly. (I doubt it, but what do I know?) I suspect, however, most places are like Madison, just not quite as delicate. You probably have to be REALLY careful about what you're building.

And even more careful about where you're building it.

> Mother Nature started to hint to us that it might not be a good idea.

Could you explain what you mean by this?

When we started building down what all the experts told us was an "under utilized" corridor, a bit of flooding appeared. Initially, when the rain would come down, you'd have to navigate through maybe 6 inches of water. Max. Annoying, but not necessarily cause for alarm. As we built more, and more down that corridor, it's gotten worse. Fast forward to today, and when the rain comes down hard you're navigating through maybe a foot or a foot and a half on a bad day in that area. It's also taking much longer to drain. (Nothing speaks to the folly of thoughtless building like high end, fancy restaurants, in gleaming new fancy buildings with sand bags out front that you have to jump over.)

So yeah, no new plans for any new massive footprint, high density buildings along that area in the near future. I suspect until they get this whole thing worked out. Point is that just digging out massive parking garages, paving over areas, building high density housing, it all sounds good on the surface. And it might be good for other cities? Who knows?

But we now have a better understanding that you need a more well thought out plan if you're a city built on a system of five lakes with a dam and locks system delicately balancing their water levels as it is.

While I'm sure there are areas where this is true, this seems like a special case. In the Bay Area some liquefaction zones and high fire risk hilly areas are likely candidates to not build on, however, I didn't suggest to build everywhere. In fact, I think we should keep open space and hilly fire-prone areas as parks, we can in fill low density areas and empty lots with high density.

Problem is it takes forever for the egg to hatch.

SF Central Stubway took 20 years to construct and will take another 20 years to reach the wharf. Caltrain DTX has been in planning for 20 years, construction probably won't start until 2030s. Geary BART has been talked about since the 1960s with no motion. Second transbay tube is needed, no specific plans yet. Muni Metro is at capacity with no plans to fix.

So you can build a lot of housing and tell people to deal, but they may be retired or dead before it gets fixed.

The whole point of a city is people aren't dependent on cars/parking. Otherwise, it's not a city.

So Los Angeles isn't a city? What do you call it then?

A continous suburb?

It's gettin' there!

Actually it solves lots of those problems too, more affordable housing would make it possible for teachers, waiters, bus drivers, waiters, grocery cashiers to live affordably in the city.

Uber/Lyft and now scooters have already 10x improved transit in SF. Living without a car and even without buses is totally possible now. The cost of Lyft 10 times a week compares favorably with a car, and scooters/bikes are much cheaper. See http://www.rideordrive.org/

Improving caltrain, muni and bart would be awesome, but there's plenty of transit to handle much more housing.

So "moar housing!"

"would make it possible for teachers, waiters, bus drivers, waiters, grocery cashiers to live affordably in the city."

Plus a broader tax base vs relying on Prop 13 property taxes.

That’s no solution. So teachers and waiters can live in the city now—great. What new schools and restaurants will they work in? Where are all the new grocery stores going to be built to cater to all the new residents? How will the traffic grid handle more Lyfts and Ubers? Are you going to build wider roads in SF? You can’t just build taller buildings and dump 50% more people in a city.

There's now a bunch of new building to put schools and restaurants in.

Much of SF is 1 story buildings. You can absolutely convert those to 3-4 story buildings and get 100% more people in SF. The first floor can be restaurants, schools and grocery stores. In this new SF, like in Tokyo, you can get a flat for $600/month.

Think of the Mission, North Beach, Noe Valley, but building that in the Richmond and Sunset. Everyone wants to live there (see the current prices), why not build more if it? Why not build a bunch in Oakland?

People can just switch to scooters and bikes and there is tons of room on the streets. I remember a NY transit authority guy at a conference, he was just amazed at how much wider our streets are. There is tons of room.

Tokyo exists, it is a real big city with low rents and a great quality of life.

Why can't we build taller schools, restaurants, and stores at the same time? Or better yet a tower that is a store on the bottom floor, then offices for a couple floors, then apartments? (or any other arrangement of the above that makes sense for the local situation)?

The reason you think more transit will be needed is because you are assuming that separate business and residential districts are required. However there is no particular reason it must be that way. If you can get people within walking distance of work and a few stores they won't needs as much transit. Transit becomes what you need for rare trips.

What is your point? That it's too difficult and we should just give up and be thankful for what we have?

> You can’t just build taller buildings and dump 50% more people in a city.

Tell that to NY.

Nearly every city in the world has built infrastructure in lockstep with growth for their entire existence. Thats simply how its done. When you have existing demand for more infrastructure, you build it.

Maybe you could claim that it is better to provide infrastructure before people, but it is actually the master planned cities that have yet to succeed, not the other way around. It's just too damn expensive to provide infrastructure for people that don't exist yet, and that deters people from moving there.

This isn't strictly true. A lot of the London underground was built first and then housing developed around it. Actually the tube getting to a place prompted massive development in the area. Similarly now if a new line gets created to an area in many cities you see development around it.

The tube was built outwards, not within. It was a reflection of demand for housing that already existed in quantities large enough to justify it, and was also growing at paces never seen before with no end in sight, and there was no possible way to build upward at the time. In other words, given the conditions of their time, they were building the infrastructure in response to already existing demand.

Isn't the massivly rising house prices a reflection of large demand for housing?

There were many ways to build upwards at the time but London favoured single family houses. Cities like Paris built upwards around that time. Even to this day Paris is more densly populated than New York because almost all buildings in Paris are around 7 stories rather than a very tall core surrounded by a lot of single family dwellings.

For SF, SOMA residental towers ("Yuppie fishtanks") seems like the way to go:

https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/yimbyism-explain...

Developing higher-value land uses increases the tax bas available pay for all of those things. SF scaled from zero to where it is now; it can scale further.

Where are all these new residents going to park?

Nowhere? They would use public transit. If public transit didn't exist, they'd become an actual constituency forcing it to happen.

And yeah, sure, developers would have add electrical lines, substation, electrical capacity depending. Jeesh theses objections just seems substituting trees for forest.

Edit: And certainly, the calls for "just do it!" are response to a corrupt collection of interests who use "do it responsibly" to soak up vast amounts of money for doing anything and then throw-up their hands and say "see we tried", which is the way public transit has gone in the last fifty years in this country.

In Palo Alto, California, the people there would consider themselves "progressive." Yet they only will accept below market-rate housing if they can hand-pick the "right" people. This, IMHO, is disgusting, blatant, racism.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/04/17/supervisors-s...

(And it's another way to pay people off-the-books and under-the table in the form of discounted housing. In theory, the discount is taxable income when it's provided because of employment, but good luck getting _these_ people to pay up.)

Local policies actually make a lot of sense in most places, as most places have unique concerns.

In Madison Wisconsin there were, for a long time, policies that tended to discourage building on the main east-side thoroughfare. Over time, no one really remembered why those policies, some of which one might construe as "inclusionary zoning", were in place. So we jumped on the urban development bandwagon. We were "All In" on it. I mean getting rid of older policies, introducing things like TIF for that very east side corridor, the whole nine yards. Fast forward to today, and there are buildings built down that corridor with giant footprints. And some people even think they are beautiful. So we congratulated ourselves.

Then something strange started to happen. Whenever it rained, that very corridor would flood. Odd? It never did that before? Well, we never built like that down that corridor before. Not to worry. The flooding wasn't really that bad. But it's gotten worse and worse. And only now are people starting to realize why those old guys back before and during the Greatest Generation wanted to discourage building anything critical there. Long story short, we're a city situated on a system of five lakes, we can't just look at what everyone else in the nation does and copy them. We need to follow a plan that makes sense for our geography. We need policies that make sense for us, even if on the surface, those policies appear to hamstring us economically.

I'm sure Madison is not special in this regard. It's likely most cities have some feature endemic to them that would similarly constrain where and how a wise man would build in that municipality. Like us, most cities have probably even forgotten the why of their constraints. I sympathize. But just as a piece of kindly intended advice from a people who have "been there, done that, currently trying to clean up the mess"...

don't look at old policies and say they're "outdated", or "nonsense"...

look at old policies and ask, "OK, what was the reason for this?"

Fair, but the root reason for many of the core zoning codes is that the WW2 and Boomer generations felt that cars were the future and that low density car-oriented development was the only kind of thing they wanted to be allowed near them, mostly for aesthetic reasons and also because they perceived (accurately at the beginning) that “those people,” meaning criminals but mostly just low income people, wouldn’t be able to follow, and thus they’d have their idillic suburban life. So when we examine those root causes it turns out that they’re pretty crap and we don’t need to keep them around.

In vast swathes of the US, the reason for it was to prevent black people from moving into white neighborhoods. I'd still call that outdated.

Yes, it's good to be mindful of Chesterson's Fence [0]. We should understand the reasons for policies before changing them. In many cases, we understand the reasons for exclusionary zoning; they're repulsive, and they should be changed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

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