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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

I am curious - how old were the houses that were getting demolished in Minneapolis?

A lot of the houses that would be torn down SF are nearing 100 years old. That probably sounds comically young to people from Europe, but SF's neighborhoods are among the oldest west of the Mississippi.

You put "character" in quotes... but how far would you go with this? Would you support the right of a property owner to tear down an old building in the French Quarter of New Orleans and replace it with a modern steel and glass structure? How about an old building in the left bank of Paris?

The complicated thing about NIMBYism is that not all backyards are alike.

I say this with full acknowledgement that SF's housing policy has created a horrendous situation. But I actually do think it's possible to build substantially more density here, close to public transportation, without tearing down the older neighborhoods.

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I've lived in San Francisco for 5 years now, and one thing I find ridiculous about this city is how ancient most of the residential buildings are. I'm currently living in an apartment that was built in the 60's, and have been to open houses of single family homes originally built in the 40's. Nowhere else I have ever lived would people be proud of that fact. In Atlanta and Vegas and Seattle I was able to find nice modern apartments to live in that weren't thin-walled, ancient plumbing, creaky floor wooden buildings well past their expiration date. But in San Francisco somehow people get offended when I suggest that an old building would be better torn down and rebuilt. (And yes there are some modern condos/apartments in SF but they are all in the range of $4000/m for a one bedroom and mostly clustered in the Dogpatch or SOMA which isn't a great area to actually live in my experience)

To answer the parent's question, I absolutely would support the right of a property owner to tear down an old building in the French Quarter of New Orleans and replace it with a modern steel and glass structure. Likewise with an old building in the left bank of Paris. I'd even like to incentivise that with tax breaks or whatever other levers are available.

I've lived in SoMA. Great place to live. Best weather in the city. Easy access to the waterfront, ballpark, Bart, Muni, and CalTrain.

edit: forgot bart

The entire peninsula is built on 1970s garden apartments without an update in 30 years. We need a solution to NIMBYism in the bay so badly - just making it more exclusive can't be the answer.

The Historic District in Tremé is causing a lot of problems where the predominantly black locals who don’t have the cash flow to keep the property up to code are being driven out by speculators who report every little historic ordinance violation to the city and then swoop in with a lowball offer after they have been served notice.

Something that is sometimes missed in these debates is that the most egregious areas are not actually SF. I mean, NIMBYism is pretty bad there, but it's way worse in, say, Marin county, Palo Alto, and other locations that want to keep playing suburb make believe instead of acknowledging they're part of a large metro region and allowing the market to add housing.

There's nothing wrong with not letting The Market optimize every square meter of real-estate you care about. Not to mention the selective application of what The Market entails - aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects? Why not allow The Market to respond to high property prices by redirecting development elsewhere?

> aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects?

No. "zoning rights" are not rights, they are rules applying to property that people own _and are subject to change_ much more fluidly than the ownership itself.

As I understand, by buying property, people get a vote on if the zoning should change, much like buying shares in a company gives you a vote on its decisions. So why are zoning rights, or rules, not part of the Market?

Zoning rules are defined by the city council.

And the ability to do so is granted by the state. Thus efforts like SB 50 or Oregon's HB 2001 to take away some of the right to exclude different types of housing.

Only if it changes. I think the point is that if people are buying under current zoning, the market has already spoken. As such it becomes weird when people want the market to handle things, but not if they don't like what the market is saying.

Quite frankly, saying “The Market™ has spoken,” is a bullshit answer. The Market™ is merely the outcome of the rules we’ve setup. We decided as a society to establish certain regulations. People intentionally shaped it. To then turn around and act like this is some sort of natural occurrence and that the outcome is now somehow sacrosanct, is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. If we picked different rules, a different outcome would have happened. And if the outcome isn’t what we want, then we can change the rules, and a get a different outcome.

That's a fine point but would you please stop arguing aggressively in the flamewar style on HN? I feel like we've had to ask you this a lot. It isn't necessary to vent toxic fumes when making your substantive points: it makes your comments and this forum worse, and it isn't fair to your fellow HN users who restrain themselves from doing the same. You may not owe better to The Market, but you do owe better to the community you're part of here.

There is nothing wrong with my comment.

I don't disagree. I think the point "deogeo" was trying to make was that YIMBY often say that zoning should be removed so the market can take care of housing. But in effect the market already says that it doesn't value affordable housing. We might not like that, and want to change zoning, but that is still intervening in the market and should be recognized as such. But then you would also have to recognize other ways of intervening in the market as legitimate, like rent control. Which is something people usually don't want to do.

The market != the set of people who vote in a jurisdiction.

The former is much, much larger. The latter is more like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who's for dinner.

And never, never forget that a lot of zoning and land use regulation was basically created to replace outright racist policies like redlining.

Well, yeah, I mean if you don't care about your fellow human beings or the environment, the current policies are working great.

Homeless people, moms and dads driving 2 hour commutes, people who would benefit from a more tolerant climate unable to live there, people unable to take good jobs... the human cost of people's NIMBYism is real, and it is staggering.

The environmental cost is pretty big too: https://www.redfin.com/blog/why-dense-housing-is-green/

It amazes me that alternative solutions are never mentioned:

1) (short term) Make remote work much widely accepted, especially for software roles.

2) (long term) Build offices/centers (e.g.) jobs outside of Bay Area and CA. This is much more scalable and beneficial for the country than having one or two super concentrated centers. Why not have 20?

Those things aren't bad ideas. However:

Teachers, nurses, janitors, waiters and so on can't work remotely.

Splitting things up that naturally group together likely has some costs. VC's might not want to invest in a startup in, say, Tulsa, OK. I've read that some are changing their minds, and it'll happen some, but clusters do happen for a reason, and fighting that may create some problems.

I've had a lot of similar thoughts. If VCs here want to tell their startups they have to be here, that's one thing, but I don't see why some of the tech mega-corps don't open more offices with a few hundred positions in places across the country. A few MBA-types I've talked to told me that just won't work but they didn't offer much of an explanation beyond some mumblings about looking for "only the best talent".

zoning rights are not as real as property rights, in fact they are the opposite. Zoning rights are your ability to limit what the actual owners of a property can do.

Which... might make some sense when we're talking about maybe not having that oil refinery next to a school.

But when we're talking about a 4-plex next to some single family homes because you don't want less wealthy people near you? That's a perversion of the idea in my opinion.

Yes, but Marin doesn't have the same number of jobs as SF and as out-of-whack jobs to housing ratio. Rent control was introduced a few years after the article and created a new haves-vs-have-nots divide of people protected by rent control vs. new entrants who have to pay vastly higher rates, i.e are subsidizing the former.

I’m ok with building materials, architecture, and any range of requirements that a community wants to place on new structures to maintain a certain “look” to a neighborhood. Those can be factored easily into costs.

I’m not ok with a community preventing new development entirely, especially taller and denser development. Even worse is that red tape can delay a project for years if not permanently, making the cost of owning property for development (mortgage, taxes, size of eventual payoff) uncertain.

If you set clear rules, the market will adapt. When everything is banned or uncertain, developers are much less likely to take risks.

> I am curious - how old were the houses that were getting demolished in Minneapolis?

> A lot of the houses that would be torn down SF are nearing 100 years old. That probably sounds comically young to people from Europe, but SF's neighborhoods are among the oldest west of the Mississippi.

I grew up and currently live in south Minneapolis, my parents house was built in 1908, most of the neighbors houses were built from around then to the early 1920s. The place I'm currently in was built in 1914, so seems to be about the same age as the homes your describing in SF.

110 years ago when my house in Calgary was built, they were sold as kits by Sears. they're essentially the same cookie cutters that there are now.

Is Edmonton much different or do they have more modern apartments?

The first people to get displaced by upzones are the ones who can't afford to continue to live there after a place gets redeveloped. I think this is really the key - you can "save" the castro, the painted ladies, and the billionaire estates in cow hollow, but you need to give people living in upzoned areas a 1-1 swap. The housing that gets built needs to be AFFORDABLE, and the people that would be displaced if they turned Excelsior into towers can't wait 10 years for rents to come down.

So here's an equitable solution that requires too much money/effort/organization/faith:

* Raise land taxes on the millionaires and billionaires in the mansions and areas that don't get upzoned - you can't have your cake and eat it too

* Everyone in the area of an upzone gets their rent frozen, and gets to move into a new "equivalent" apartment as new ones are built - in the same neighborhood. Rent is unfrozen when the median rent price lowers back to where their rent is now, or equal difference between median and theirs at freeze time.

* Govt pays market rate for the housing out of land taxes - city-wide rent control for up-zoned communities, in order to move into new places.

* Create a special economic zone in some of the upzoned communities - prioritize building and reducing regulations like sight-lines, and people in that community get first dibs at new housing (with their rent subsidies, or if buying a new place).

* Flurry of building occurs, eventually excess is made and maybe prices go down, but the buildings are less of a soulless shell for rich people, formed off the remains of the community that was once there, but filled with people who've lived there.

If you place too many rules and restrictions around new development and the rent you can charge, nobody is going to build.

If they get their market rents, and they get upzones, I feel like they’ll build.

This is why I'm looking with anticipation at the plans to develop downtown San Jose. Nothing is "sacred" there, so you avoid all these discussions and get on with building.

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