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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Just blaming "regulation" without qualification is a little vague for my tastes. There are important reasons why we don't just allow anyone to come along and build anything anywhere. Some of those reasons are really good— neighbourhood character, height limits, flood/ecology/watershed management, traffic management, etc.

And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).

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> neighbourhood character, height limits

Absolutely not. These are horrendous reasons and take much of the blame for the housing crisis. We must build upwards to house people.

Neighborhood character and height limits can mean a lot of things and be implemented for different reasons. If done in the NIMBY sense of "you can't have anything I don't like", yes it's horrendous.

But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.

I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.

Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.

Part of the reason Paris feels different is that they've mostly allowed the city to grow up, everywhere, instead of just a few places. The latter is more likely to lead to not very friendly feeling skyscrapers without a lot at the street, human level.

And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.

Ha, I knew putting that in there would be contentious, but I suppose that's my fault for doing so in a comment specifically calling out the vaguery of "regulations".

In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.

Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4550536,-80.4917221,331a,35y...

> neighbourhood character

That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.

To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.

Neighborhood character and height restrictions aren't "really good", they are maybe okay sometimes.

Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).

Only watershed management is a legitimate reason for regulation out of your list.

And even then it's not a hard limit. You can always pull a Boston and get the state to let you take the water from a poorer area with plenty of water.

As an aside, Georgia periodically tries to claim a chunk of Tennessee to get access to the Tennessee River.

"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)

If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.

"Neighborhood character" is not a good reason to not build.

Without "regulation" downtown San Fransisco would be a towering mass of high rise apartment complexes. Traffic would be impossible so people would be forced to find alternatives. There would be endless bitching about the eyesores on the horizon and the perpetually congested streets and the ruination of property values for the heavily gentrified neighborhoods.

It's hard to tell whether you're presenting this as worse or better than the current situation.

It would be better for some (more reasonable rents, no need to own a car) but worse for others (retirees who intended to sell their house for millions and move out to the country). It would also force the city to invest in more mass transit, which will inconvenience a lot of car owners.

The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.

No offense, but I could care less about some boomer who will only make 500% profit off of his house rather than 1000%, vs letting people who aren't developers live in the city they work in. Car users benefit from better transportation because their repair bills go down, and there are less cars on the road.

Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.

No offense, but it is hard to care about the problems a bunch of 20-somethings making multiples of the median household income have finding apartments for prices they want to pay. Particularly if they don't live in the area they want to diddle around with.

First of all, they probably wouldn't make as much, at least at entry level, if cost of living wasn't so high. Second, the silicon valley ecosystem isn't even mostly populated by developers, the rest of the people making below median household income need places to live too. The housing problem isn't a "rich millennial vs rich boomer" scenario, it's "rich boomer vs literally everyone else". Maybe if they had to pay property taxes on the current value of their property they'd move somewhere else, and we wouldn't have this issue.

Would the rents actually be better, or would people now in Oakland move into SF?

The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".

Increase the supply and the price eventually has to drop. Basic supply and demand. That said, this problem has been allowed to grow exceptionally big and there is an fantastic amount of pent-up demand that would have to be satisfied before prices really started to normalize.

Add anti-lock braking systems and automobiles have to be safer. Basic physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

If people in Oakland want to move into SF and can afford it at current rents, they're doing it now.

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