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Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now

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491 pointsoftenwrong438 comments

>Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs,

I read somewhere that the lack of rooming-houses significantly contributes to homelessness.

They fill a gap between an individual apartment and your car or the street.

It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. I know those populations can be hard to live with, but it's better than having them live on the street.

They also made it much easier to move to a new city to try out the job market there.

It's no surprise that worker mobility is at historic lows given how hard it is to even put a roof over your head in another place, especially if you don't have good credit or income.

Seattle banning micro-unit construction is maddening, considering they're slowly creeping into SF territory with pricing.

Seattle is a bad example, it's cheaper relative to peer cities (with 50+ units right now under $1500 in Seattle proper), and the market isn't keeping pace with surrounding King county or even national housing prices: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ho...

I know the units under $1500 very well, as I'm helping someone move out here who's not in tech/finance/medicine/law. That's simply not cheap enough, and micro-housing works for these people.

People come to cities for economic opportunity, they need to be able to live here while getting on their feet.

> worker mobility is at historic lows

Perhaps the disappearing ladder rungs of housing, occur in transportation too? Some years back, Boston-NYC intercity buses had a couple of inexpensive "light gray"-market companies go mainstream. They were attacked by incumbents, federal and local politicians and law enforcement, and press. Leaving now gray-market buses for "illegals" pushed to the city periphery, and a (now somewhat more competitive) middle-class mainstream. With a gap in between, where working poor might commute, bridging the two labor markets. It seemed that price point and use case was too socio-politically vulnerable to be viable.

Uh, did you ever ride one of those Fung Wah type buses? They were terrifying even before the spontaneous combustion trend started.

For years. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I found Fung Wah, in cleanliness and operations, perhaps a lower class of service than then dominant Greyhound's local equivalent. Unsurprising in a low-cost provider. As for "trend"... it seems naive now, but I was surprised then not so much by competitive PR weaponization of press narrative, but by the unprofessional sloppiness with which the press indulged in the "Chinese bus" narrative.

The point "lower class of service" is perhaps key. As with flop/cage/SRO. A "yuck" service, serving people with little pull, perhaps tends to "bad thing - gone now".

Mega-bus still seems to be pretty cheap. Maybe it's higher during high-demand periods but it seems to be less than $20 or so.

Good point. "Leaving now^W some years later". And midweek Lucky Star can now be $15. I don't know what gray market is - perhaps still $5-ish?

So a narrower gap than there used to be. For labor mobility, perhaps a difference that still matters for commuting on minimum wage. Exploring a possible job. Geographically broadening one's social support network.

Thus motivation to outlaw these accommodation types likely was based on them being centers of prostitution, drug use, drunkenness, and other vices. But the underlying issues weren't address so the naive belief that doing away with these places would do away with the social issues proved to be wrong. It made them worse by moving them out onto the streets while erecting a barrier to those trying to climb back up the socioeconomic ladder.

It wasn't naive, it was hateful disregard for the needs of the poor and working classes.

It could even be the driving cause behind the cycle of homelessness, mental and physical health problems and addiction are often the result of or severely aggravated by living in such deprivation. It's nearly impossible to get a job without a fixed address and proper facilities for daily hygiene. I'd imagine that a communal living environment would also have pro-social effects since there is an expectation to keep yourself and your space clean and meals would take place in a shared eating area.

As others have pointed out, rooming houses weren't only for the dispossessed. They were a low rung on the ladder for young people trying to make a start, for people between jobs or starting over in a new city, for the vulnerable escaping bad marriages, for new immigrants and the elderly without support systems. It's interesting that this list closely mirrors the precarious stages and situations in life that can often lead to homelessness.

There was a long essay in the New York Review of Books way back in the mid ‘90’s that argued the point. SROs and casual labor are essential to combat homelessness.

We lost SROs but we also lost casual labor. Business are criticized for not providing full time positions with benefits. The idea that someone could walk in and get day work helps folks who really don’t want to or can’t work full time.

The new casual labor is the gig economy, slowly being chipped away for the gig economy laborer's 'own good'.

Roomates in a SFH / Apartment are the new SROs, but they definitely have higher barriers.

Most of the users of the gig economy doesn't want homeless people driving them around, or walking their dog, or cleaning their home.

The gig economy is not a good replacement for the full spectrum of casual labour.

I think the much bigger obstacle is that they don't have a car in the first place. That means no Uber, no Doordash, no cleaning (can't get to the customer, need to transport cleaning equipment).

You can do deliveries on bike, rent a car just to do the job with getaround:

https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/getaround...

Also cars are typically cheaper than rent, and the gig economy hires you usually on automated & objective criteria with flexible schedules. Vs. having to convince your local mcdonalds manager to hire you and working on shift schedule that is ever shifting.

> Most of the users of the gig economy doesn't want homeless people driving them around, or walking their dog, or cleaning their home

Excuse me? How can you tell it's a homeless person doing it? I am willing to bet all of these is already happening.

When the uber driver picks you up you don't ask if they are sleeping in the car. But it's been reported to be pretty common.

> Excuse me? How can you tell it's a homeless person doing it?

The kind of homeless person who can get clean clothes, a shower, and a shave on a regular basis (let alone a car!) is already doing better than a lot of street people. It's good that those people have options, but catering only to them will not solve the problem, nor will behaving as if the other sort doesn't exist.

>The kind of homeless person who can get clean clothes, a shower, and a shave on a regular basis (let alone a car!) is already doing better than a lot of street people.

In the grim darkness of 2019, the working homeless are privileged.

I think you're being sarcastic, but I'm not sure why. "Some people are better off than others, even in the lowest levels of society" shouldn't be a controversial assertion.

I replied to this soon after it was posted, but opted to delete. Now I'll try to rephrase.

My primary objection is to the idea that you can tell a book from its cover or anything that might be construed to suggest that there is some immutable lesser category of person. I live in San Francisco and walk its sidewalks every day. I've seen a lot of the category of homeless you're talking about. But it is silly to categorize. And a lot of times, even for those who don't shower, wear the same clothes and don't have a car, you really can't tell sometimes. It's also the case that housed people also have varying amounts of hygiene and behaviors. We are all just people.

In the context of this thread, my point was that the gig economy is not a sufficient replacement for casual labor, because there's a lot of people in precarious situations who could get day-labor work but can't make themselves presentable enough (whether in terms of grooming or socialization) to be accepted in the gig economy.

I mean, I would argue casual labor should be fazed out because corporations lobbied to make benefits (specifically healthcare) tied to employment. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if we want a flexible workforce then life-necessities cannot be tied to permanent employment.

>corporations lobbied to make benefits (specifically healthcare) tied to employment

Unions probably did that more than management given that at least some of it was driven by wage and price controls during certain periods. Though that's still corporations in some sense.

The real driver of health benefits tied to employment was that businesses were not allowed to give huge wage hikes during World War II. In order to compete for very scarce workers, businesses added a variety of benefits, including health insurance. Around this time, medicine actually started being effective, which has led to an ever increasing set of costs (now we use million dollar machines and whacky drugs by the bucket load, when it the past they just tried to keep you comfortable or stop you from bleeding to death).

As the cost of health benefits increased, corporations lobbied for tax-exemptions providing this benefit. Congress gladly obliged because it seemed to be an effective way to get everyone (who mattered) insured. This really cemented our current system in place.

> was that businesses were not allowed to give huge wage hikes during World War II

Interestingly war industry wages far as I saw were specified by the government contracts. They were good wages compared to pre WWII. My uncle busted out in WWII because all of his employees left for the shipyards.

Life necessities became tied to permanent employment because of income and tax policy, not some corporate desire to control heath-care.

The tax code is totally corporate dictated and to their interests - the huge bias against self employment is evident of that, whereas in a more competent economy policymakers would acknowledge the strong growth potential of incentivizing small business creation.

This was policy makers dictating to corporations, not the other way.

It was a product of (1) intense focus on wage freezes during the labor shortage of World War II, and (2) the growth of unions, which focused on winning concessions from management, not government.[0]

I agree it's a terrible policy. Corporate management now accepts and exploits it. But it was not a decision by 'capital' to spite labor or self-employment. It is the consequence of 'progressive' tax, regulation and labor policy.

[0]http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/67493CA6B8...

No, it's because of a political decision. In the UK, you get healthcare regardless of your employment status or insurance cover.

You don't get somewhere to live without a source of income, and our benefits system is being systematically shredded by a government ideologically opposed to the very concept (currently campaigning for tomorrow's election on a variety of lovely talking points like "poor people are just stupider" and "disabled people shouldn't have to be paid the minimum wage because they don't understand money"), but for the time being at least we have healthcare for all paid for by general taxation.

We should have housing and food for all as well, but I'm not sure anybody's seriously looked into how to do that.

Yes, the history of tying health insurance (and thus health care, in the US) to employment is an interesting series of political compromises and deals -- and it has such extensive effects on day labor and the gig economy and entrepreneurism. For folks who have health conditions (mental or physical) which mean they can work intermittently, the tie between employeeship and health care is really detrimental. For entrepreneurs, the tie between being and employee and having health care is detrimental. For public health, the tie is detrimental!

Rooming houses had a variety of functions. My grandfather lived in one while a young adult; he was also a butcher at the co-op grocery, and made sure to get his landlady good cuts of meat since he knew he'd benefit at meals ;) There is some interesting history, too, of how rooming houses run by Respectable Matrons facilitated the entry of young women into the labor force and the migration of labor from rural areas to the cities. Sylvia Plath might be the most famous recent writer about this... but see [1], [2].

Last, I'm very happy to see near me a lot of development with first-floor commercial and living above that. The most recent development near where I live has 5-6 floors, of which most are apartments, but street level has a pie shop, a restaurant, dry cleaner, etc etc. I am delighted! It increases our quality of life.

[1] https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-i-live-in-an-all-women-bo... [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/brief-history-of-co-liv...

> corporations lobbied to make benefits (specifically healthcare) tied to employment

They didn't. It came about because in WW2 labor wages were fixed by law. In order to attract workers, employers could not offer more pay. But they were able to offer benefits, like health insurance. It stuck because employer paid benefits were paid out of pre-tax income, while if the worker paid for them himself it would be from post-tax income.

I.e. it was cheaper to provide it through the employer, thanks to the tax code.

> It stuck because employer paid benefits were paid out of pre-tax income, while if the worker paid for them himself it would be from post-tax income.

It stuck because of corruption since the legislature won’t fix the situation, a situation that conveniently provides a competitive benefit to large companies with lots of lobbying power versus small business and individuals.

Same garage with the pitiful restriction on IRA contributions (zero if you have a spouse that has 401k), whereas people who work for employers giving 401k get $19k.

Absolutely no reason for the discrimination to exist other than it benefits bigger, entrenched businesses at the expense of smaller businesses and individuals.

>Business are criticized for not providing full time positions with benefits.

That may be a factor but at the low margin "we just need you to have a pulse" end businesses mostly don't care what you think about their benefits package.

The problem is in the law. It is very hard to just hire someone off a street corner and comply with labor and tax law. Then there's civil liability. Employers mostly can't afford the risk of just hiring whoever shows up because god knows who they are. If they decide to shoot up half way through the workday and get hurt or hurt someone the employer is gonna wind up footing the bill. Unless you have an army of lawyers who have figured out how to insulate you (e.g. the gig economy) it just isn't worth it to take the risk on someone you can't vet.

> It's interesting that this list closely mirrors the precarious stages and situations in life that can often lead to homelessness.

When you realize that many of the items on this list also decrease tax revenue over single family housing and discriminate racially via income levels, it's not even surprising.

Essentially it's "Let's run the city like a corporation, maximize tax income and keep our neighbors safe from people who are non white, homeless, atheist, alcoholic, or otherwise scary to us. It'll be legal this way."

> decrease tax revenue over single family housing

Density increases property taxes per sqft. 4 condos combined are worth more than a large SFH. It's all about excluding people.

And simplistic concepts of what makes for good urban planning. I think there are people who actually think separating commercial from residential zoning is a critical thing to do. Maybe a little makes sense, but it just speaks to a simplistic mentality regarding how people live.

> Density increases property taxes per sqft.

The trouble is that it decreases them per capita, and now you need more teachers and firefighters to cover the additional residents.

This is the dark side of funding services through taxation. The people with little money pay little in taxes but still consume services, so they're a net loss to the government which then has a powerful incentive to push them out of the jurisdiction.

One way to solve this is with a UBI. That would allow local governments to charge actual cost for local services rather than tying them to property values, without imposing an impossible burden on low income people, because then they could pay the cost from the UBI. Which would in turn remove the perverse incentives local governments have to inflate local housing costs or push out "unprofitable" residents.

> The trouble is that it decreases them per capita, and now you need more teachers and firefighters to cover the additional residents.

That doesn't sound right. Average incomes in urban areas are higher. The economies are stronger. Then there's the economies of scale in providing infrastructure.

Wish I could find numbers on it one way or another.

> That doesn't sound right. Average incomes in urban areas are higher. The economies are stronger.

Average incomes in urban areas are higher because it requires a higher income to afford to live there. What do you expect to happen if you increase the housing supply, allowing lower income people to be able to afford to move in?

> Then there's the economies of scale in providing infrastructure.

The biggest cost centers don't really have these -- it's why they're the biggest cost centers. If you want to add ten new classrooms full of students then you need ten new teachers. If you want to add twenty new classrooms then you need twenty new teachers. You don't need twenty new superintendents, but the cost of the superintendent was already a rounding error to begin with.

They're higher because they have more productivity. Business don't preferentially open locations in the places with the most expensive real estate just because they have too much money burning a hole in their pocket, they do it because they make more money by having locations there.

The answer is not UBI, if you want to give people more money, stop having the government take it. The government is only good at 3 things, killing people, locking people in cages, and wasting money. People with needs they can't take care of themselves should be helped by charities. People would give more to charity if they had more money and they didn't believe the government was taking care of the problem.

The answer to this problem is to get rid of zoning laws and allow land owners to use the land in a way that maximizes its value. You will end up with natural zones.

> It's interesting that this list closely mirrors the precarious stages and situations in life that can often lead to homelessness.

It also has direct knock-down effects.

When everyone has a large (historically speaking) private home, what need is there for public spaces?

If I have a bunk in a shared room, suddenly a well-run tavern seems more interesting.

And maybe, in that public space, I meet people who are dissimilar from myself. And maybe that broadens my view of society and knits my local community more closely together.

... Or I could sit in my home, watching my TV, being recommended media that agrees with me.

Would this include hostels? Those are still around. Usually they have a strict limit on how many nights you can stay though.

No, hostels have limits < 30 days.

SROs? (I'm not familiar with the word in english) are generally for people living full time. Many have minimums of > 30 days.

> No, hostels have limits < 30 days.

I've lived in a hostel for months at a time. At one point an employee mentioned their monthly rate (not advertised; I was paying by the night).

I stand corrected. I should have said: "< 30 days... As far as I know, the majority of hostels in most large metropolitan cities where rents are expensive and therefore lower income normal people might choose to forego having a kitchen/bathroom". At least that was my experience many years ago when I was younger and stayed in hostels in NY, LA and a couple of other places where they had explicit signage that clarified the point.

On many places in the US hostels require proof of non-residency (an out of country passport or a long rang transportation ticket...etc)

It’s better if you’re not stuck next to them.

SROs are havens for drug addicts and prostitution, with a mix of indigent elderly. It’s incredible that they would be put forth as a cure for a social ill.

You know what would help these cost problems? Incentivize companies to place workers in Cincinnati or Harrisburg instead of only working in 5 cities.

IBM is the old days used to be able to rule the industry from places like Binghamton, NY and Minneapolis. The current scenario is ridiculous.

I lived in an SRO in SF for 5 years. It was definitely the lowest rung on the housing ladder. I climbed out of homelessness and stayed there. For others, it was there last stop on the way down before losing it all.

I remember one older woman who got evicted. Late at night she'd sneak into the building and walk up the stairs when the front desk clerk was distracted. She'd go to the 2nd floor, walk into a end floor bathroom, and lock the door for the night. Imagine being 70-something and having to play games just to have a chance at sleeping in a small bathroom with an often nasty toilet.

Other stores include a 20-something woman I knew died of a drug overdose, my short-term house guest who was a raging alcoholic with no survival skills, the meth head who offered her services on a regular basis, the strippers who wanted my ADHD meds... So many stories.

Thank you for sharing your personal stories - appreciated.

I, also, lived in what might be described as a pseudo SRO for about nine months in 1998/99. I witnessed similar things.

I'm not sure where these (SROs) should exist or how many of them we should have but it is completely reasonable and judicious to heavily regulate them and keep them out of neighborhoods where personal and familial status has reached a higher level of development.

Personally I don't have a problem with poor people living right next to rich people. I think the more we isolate ourselves from each other, the more we lack empathy for each other. Having been homeless, my personal experience is that people who haven't been homeless don't get it at all. The first night I had to think about where to put my stuff, I realized I was not prepared to deal with that.

The problem is not poor people living next to rich people. SROs would be fine if they were simply people with very little income who take care of themselves and their community. But you know what actually goes on there.

I like how people who have likely never been exposed to SROs are downvoting the truth about them, even when it’s coming from people who have actually lived in them.

Nobody wants an SRO near them. In theory, it’s just a small, affordable room, and that sounds fine. The reality is quite different.

The reactions to stories about housing attract a visceral reaction on HN, because it’s a real struggle. We all see the world through our own eyes, and even fairly affluent folks struggle with housing costs.

SROs are problematic because they aren’t and cannot be communities. They are warehouses for the desperate, and mostly dropping off points. Residents get more isolated. Others can describe that experience better than I.

I can understand the perspective that homeless people are better off with some sort of home than the street. But the reality is homelessness is complex, and a flophouse doesn’t provide the support that people need to get back on their feet. The folks who posted about their experiences are inspirational, but I don’t know if they are typical.

> I can understand the perspective that homeless people are better off with some sort of home than the street. But the reality is homelessness is complex, and a flophouse doesn’t provide the support that people need to get back on their feet.

I suspect your argument stops at not wanting to live next to SRO's, and that the rest of it is just post hoc rationalization to an emotional reaction.

Seriously it breaks down after that. Your first sentence above for example should clue you in. It's not exactly dripping with magnanimity.

Homelessness is complex, but who says that you can't house the homeless and provide them support?

In the US, with it's byzantine medical and legal environment, where even 'good people' can end up owing six figures unexpectedly, nearly everyone is in danger of becoming homeless.

It's especially true now that our society is so fragmented, with everyone leaving behind all their social support to go make a buck elsewhere.

With all due respect, you know nothing about me, and nothing about this issue. I'm not talking about homeless shelters, SRO are modern tenements.

I worked in this space, including working to set up pilot programs to transition section-8 voucher recipients into homeowners, and helping to advocate for the rights of families stuck in slumlord situations in unsafe apartments. My family and I fundraise and work a couple of days a week in a food pantry about 500 feet from my home that supports folks in our neighborhood.

My disagreement that prompted my post is that the factors that drive people to last resort housing, whether that be scummy hotels or SROs are almost always tied to other things where people need some sort of support. If your idea of humanitarian action is sticking people in a room, I understand that but deeply disagree.

SROs aren't social services endeavors. They are private enterprises focused on exploiting the desperate and extracting as much money as possible from these folks in minimally viable buildings. Here's an example of one in Brooklyn preying on young people: https://gothamist.com/news/slumlord-matchmaker-brooklyn-land...

If that's your level of experience with the issue why didn't you lead with that then?

Your comment above is getting down-voted into oblivion, and when read in isolation I think you will certainly understand why.

That's ok. I'll deal with the loss of internet points.

One could just as easily ask why did you just assume that he didn’t have more experience than you that was informing his opinion?

That demonstrates the problem with the downvoters, not with him.

People are pretty naive, and those of a certain ideology in particular have a habit of putting more weight on their uninformed idealistic assumptions than on the real world experience of others, who they promptly dismiss as intolerant/nazi/whateverist, at their own peril.

I bet the downvoters haven’t helped struggling people half as much as what he mentioned just in his post.

It’s either there or the sidewalk outside, and security guards and cameras are a thing.

Nobody in America will tolerate being around people poorer than themselves unless those people are doing labor for them. That's why we have this problem, rich people live in a deluded state of being intolerant to anything that doesn't make them feel good, because they want their delusions of grandeur to be accepted as reality and because they have the resources and control they make people suffer. That's what this is all about, they don't want to end the suffering because it would challenge their delusions.

This isn’t even remotely true. I have no idea what would even lead someone to such a bizarre outlook.

You having no idea being the key point.

Dying in the street is worse than living in a boarding house.

SROs abound in downtown Los Angeles, many converted old hotels. Some are run by non-profits.

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/no-kitchen-shared...

They are allowed in some places. There are some near me in New Hampshire, and there are some in New Jersey (or at least there were a few years ago).

"It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. "

It is a mystery to me anyway, how people can seriously have those laws (and much more) while considering themself to be in the land of the free.

Now sadly the rest of the world is not necessarily better with this (for example the cologne cathedral, everybody is very proud of it, but I read even government officials admitted that today you could not build such a monument again, due to building regulations), but at least they usually don't claim to be and lead the land of the free.

They were allowed, you could find them in many of your local YMCAs. The flip side being the YMCA became the place where those people hung out, though.

I own and live in a two family house built in 1924. It's one step up from an English row house in that you have windows on all sides. These, and New England "triple-deckers" are pretty good. In Worcester MA you could buy an 1890/1900 triple-decker for $30k in the early 90s.. if only I was smart enough to buy one then.

These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage.

My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities.

New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties.

SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?

I was kinda shocked to see Worcester mentioned here in the top comment. I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned.

I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.

For the whole house I hope...

It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.

Fellow WPI grad, in 2012 I paid 275/person/month for an admittedly crappy apartment that I shared with 4 people, and later on 475/person/month for a room in a nicely renovated 3 story house right next to campus shared with 5-6 people. This one didn't have that many remnants except for an ironing board in the kitchen that plopped out of a wall closet, and a button next to the stairs indoors that said, ominously, "Sedgwick". It seemingly did nothing. We never figured out who or what Sedgwick was. We made sure to press it every so often, to "feed the Sedgwick" :-)

I'm not sure what houses look like in Hanoi but if they are kind of like the 3-5 storey houses in some parts of East Asia those are not great designs. They’re like twenty feet wide and forty feet long with steep stairs connecting the floors. To me the layout is awful. It wouldn’t be bad for one off where the lot was oddly shaped but to have that as a default for attached homes isn’t great.

Twenty feet wide and fourty feet long is like 6x12 meters per floor.

That’s as big as my entire house, and we can fit 4 rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in there.

2.5 rooms per floor would be the height of luxury.

Why do you say these are terrible?

Like I mentioned, the layouts aren't great --unless-- it's one designed by a known architect then they can at least look nice from the outside, yet they are still constrained by the dimensions --which can be from 12-foot wide to about 20-foot, in most cases. Here[1] is a sample of stock that's about 30yo. in the background you can see the roofline of a newer design.

[1]https://imgur.com/a/pdHmByZ

I would say it because I've spent time on crutches, I have a parent in a wheelchair and another one that just wouldn't have the energy for a staircase much of the time, and staircases are a pain in the neck with small children and make it harder to move appliances and large items of furniture in and out. As a default form of housing, living across four floors is actively excluding many people with disabilities and massively reduces the ability of aging seniors to manage unassisted living.

It seems like the solution to that would be to use multiple types of housing construction within the same city, and then people can choose one suitable to their situation. And to make other sensible choices like to put heavy appliances on the ground floor.

Yes. The comment you responded to earlier said "It wouldn’t be bad for one off where the lot was oddly shaped but to have that as a default for attached homes isn’t great."

And what I'm saying is the opposite. It's fine for it to be common as long as there are still enough single floor dwellings for the people who need them.

There should be all kinds of everything. A city should be a massively diverse cacophony of individual choices. That means that finding exactly what you want is going to exclude >90% of the properties -- but means that finding exactly what you want is going to be possible.

These sound like complaints against any house with stairs. I think that disqualifies like 95% of all stock regardless.

I think we’d find that the number of people that need single floor apartments fairly closely follows the available supply.

If the first floor apartment had ramp access then wheelchairs could get in. Elevators are another option but somewhat expensive.

> I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned.

Because you're competing with Boston money. The fact that it's possible to live in Worcester and work in Boston (and the fact that Worcester is known for being nicer than New Bedford/Fall River and Fitchburg/Leominster) means there's tons of working professionals who are jacking up prices.

It is my understanding that boarding houses were not cheap. But I've mostly only read about them in fiction form the time period. If there's any truth to them, it seemed like to afford to live in a boarding house in the city proper you needed to be a single working professional.

I think people liked to live like that, just like they'd like to have fresh made meals and live in walking distance to everything now. But once you get married have kids, it gets too expensive. You're housing and feeding multiple people that aren't working. Also, people forget boarding houses usually came with a shared bathroom.

Boarding houses also came with all kinds of guest restrictions (particularly around the opposite sex). Restrictions that would never fly today.

Those restrictions are enforced quite healthily in hostels across the US at least.

Hostels are temporary housing.

In the US. Lots of longer stays in places I've stayed at in Australia or Asia. Mostly travelers or foreign workers, but there was a flophouse element, most notably a prostitute in melbourne who rented a private bunk and would sometimes entertain "guests".

I think boarding houses were generally a combination of bachelors and widows (who presumably got the house when their husbands died), at least the combination as shown in Sherlock Holmes is, I think.

Nicer boarding houses, yes. It scaled a long way down.

Also shocked to see Worcester, MA mentioned here!

Many of these triple-deckers are pretty great in the sense that they can house a lot of people - they are not so great in many other aspects.

The youngest triple decker in Worcester is ~100 years old and many of them catch on fire and burn really easily. Your mileage may vary depending on the landlord you get. One landlord I had owned 100+ properties in Worcester and barely had anyone working for him. He refused to hire more people, so many of the issues we brought up would not be addressed for a while. My current landlord is great and any issue we have gets addressed almost immediately.

That being said, the city is currently working on revitalizing triple-deckers: http://www.worcesterma.gov/announcements/city-announces-worc....

Triple-deckers have a certain quirky charm to them. My current apartment has closets that are the right depth, but for some reason are super-wide. Many other triple-deckers have split the living room in half so that there can be a bedroom - this means that the door to the bedroom are sliding doors that you close.

That first one, the single family homes with a shared courtyard?

We need more stuff like this! Backyards in Brooklyn used to be treated more communally (before my time) which created a large shared space safe from cars where children could play.

Now I just stare out my window and watch people basically never go in to their yards.

What a horrible waste.

Go out in your yard, then, to watch the people who aren't there. Be the change you want to see, etc. Or possibly learn why they don't go out, "never noticed that odor til i sat here for an hour... now i'll never not notice it"

A lot of times the yard is rented as part of the ground-flour unit ($$$) so only ~1/4th of the people in the building have access.

I lived in a three-storey walk-up that was built at a shift in grade, so two of the floors were ground-level.

The top floor (us) had a small balcony in the front, and that was it.

The middle floor had a medium-sized ground floor patio out the front of the building adjacent to the parking area, and a small balcony in the back.

the lower floor had a gigantic fenced ground-floor yard that was easily bigger than the entire top floor we lived in. They were the only people in the building who had any green space.

They probably also payed for it I imagine. Something like this rarely comes for free.

Speak for yourself. We've got a small yard. The kid loves it -- when I get stuffy about screen time, he gets bored and unless the weather is awful, he'll go out and play. There's other kids on the block, and they'd be friends (well, or enemies, but there's valuable life lessons there either way) by now if there were shared spaces.

I love it. There's a small neighborhood in New Orleans built/planned in that style [0]. I have very fond memories of playing ball and just wandering through that area as a kid. Completely forgot about it until now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orle...

One of the early voting centers for Orleans Parish is there

I have a hunch it's the bit about the parking that is illegal. To be honest, the whole post rubbed me wrong- like an industry shill or something trying to start some grass-roots anti-building-regulation discord.

Uhh, have you heard about the housing affordability problem in many states? The zoning regulations have created cookie cutter cul-de-sac neighborhoods that have contributed to unnatural sprawl. It's very difficult to even innovate in housing and commercial design due to these restrictions.

In Houston, the same thing has happened without zoning. Have you perhaps considered that there is a massive market for "cookie cutter" suburban housing? HOAs have also largely taken the place of zoning, on a hyper-localized level. Furthermore, lots of other stupid rules apply, aside from zoning, that limit the ability to build new housing.

That market was deliberately stoked by FHA and mortgage lending restrictions. The thread itself points out that these issues are not soley the result of zoning.

> While single family zoning was reserved for homeowners (read: White), multi-family housing was seen as being for renters, (people of color).

> State, federal, and local governments all conspired to limit homebuying and lending to whites for decades.

You're not providing any causal link. You are effectively positing that a whites-only neighborhood will spontaneously organize into suburbia, but an integrated one will not? Would you please provide some evidence or background reading to support that?

I won't speak to the race issues but as a former realtor I dealt with FHA loans and they have asinine restrictions on them. I had to get local ordinance exceptions on a number of issues to get a loan approved for some buyers. It was a mess. They required certain lot sizes and certain dimensions. And while FHA has lost its luster a bit over the decades, it used to be a much more common type of loan, as it was one of the few ways to buy without putting a lot of money down.

I was quoting the Twitter thread to show that it discussed alternate causes beyond zoning, not making any of the claims that you seem to have taken issue with.

Uhh yeah. It’s not because of setbacks or hurricane structural requirements or parking spaces. The “cookie cutter cul-de-sac” neighborhoods are the affordable neighborhoods built to fight that. What you present as evidence contradicts your thesis. I lived there. And affordability is why.

A section of publicly owned and maintained road that only 5 families ever use and only for residential use is not a good use of resources and is affordable only if you live there. It is being subsidized by people that live in denser areas unless the roads are paid for by an internal home owner's association.

Yes- we had to handle the roads as a home owner's association (the developer had to build them).

I mean, I am not an industry shill, but I also believe that modern zoning and building codes (not the safety codes, but things like parking) make the kind of places that I would enjoy living "illegal to build today". There are a lot of bad regulations in the building codes today. Fireproofing, egress, and siesmic stuff is great, absurdly low FAR in urban areas? 2 parking spaces per unit? That ruins any chance of walkability.

It may change in the future, but if you have a home with two working adults you need to allow for roughly two cars per family (like, 180 per 200 units). Otherwise you have serious community issues. I’ve been president of a community. There are reasons that these rules are asked for and obtained. I don’t like them all, but they solve problems. The setback shot showed pedestrians. What if there were cars in that street- and people in wheelchairs also trying to maneuver down the street?

Even places with public transit good enough that you don't have to have a car (ex: Somerville MA, where we live) generally require off street parking.

Setbacks are not the same as sidewalks. You can allow buildings to run right to the sidewalk without pushing pedestrians/wheelchairs into the street.

Indeed. I tell people that what the world knows about urban development comes from mistakes made in MA. I live here too. Not in Somerville- I’m up in Marblehead- but I moved from Gaithersburg MD. At first I was annoyed by the regs when I moved to MD, but then I came to understand why they are there.

I love big brother...

I'm not sure what you're saying; I don't think Somerville should require parking (though if you choose to build units without off-street parking I think there should be ineligible for on-street parking).

So only people without cars would buy them? Do you think a developer would risk only selling to that market? It seems like that would limit what they could sell the units for, and as a buyer I would have to think carefully about being able to re-sell the unit.

> So only people without cars would buy them?

I expect so. About 16% of Somerville households don't have a car (according to the census).

> Do you think a developer would risk only selling to that market?

Some developers would choose to build off-street parking anyway, even though it's not required, and that's fine. I'm saying we should remove the requirement to build parking.

> It seems like that would limit what they could sell the units for, and as a buyer I would have to think carefully about being able to re-sell the unit.

This is another way of saying that the units would be cheaper. That's a good thing!

Parking minimums force low density and thus car dependency. Much better to build densely enough so that people don't need cars to live, and have many opt out.

There are certainly families and communities that will want to live somewhere that has parking for two vehicles -- which is fine, because that means there will be demand to build such housing, and it will be available at a price that reflects the cost of doing so.

But what's the excuse for passing a law that prohibits the alternative? Can't we have both?

> But what's the excuse for passing a law that prohibits the alternative

Avoiding a tragedy of the commons. If you don't make parking mandatory in building code, people won't build it and everyone will try to park on the street in public property, which leads to a bunch of other issues. By mandating the off-street parking by code, you're preserving the city right of ways and ensuring things like fire services, street sweeping, etc. aren't constantly dodging (potentially illegally) parked cars filling every inch of space.

Why isn't a better solution to enforce an aggressive towing policy with parking fines sufficient to pay for the enforcement?

Then people who own a car without a parking space will get tired of having their car towed every single day and move into housing that has parking, and the housing without parking will be left occupied by people who don't have cars.

You make it sound easy. There is a huge fight in my town right now about exactly that. You see, when you develop land, that land is being used. You can't go ahead and develop the same land another way. The people in "Old Town" have no off-street parking and never will. Back in the day when the town was less densely settled it was easier to find something to do with their car. But now those resources are scarcer and people are angry that they aren't allowed to park overnight on the street during the winter (another regulation- sheesh).

And it can be damn hard to move. I think it's better to prevent the problem by ensuring developers plan on enough space. Another thing that's sometimes required is to ensure access by car (the developers may be required to rework an intersection). Again, for good reason.

These regulations were born of seeing things that were wrong and trying to fix them. Not perfect, but it's an attempt. Nobody's trying to be evil, they are just trying to make it so that people can live places easily and have their needs accounted for.

> You see, when you develop land, that land is being used. You can't go ahead and develop the same land another way.

But why not?

You have a street with insufficient parking. There is demand for parking, so you buy one of the homes, knock it down, put up a new building with a large parking garage and sell spaces to the neighbors. Now there is more parking.

It seems like the problem is that people want to eat their cake and have it too. They want parking but they don't want to pay for it. But mandating it doesn't allow you to not pay for it, all it does is require you to pay for it even if you don't need it.

You can't make those modifications without others letting you. And when the others don't want that happening in their neighborhood, after 50 years of precedent they decide the best option is to prevent the problem and only allow housing that can fully accomodate the homeowner. And that includes their vehicle.

Someday, it may also include their pets. As of yet it doesn't, but these "thickly settled" areas are starting to feel the effects of people who want to keep large pets in small houses where the space to walk them is limited.

Not sure about other older cities on the east coast, but the problem you describe is a good description of older parts of much of my city.

We have a lot of dense 30’ city lots with no parking, and narrow residential streets not wide enough for parking on both sides. If people park legally, larger vehicles like emergency vehicles cannot pass. So most people park on the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods and it is tolerated. This blocks sidewalks for pedestrians and the disabled, and the sidewalk crumble, look awful, and are a hazard to walk on when cars aren’t parked on them.

Back when the neighborhood was built, there was a robust transit system and everyone worked and shopped in the city center. But now, we have shopping malls, suburbs, and office parks. No longer can a person shop and work exclusively in the city center. It’s too spread out.

If the options are

a) pay $200 more to have off-street parking, or

b) pay $200 less and fight to the death for on-street parking once or twice a week

Lots of people with cars will choose b. This presents a problem for the municipality, because now street parking is >100% full all of the time.

It seems like that would be more of a problem for the people who chose to pay less money and then can't find street parking than for the municipality. But if they really cared then they could just put parking meters on the street parking, priced such that it only gets 80-90% full instead of 110%.

That's a problem for the other residents, whose visitors now can't ever find parking, and any businesses in the area, whose customers can't either. Those people obviously wouldn't want meters in front of their homes and businesses, either. The politically easiest solution was the parking space minimum.

Parking space minimums solve a non-problem. If people want parking they will build it. They shouldn't be forced to though as it adds expense and makes things more car dependent, reinforcing the need for parking. It is a vicious car dependent cycle.

> If people want parking they will build it.

Maybe they will, but not before first overloading the existing available public parking, which may be a non-problem to you but apparently isn't to lots of people who vote.

Can confirm. Used to live in Hollywood, CA hot area. I had a parking space. Having a guest that drives a car - impossible.

However, in LA while it's required to have parking space minimum for new residential buildings it's not required to give those spaces for free to resident. I lived in a new apartment complex with tons of parking, but none of it was used. It was 200$ for extra spot and not guest parking.

Another issue is those dumb plaza everywhere. 50 businesses and 20 parking spots.

The municipality is the people. What's wrong with them wanting to guarantee that option b) exists?

> The municipality is the people.

The government officials pretty clearly have their own interests and incentives independent from the citizens, but we don't need to go down that road right now.

> What's wrong with them wanting to guarantee that option b) exists?

It's option b) that they're prohibiting. But if you want option a) then all you have to do is choose it -- nobody is requesting that housing with parking be prohibited. If you're willing to pay the premium it costs over housing without parking then go do that, just don't prevent other people from doing something different.

My guess is that the people who want that are a minority, at least for now.

Or at least the people who are willing to give up easily available street parking for visitors and consumers to get it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...

I live in one currently in Los Angeles and it's amazing. One of the best living situations I've had in a long time. I get to have a semi-private yard without the huge additional cost.

How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out.

Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.

This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.

No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...

Agreed. If you have enough money to own a house with a garage and electric car, you can probably afford to have an electrician run an outlet to your garage if it doesn't already have one. Similarly, I doubt anyone who owns a house and gasoline car is going car shopping and saying "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."

You have the qualifier of "probably" - but money may not be the only thing holding someone back.

For instance, I want a 220 outlet in my garage so I can have a proper welder out there. I don't have an electric car (and even if someday I do own one, it won't fit in my current garage, due to various reasons - chief one being it's a conversion from a carport).

That all said - I am not sure I can get such an outlet. Money isn't the issue - but it could become the issue.

Because I would need an additional 220 circuit added to my existing circuits in my breaker box. But the panel is full. So I would probably need to either get a larger panel, or add on an auxiliary panel (likely the latter). But that also depends on my service from the main transformer.

I might not be able to get an extra circuit if my service isn't large enough to support such an extra circuit. The only way to change that would be to have a larger capacity transformer installed. That transformer is shared between my house and the neighbor's house. I don't even want to contemplate what it would cost to change that out (thinking somewhere in the 5 figure range - but where?).

So money isn't an issue - until you have an electrician come out and tell you that to run an additional line is going to require major changes to your current electrical service.

This was my thought on seeing the regulation as well. Although it may have been better to mandate panels leaving room for expansion instead of mandating a 240v outlet.

They make 120v breakers that have two switches on them and two hot terminals in order to save space in the panel. That sounds like exactly what you need.

Fitting in additional breakers is not usually a problem and adding an expansion panel isn't either.

If the supply from the transformer isn't enough, then I don't see a regulation requiring a 220v in your garage affecting that. Whether it's new or an an upgrade later, you are going to have the same problem.

Have you checked with your electric company? Depending on where you live, it's likely they will upgrade the transformer at no cost to you.

what does the average guy do in this situation? exactly, get an extender, plug it into a random outlet in the house, attach it with duct tape, job done. Regulations have made our lives safer once again

> "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."

I have that problem. It will probably cost me $3000-$4000 to install the wall charger and then in 10 years they will probably rip it out and replace it with a whole set of wall chargers with central load balancing for a much lower cost because the cost of running a wire doesn't increase with the number of chargers. (Underground garage of an apartment complex if it wasn't obvious)

I find this a very weird thing to be upset about. The cost is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the price of a house, and I imagine plenty of people would like having an outlet there even if they don't drive an electric car. I'm sure there are lots of pernicious regulations, but this doesn't seem like a great example of one.

Electric cars are up against a vicious cycle: no one will build houses to accommodate electric cars until a lot of people have them, but most people won't buy an electric car if they can't charge it in their garage. So if you want people to drive electric cars, which the government rightly does, it makes sense to require that new houses are built with electric cars in mind. Yes, Teslas are expensive, but the expectation is that the houses will still be around once electric vehicles are more affordable, and it's cheaper to prepare for them now than to retrofit later on.

Electric cars are still a luxury good.....

You can buy a used Leaf for under $15k. Not exactly luxury pricing.

For $4k, as it happens. As I did a few weeks ago.

I bought a NEW Leaf for $16K (after tax credit) in 2017 when they were liquidating the 1st generation models. It has 30 kWh of battery and a range of about 120 miles.

Right now, you can buy a USED Leaf under $5K, but it probably has a worn out battery with 60-70 miles of range usable:

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nissan+leaf&so...

Even taking that as a given, it's eminently reasonable to expect new home construction to last long enough that for future residents, electric cars will instead be a normal fact of life.

Did you price used electic cars recently?

Electric vehicle sales in california are growing rapidly each year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_C...

Also, once people switch to an EV, they don't generally want to switch back (quiet, clean, cheap, minimal maintenance)

The cost is a drop in the bucket, but there are enough other drops to overflow the bucket. When we take offense at substandard living conditions and then regulate them away, we price out the poor. We often even excuse it as some benefit to the poor, saying that they deserve good things too, but of course the totality of the regulations ends up pricing them out of the market.

I think it’s a red herring in areas with expensive housing. If you could save a bit of money with cheaper building codes, the land cost would increase by the same amount, because land is capturing all the surplus.

Land only captures all the surplus when construction that increases density is prohibited. What people are really paying for living space, not dirt. A thousand square feet in a ten story building is pretty much just as good as a thousand square feet in a single story building, but the ten story building has ten times as much of it, so at scale more supply lowers the price.

There is also demand for "smallest available unit of housing" which naturally costs more if it's required by law to be larger.

The regulation you cited only applies to new construction, and according to link you gave adds about $50 to the cost of the house. This is not going to stop anyone from becoming an owner--poor people tend to by existing house, not new construction.

A level 2 charger is not much different from an electric clothes dryer as far as your house electrical infrastructure is concerned, so when putting in support for the later it is cheap and easy to put in support for the former, too.

That’s one example.

Now add up all the other requirements.

How much of the $700,000-$1,500,000 price of a 15-year-old house in a coastal city is due to all of these requirements adding up?

2%? 5%? It's not the reason why I was stepping around a homeless person sprawled in the middle of the sidewalk on my Monday commute.

The reason housing is unaffordable is the cost of land, availability of credit, and the self-fulfilling expectation that houses are a good investment that will grow in price.

*cost of land in California

That was just one example of the many new requirements that make houses more expensive. Solar panels will now be required on all new homes. Also fire sprinkler systems are required, adding somewhere between $5k-$10k in costs. Each new regulation might seem okay on its own, but all of these things add up.

Speaking of building regulations and solar, I stayed in a house that was completely powered by solar and wired with DC for lights and electronics. You can't just add an AC outlet in the kitchen for a coffee grinder, though. If you have even one AC outlet, you have to wire the entire house to code -- useless and unused AC outlets every few feet along the hallways, AC outlet in the bathroom even though the inverter can't handle most of the things (e.g. hair dryers) that would be plugged in in a bathroom.

What poor person is using a coffee grinder is sort of my original point.

Huh? Whole bean coffee doesn't cost any more and some grinders are quite cheap? The vast majority of poor people have smartphones, and those are much more expensive.

Coffee grinders are ten bucks and beans last longer if they're not ground.

Also, everyone has the things that they choose to splurge on, even a poor person. When I was dirt broke in college I still bought 2 ply tp because dammit life is too short to deal with anything less. I don't regret it.

Those are much better examples that the electrical outlet in the garage.

Solar is probably a bad example because it's likely to be net profitable.

No, it makes the upfront cost of a house more expensive, it is a fine example.

Basically nobody buys a house outright, so they're not paying the upfront cost anyway, they're taking out a loan. Taking out a larger loan so that you have a larger loan payment when the increase is less than the amount the panels save you in buying electricity from the power company doesn't cost you anything, it turns a profit.

Being forced to pay for a parking space even when you don't own a car costs you rather a lot.

My favorite part of when I post that example is how someone inevitable tells me how much $50 is not a big deal.

*Addendum: Nobody should be forced to have a garage on their house and the government has no business requiring that.

Have you ever been to an area that doesn't have regulations on housing? No, thank you. There will be some crappy ones, but overall it's a win.

I've been to places with more and less regulation. I've noticed that while California is significantly more regulated than Kansas, I'm much more likely to see a "quirky", "fun", or "exotic" domicile in the former than the latter. The government has a much greater capacity to hinder than promote legislatively; we have seen a hindrance of normal housing and a promotion of very little in its place.

Huston doesn't having zoning laws and they're doing fine. Have you ever been to an area that doesn't have regulations on housing?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2017/08/30/did-houst...

The article's title: Did Huston Flood Because of a Lack of Zoning?

The article's actual content:

>All the same, it doesn't seem that tight regulations, or less development, have prevented flooding in other cities. When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it had far less impervious surface than Houston does now; in fact, its population had been declining in every decade since 1970. Alas, the tragedy wasn’t about that anyway, but about infrastructure that collapsed and spilled water into a flood plain--a flood plain that had been developed despite New Orleans' strict zoning laws. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, it damaged a metro area that, overall, is both denser and more regulated than Houston. In the last decade alone, flooding has also hit Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Colorado, and various other regions with diverse geography and regulations.

https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h...

“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”

To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”

The person you're replying to was talking about building codes, but then you started talking about zoning laws. These aren't at all the same thing.

> Huston doesn't having zoning laws and they're doing fine. Have you ever been to an area that doesn't have regulations on housing?

Say what?

And is people taking dump on the streets better and safer?

I upvoted you, but it's not black and white.

The government prevents someone from opening a lead smelting plant next to a school (hopefully). They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, etc.

But they also discovered manufacturing housing scarcities and _also_ making massive, lifelong loans available for housing are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head. Want to work part time and pursue art? Want to stay home and watch your child grow up? Too bad, there's 10 more people who'll outbid you for your house, so you have to design your life around income maximization.

These scarcities are created with zoning, parking minimums (maybe the most horrible part), green space (aka yard size) requirements, ridiculously large streets, density restrictions, etc.

The escape is to leave the city and work remote (honestly it's amazing what having no mortgage and no rent does to your sense of agency) but that's an option open to rather few people, and probably not for long as it becomes normalized and wages adjust as a result.

Yep. There's a difference between my example and proper fire exits. I didn't capture that in my original post, but I fully agree. Unfortunately the power to regulate these things has been abused to keep the poor out of housing permanently.

> They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, etc.

That can't be true? That makes 90% of existing homes illegal to build again.

A window that can be opened is considered an exit.

This just means sleeping areas require a window

It's not true, but not for this reason. 100% of old enough buildings couldn't be built again in exactly the same way. Codes evolve over time.

Why isn't it true? My understanding was rooms where people are likely to sleep require two means of exit (e.g. door and a window).

> manufacturing housing scarcities ... are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head.

This guy gets it.

The urbanists' hearts are in the right place, but in the end they're getting used. The only way to win is not to play.

Source: bought a rural foreclosure and licensed wholesale dark fiber from the electric utility. My internet bill is ten times my property tax bill and it's worth it.

Urbanism works except we need to address a century of pent up demand and every time someone says "well you're just building for the rich" but the whole point is that it's to scarce so obviously only the rich can afford the first nice homes to be built in a century!

But yeah, houses are cheap. Very nice log cabin style ones (manufactured parts, assembled on site) can be sub 100k. In a scarcity house prices rise to match the debt available. Incidentally, if you like a project look for houses no bank will lend on.

The problem isn't government regulation, it's bad regulation.

This smacks of the No True Scotsman problem - were all the regulations good, we wouldn't have this problem. And yet, governments are by and large incompetent, and most regulations they pass are bad. Almost all have significant unintended consequences. The ways to fix this are to minimize regulation at all levels and make regulation as hyper-local as possible.

In what way? There are many regulations that are critical to a functioning society. Seeing a set of bad regulations and saying "that's it get rid of all of them" smacks of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

> There are many regulations that are critical to a functioning society.

I disagree vehemently, and believe there are very few that are necessary, aside from enforcing the harm principle and a few basic functions (i.e. diplomacy & military). Rather, most people use laws to attempt to enforce upon society their visions of how it ought to look and operate (i.e. drug bans, zoning). My motivation for getting rid of _most_ regulations is ideological (I can think of no ethical justification for the state to compel, by force, a home-owner to install an outlet in his wall), and I was attempting to illustrate a practical aspect of why; I don't believe there's much "bathwater" to be thrown out that wouldn't have been provided through other means.

Your motivation may be ideological but it is not in anyway practical.

If you look worldwide, places with minimal levels of regulation and enforcent tend to be more impoverished and almost no countries with a functioning government have the level of regulation that you advocate. The evidence strongly suggest that regulation tends to increase economic efficiency (at least up to a point).

Perhaps you can redirect your ideological distaste to find ways to help systematically determine which regulations are effective/necessary and expediently remove those that are harmful rather than advocating for a state of affairs that ignores reality.

Singapore and Hong Kong are two of the richest countries on Earth per capita, and have much less regulation than the US or Europe.

But they have much more stringent enforcement.

Those poorer nations with less regulations don't enforce what they have. See, for instance, the post about massive sand theft in India; rampant corruption enables anyone to bypass the law amd cause harm to others. Passing more regulations won't fix that; said nations have tried that and failed.

I specifically meant HK and Singapore.

Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have zoning and land use regulation. They have consumer safety regulations. They have much more strict drug law penalties. Thereay be areas where they have less regulation but they are hardly the poster children for "minimal regulation" countries.

I am not at all saying that our level of regulation is perfect. There are lots of bad regulations that exist to protect industry profits or simply remove citizen choice out of fear.

> Rather, most people use laws to attempt to enforce upon society their visions of how it ought to look and operate (i.e. drug bans, zoning). My motivation for getting rid of _most_ regulations is ideological

Do you not see that, were you to get your way, you'd be doing precisely the same, just with a different vision?

If I want 'drug bans and zoning', for example, I'll be cross that you've used (perhaps lack of) laws to force your own liberal vision upon me.

And that's essentially how we've (in much of the world) arrived at multi-party democracy.

Not passing a law does not force you to do anything. It still leaves individuals the freedom to make choices; i.e. I support removing drug restrictions but don't use them myself. Let everyone make his own choice. Your position is the restrictive one, the one where you seek to force me to live as you see fit; not passing a law allows everyone to live according to his own choices. On the other hand, if I transgress against your governmental club, policemen bust down my door at 3 AM and haul me off; there is no such occurrence without a law.

(to be clear 'my' position is just assumed for argument's sake)

It's still the laws or not that govern society, it still affects me. You'd like some minimal laws too, as you said, such as preventing people killing each other - that also is restricting other people, for the benefit of the others.

Absolutely, I believe in some very basic stuff, like what you described (enforcing the harm principle). But, someone's drug abuse (for instance) does not harm me, unless I have to pay for the rehab; a lack of zoning may lead to an ugly house, but the closest that comes to harm is failing to provide visual or aesthetic pleasure to me.

However, you claimed restricting one from killing another is for the benefit of the one. Not so, rather it is to prevent undue harm to another. Conceptually, it is the difference between you stealing $100 and me giving you the same.

I also believe in remediating externalities, i.e. no one gets to dump toxic sludge in the river. I simply don't see an ethical case for laws that tell a landowner what he can and can't do with the property.

> However, you claimed restricting one from killing another is for the benefit of the one. Not so, rather it is to prevent undue harm to another.

I'm not really sure what you mean, I think we're in agreement here. I said:

> preventing people killing each other - that also is restricting other people, for the benefit of the others.

I'm not arguing that your views are wrong or unethical, just that they can't stand on natural superiority, it's all up for debate, it all impacts others.

(Drug use absolutely impacts others beyond hypotherical tax paying for rehabilitation - there's potential for anti-social behaviour, littering, and smell/noise/etc. in public spaces. I'm not making a judgement on whether that should or shouldn't be available for individual choice, I just don't see that it's ultra vires for a legislative body to rule on it.)

Governments are not by and large incompetent, nor are they responsible for craft commonly-used electrical wiring standards. That is, in fact, written by a private organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electrical_Code

Local governments (the ones in charge of zoning) adopt this because it's easier to adopt an existing standard than to try and write one's own. Any homeowner who's discovered wonky wiring done by a previous handyman will appreciate the existence of standards like this.

So many people argue against regulations, not realizing how much absolute shit they'd be up against now without them. People being electrocuted by their homes used to be a routine thing, for example.

It's like how we have anti-vaxxers now that the memories of what the vaccines cure are so distant.

We never have enough outlets, and it is a good thing mandating enough of them in new constructions.

In fact, at least in France, where I live, it is a common annoyance in old houses: not enough outlet. Some people add them later on, and it is not always pretty... or safe. There is now rules mandating a minimum of outlets and light fixtures for new constructions, and it is a good thing.

Electric car or not, a high enough amperage outlet is good to have. And you have to think long term too. Electric cars are mostly luxury vehicles now, but things are evolving. And consider that the next owner may have an electric car if you ever want to sell your house.

Of course, you can install the outlet later, but generally, doing things later in a house is a huge pain in the ass. For example, you want to drill holes and make a mess before painting and furnishing.

These regulations actually make things cheaper, because you don't have to rebuild things later.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. We have building regulations because buildings before regulations were dangerous or unusable to such a degree that citizens banded together to outlaw such buildings in the future. Communities don't want homes built in their neighborhoods which lack plumbing or electricity.

Also, we don't build housing for the poor, we build housing for the wealthy and middle class, which later becomes available to the poor due to depreciation. I live in a city where literal mansions have been carved up into apartment buildings over the years and where poor people live in Italianate apartments with beautiful stonework.

Complaints about regulations always ring hollow to me, because they always seem to imagine that regulations spring into being ex nihilo. Regulations are practically always written in response to something going wrong -- frequently, involving somebody ending up dead.

So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.

That doesn't mean that the regulations were well designed, or even if they were, that the reasons remain the same. But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them, and they don't get into place lightly, either. So if you want a regulation removed, you need to figure out what caused it to be created in the first place. Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.

> So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.

Given that the rules are nominally in place to benefit occupants, I don't see where you're getting a conflict of interest. It's offering to suffer the alleged harm yourself in exchange for not having to pay significantly higher housing costs.

> But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them

The problem is that they're not. As you say they're often imposed following some fatality. But even if the new rule is ineffective garbage, it's unlikely to be traceable to any specific deaths. The way regulations kill people is much more indirect, e.g. by making housing more expensive so that people who can no longer afford it freeze to death on the streets, or die in car crashes because they have to live somewhere with a longer commute and the additional vehicle miles turned them into a statistic.

What that means is that there is a process for getting individual rules added in practice but no equivalent process for getting individual rules removed, so they accumulate over time.

> Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.

A huge part of the issue is that some problems don't have cost-effective solutions. If you can prevent one death every ten years by raising housing costs by $1/month, notice that in a city with a million homes you've just spent $120M to save one life. If the value of a statistical life is something like $10M, well, we just overpaid by >1000%. And we may not know of any way to prevent that death for the less than $0.10/month cost increase it would take to make it cost effective. (You also need to verify that the rule is actually effective and not just speculate that it might work when it might not.)

But local zoning boards are hardly doing that kind of cost benefit analysis every time they add a new rule to their thick book of rules, so consequently huge swathes of the existing rules come out on the wrong side of it.

And since nothing ever really gets people excited about any given individual minor regulatory inefficiency until they stack up to be killing thousands of people on net, fixing that problem characteristically comes in the form of a mass culling of existing rules.

Did you just make an argument for trickle-down housing? I think we’ve established that it didn’t work for money. I think it’s a bit too optimistic to assume that it will work for real-estate.

What will actually happen is that the children of the original owners rent out the place for extortionate amounts, and people will pay it, because they have nowhere else to go.

A friend is remodeling (drastically) their house in Mountain View. Some of the code stuff seems crazy. Bathrooms must have motion sensor and humidity sensor enabled fans? Bathroom lights must be motion sensor enabled?

I’m sure there’s something driving all of this that has some basis in a real concern (similar to sprinkler systems and networked smoke detectors) but it seems like the complex and higher cost code-driven housing requirements is basically unbounded.

Why do I want a motion sensor in my bathroom? Every time I find a house where that is the case I have to keep waving my arms about when having a dump :(

That and practically disallowing the sale of incandescent light fixtures. It's all typical California insanity. You don't have to deal with that in a lot of other parts of the country.

LED and CFL lights use the same fixtures as incandescent which are not banned in California. In my experience, the number of people spreading FUD about California far exceeds the craziness coming from the state itself.

While this stuff can be cheap, it sounds insane. I understand that it can vary from state to state but American building code and zoning sounds so over regulated to European countries. I wonder why there isn't more pushback from people since Americans tend to prefer liberties and freedom.

Be careful - a lot of these "quick, solve the housing crisis" invite in sketchy developer practices that cut the most ridiculous corners when building.

Prewiring new homes for solar or electric cars probably costs $100 when building a house. Romex is that cheap and pulling the wires before the walls have drywall is trivial.

Doing it after the house is built is several orders of magnitude more expensive, and a great barrier to homeowners.

Um, what electrician are you hiring that runs wire from roof to ground and terminates, and provides materials for just $100 bucks?

I think the point is more that you are already paying them $2000 to run some wires from roof to ground, running an additional wire while they’re doing those only costs you an extra $100.

A new trace for 3 to 8 gauge cable depending on load from roof to ground isn't a five min job nor are they cheap, both wire and labor. Hell, I charged 80/hr for low voltage pulling. High voltage is a whole different set of concerns and fire risk. This isn't something to hand wave as incidental and throw numbers around putting silly ideas in people's heads.

> How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out.

It’s not just government; private contracts often prohibit homeowners from serving more residents. In Zoning Rules! (https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio...), William Fischel describes how zoning can substitute for private CC&Rs, which are worse than zoning in that amendments often require supermajority of all property owners in the neighborhood instead of simple majority. Property rights that are too strong can be just as big of a problem as government regulations that are too restrictive.

I can still see some value to building codes and regulations, but I really don't see what benefit the very strict zoning regulations are bringing to the table.

If my neighbor and I decide to sell our land to a developer so they can build a small apartment complex we should be allowed to. If the neighbors don't like the idea of having an apartment nearby they can see if they can get in on the deal too (probably turning a tidy profit on their lot) or they can suck it. It's my land I should be able to sell it to whomever I want or build whatever I want provided the structure doesn't pose a physical risk to my neighbor or their property.

But when your neighbors bought the land they bought it priced with the knowledge that their neighbors (you) could not do that, so to them, you can suck it.

(I'm for relaxing zoning laws but if you ever wanted to convince anyone this kind of argument is like the last approach you should use.)

Yeah I don't usually find "suck it" to be a compelling argument it's more expressive.

They didn't quite price in the current zoning restrictions in that they were as changeable then as they are now. If I was particularly motivated and persuasive (or let's be honest good at grift) I could still convince my local city council to rezone my neighborhood to allow said sale. My formulation just doesn't force me to go through a middleman who, most likely, really doesn't care about my neighbor's concerns are just what their cut will be.

Would you make the same argument if your neighbor sells their land to build a tannery or for the construction of a brothel?

See, I thought not.

There are a lot of places in the world that have little government regulation and a huge housing crisis. What’s the evidence for government being the problem, or for getting rid of it being the solution?

Nobody is being forced to have a car charging outlet in the garage. From your link: “The rule specifies that one- and two-family dwellings have a service panel with capacity for a 40-amp circuit--enough for a 32-amp charging station--and conduit that can support wiring for an 80-amp circuit.

“The estimated cost of compliance is reportedly around $50, a fraction of the cost of adding the appropriate electrical service and wiring later on.”

And you know Teslas aren’t the only electric cars, and that more brands are on the way, right?

> Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.

> This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.

That one regulation is marginal compared to the effects of very restrictive zoning for density and transit, which is usually a tool most effectively implemented by highly exclusive locales.

The trivial cost of adding one outlet when building a new home is not what is preventing poor people in California from buying a home.

The price is in the land not the building.

Different areas/regions/countries have such different norms.

Where I'm from if someone said a property for sale had no power in the garage I'd be genuinely surprised and wonder what went wrong during the build. The same level of surprise as if there was no roof. Power in the garage is so useful. 240 volt power at a minimum as well. That level of expectation goes back several decades.

I don't own a Tesla or EV.

I would include things like home owner's associations as government. They only thing they are good at is maintaining shared resources. Everything else about them is counterproductive. They lock neighborhoods into being the same forever.

This. People miss the broader picture when they support “safety” regulations. Politicians will often amplify the outliers in order to gain public support to enact regulations that further monopolize returns for their buddies.

Is there any possible way to break the American addiction on housing as the primary investment / wealth for a family?

As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change. And who can blame them? For most people their house is worth more than all their other possessions and investments combined.

Besides the incentive issue, the fact is that most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner. They're created by the city who provide streets, infrastructure, security, etc. They're created by small business owners who make a neighborhood attractive to live in. They're created by nearby employers who bring in wage earners who create demand. The new bathroom the homeowner puts in is a minor matter. Yet all of the value (minus property taxes where applicable) is captured by the private home owner.

Raise property taxes and you suddenly have a lot of people who don’t want home values to go up any more. This is a common phenomenon in the sun belt, especially the Houston, TX area where you’ll see public meetings crashed by people opposed to projects they think will raise property values and thus their tax bill.

But, good luck campaigning for tax increases.

One way would be to encourage alternative investments. It's actually really tough for non-wealthy Americans to invest in capital markets in an efficient way.

Another would be to encourage them to really commit to the value of their homes (instead of the price). If property taxes in California rose with the value of homes, many more people in San Francisco would have found it expedient to (a) sell to developers or (b) let out their homes or (c) remodel their homes as denser housing. Well...(c) could have happened, if it were not so difficult to build in San Francisco, but that goes back to helping people find better ways to invest, by not discouraging commerce.

Most investments work the way you describe: "...most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner." It's the same when you put money in a 401k or an index fund. Investing is putting capital out there and hoping it comes back. Doesn't make sense to advance this argument against home ownership as an investment.

> As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change.

I'm not sure it's that logical. If you own land and tomorrow it's upzoned to allow more density, the value increases immediately. Once the density creates enough foot traffic to support cafes and restaurants in a walkable space the value goes up again.

People are stuck on the idea that urban means blight so they need to zoning rules to keep out "the riff raff".

Get rid of the mortgage deduction. Get rid of property tax increase limitations.

It looks like the author might be in the NW. I'm curious whether they would be optimistic about the zoning changes (https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning...) here (https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB...)

Yes, he's from Oregon. HB 2001 is good news, but we need to allow for more variety, and it'd be wonderful to also allow light commercial by right, so that, say, you can walk to a corner store instead of getting into a gas guzzling SUV just to do something people in many countries can do on foot.

> allow light commercial by right

Is this a US-specific term? What does it mean? (Only really found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light)

"By right" means that you can just build it without having to apply for any specific exceptions, go through hearings, etc...

"Light commercial" means things like small corner stores, barber shops, local restaurants, stuff like that. There are legit reasons to not want, say, a tannery right next to housing.

Ah, right, indeed. Related to the thread, I don't see how banning "#5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing" makes any sense. These can be a game-changer for local town life.

The only bad thing about them is that they tend not to be accessible for people who have difficulty climbing steps... which is fine as long as there's lots more available housing which is accessible.

I lived in an apartment over a specialty supply company one summer; it was a great bicycle commute to work, walking distance to a supermarket, and nobody was actually in the ground floor at the times I was home, so they certainly didn't care if I played music loudly or thumped furniture across the floor.

Even a shoe-repair or nail salon can be noxious in confined spaces, say an indoor or underground mall. That despite these nominally being "commercial" rather than "industrial" use.

Restaurants and bakeries possibly as well, for smoke, oder, and (for restaurants and bars), late-evening / night noise and disruption.

That's a separate term. I think what you're parent is talking about is letting light commercial (as in small shops) build without getting cumbersome regulatory approval first, i.e. let them simply comply with the law instead of needing a specific permit.

>An as-of-right development complies with all applicable zoning regulations and does not require any discretionary action by the City Planning Commission or Board of Standards and Appeals. Most developments and enlargements in the city are as-of-right.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/glossary.page

Oregonian here. HB 2001 is great, but Oregon still has insane housing regulatory requirements, which is why most homeowners in Portland at least completely ignore getting permits for most work (no data to back that up, just what we noticed when purchasing a house here -- most work is unpermitted).

Like, you have to plant a tree on your property if you improve it more than 25k (so if you rewire an old house, or decide to split your home into a separate unit to rent and create housing, like we're doing right now). This applies even if you have no yard. Trees are expensive, but yards are more expensive, especially in a city where space is at a premium. This is an insane requirement when there are people sleeping on your streets because there are not enough beds for them. That is only one example. The heavy hand of Uncle Ted is felt everywhere here, so HB 2001 is not enough.

Who is Uncle Ted?

Current mayor of Portland. (Could be ex gov Kulongoski but less likely so)

Ted Wheeler... mayor of portland

No citations are provided to support the “most American cities” claim, and many of them are common even in the places best known for anti-development NIMBYism, so I suspect that their association with the thread title is frequently inaccurate.

A lot of them are common in places where they were built before modern American zoning laws came into being.

#5 is common in new construction today, in the NIMBY-heavy Northern California (including the SF Bay Area), which is, to be sure, not free of the influence of “modern American zoning laws”, and I can think of at least one Bay Area small town where (if one restricts to residential structures) the same developments that contradict #5 also is do so for #8. The essential equivalent of #7 is a common form (including, again, in the Bay Area) of newer condo development, though they are usually marketed as “townhouses” rather than “rowhouses”.

For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it. You're seeing the few exceptions.

> For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it.

I've seen it in virtually every urban and suburban area of Northern California, it's practically the on-trend mode of infill development and has been for a couple decades. Either Northern California has the reverse relationship to the rest of the nation that it is reputed to have for development (which I doubt), or the assertion that this is prohibited in most US cities is false.

You don't know what was required to get it approved. It might be allowed only in certain areas of town by right. I can't even convert my detached garage into a living space where I live.

> You don't know what was required to get it approved. It might be allowed only in certain areas of town by right I know that it wasn't prohibited I. The cities in which it was approved and built; the claim was that it was prohibited in most cities, not that it required special permits in most cities outside of limited predesignated areas.

I'm simply not going to treat a Twitter thread making claims about what is prohibited in development in most American cities that provides no evidence of this widespread prohibition seriously when several of the things it points to are clearly not prohibited in most cities in the region notorious for being unusually restrictive about what is allowed in development.

Now, sure, that's not disproof of the claim, not have I claimed that it is. But it is more than a sufficient to demand evidence before granting it credence, and when even those trying to defend the claim have to shift the goalposts far from the actual claim, I think that's a further indicator of it's shaky ground.

Yeah, this tweet-complaint list is simply not true. SRO/Tenements are obviously not legal (for good reasons, imho). But the other examples in the tweet thread are legal in most cities, and these get built all across the US literally every single day.

In my small-ish Michigan city alone, we have multiple examples of #1, #3, #4, #5, #7, and #8, all of which have been built this decade. The same is true in Minneapolis, and Portland, and Seattle, and Chicago, and others.

I think you are missing the point if you think the author implies that they are completely banned. They are obviously not all banned. The issue is that they are banned in certain places. Most cities strictly regulate where you can build different things and have restrictions on setbacks and parking for all of those things. In my midwestern town, I could not tear my house down and build an apartment. It is zoned for 'single family 2nd density residential.'

Anything to make new housing as expensive and complicated as possible so NIMBYs don't have more housing inventory to attack their valuations or more neighbors too close to them. The consequences of this selfishness are more expensive rents, more expensive housing and more homelessness.

There's something really beautiful about streets without setbacks like this [1]. I can't put my finger on what it is but they're all over Amsterdam and Japan, and they always make me so happy to walk though. Does anyone know what it is about these?

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=...

No/little room for cars, lets one feel safe.

No cars?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

More seriously, my guess is that you enjoy those streets because there's so much more character to them. They are generally part of an older, more storied urban core, so the streets are more imbued with a "there"ness of the community.

Contrast this with the experience of walking down a recently-gentrified street.

They’re at human scale. There’s lots to look at, it’s quiet, there’s sense of security from not being out in the open, tons of advantages for humans.

I can't stand them myself; they're rarely that uncrowded and many streets with cars/cycle traffic here also don't have setbacks while, at the same time, allowing private property to build high walls.

This results in a large number of blind turns where you can't tell if anyone's coming around the corner unless there are mirrors available, which aren't always a guarantee.

Lack of cars and the fact that you're near other people. We are social creatures, we need some minimum amount of space, but more than that just makes us feel isolated.

Human scale, as noted. High variety. A ready change of scene or situation. Opportunities located in close proximity. And generally, an active (and frequently well-behaved) street life.

That said: I'd really like to see a list of places which afford such environments.

I think part of it is the visual complexity. Uniform color and shapes of a normal street is boring. Easy access to both sides of the street is also appealing. If the woman to the right wanted to go to the ristorante on the left she could be there in seconds.

It is human scale rather than car scale. Things being closer together makes things more enjoyable for humans. For cars, we go so fast past things, we want them farther apart to perceive the same amount of changes. Car scale makes us think we should spread stuff out more.

Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your own house.

I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.

I spent some time in Philadelphia, where nearly all of the housing in the city core is rowhouses or apartment buildings. It's fantastic. It makes a dense, walkable city, and people still get the amenities of their own house with a little tiny backyard (big enough for a fire pit or grill). Also better for the environment when heat doesn't radiate off all four sides of a house.

They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.

I think you really should have enough room for scaffolding. How are you going to take care of a wall that is physically touching your neighbor's wall? That wall ought to get inspected at least. It might need paint. If one house starts to collapse onto the other, then both have problems. You're also at a higher fire risk, even if the walls in the middle can't burn, because embers can more easily go from one roof to the other.

Yeah, the Philly MOVE incident led to 64 other buildings burning.

I think the scope of that fire is better attributed to: the police dropped a bomb from a police helicopter on the home where people were living, and it was a poor neighborhood that may not have had firewalls between dwellings. I've seen fires there where the shared walls are brick, and those firewalls do work.

They also deliberately didn't put the MOVE bombing fire out.

Much of SF is build this way. Homes have maybe a 1” gap between them.

Good question on how you’d repair the exterior wall. Usually if it’s that bad, it’s almost a complete rebuild and the wall comes down.

you're not allowed to have a fire pit in philly within 15 feet of a building

I wonder if rowhouses weren't banned, just renamed.

I'm not entirely sure what the proper definition of a rowhouse is, but at least where I live (US Midwest) there are a lot of newer townhouses (multi-floor houses that share a wall on at least one side). There are also quite a few zero lot line houses (also called a duplex?), which are houses that share a single wall only.

Zero-lot-line homes do not share a wall. Each building is constructed such that a wall can abut the property line. Duplexes do share a wall. The two types of building are distinct.

Rowhouses/townhomes would be homes with two opposed zero-lot-line walls, exactly the width of the property, all in a row. If a whole-block-width building had partitioning walls at roughly the same interval, that could instead be a rowhouse-like condominium.

Sharing a wall does bring in some legal issues and definitions, which do not come into play when each structure is completely independent (but abutting other structures).

The ability to build without setbacks is a major factor in urban density. The costs of maintaining a city roughly scale with the linear amount of street frontage, so not wasting that length on empty setbacks is a great way to keep city services cheaper.

The whole "sharing a wall" vs. "two walls abutting" seems somewhat academic to me from a homeowner perspective. I'm not sure why it makes such a difference.

The drawback of having no setbacks is that your pedestrians have to mingle with the car traffic? The example in the article didn't make it look very desirable to me.

I think the difference is that in the case of sharing a wall with a neighbor you have a) extra noise leakage that you wouldn’t if you had that extra layer, b) shared infrastructure, which makes things a little harder if you need to make changes/have a plumbing issue/etc. Also the roof is continuous between townhomes, so when it comes time to replace that you have to negotiate with the neighbor.

On your second point, I think a few different things are being conflated here. Usually setback rules require empty land between the building and the sidewalk, so they don’t serve to create any buffer between pedestrians and vehicles.

Also, some cities have streets with no setback and no sidewalk, where vehicle through traffic is generally banned. You could debate whether this is a good idea. Personally, I found having the entire street for pedestrian traffic, while occasionally stepping out of the way of a vehicle traveling at a few mph was more comfortable than walking along the sidewalk with vehicles traveling at 30 mph a short distance away.

I think you have to travel outside the US for examples in the second paragraph. I immediately thought of Shinjuku.

If the walls are separate, I can tear down and replace my wall without opening up your house.

It occurs to me now that the article is really referring to urban areas, whereas I live in a suburban area. So maybe that’s the distinction.

It's even more complicated in Philadelphia. Most of the old row houses do share a wall, which leads to a quirk if you buy and tear down one house in a row: you can't reattach to the existing wall.

Your new house just lost several inches of width, for having to build a new exterior wall, even if it buts up right against the existing wall. (Source: a realtor friend in Philadelphia)

There are a lot of them in many cities. In LA a lot of apartments are basically row houses, only turned 90* and facing the next lot, not the street. I'm assuming it's harder to build them here without wasting tons of space as the parcels are narrow and deep.

They're not banned in Mountain View, CA. In fact, they seem to be the only thing allowed to be build in MV these days. My own house was built in less than a decade ago and it's a row house.

I don't know what he means by "banned". It seems that given the locality of such regulations and the vastness of the US, there are many exceptions to his claims.

Cities are zoned for different densities. There will be R-1, 2, 3 etc. Meaning 1st density residential, 2nd, etc. My city, for example, requires a 60 ft wide lot and at least 7 ft of setbacks on each side for R-2 zoning. Row-house is out of the question.

Mountain View underwent a dramatic political change within the last decade - housing/rental prices got so bad that the entire city council was replaced.

Prior to that the situation was much like it was in most places in the US: current homeowners interested in raising home prices ran the politics, and everything listed was effectively banned.

And in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners

> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US?

No. It's an invention by the author, who provided zero support to their repeated claims of everything being commonly banned. Check out how they phrased each tweet, it's because they can't support what they said at all. When called out about the lying, for example re Texas (the second most populated state), the author promptly evades.

> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US?

They are de facto banned though. ~99% of all land in urban and suburban areas has FAR requirements and setback requirements that make it impossible to build a new rowhouse.

Atlanta is full of new town homes which are essentially row houses.

https://www.dorseyalston.com/knowledge/atlanta-residential-z...

De Facto banned for normal people to build.

Look up residential zoning codes nearly anywhere. They are not specifically banned. Most things are banned because of setbacks, FAR, parking requirements, or certain areas zoned only for a certain type of housing (detached single family for example). Atlanta, for example: https://www.dorseyalston.com/knowledge/atlanta-residential-z...

They are common in new suburbs and common enough in cities even if new one's are not allowed there.

Rowhouses are common in Philadelphia, and are constantly being newly built.

In the US you would normally need 2 or more parking spaces for each dwelling, depending on size, number of bedrooms, etc. and if you build semi-detached you quickly run out of palatable options for where to put the cars.

An insane amount of US urban design is caused by the desire to give people free storage of private cars on public land everywhere all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s

Why do these laws exist? If I want a house with no parking why can't I have it? The market should be able to work it out: if buyers and renters want parking lots and otherwise won't buy the house or apartment, then developers will make sure to have parking. As much as demanded. If that's not enough, someone can make profit by constructing a multi storey or underground garage nearby.

For the same reason garbage collection service is mandatory in most cities: because people will generate trash and dispose of it one way or another. In the city I lived in if you don't pay the trash bill they add it to your sewer bill, and if you don't pay your sewer bill they put a lien on your house.

When you go to sell your house, do you want the government interviewing potential buyers and vetoing the ones it thinks are likely to buy a car and park it on the street? A block or two away if necessary? Sorry sir, the high bidder for your house works in an industry that makes him a car-commuting risk. You'll have to settle for the second-highest bidder.

You could also just have actual public transit in cities so that car ownership isn't mandatory for all residents.

NYC is pretty much the only metro area in the US that fits this criteria, and thats entirely because it was the only city built up to reasonable density and scale before the postwar racist zoning laws came into effect everywhere else.

If there are more cars than street space for them, the street space is too cheap and the government needs to charge more for it.

No, I want it charging market rates for all parking and letting people buy said parking to build homes if they bid more.

I don't understand. In Europe it works like this: There's limited parking space and if someone with a car wants to buy a place, they research the parking situation in the area. If there are not enough private parking lots or a garage, then people keep their cars on the street. There's a risk that it may be a bit of walking involved. Again, if that's not good for you, you buy a place in a sparser area.

I don't understand the veto thing. Can the government of the land of the free veto my decision to sell my apartment to whoever I want with ridiculous reasons like "may want to park outside"? What interviews are you talking about, what bidding and where does one "go to sell" a house? Here you just sign the contract and get it notarized and done deal.

I feel you there - I moved to Europe from the US (though to a car-dependent place - Ireland, sadly).

What happens is:

* People in houses buy cars

* They park on the street (they have to)

* New houses get built

* Those new houses' residents also park on the street

* The street fills up

* Residents pass a law requiring all new construction to come with off-street parking

The idea is to preserve taxpayer-funded parking welfare at the cost of everyone to help car owners store their vehicles for free. Often you see paid street parking but with free (or virtually free) annual permits for people who live on the street.

It pushes buildings apart, makes less pleasant neighbourhoods, reduces walkability, is more dangerous, etc. but it's what we've got becauase we haven't figured out how to transition from "suburbia" to "dense mixed use" without angering the existing residents, who vote.

I mean, you'd think "well we all get a spot I might as well use it how I please so I'll ride a bike and plant a garden in my street spot" but no, apparently that's not allowed for some reason.

Because drivers irrationally expect free land for their car everywhere.

It's stupid but that's why. Though often when you suggest letting a homeless person sleep on that land (via building homes) or using it for other things like a garden they react with anger.

Driver entitlement is present in many, many little ways in our lives. Even if we don't intend it to be. My mother in law visited and remarked that a person standing in the road chatting with their neighbour should move and was surprised when I said "this lane is at least 300 years old and SOMEBODY was the first to drive up and say 'get out of my way or I'll kill you' and somehow we sided with the driver. I can drive slowly it's ok".

#7 right-side pic is a refurbished row of Baltimore rowhomes.

When the author says (of #1-7) "Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons", sure, there was tons of redlining (racially biased zoning and bank loans) throughout Baltimore, but that doesn't have to do with why rowhomes aren't built more today. Rowhomes aren't built today because they don't scale up very well, and a fire can easily gut an entire block in one night. They also don't make developers as much money to build, and they're less attractive for a city that wants to keep units from becoming abandoned and unmaintained.

In both Philadelphia and Baltimore, new multi-unit condos and apartments have been going up for at least the past 5 years, in increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods. Whenever possible they are >3 floors and mixed-use, and when not possible, they are revamped and carved into condos. They all look ugly as hell, and they're all wildly more expensive. In the Fishtown and Northern Liberties neighborhoods of Philadelphia I have counted at least four gigantic excavated lots for new multi-story condo and apartment complexes, where before there had been rowhomes.

So in truth, density is going up, but home ownership is going down, while the cost of living is going up.

The headline is exaggerated. The things mentioned in that article are banned in some places, but not 'almost everywhere'. There are many, many rowhouses in US cities, as well as suburban condos that are built with the same design.

For a long time, during most of the post war building boom row houses were banned. Most places have relaxed that for new construction.

At least in the bay area the retail on the bottom, housing on the top is now quite commonly built. There are new units in Mtn View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. And maybe if the courts don't stop it, Cupertino :-)

> 5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing.

> The US often doesn't allow inclusionary zoning like this unless development is denser.

4+1s are fairly common now. Most new development in chicago has this.

Here in northern New Jersey there is a building currently under construction that meets the exact description quoted. There are several others that have been recently built in the 2-5+1 range as well.

They are popping up everywhere in LA. A lot of parking is still required, however, which ups the builds cost and moves those businesses and apartments into another economic class. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but the only places cheap enough to buy and raze are places currently occupied by the working class, who will still have their jobs in town but will end up with longer commutes to affordable neighborhoods.

I had never heard about this until about 10 years ago, now it seems like they're going up everywhere. Most of the new construction here is listed as mixed use commercial/residential.

For those unfamiliar with the (rather unsearchable) "4+1" notion, also known as "four-plus-one":

https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus...

Somewhat specific to Chicago as terminology, though the construction is more widespread.

They're building a lot of these in New England now.

> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living.

Aren't there a few startups doing this and marketing them as communal living for young techies?

Yup and priced at market rate for studios usually. "dorm room living," I still have PTSD from what was left in those communal bathrooms after a weekend of drinking.

SROs don't have to use communal bathrooms. A family member lives in what's classified as an SRO, but in the ritzy Cow Hollow neighborhood. It's a tiny unit but has its own bathroom, including shower, and a very tiny kitchenette (sink, no stove). It's probably smaller than most of the more modern SRO'ish units that have recently been built around SOMA, even though some of those rely on communal spaces.

Other than the size of the units, it's a typical apartment building--office workers, teachers, retail workers, and even a dentist with a house in Marin who keeps a unit so he doesn't have to commute during weekdays. It was probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, before zoning laws stopped construction of such buildings.

It would be nice to know the why's for each of these laws. I'm sure some seemed at the time, or maybe still do have legit reasons.

Houses, or rather apartments with a shared kitchen and maybe shared bathrooms are still a thing in Japan.

There are "share houses" of which maybe the most famous/notorious is Sakura House that has many locations and caters to visitors.

There's also https://www.social-apartment.com which is targeted more at locals. I've thought about joining one for the social aspect. I think there would be a market in other countries, especially if there was an activity director making sure events happened. I didn't know it would be illegal in the USA.

There are also high end apartments that have an activity "roof top". A friend lives in one. The rooftop has a restaurant, live entertainment, indoor and outdoor areas, a pool, and rooms you can reserve for private parties.

Tangentially, lots of old USA movies show characters living in boarding houses, having a room to themselves but sharing meals. Seems nice in the movies. No idea how it was in real life.

NIMBYism in most cases

It’d be nice to know what laws we’re even talking about, and what locales they apply to. There are a lot of tall claims in that thread that seem unsubstatiated and/or exaggerated, and a lot of replies with counter-examples.

I go like having sidewalks. I do like setbacks. The rest of it, some of it is outdated for modern society (tenement housing), but most others are mostly okay and good options (like density in small towns, mixed use housing, multiplexes in appropriate locations (town centers). I think context matters. I would not want multiplexes in the middle of a leafy neighborhood, but certainly should be okay next to busier areas like shopping boulevards and shopping districts, etc.

Mostly: Poor people live in these, or even worse, poor black people.

Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.

> Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.

It's not accidental either, they were written that was as a neutral way of implementing racist policies.

Just like the war on drugs was a smokescreen for Nixon to attack the hippies and peace protestors.

Key sentence:

> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

The problem with all these regulations is that it completely stops all innovation. Imagine what the internet would have turned out to be if, from day one, it was heavily regulated as housing. Imagine if every company or every developer had to get a permit before building any website and every website had to look a certain way with certain margin. We'd be nowhere.

Housing, desperately needs permission-less innovation (completely regulation/zoning free). Maybe not everywhere. But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas.

At the current rate, the way things are, we're never going to see any progress in housing.

The chilling effect of (some) regulation often goes unnoticed, because it impacts few people directly. The chilling effect is essentially invisible until we can see a better way. Eg uber vs taxis. There's usually an incumbent that benefits from these regulations as well that will argue against lessening them.

I think your recommendation can help with this issue, but I wonder if CA is a good place for this. As I understand it, access to water is a limiting factor in CA.

> access to water is a limiting factor in CA.

It is: for farmers, who use something like 80% (I forget the exact number).

It isn't for cities, and denser cities use less water because there are no big lawns and other waste.

Many cities in my state (MN) still have laws on the books that will fine lawn owners for failing to maintain a green, healthy appearance.

Never mind if it's in a desert or forest terrain... they only allow paved spaces, green grass and landscaping, or certified native prairie replantings, which cost a mint's worth of money to do.

Because "everyone loves green grass" no matter how much water it uses or how much fertilizer runoff it allows.

And most of the produce is exported. California wouldn’t have a water crisis if only Californians used the water.

> The chilling effect is essentially invisible until we can see a better way. Eg uber vs taxis

I don't think it's clear that Uber is a better way than taxis. Cheaper for an individual ride? Yes. Better for the drivers? Maybe, but maybe not. Better for society as a whole? I lean toward no, even if the only factors we consider are congestion and pollution.

Zoning laws need to be addressed, and we need to do something about housing prices in major metropolitan areas. But at the same time, we don't need to allow the construction of meat packing plants in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and we don't want to promote construction of what will end up being slums in the name of affordable housing.

There is, like always, a balance to strike.

> Better for society as a whole? I lean toward no

I used to think this way. But I realized something. Uber/Lyft eliminate an entire class of scams that taxi drivers have gotten away with for decades. No longer can unscrupulous drivers take tourists on a joy ride "shortcut" or just outright overcharge them. Fares are agreed upon ahead of time. They also tend to be safer. You don't have to worry about writing down the taxi cab number you're in, or the driver's name. Uber/Lyft track everything for you.

This is not to say that traditional taxis couldn't be this way. But the fact is, they weren't getting there if Uber didn't light a fire under their ass.

Uber/Lyft eliminate an entire class of scams that taxi drivers have gotten away with for decades.

And in the process introduced whole new categories of scams.

As a for example: look up vomit scam. But there are a lot more.

To be fair though, websites don't affect each other while structures typically affect their neighbors (views, noise, etc).

For the parts of the internet where users can affect each other, like the networking layer, RF protocols like LTE/bluetooth/wifi, there do tend to be heavy rules (RFCs) and sometimes regulation (FCC).

As far as I'm aware, there is no FCC regulation on non-RF networking. You are allowed to peer with whomever will accept you and if you send them garbage data, they'll just stop peering with you and block access to the internet. Criminal behavior conducted via internet is of course regulated by normal criminal law.

Agreed.

As a resident of Ann Arbor, MI, I am an opponent of all the high-rise developments. I've seen general prices rise, I've seen traffic start jamming, and I've seen days with much lower air quality.

I prefer to see cities managed like an interconnected ecosystem rather than a simply supply/demand chart for housing.

Are you sure that the causation arrow runs: high rise construction —> traffic + price increases? It seems like less of a case of “if you build it, they will come” and moreso “they are coming, so we’d better build”.

The problems came after the first stages of development, but I'm open to being convinced.

Is there a single example of urbanization resulting in lower prices, lower costs-of-living, lower rates of homelessness, less economic inequality, less traffic, etc?

Or is there an economist that can rationalize how the correlation between urbanization and urban problems can be positive while the causation is negative?

>Or is there an economist that can rationalize how the correlation between urbanization and urban problems can be positive while the causation is negative?

Sure, almost any if them can. It's called spurious correlation.

So if 100 people want to buy homes in the area and there are 100 homes available for sale, you think that building 100 more homes will actually increase the average home price?

More homes always means downward pricing pressure. That may not overcome upward pricing pressure due to other factors. But you can be pretty sure that housing in your area would be even more expensive were it not for the additional housing inventory.

The reason you have never seen cheaper housing due to new developments is because you usually see new housing built as a response to increasing demand and prices.

Spurious correlations generally don't go in the opposite directions of the direction of causality.

If you travel around the world in a snapshot in time, you find that there's a positive correlation between density and rent prices. If you stay in one location over decades, you would still see a positive correlation between density and rent prices.

I have never heard of an increase in development bringing downward pressure on rent prices.

Edit: that doesn't even bring into focus the effects on traffic, on costs-of-living outside of housing, on infrastructure, etc. From what I've seen in Ann Arbor, overdevelopment almost breaks the competent functioning of the city government.

>I have never heard of an increase in development bringing downward pressure on rent prices.

Can you offer up a plausible theory as to how more housing could possibly create upward pricing pressure on rent prices?

It's simple supply and demand. You can't "see" downward pricing pressure if the price of housing is still climbing nonetheless due to demand still growing faster than supply.

What do you think would happen if the number of available housing units in the bay area doubled over night? You think everyone would be able to keep raising the rent and keep their units rented at the same prices? Of course not, the empty units are going to cut prices to attract buyers/renters.

I don't think it's even necessary to have areas that are completely regulation or zoning free, there are much more rational models in other countries. One of which is Japan http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

We would see a lot of disregard for minorities and those with disabilities

Mind you, in some cases the regulations were put in place to discriminate against minorities. See https://crosscut.com/2018/12/rectifying-seattles-racist-past... for a great example.

IMHO you can't just say "regulation is good" or "regulation is bad." Intent and consequences both matter.

For a broader look, this book is good, but tough, reading: https://www.powells.com/book/color-of-law-a-forgotten-histor...

How would there be disregard for minorities?

People should pay for the costs of the negative externalities they impose on others, something that seems to be missing in the town you imagine. This is one thing I think YIMBYs constantly miss. "Build, build, build!" and when someone criticizes they say "you're just afraid to lose money on your house, housing should not be an investment" and I think that captures part of it, but it's not just that a $800k house is now worth $700k, it's that the entire character of the house is changed when it's in the shadow of a skyscraper for 6 hours a day. In this case the homeowner has not just lost money, they may have lost what made them desire the house in the first place - a calm neighborhood, a sunny garden, a beautiful view, easy parking, a neighborhood populated by similarly wealthy individuals. Now you probably take issue with at least one of those, but there are others that are perfectly reasonable and until YIMBYs confront the massive negative externalities they wish to unleash on people they'll continue to look on in disgust as entire communities show up to their council meetings and shout and howl and kill YIMBY proposals.

Agglomeration economies lead to positive externalities on balance, not negative ones. And YIMBY isn't arguing that one should build skyscrapers next to single-family houses. One can increase density in a rather gradual way, and a few skyscrapers here and there don't even give you a density advantage compared to building a far greater number of mid-rise and high-rise buildings.

This is very true. Vancouver has a huge housing issue because the main options are single-family homes (which are inaccessibly expensive) and ~20 storey condo towers (which are also inaccessibly expensive).

Then you end up with people opposed to densification because they only way that we can get sufficient density is to take this one small space and build 20 storeys of housing on it. If we wiped out one single-family neighborhood and replaced it with mid-rise residential with ground-floor commercial, it would be much more of a neighborhood and fit a lot more people sustainably.

Instead, they fight against any densification and argue that a three-storey walk-up is going to "change the character of the neighborhood" (because people who can't afford to buy homes will be able to live in their neighborhood) and now everyone is screwed (except the people who own).

That is definitely not why Vancouver has a housing issue. We all know why Vancouver’s housing market is distorted.

People do not experience 'on balance.'

> they may have lost what made them desire the house in the first place - a calm neighborhood, a sunny garden, a beautiful view, easy parking, a neighborhood populated by similarly wealthy individuals.

Good. If you want these things, you live rurally. Everything has trade-offs.

No one is building skyscrapers in the suburbs. Mid rises, of course. There are neighborhoods in LA with old mid rise apartments from the 1920s with hundreds of units, and you can't even zone for something that size in that neighborhood today. The zoned population of LA has actually shrunk in recent decades.

If you want stasis, California has never been that place. LA has had double digit growth per decade for most of its history, sometimes triple digit.

The only way to ensure the neighborhood doesn't change is to own the entire neighborhood. Otherwise this is just individuals using the government's power to control what others do with their property.

Have you looked into Detroit's problems at all?

Even though a large fraction of the city is abandoned, getting the city government to approve things like experimental urban farm plots and green spaces made up of combined vacant lots is extremely difficult... because deep down the city doesn't want to give up the theoretical tax revenue they might be able to get if new houses were built there and the owners started paying.

People don't like change much.

But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas.

There are lots of sparsely populated areas in CA where developers can effectively build whatever they want.

But they're sparsely populated areas because they're undesirable for one or more reasons: too hot, or too dry, or too plain, or too far from the rest of civilization.

And no developer wants to be left holding the bag if the investment doesn't pan out... In fact, what happened in San Bernardino County and in Clark County (around Las Vegas) are exactly the types of failures that real estate developers have nightmares over.

that's why government can help play a role by first incentivizing companies to move out there. once jobs move there, people will follow and you won't have the problem above.

Back in the early days, the US gov would provide enormous incentives for people to populate the western part of the US, going so far as to even give away free land.

That is an overly simplistic understanding of how businesses and tax incentives work. Money isn't the solution to everything, and "jobs" is not a magical chant that solves every problem.

Land in San Bernardino and the High Desert is effectively free right now and developers still aren't flocking there...even though people already live and work in the area (San Bernadino is a ground logistics/transshipment hub for North America.)

People already work there. The problem is that nobody wants to live there.

What's wrong with San Bernardino? They've got museums, a university and their own baseball team with their own stadium and a nice downtown. It's just a bit high crime, like all cities. It can't be worse than poop town SF.

> poop town SF.

It's frankly going to be hard for me to resist calling it that from now on.

I'd have some trouble deciding between the two but I need to put on an extra layer when the temperature drops below 80F.

Most of the storefronts in downtown San Bernardino are empty. The mall has 4-5 occupants out of 30+ storefronts. Houses just a block or two from the courthouse and city hall can be purchased for $1000.

It's nicer now than it was at the bottom of the recession when it led the state in homicides and gang crimes, but it's still a long ways down from its heyday when it was a nicer city than Riverside.

> There are lots of sparsely populated areas in CA where developers can effectively build whatever they want.

Objectively wrong: every county in California requires building permits and has zoning.

I used the qualifier "effectively" because in practice the building permit requirements and zoning restrictions widely vary across the state and they are many counties where these restrictions are extremely light.

In practice, there are plenty of rural counties where building permits are a pro forma formality and all applications for permits are approved.

In practice, there are plenty of rural counties where the county will re-zone plots to satisfy developer requests because they'd rather see the land develop and bring tax-paying jobs than see the land lie fallow with its original zoning.

Even urban counties will change zoning to satisfy developer requests. Most of the new multi-unit residential construction in LA in the past few years has required zoning exemptions or zoning changes. The building I live in required both a zoning exemption and a zoning change...

The way I see it U.S is just bad at regulating things, and blames this on regulation as a concept, instead of its own implementation.

Any attempts at actually regulating things in the U.S are watered down by "but free markets!" and "oh no big government!", and the shitty compromise results in giant loopholes for regulatory capture, and toothless govt agencies that can't regulate what they were created for.

You can see this playing out in real time as politicians are inviting companies like Facebook to be involved in coming up with regulations.

You should use experts when coming up with regulations. But you need to use unbiased experts. Anything that Facebook suggests will of course amount to nothing more than a moat for their existing business.

Most by what metric? A great many cities in the US permit most (all?) of these things.

None of them are popular to build now, however, where they are allowed.

Examples?

The setbacks complaint seems mainly to be that locals can't privatize, or otherwise restrict usage of, public spaces.

How does having my house near the street on my lot restrict public usage of the street?

The sidewalk. And the street right of way extends beyond just the physical street in most places.

Your lot usually doesn't include the sidewalk or the treelawn for that matter, although you are usually held responsible for its maintenance.

This comment is pedantic. Yes, there are special regulations about homeowners in some areas having to place and maintain sidewalks along their property. (In other areas, they are owned and/or maintained by the city.) That's very distinct from setbacks, which prohibit construction for a depth much further than the width of the sidewalk.

The combination of setback and building height limit establishes the maximum amount of natural sunlight that your building can block from your neighbors, and the adjoining street.

I believe the template for setbacks and height limits came from New York City, wherein a new 40-story building cast a good deal of the surrounding neighborhood into permanent shadow.

As the "Ancient Lights" doctrine of English property law had been repudiated in America, and the Prescription Act 1832 obviously came after independence, the neighborhood incumbents had no real legal grounds for complaint. This disturbed enough people that New York passed its first architectural restriction laws.

Land-use restrictions basically came out of racists trying to legislate segregation. Those nuisance laws combined with architecture laws to birth modern zoning. Once that camel's nose entered the tent, the rest of the camel came right in. Every problem that has a nexus with private land use had an attempted zoning solution attempted somewhere. So things like parking-space allotments and environmental impact assessments were added. The NIMBYs could halt developments they didn't like by dealing the death of a thousand permits and public hearings through the zoning laws.

This isn't privatizing or restricting usage of a public space.

I believe the argument centers upon enjoyment of natural light, which was a long-standing matter of right in English property law, that did not carry over to American law even as the people continued to expect it as their right.

I think there was a law in Boston regarding buildings that cast shadows onto public parks that affected the height of a building quite some distance away, as it would have cast less than an hour of shadow on a few autumn days, on one corner of the park.

Setbacks and height limits have always been about the fear of turning the city into a maze of dark corridors, bounded by high walls. The zoning planners wanted sunlight to fall upon the streets.

They may have overestimated the public's lust for light. A lot of us prefer that everything we wish to reach be within walking distance of our homes, and there are vitamin D pills to be swallowed and SAD lightboxes to stare into, to make up for the loss.

I was trying to narrowly critique wang_li's comment, not debate the main issue.

Ah. Hopefully you, and anyone else reading, understand now the argument as to why a private construction that comes close to a public space, but without actually touching it, might be considered to be depriving the public of the full use of that public space.

It's a similar argument as to why some people who live in the desert are not allowed to collect the rainwater that falls upon their property. Apparently sometimes you can own the weather, and sometimes it's a commons, and sometimes it belongs to someone else, somewhere downstream.

No, in fact, I have heard the arguments you've made ad infinitum before, as have just about everyone else reading HN.

Then it would appear my comments have been for the few that haven't heard it all before, and you are not one of them.

Was this a rhetorical question? "How does having my house near the street on my lot restrict public usage of the street?"

If you have heard the argument before, ad infinitum, then you obviously already knew one of the possible answers. So yes, it must have a rhetorical question. But no one else but you would have been able to know that, and I mistook it for genuine confusion or curiosity. Why would you criticize someone trying to answer a question that you asked? It would have been easy enough to mention that you had already heard the incident sunlight argument and reject it.

For the record, I reject it, but whether I agree or not, that is one basis for the architectural restrictions included in zoning laws all across the US. Knowing that it is such a trivial and frivolous reason is just another reason to dislike zoning, along with knowing that land-usage restrictions are based on racism.

> Why would you criticize someone trying to answer a question that you asked?

I'm criticizing your unnecessary verbosity.

It doesn't at all. Most streets are super wide anyways.

For what it's worth, I recently bought a new-build condo-ownership model townhouse in Silicon Valley that is effectively a row house. Six units in a building, three stories each. It's not quite the same, but it seems to be cut from the same mold.

Do you have a link to a similar one? Curious for what that goes for and how it looks

Here's one similar development: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4166212,-122.087934,3a,75y,7...

Prices are well over $1million. These developments are quite common around the south bay. There are two more similar developments within a couple of blocks of this one, and I used to live in yet another over in Milpitas.

Very cool, thanks for sharing! Seems like a decent quality of living, definitely higher density than I was imagining, but it could foster community and lead to more efficiency than all single family homes.

How is the shared wall? I used to live in an old brownstone sorta place and that thing was like a tomb in terms of noise.

Now I live in new construction which is timber framed, cheap drywall, and cheaper california insulation, and I can tell what specific video game my neighbor is playing along with his bowel schedule. Once this lease is up I'm running for the oldest heaviest looking building I can find.

Remarkably good. We were worried too but we hear almost nothing through the walls.

Houston is one of the only cities in the US that I know of that does not have any zoning laws. All of these would be possible to build with zero-lot lines, no commercial or residential zones, and no height restrictions to speak of.

Enormous parking requirements, though.

This is a myth.

Enormous chunks of land surrounding the three airports have actual zoning.

The rest has de facto zoning. It just isn't called zoning. This is why Houston looks pretty much like any other city with zoning.

A lot of what can and can't be built is covered by deed restrictions, which are enforced by the city. (i.e., a developer may put a restriction in the deed stating that only residences can be built, and no commercial activities.)

In addition, there are gazillions of 'land-use' ordinances that control the height of buildings, lot size, parking, etc.

While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h...

[edited to supply link]

Incidentally, these sorts of things (deed restrictions/covenants) are also what preceded zoning as we know it today. They're just more difficult to enforce because you can't control what happens on the edge of your covenant-protected neighborhood.

This paper has a really good summary of the history here: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf

> While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

If you're counting covenants as "zoning", I'm not really sure that such a thing is possible without a major change in property right law (except for the parking and height restrictions, which obviously have a big influence on structures everywhere and should go away IMO).

> While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

It seems to me that Houston is a great example of that experiment: in the absence of a formal centralized zoning system, the vacuum of limiting who can build structure x in location y is filled by informal and labyrinthine arrangements.

Indeed. This idea always comes to mind when I hear people wonder out loud what a true 'anarchist' society would look like... I privately answer, "Pretty much exactly like what we have now."

If you want to see anarchy one only needs to visit Venice Beach.

Reminds me of a famous essay in the anarchist literature: "Do we ever really get out of anarchy?" by Alfred Cuzán

https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west-florida/colleges/ca...

The issue isn't necessarily zoning per se. The issue is that zoning as practiced in most of the US is centered around cars first. This means segregating usage and type completely and placing everything far apart with lots of parking and space between things.

To build onto this, the Ashby high-rise dispute has been going on since I was in graduate school over a decade ago:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/articl...

There was a more recent dispute in the Heights where a the local residents secured an ordinance to force single family homes in an area under proposed development:

https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-o...

The point being to re-enforce the point, the lack of zoning in Houston is a myth. Deed restrictions, ordinances, and nuisance laws create a patchwork of regulations that essentially create an ineffective, confusing, and legally complicated zoning system.

> While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

Kowloon Walled City would probably be one possible outcome...

Kowloon is certainly an example of what can happen in ultra-high-density environments, but I think most of the developing world is a good example of what would happen in most of the US without building regulations. A GIS of "housing <developing country>" provides a reasonably good example of such housing. Think somewhere between wooden shed, to modestly constructed masonry and no electricity.

No need to set up an experiment, look outside of the U.S. at Rio de Janero. High rises aplenty for the middle and upper class, and the working class living in favelas straight out of the middle ages but with high voltage power lines. That being said, living in a favela is probably much more comfortable than what we deem acceptable for our economic underclass: living in a tent on the street.

> living in a tent on the street

You're drastically exaggerating of course. Unless you're primarily talking about a few cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. The US has a wildly successful Housing First program that has pushed its homelessness rate below that of France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand. A rate comparable to that of Finland, Netherlands, Austria.

> While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

Take a look at the core neighborhoods of pretty much any major city on the east coast. They were built out pretty extensively before zoning existed.

I still struggle to see what was so bad about it. The few things that might have been bad would probably be better addressed with nuisance law instead of the endlessly prescriptive micromanagement that zoning brings.

#2 does not seem to be true in some cities. There are a lot of new "pod" apartment buildings with shared kitchen facilities. There's one right across the street from me in Denver.

Sure, housing regulations are hyper local, so there will be exceptions. The fact that some many localities have converged on banning the same stuff is still remarkable, and evidence that it's being driven by the same forces rather than being a tailored response to details of a particular community.

How is that remarkable? Local governments governing locally sounds completely normal to me.

Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments, believe it or not, and to have significantly less oversight. The argument for giving them huge power to dictate what people can and can't build on private land is that local regulations can be more tailored to local details. But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people.

> Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments

Since you're invoking authority here, I'm gonna say [Citation Needed].

> But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people.

Or, it could be as simple as a locality copying what seems to have been successful in other nearby localities, with not enough people speaking up with compelling evidence to the contrary.

Believe it or not, not everything bad that happens to poor people happens out of malice directed their way. Sometimes, bad shit happens to poor people, because, being poor, attempting to change conditions to make less bad shit happen would further strain their already stretched-to-the-limit resources. And there's one resource that anyone who wants to participate in local policy making must spend without exception, one which those struggling to make ends meet will tend to have the least of: Time.

There is no Machiavellian mustache-twisting involved in keeping the poor out; the poor never show up to give their input on the policies that might adversely affect them. It's kinda hard to even know about the 90 day advance notice postings in town hall when you're working 2.5 jobs to keep food on the table and the heat on during the coldest winter months so you don't freeze, and the public bus routes you rely on don't even go near city hall. Never mind having the time to think about the Nth order effects of such proposed policies to figure out if they'd adversely affect you, or then getting down to city hall for the planning meeting to give the council or committee your 2 cents. I mean, some localities are better than others about giving all of their local socioeconomic strata sufficient advance notice and a fair chance to provide input, but there's a limit to what's reasonable. Eventually, time for input and comment will have to be ended so a decision can be made, otherwise nothing would ever get done.

If the above sounds sucky and unfair, well, you're right. It does suck and it is unfair. But if you want the conditions of the poor to suck less and become more fair, you're going to have a hard time being effective if you are too quick to ascribe results to malice.

In Seattle building "apodments" has been an uphill battle against the city: https://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micr...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html

Cronyism. Outlawing building types like these hurts middle and low class individuals. They take advantage of the public by citing “safety” reasons but really this just lines up the pockets of larger real estate developers and their political cronies. I imagine it is more correlated with left-leaning cities but wouldn’t be surprised to see cronies on the right too

I think a lot of this is due to people in the neighborhoods not wanting the neighborhoods to change. It's this way in the USA precisely because of citizen control. Single family home neighborhoods are some of the nicest places to live in America. Why shouldn't the people who have invested in the community get to decide how the neighborhood evolves?

That would be perfectly okay if they didn't invite more workers to their cities.

There is also the building code related things, you can't build a texas dogtrot, or in many cases middle eastern compound style houses (thick walls, high concrete fence) anymore either. Never-mind outhouses, despite them being all over parks/etc these days under the name "composting toilets".

Come to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Tons of new rowhouses. Live/work units are increasingly common.

A family friend was the proud owner of the last outhouse in Boise city limits. All things considered, I'm not too shocked at this omission...

Also it's illegal to build chicken coops in many cities. Not sure how common that one is, though

I don't think you can build new trailer parks in most of the U.S.

Minimum housing size regulations (which is really what the source is about) has similar impact to minimum wages. It gives lower middle class people bigger homes / higher wages but increases homelessness / unemployment.

Maybe I'll try and find the talk again. But saw one where the speaker showed slides of various housing units. They varied from a very nice looking art deco style apartment in Redwood City at something like 220 units per acre. And single family homes in Los Vegas built and zoned for 4 units per acre.

Meanwhile most of these are what you get in England

What a sensationalized title. These are urban regulations and they exist in every city.

I'm on edge whether the title is sensationalized or not... It does state the fact that it is illegal to do these. I would even see it as a better reflection of the current status then perhaps stating "Urban regulations prevent building these types of buildings."

When there is so much regulation there is a point where the only real law becomes "have you sufficiently annoyed someone"

Most zoning laws are the result of a group of politically-connected individuals saying, "they shouldn't be able to do that" and using their influence to stop such behavior.

Some are really just there to ensure that developers don't cheap out on the stuff in the walls in order to cut costs. But I don't think people are really complaining about requirements for the species of wood required for framing or the number of electrical outlets per square foot.

Some of these were removed from zoning because they weren't fantastic housing. I've been in a bunch of those old boarding houses (several existed near my university) and they were relatively terrible structures with minimal privacy and universal rodent issues.

But they were cheap. Which is a really great thing when you are broke but still want to go to college.

If the health situation is bad enough, it's just making externalities via health risks for everybody those residents interact with, since they're now vectors for whatever diseases crop up.

Sure. Hypothetically. But banning and entire class of building because someone says they saw rats seems a bit heavy handed.

Yea but in many cases the alternative isn't "good housing" it's living in your car or a shelter. That has other health risks.

lol - how is this any different from living in a house with other people?

For reference - I lived in a very clean SRO in a co-op building. We all kept it looking good.

Unless the health risks are greater than those for homelessness, we shouldn't care.

Absent additional research, my prior is that homeless disease vectors are probably worse, since people in that position have fewer shelter options from the elements and more direct exposure to the public.

Houses don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than what we have right now. I mean, even in a bad situation... there are rats on the street. It's very difficult for me to imagine someone in that condition looking at a house and saying, "no, the street is cleaner."

Maybe there's an extra perspective I'm missing.

There still needs to be a solution that exists somewhere between "fantastic" and homelessness. Creating more options allows people to choose the best solution for their own situation.

Non-fantastic housing should be banned?

If housing represents potential health issues to it's occupants such as lead paint, fire hazard or drastic rodent issues, we generally require those issues to be corrected before it can be sold.

These are banned for new construction though, and new construction would not have lead paint, and would be inspected for fire hazards.

And most cities require those issues to be corrected by the landlord all the time, and if they aren't you have a case to pay your rent in escrow until the problem is fixed.

Is this abused? Sure. But its a lot better than living in a tent on the street where you are guaranteed rodent issues along with far worse health hazards.

The fact that some houses with shared living space in the past had health hazard is not a good argument for banning all such houses. We don't ban Chinese restaurants because some violated health codes, we don't ban station wagons because potheads disproportionately own them, etc.

> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

Is this really true for all of them? I see in the thread that

> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

Some of the ones who are not NIMBYism or the above I can absolutely see how they could be motivated in an effort to slow down/hinder certain socioeconomic dynamics.

> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living.

In a poor environment and/or when housing is scarce, these easily become hosts for abusive or exploitative relationships between landlord and tenants or shitty housing.

> #1 Bungalow Courts. Single family homes with shared walls and a communal courtyard. And no car parking requirement.

Aka gated societies

EDIT: Downvoters, why? Care to reply? Is this question ignorant or irrelevant to the conversation? I'm not defending any of these or claiming that they actually have the desired effect.

I don't think this is an insane question. My take:

#1 -- gated communities are way bigger than a bungalow court and are much easier to isolate from the community around them. I think this correlation is a misapprehension. Here's a highly renovated example: https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cot...

See how it faces the street like any other house, but there's a little private shared area in back? It's not self-contained like a gated community can be.

#2 -- yep, there's the potential for abusive relationships. There is no rental model that works without strong protections for tenants and, yes, landlords. So that problem isn't inherent to rooming houses. However, the power relationship is usually tilted towards the party with more money and that's likely to be accentuated in this type of housing. You gotta be careful.

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