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Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

I think what’s interesting is that there are people in the Bay who want to live in apartments and take transit to work and there are people who want to live in houses with gardens and stuff. The people in the latter group do not want to allow the people in the former group to have the experience they desire. But that’s because the people in the latter group do not want just to live in houses with gardens. They want to live in houses with gardens where their neighbours also have houses with gardens.

So we have these big fights about property rights and whatnot when it’s just that the two aims are incompatible and the latter group wants the status quo (which is necessarily easier to adhere to)

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I'll bite... I've protested apartments being built near my house-with-a-garden in the suburbs (Seattle area).

Not because I have a particular interest in my house price, or want to interfere with other people, but because the plans are doing absolutely sweet FA to improve the infrastructure to cope with the additions. In general, I'd be happy for the extra apartments if they came with extra infrastructure. We'd all benefit from it.

In one case, they started planning to add hundreds of apartment blocks specifically targetting young families, and yet the way it was being done there would be zero money going towards local schools to deal with the extra influx. Usual construction requires money towards schools, but there are loopholes, and the developer was using them, and the city seemed happy to let them.

Nor were there any plans to deal with the additional cars being added. Even with good transit links to Seattle, the roads leading to the proposed site.

Nor were there plans to deal with increased sanitation or power demand on an already flaky power grid.

The list literally goes on and on. What we keep seeing around here is developers interested in doing the absolute bare minimum to build apartment blocks, and a city content to just let them overload an stretched resources.

Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built, and on what timeline? Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?), but if the people haven't moved in yet then there's no data to show the city so that they can project tax/levy money and scale schooling, transit, and other infrastructure appropriately.

If we let the circular dependencies stymie us at all turns, we'll never get anywhere. Gotta start somewhere, and having people to clamor for services seems like a good place to do so as any to me.

> Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built, and on what timeline?

The new residents, so, by proxy, the developer putting the apartment block in.

Of course, the developer immediately starts grousing about regulation, and excessive fees, and apparently, this is the reason for why we can't have sub-$400,000 apartment units.

> Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?)

It is reasonable for them to pay the city enough money to construct the infrastructure necessary to serve the new density they are adding.

infrastructure in sprawl costs more per capita than in dense urban developments. If these people will move to the same city anyways, maybe the city should be subsidizing the cost of the infrastructure because it’s cheaper to provide it to a big building on an existing street than it is to a new subdivision down the road

> infrastructure in sprawl costs more per capita than in dense urban developments. (snip) it’s cheaper to provide it to a big building on an existing street than it is to a new subdivision down the road

Unfortunately, even if you divide the costs per person, it's still often cheaper to get 40 people new water lines in say 20 average suburban homes, than it is to get 40 people new water lines in say, one building in Manhattan.

Infrastructure costs do not scale evenly per mile. The capital costs in infrastructure are rarely the actual wires or pipes, it's the installation and maintenance labour. Which are considerably more complex and more expensive in dense urban environments, than it is in the sprawl.

There are plenty of downsides to sprawl (it's a waste of land, for instance). But sprawl is nearly always cheaper (even after removing all subsidies), that's kind of the whole reason sprawl exists in the first place.

The problem is, you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes. Price/performance tends to be mid-rise apartments, which look like duplexes for the most part. These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes.

Sprawl exists because of zoning codes, not because of a market equilibrium.

If you're interested in the phenomenon, read https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ about the Growth Ponzi Scheme.

> you're comparing a Manhattan high-rise to 20 single-family homes.

That's generally what people mean by "Dense Urban" vs "sprawl", yes? You could replace "Manhattan" with "Chicago Loop" and it would be the roughly identical.

> These mid-rise apartments are cheaper per-capita both capital wise and maintenance wise than sprawly single-family homes.

They aren't, sprawly apartments (like duplexes, or low-mid-rise apartments) are roughly equivalent to costs as sprawly single family homes, and dense apartments are more expensive.

This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive).

> Read Strong Towns

I have, many many times. They get promoted on HN on a literally daily basis.

Strong Towns is a fun blog to read, but unfortunately, Strong Towns is simply wrong sometimes. Their understanding of suburban finances is one thing they are semi-routinely incorrect on, they assume most suburbs are only financially viable if they continiously grow -- and while this is true for some, it is not common for most. The Growth Ponzi scheme they mention, while true for a handful of suburbs, does not apply in any way to 75% or more of suburbs across the US.

Don't take my word for it. Most municipalities budgets are public record (they should all be, really). Look up one near you, and see this for yourself.

I'll break this down another way.

I'm going to pick a random suburb that happens to be near me. They are about a 33% even split of old suburbs (1940-1960s), middle suburbs (1970s-1990s) and new suburbs (2000s+), with maybe 15% of that new suburb land still totally empty. There are a few duplexes and apartment buildings in there, but nothing dense. No buildings higher than 3 stories, it's like 95% low density stuff.

Their budget for 2017 includes $7,143,000 towards "Major Streets and Local Streets". That's costs for basically every road except the freeways (those are maintained by the state). This suburbs spends that, every year, on roads alone.

"OH MY GOD THATS SO EXPENSIVE" says StrongTowns, "OBVIOUSLY SUBURBS ARE DOOMED!"

There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden).

Even ignoring all business revenue, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription per person, this suburbs maintains every single street in the entire suburb.

An average house in this Midwestern Michigan suburb, costs about $150-200k. A single family home pays a couple hundred dollars per month in property taxes. It costs just $8 of those couple hundred dollars per month, to maintain every single street in the suburb.

Is it possible the municipality mis-counted something? Sure! Is it possible they aren't fully accounting for every possible road cost? Perhaps! Let's pretend they mis-counted by something extreme, let's assume they are a full 50% under-estimating on literally every street in the sububrb.

That doomsday scenario means a citizen might have to pay $16/month for roads, instead of $8. Oh no, what a terrible world that would be

I'm not pretending every suburb is identical. I'm sure there are suburbs that spend more than $8/per person per month on roads. Some suburbs are more sprawled out than others. But generally speaking, there is no great infrastructure apocalypse coming down upon us. It's just not happening, unless some major disaster wipes everything out all at once (like a hurricane, or a tornado, or a screwup like Flint's Water crisis).

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The Growth Ponzi scheme makes a great headline for StrongTowns. But for most people, it's completely fanfaction. It is not grounded in any reality whatsoever, for the vast majority of people who are reading it.

> There are 75,000 people living in this suburb. That 7 million dollars, divided per person (per capita) per month, comes out to $8/month per person. (That's number is artificially high, because it includes none of the businesses or retail that also pay taxes -- it assumes just the residents alone shoulder all the burden).

Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people owns property and pays property tax? That is a pretty inaccurate statement.

Moreover I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA [1]. Rather than guestimating property taxes based on some weird anecdotal extension of my own property tax, I'm going to take a look at the city budget [2]. The city earned $10,370,327 in property taxes in the 2017 FY. The city paid $1,258,730 to maintain its streets in the same FY. That's 12.1% of property taxes devoted just to street maintenance. In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paso_Robles,_California

[2]: https://www.prcity.com/DocumentCenter/View/23619/Two-Year-Ad...

> Are you assuming that each of those 75,000 people pays property tax?

Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another.

> I too will engage in your random exercise. Let's pick Paso Robles, CA

So, using your approach for the suburb I picked, all road construction + maintenance + repair costs are about 20% of the total suburban budget. Approximately $8/person/month. (This is in Michigan, where we have snow+ice+flooding for 6 months straight each year, so that seems totally reasonable to me.)

Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month.

So, your suburb spends even less to maintain their roads (per capita) than mine does. Isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that just further reinforce the fact that there is no coming "infrastructure apocalypse" for roads? If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year.

> In fact, if you look at the city budget, property tax can barely pay for the public works of the city. Without other sources of revenue, the city would fall woefully behind on its payments.

Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.

> Yes, because effectively, they are. Renters pay for it through their rent (landlords don't just eat costs for free) and obviously children don't pay for their own, and homeless folks don't and such. But effectively, most every resident is paying property taxes (or someone is paying their share for them) in some way or another.

I think this is a weak argument you're using to make the price per capita seem low. If your income is $10 / mo, and you pay $4 in property tax, then you are spending 40% of your income in property tax.

> Using your own link for Paso Robles to the budget they provided, they're devoting 12.1% of property taxes to street maintenance. With ~29k people, that's ~$4/person/month.

That's still 12.1%. Whether it's $4/person/month or $1/person/month, it's 12.1% of property tax.

> If Paso Robles needed to double their entire road budget for some magical reason, you'd still be paying less than what folks up here already pay every single year

Again, how does that matter? The city will now be paying 24.2% of their property tax on road maintenance, leaving a shortfall.

> Isn't that also a good thing? In a perfect world, the total taxes collected would pay for all the services provided, with a little set aside for a rainy day and nothing more left over.

Right but what about emergency services, and city vehicle fleet maintenance, and sewage, and parks... The property tax cannot pay for all services associated with the sprawl. Oh and building new infrastructure. The city relies on a bevy of other taxes and entitlements to pay their budget, including various State transportation subsidies.

“If your income is $10 / mo, and you pay $4 in property tax, then you are spending 40% of your income in property tax.”

Those numbers don’t seem very realistic?

The obvious reason that property tax collections 'just barely' manage to pay for public works is that citizens set the rate of both taxation and expenditures (taking into account the availability of state and federal funds). They're not broke, they could raise the tax rate, they just don't want to.

Asserting that "sprawly apartments" have the same cost as SFH is not compelling unless backed up by TCO figures, since it runs up against the metric of "geometric efficiency". If I have more destinations nearby, I spend less on all forms of transit, which compensates for rent and utilities costs. And if my neighborhood is denser on average, then I have more walkable destinations, subject to zoning law, and each destination in turn sees a better return on infrastructural investment.

Urban streets in Japan tend to blend together because they allow commercial uses throughout - you can wander a single neighborhood for days and not see every storefront. It's not just the transit. There's a built-in bias towards density there that is not present in US suburbs, which are largely motivated to build big box retail and office parks instead of houses because they are bigger moneymakers. We are setting a market equilibrium by law.

> This gets confusing, because sprawly apartments (like duplexes or low-rises) are usually lower quality and lower maintained than nearby single family homes, and therefore are cheaper. But if you brought the SFH down to that lower level of maintenance, they too would be cheaper in a similar way. (And similarly, if you brought those low-density apartments up to the quality of nearby SFH, they would be slightly more expensive).

Without TCO figures, I can't agree or disagree with you. Moreover I feel like this is permeated with a pretty common American bias, namely that homeowners maintain their property better than landlords (the myth of the yeoman property owner).

> But sprawl is nearly always cheaper

Spawl is cheaper to build new. However, sprawl is more expensive to maintain.

Suburbs run into this problem quite dramatically when they start contracting and suddenly their infrastructure costs start soaring relative to their budgets.

If it is taking people from actual rural areas (and not just suburbs), rural areas can grow much of their own food, heat their homes with renewable wood, draw their water from a well, shit into a drain field. The only infrastructure is power and roads and the roads are needed regardless because rural areas produce resources that cities require to exist. Be it crops, milk, meat, coal, iron, copper, sand/glass, stone, concrete, ect.

  heat their homes with renewable wood

This is increasingly regulated against, and we wouldn't want more if that even if unregulated.

>> Whose job is it/should it be to get that infrastructure built?

> The new residents

Surely it's not their sole responsibility. New residents boost the local economy, so the old residents benefit.

Those apartment buildings are paying the same property taxes as everyone else.

That I'd what property taxes are for. To pay for stuff like this.

  paying the same property taxes as everyone else

Not per capita, they aren't.

This isn't really a circular dependency because the developers can't build without the city's permission. If a developer plans to add N units of housing to an area that means there is need for NxM of various kinds of resources in the area, and you need them before NxY people move into the area and need them.

You can't just suddenly have 10,000 more people and no sewer system for them until you find out exactly how much poop they produce.

It's not even like questions like "If you add this many 3 bedroom homes to an area how many schools do you need" aren't unstudied questions, either. Civil engineering is a thing and should be able to answer questions like that pretty darn well.

Who is responsible for actually building it is a fair and open question with several different answers, but as long as city planning is a thing, the city that approves construction is responsible for ensuring that that construction will not overload resources somehow, and I don't even see how that can be under dispute.

> It's not even like questions like "If you add this many 3 bedroom homes to an area how many schools do you need" aren't unstudied questions, either. Civil engineering is a thing and should be able to answer questions like that pretty darn well.

That's not the kind of question civil engineering answers. That's more urban planning.

That's fair. The point still stands.

10,000 people sounds like a lot, but in terms of a large city’s sewer system it’s not that meaningful. In terms of traffic etc you are talking about 10k people in a 3,870k people population area. That less than 1/3 of one percent.

PS: Simply from the overall US population growth rate the metro area should expect to add ~27,000 people every year.

The exact number is not particularly relevant and is deliberately vague since it doesn't say in what area or what kind of city I'm talking about.

This is because the point is to illustrate the ridiculousness of suggesting that infrastructure should only be meted out once demand is known in the concrete with people living there by pointing out that until you build the sewer system, N people still need to poop, not to talk about what kind of population growth is normal for a large city.

I was assuming you where being approximate and continuing to talk about the Seattle area.

Anyway, my point is more the US population is growing so just about every Metro area needs to deal with continuous growth. And 10k homes are generally not going to fill up in a single day it’s going to relate to the areas migration pattern. City’s can’t just stay static while continuing to be viable.

That said, OP seemed more concerned with Developers not paying for infrastructure which is a reasonable concern, growth on the other hand is not optional long term.

Cities “can’t just stay static while continuing to be viable.”

I have to wonder what you mean by static and viable. Seems like the cities most derided for being static are also quite viable: San Francisco, San Jose, etc...

From 2000 to 2017 San Francisco grew 13.5% and San Jose grew 14.5%.

Going back San Francisco county grew from 680k in 1980 to 884k in 2017 that’s significant growth which tracks fairly well with overall US population growth. https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/san-francisco-californi... So, it was ranked 13 in 1980 and is ranked 13th in 2017.

San Jose grew faster than the national average from 1960 to 2017. https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/san-jose-california

Thus, perception does not match reality in these cases. On the other hand overall US population does not grow that fast. So, things can feel static in the short term.

> Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?)

In the UK there have been various methods to get residential developers to pay for infrastructure.

They're fairly recent, and I'm not too familiar with them.

Even if the developer isn't to pay the full cost, there are efficiencies by the local government working with the developer to build relevant infrastructure at the same time.

Example: https://www.telfordhomes-ir.london/media/press-releases/2017...

I wonder to what point some of these methods just increase housing prices.

For example, having the developer plant trees along the street means the price of the new build goes up (of course the developer will pass along costs), and existing residents get an improved neighbourhood without increased taxation. But is this not something the council should be paying for? After all the new homeowners will be paying council tax, why must the also pay a fee to join the community?

For large-scale development, it is reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block. I've seen it in Flowermound, TX. The developer built a really nice elementary school and donated it to the city. Perhaps it was required by the town. Perhaps the developer got a tax break. Either way, the nice school surely contributed to higher selling prices for the homes the developer was selling.

Shouldn’t all this be a responsibly of local government that will get influx of tax revenues?

That government is run by elected officials who receive a majority of their political contributions from developers... nobody has a lot of time to read (and "help write") the controlling rules (that they always want to update) which affect them as much as the developers do. City councils are run by developers.

Also, the tax revenues often don't offset the ongoing cost of the development to the city (if they do the proper roads, sewers, power, trash, policing). They are a sunk cost at the time of development and then there's no money for maintenance (without more growth).

Imagine you rented a shared, five-bedroom house, with 4 other roommates.

Each of you pays 20% of the rent, and utilities. These are your only expenses.

Now, imagine that I move into your house, demand that you knock down a wall, build a fifth bedroom, and a second bathroom. Construction will cost $100,000, and I will generously chip in my 16% of it.

Do you see a problem, here?

The only fair way to handle this, is to make me pay the full cost of construction. New construction must pay for 100% of the new infrastructure necessary to support it.

The fifth bedroom and second bathroom primarily benefit the new resident. Better infrastructure, by contrast, benefits everyone. For instance, more trains = more frequent trains = less waiting at the train station. More bus routes means more potential destinations for you.

If you never intend to use public transit no matter how robust it is, this won't apply. However, in this case, you should really consider the environmental impact of your actions.

All bathrooms in the house are communal, so it 'benefits' everyone. It takes the bathroom situation from overcapacity (6:1), to medium capacity (3:1).

However, everyone was getting along just fine, with the bathroom at capacity - (5:1) The new bathroom only became necessary when another person moved in.

> Better infrastructure, by contrast, benefits everyone.

For various reasons, nobody was in a hurry to install a new bathroom before the sixth housemate showed up, and made the bathroom situation untenable.

> If you never intend to use public transit no matter how robust it is, this won't apply. However, in this case, you should really consider the environmental impact of your actions.

This doesn't just apply to transit. This also applies to sewage, roadways, city services like police, schooling, etc. When any of these systems are at capacity, and need a large capital expense to expand, it is unfair for existing residents to shoulder 95% of that financial burden.

Adding more buses to a bus line is not a large capital expense. Adding more trains to an under-capacity train line is not a large capital expense. Building a new train line, because a neighbourhood with 5,000 residents, who were sufficiently served by surface streets, but now has 25,000 residents, who cannot be served by existing surface streets is.

If all bathrooms were communal and wait times were a problem, I might agree to this theoretical deal!

There's also a wide array of possible benefits to more people moving into your neighborhood, that don't really exist in a house. It's not just a larger tax base for public transit—there's also a greater potential for new restaurants, shops, etc to open, to serve the greater customer base. I suppose your new housemate could in fact be a master chef who is happy to share dinner most nights—but probably not.

But more fundamentally, I don't think people should have the same level of control over their neighborhood as they do their houses. You don't own your neighborhood. Other people's interests—including those of future residents—should be considered.

> If you never intend to use public transit no matter how robust it is, this won't apply.

They actually still benefit, even if they don't use the public transit. If the less people took public transit, then they would have to drive, and traffic would be much worse.

Sure, but when we're talking the effect of new residents moving in, which by itself can increase road traffic. The nice thing about public transit is that—when done right—more customers can actually mean better service for everyone.

You get less taxes per person if people don't own their own land and houses.

Don't schools get funded by local property taxes? More development (the hundreds of apartment blocks) = more property taxes = more funding for the school.s

That’s the problem. Housing geared toward young families tend to have a lot of school age children and they tend to create higher school costs than they pay in taxes.

In theory, more development = more property taxes. But reading the OP's post, it sounded like the developer was avoiding those taxes.

It's fairly common for big developers to get temporary tax abatements for developing big projects. I have seen "temporary" over 10 years, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that sometimes it goes beyond 20.

The OP mentioned Seattle, which apparently has a boilerplate 12-year tax abatement for multi-family developments: https://clarknuber.com/seattles-multifamily-property-tax-exe...

12 years is a long time to underfund municipal services in an area.

A lot of Communities charge "impact fees" as a bit of a pre-tax so that they can extend infrastructure as necessary to support development projects. Of course a lot of municipalities will just mismanage and spend it on other things.

Yes, but in addition to that are impact fees for development. That's specifically designed to cover the build up of additional infrastructure necessary to support the buildings being added. But there are loopholes that developers like to use to avoid them, and cities willing to look the other way. I don't blame the developers for wanting to avoid the fees, that's just good business sense.

I do blame the city for being willing to look the other way and enabling it.

I wonder if the same folks who were against extending the NW to LaGuardia are now the same ones complaining about Amazon moving in

Bit of a vicious circle when there are complaints about lack of infrastructure and then objections to building more transport links

I’ll also bite and say it should not be that controversial to oppose housing development that comes without a transportation/education/garbage/power/water plan. You can’t just shovel thousands of people into a neighborhood designed to support hundreds and declare the housing problem solved. “Just add housing” is a simplistic and insufficient solution.

This. Who must do the infrastructure building may be debatable, but it's entirely reasonable to oppose new units when no one is pulling their sleeves to build infrastructure.

I have a funny anecdote about developer building high rise condos in a very crowded market, take some shortcuts to squeeze in as many units as possible under the local zoning law, and pay the consequences.

I know people who live in a newly built high rise condo in a very crowded, popular city to live in west side of US. It was built during the recent building boom.

Recently they found out that about a few dozen units in the building have filed claim against the HOA/owner due mold under carpet, that starts around laundry machine.

The outbound water pipe connecting between washer and the main outbound pipe of the building is apparently too small. When the washer is in use, it builds up too much pressures and starts a slow leak behind the washer. This is in a hard to view area and goes undetected, starting mold problem.

I was told that the builder wanted to fit in more condo units but stay below allowed outbound sewage pipe size (?), so the hack they came up with is using narrower pipe between the washer and the main outbound pipe in the condo building.

Yes, builders don't have to build/pay for roads and other infra, but indirect cost is always paid by someone else. Even the residents of the development.

>Not because I have a particular interest in my house price

Where I live condos/highrises have gone up and the very few houses that remain as neighbors...well the prices haven’t gone down because supply is up, in fact the prices of the houses have skyrocketed.

That wouldn’t be true of every location, but it would be interesting to have an interactive map to see where this type of developments have occurred/when and then resulting prices of the remaining homes. Correlation/causation and all of that but I’m sure there would be interesting patterns.

What a weird coincidence. As someone who rents, I share none of those concerns, even though in theory they should affect me just as much. This “but what about the parking?!” argument gets trotted out so often, but it only ever really seems to concern those who stand to gain from a housing shortage. If you want more infrastructure, vote for more infrastructure.

Race to the bottom... make everyone's life worse because there's a fad right now, till the techbros get kids. Still won't let the working class stay where they grew up, but who cares.

Yeah, the Safeway parking lot is already half full at 3am with cars that don't move until the next morning. All the street parking is full and the "transit corridor", that allows the apartment owners not to put in parking, is a bus line that is loved by the homeless because it takes 3hrs each way (no one else wants to take it).

What kind of infrastructure are they going to put in? A $30B subway that goes everywhere (the buses are late because of the traffic)? I don't think my vote is going to convince everyone else to kick in $30k.

I don't think demand for housing is called a fad. Demand for housing changes. What was once a bad place to live becomes a good place to live. Unless you want to freeze the nature of changing demand, we need to change the way we build housing.

Also, as long as population increases, housing stock will have to increase more.

Not quite a techbro, but I am a techie old enough to have kids.

We have a house, with a backyard the size of a tablecloth, and one car. My wife drives it. Lots of apartment buildings nearby, some of which do not come with any parking.

If you're referring to the move away from suburbs as a "fad" that you oppose, you're on the wrong side of history. Suburbs are extremely wasteful, boring, and lacking in opportunity for their residents. We need to get as many people into the urban centers as possible.

Suburban density has been the norm for most of human existence until the last century. Not everyone prefers to live in crowded dirtty noisy "exciting" environments. Stress shortens lifespan.

No, not everyone prefers that. But over 70% either does prefer it or has no preference.

There is more than enough land for that 30% who want a suburban house. They should just leave the rest of us our 1% of the land to build high density housing.

Suburbia is a postwar invention, enabled by and designed for the automobile. We have not lived in habitats made of subdivisions, cul-de-sacs, collector streets, and parking lots for "most of human existence."

You may be thinking of the traditional town, which is characterized by pedestrian scale, mixed uses, and continuous structures right up to the sidewalks of narrow streets, engaging pedestrians instead of boring them with "open space."

Walkability was not a novelty for the young and childless. It was how you got your kids to school and yourself to work or the grocery store. Mixed use wasn't about "exciting." If you prohibited commercial uses for miles around your house, you'd have a hell of a time buying milk.

About the only thing a traditional neighborhood shares with suburbia is single-family houses. In most other ways it's the polar opposite: its defining characteristics are what suburban zoning prohibits. It would be a huge win for urbanists to reform modern suburbia in the image of the traditional town. The Bay Area's housing capacity would skyrocket. Planning based on minimized travel needs and a redundant, load-balanced street grid would significantly soften the impact of growth on traffic.

Turning this [0] into more of this [1] would be immense progress. You don't have to build Manhattan.

Andres Duany's spiel on this topic is excellent. Here's a nice compact PDF: http://www.ulct.org/ulct/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2013/02/....

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3649085,-122.0288736,3a,90y,...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8669525,-122.2587504,3a,75y,...

Well, since the population of SF (like Manhattan, Tokyo, Paris) hasn't been growing much over 1%/yr for the past 30 years, I'm comfortable with history.

You can have enormous growth in established centers (not bombed out) if you don't have property rights. See Beijing or Shanghai. I've seen 30-50x 30 story apartment blocks go up in a year. I don't mean 1 block like that. I mean 5 or 6 just looking around. Each one has it's own school, fire, policestation, and is designed for a subway stop and a mall underneath. It's amazing what a centrally planned economy can do!

> the way it was being done there would be zero money going towards local schools to deal with the extra influx

This is built into the system. More housing units means more property taxes which goes directly to schools.

> but there are loopholes, and the developer was using them

A lot of these big fights also happen because of the "FU, got mine attitude" that affects owners and renters alike. The fact of the matter is that cities like San Francisco are mostly composed of renters, and could easily outnumber NIMBY homeowners to build much more dense housing. However, thanks to policies like rent control, among other issues, renters don't organize and vote to advance their own interests the same way homeowners do.

>thanks to policies like rent control, among other issues, renters don't organize and vote

I'm not sure I understand this train of thought, can you clarify how rent control disenfranchises people?

I'm not sure if disenfranchise is the right word to describe it, but rent control leads to the following, in SF at least:

- Not caring about getting new housing built, because the tenant is under rent control, and their housing hasn't really gotten more expensive, not their problem etc.

- Not wanting new housing to be built because new housing is not subject to rent control — They'd rather keep the old units.

- New renters subsidizing old renters because landlords can't charge market rates to old tenants, creating a divide between old tenants and new ones.

- Creates a sort of class divide between the haves and have-nots, well off newcomers paying exorbitant prices vs. those less well off trying not to be gentrified away from "their" neighborhood. This is also a reason many oppose new housing in lower income neighborhoods (Mission, for example).

Taken together it is easy to see that policies like rent control make it difficult to organize behind a common interest (More, and cheaper housing for everyone) the way homeowners do (Keeping property values high).

I am not suggesting this is the only reason housing prices are extreme, but I do believe that if renters were more closely aligned in such a tenant city like SF, they could easily overpower NIMBYsm to achieve their interests. 60% of SF renters are under rent control [1]

[1] http://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/2017‐007933CWP....

If you tally up all of the people who own their home in San Francisco and all of the people who live in rent-controlled apartments you get a majority of the voting population. It follows that either they don't have a stake in the housing crisis or that they stand to benefit from it. Either way they have no incentive to vote for solutions to the housing crisis. As long as the majority of voters in a democracy aren't negatively effected by an issue it's unlikely to get solved.

Abolishing rent control at the state level (as WA did in the 1980's) would go a long way toward lowering the cost of housing in the bay area. All of a sudden the majority of the population would be clamoring to approve as much new housing as possible and investors would be rubbing their hands in glee thinking of how much money they could make by undercutting the existing market while still turning a larger profit than they would have previously. Seattle faces all of the same issues that San Francisco does, earthquake-proofing expenses, massive influx of population, water on three sides of the city, disproportionate zoning allocation to single family homes, etc. But unlike San Francisco, Seattle has seen an incredible construction boom in high-density housing because it's actually legally possible and economically viable to build.

Rent control insulates current residents from paying market rates for housing. This reduces their incentive to fix the problem (expensive housing) because they have already have cheaper housing... as long as they don't need to change housing (often prompted by new job location/family growth etc). Rent control has the follow on effects then of decreasing mobility and increasing commute traffic.

  renters don't organize and vote to advance their own interests

Renters supporting rent control are doing exactly that: FU, got mine.

"They want to live in houses with gardens where their neighbours also have houses with gardens."

... which is a totally reasonable and in-bounds objective for an actor in a democracy.

I might not personally vote for such a thing - I happen to think that a LOT of San Francisco should be in-filled and doubled in height - but I value democracy and local control more than I value my personal tastes in SF neighborhoods.

The predictable retort which will now appear, like clockwork, is that local control is inherently undemocratic to which I would respond: how did you vote in the Marijuana legalization ballot initiative ? Where do you stand on sanctuary cities ? Why are those local control issues palatable, but financially inconvenient ones are not ?

A local city choosing to ban gay marriage or gay people from their city would be completely democratic, but would you be willing to defend that action? It gets even muddier when you start to consider who has more power in those situations to influence votes, or to deny people their rights to vote and so forth. This is similarly the case with NIMBYism which can be viewed as a battle between the wealthier home owners and the influx of young professionals who are being priced out of basic living arrangements.

Democracy only really works when each individual actor is playing on the same equal playing field. When you have companies lobbying to frack on public parks or wealthier individuals taking advantage of outdated laws or AirBnB, that's not exactly something I'd consider democratic.

I have learned not to value local control. This is because I value incumbent residents and future residents equally, but local control only can give the former group of people a voice. In this way, I do absolutely find it anti-democratic.

I would definitely prefer issues like marijuana and sanctuary to be settled on the national level if that were possible. Same goes for zoning. I don't see the paradox you seem to see; when these things are forced to be solved on the local level, I'll support my position. That doesn't stop me from thinking that sometimes the local level is part of the problem.

> This is because I value incumbent residents and future residents equally, but local control only can give the former group of people a voice. In this way, I do absolutely find it anti-democratic.

Maybe I'm just a hick who doesn't understand big city think. But I interpret this to read "The people around here can't make proper decisions for our future, so let's depend on everyone else from other places to make the decisions for us and force us to obey."

That logic seems flawed.

They aren't incompatible. The people who want houses with gardens just need to live further away from the transit stations than the people who want to live in apartments and take transit.

London has recently mandated a minimum housing density for any development within walking distance of a train or tube station. Seems a good idea.

Chicago keeps trying to encourage that and apparently that causes "gentrification". Everybody is going to get pissed off about something.

You know what really causes gentrification? Artists.

There's a perverse incentive in that, considering that the people who want houses with gardens have them already, and the developers are making a request to build apartments, i.e. if you destroy local public transportation, you will make it more expensive to build apartments in the neighborhood.

"just need to live further away"

there's the rub. most suburban outposts of transit on the west coast just have SFH around them, which is a nice $billion entitlement to public infrastructure if you can get it. anyway THOSE people have the most to lose (neighborhood, lifestyle) from new apartments and a huge amount of political leverage over land-use in their area.

in summary, very fine grain local control of housing/transit planning is bad.

  most suburban outposts of transit on the west coast just have SFH around them

If you define "suburban" as SFH neighborhoods, that's a tautology.

With respect to Caltrain, it's not the case at all.

people in the latter group do not want just to live in houses with gardens. They want to live in houses with gardens where their neighbours also have houses with gardens.

If the apartments threaten to block the sun for your garden, is it really totally irrational to care?

You might think gardens are stupid, but you've got to admit gardens generally require sunlight!

I'm sure the neighbors will be happy to sell the air rights above their buildings so that plants can get that sunlight. Which I'm sure would promptly sold by the garden owner o because its worth a lot of money. It's a classic, well I don't personally profit and in fact lose a little so I'll stop them from doing it -- I could try to bargain with them (compensate them, etc) but I choose not to.

I think it's simpler than that; I think there's a subconscious application of the doctrine of prior use. If I'm using the sunlight to grow plants, I feel like somebody shouldn't be able to roll in next door and shade my garden with solar panels. There's plenty of precedent, see water law in the West.

And California also has problems dealing with water pricing during draughts due to the that precedent.

> I'm sure the neighbors will be happy to sell the air rights above their buildings so that plants can get that sunlight.

Or the majority of the people that live somewhere will have all "air rights" controlled by the city, and dictate how tall things can be built. "Air rights" aren't a thing unless the jurisdiction makes it a thing; you can't charge a toll for planes passing overhead.

Why would you "bargain" with someone who doesn't own anything that you want? You're talking about compromise, not bargaining, and that involves a friendly relationship; the kind normal people living in a home don't have with anonymous developers.

> you can't charge a toll for planes passing overhead

You can up to at least 365 feet, and sometimes higher depending on jurisdiction.

They almost certainly do own something that you want. That thing is usually money.

I am sure that the vast majority of garden owners would be willing to accept a couple thousand dollars in exchange for having slightly less sun hitting their house.

Which is why tall buildings are not generally built right next to and to the south of low buildings, never mind gardens. This is straightforward planning 101.

> the people in the latter group do not want just to live in houses with gardens.

Pro tip: you are a very smart person, but not even you are good at reading the minds of everyone else. Not only that, there are people who live in houses with gardens who share your opinion.

A lot of NIMBY-ism is because of money. Having an apartment complex go up in your backyard often reduces property values. It's not that people don't want other people to have a place to live, they retain want to retain their property values. It sucks selling your house for less than you paid, or worse, being upside down on your mortgage.

Unless things are being zoned in some crazy space-filling fractal shape, the vast majority of houses-with-gardens are going to have houses-with-gardens as neighbors. And the boundaries don't have be abrupt. There's plenty intermediate solutions between houses-with-gardens and 20-story apartment towers and any planner worth their salt knows it.

Yes, it should be that way, but if you can talk the planning committee into making an exception just for you... you can make a bunch of money in the year it takes to build and sell the building... then you leave (well, first you need to contribute to the right politicians).

gardens for everyone i say

gardens for some... miniature American flags for others!

I think people would like to live in a freehold house and take transit to work if given the option between a lease hold apartment with all the extra costs ground rent, management changes etc

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