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Comment by RandomGuyDTB | Hacker News Reader

"It's not one entity that's going to solve this," [Hartman] said. "It's not on corporations. It's not on congregations. It's not on government. It's not on foundations. It's all of us working together."

While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay we won't see much affordable housing. Real estate laws do not reward and have not ever rewarded "working together". If Seattle funneled the money going towards anti-homeless structures to building municipal housing instead this "homeless crisis" would be resolved quickly. It wouldn't fix everything and it'd be just as hard for someone who's both unemployed and homeless to get back on their feet but it would make it easier for them to stay on their feet.

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> While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay

But that's not the system!

The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities.

If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone!

You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/

For that to go through politically you'd probably need support from the existing NIMBY house owners. This could be possible if they allowed fairly free construction in some non central area in return for some vagrancy laws so the homeless were kind of made to go there rather than pooping on the streets where the NIMBYs are. Both groups could win that way.

Imagine making it a crime to sleep outside. No thanks!

I would much prefer to rent "illegally" or sleep in my car before we criminalize being at a certain location at 4am

Open defecation is a health hazard, which the WHO and UNICEF are trying to get rid of throughout the world. Yes, we should be providing reasonable alternatives (such as environmentally-friendly public toilets) but to say that there's no real issue here seems quite misguided.

I was in San Francisco for about 1 hour last year before I saw multiple people asleep on the sidewalk downtown in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I was there about 16 hours before I watched a woman, a block from OpenAI, step out of a tent (in a row of tents and tarps) and squat immediately front of her tent, take a dump, and go back into her tent before I could walk 20 feet. Never in my 33 years of life at the time had I thought I'd witness such a thing, that's when I realized what I assumed was a police horse barn somewhere nearby (we have mounted police, and hansom cabs, in downtown Indianapolis) was the smell of human feces and urine, not road apples and hay.

Then I started looking where I was walking and noticed brown smudge after brown smudge after brown lump. Saw a decent one outside of YC's SF office too maybe halfway down the block.

Homeless people have to use the restroom, if they're homeless they don't have a toilet and are probably going to do it on the sidewalk or in an alley. This is how disease spreads.

Then fine her for shitting in public and not sleeping in it :)

It's like saying we should ban batteries because maybe you will throw them in the river.

You don't really have to imagine as places like Las Vegas have similar laws already. It's a trade off. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-slee...

> If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone!

It's not that simple. Rapidly increasing the housing supply has all kinds of effects on communities:

* Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

* Increasing traffic and strain on community services like schools

* Environmental impact

* Rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area

Zoning laws and the permit process exist to help ensure safe buildings but also to help protect the home value of existing residents.

This makes sense in communities with the infrastructure to support it though and we definitely should be looking into ways to safely house everyone.

> Decreasing the value of nearby homes

People often overlook this point way too quickly, they don't consider people with mortgages, if you saved up for a house and purchased with a mortgage then when the flood gates are opened and your house value drops, you now owe more than your house is worth, not a good position to be in.

Poor investment decisions should not be insured by your neighbors and local government.

Historically, homes weren't meant to be purchased for life for the vast majority of people. In the past few decades people have got in the mindset "I'm going to live here for at least 2 years, I'll buy a house" and then buy, sell, buy, sell, buy sell "Hey, property values are up 30%, time to sell and buy a bigger house!" or "Oooh such and such city/neighborhood sounds cool I'm bored with this city/neighborhood, time to sell!" type behavior.

If people would go back to purchasing homes with the full intention of staying there for decades, this wouldn't be an issue for most people.

Increased density tends to go together with higher real-estate values, not lower ones. (What it does is lower demand for real-estate elsewhere, as the high-density area becomes more desirable due to its better amenities.) And it makes it easier to provide "community services" like mass transit, that obviate increased traffic.

Other than environmental impact, I don't see why any of those bullet points should be protected by law.

> Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

Or rephrased: "Making housing affordable".

I mean you're right, but this is the entire point of building more housing!

It makes housing affordable for new homeowners, but if prices drop rapidly existing homeowners can owe more than their home is worth.

That's why it's not as simple as "build more affordable housing", not everyone wins if it's done too fast.

While we need to provide affordable housing there are reasonable economic / environmental / community reasons why some small towns don't want it in their own backyard.

That's how cars economics work. Homes are depreciating assets. They need expensive repairs and renovations throughout their life. Modern homes are designed to last a few decades. Why are capital holders entitled to guranteed capital returns when their neighbors sleep in excrement on the streets?

I see your point, so please don't accuse me of missing it. However comparing an underwater loan to living on the streets is absurd. If the house isn't worth the mortgage file bankruptcy and move on with your life. If you're living on the streets the chances of getting another chance are razor thin. We all should take a hard look at our privilege before we compare the pains of bankruptcy to the immediately life threatening hellscape that is homelessness.

Affordable housing and homeless shelters are two different things.

I doubt homeless shelters produce this effect on existing home prices.

And yes, telling a hard working middle class family with kids to just declare bankruptcy and move on is a big deal and worth examining the impact before you create policies that make that a real possibility.

Sure it's a big deal. They gambled on a house and lost. Homeowners should not be guranteed an roi on a depreciating asset like they are in this economic climate. The housing market is irrational because of speculative investing, predatory renting, rent seeking landowners, nimbys, racist lending, etc. Each of these requires different solutions.

Would I feel bad for someone who bought a sfh and went underwater. You betcha. That's life though. Most car loans are underwater from day 1. Should be artificially restrict the number of cars on the road so car owners can sell their worn and breaking down clunker for a profit too? Should we continue to limit this dynamic to scalable profit generating schemes that disproportionately benefit millionaires and billionaires?

> strain on community services like schools

Public schools take forever to build because they need to get a bond approved, procure land, find a builder, staff it, etc. If Washington in general and Seattle in particular were more open to charter schools, there's a better chance of schools keeping up with demand. Additionally, if Washington allowed a voucher system (it's been a while since I checked, but I'm pretty sure it's not allowed), private schools could also pick up the slack.

> rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area

Is that a bad thing?

I'm okay with zoning laws in general, but for it to work, the city needs to be open to rapid changes in zoning.

Rapidly increasing the housing supply in a way that has these knock-on effects is only possible if demand already far outstrips supply. So really the problem isn't that these things will happen—it's that laws have been protecting wealthy "communities" for so long already that the whole thing is upside-down and we risk unleashing chaos simply by satisfying the demand for housing.

The solution is to get our heads around the fact that people need affordable places to live, and work toward satisfying that demand as quickly as reasonably possible without completely overloading services or putting too many homeowners on the edge upside-down on their mortgages. Unfortunately, so much damage has already been done that this will not be easy, but it will only get harder as governments continue to shelter the wealthy at the expense of everybody else and local economies in general.

Oh, and hand-wringing about changing demographics and culture is not helping. Change happens. Integration is necessary.

> Oh, and hand-wringing about changing demographics and culture is not helping. Change happens. Integration is necessary.

Culture matters to a lot of people. Why do you like one town versus another? Maybe the weather, maybe the jobs, but probably also because of the people, the shops, the architecture, the parks, etc. The later are all a function of culture.

Some of the most unique cities are ones with a strong identity. If you take an agricultural town with lots of great festivals, open space and farm to table restaurants and basically make it an affordable housing suburb for the nearby big cities, it's not an easy win/win. You'll need to take that open space and popup some fast food restaurants to feed the demand. Something is lost culturally in that process and it's worth examining rather than saying it's inevitable or necessary.

Culture is made of and by people, and when those people are spending four hours in their cars every day getting to and from work or working themselves to the bone with multiple jobs just to afford a place to live, you're going to have a whole lot less of it.

Fetishizing yesterday's culture is a poor substitute.

The people are moving there whether you like it or not.

Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. Yet, it has this idea, that if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.

Realistically, every city needs to accept that it is not an ocean liner, and cannot pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"

> Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion

False. "Seattle not only has more cranes than any other major city in the country, it’s by a landslide—the city with the next-highest crane count is Chicago, with 40." https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/7/24/17608278/seattle-constr...

> almost no affordable units

Rents have actually declined over the past few years, and housing outside the urban core is affordable. Not everyone needs to live in SLU.

> if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.

If you just stop interfering with the market, the market will fix your problem for you.

Regionally, we've had a couple thousand high end luxury units built, but no great growth, to keep up with growth we need an order of magnitude more housing then that. There has been almost no growth of rental housing outside the downtown core.

My rent more than doubled from 2012, to 2015, and then went up 10% a year thereafter - you are mostly correct, for one year in there my rent didn't go up - then the northward climb began again in earnest. I was living for most of that in what most would call affordable housing.

The market probably would do its job and solve the issue, provided we didn't make it so dang hard to actually build anything in the City of Seattle.

> The market probably would do its job and solve the issue, provided we didn't make it so dang hard to actually build anything in the City of Seattle.

With you there. But compared to the Bay Area, Seattle is practically permissive.

> Regionally, we've had a couple thousand high end luxury units built

People conflate "luxury" and "expensive".

Any housing you build in an acute housing shortage will be expensive. This is because there is so much unmet demand, not because it's "luxury".

So it's impossible to build cheap housing in a housing crisis, and if you demand that only cheap housing be built, you're actually demanding no new housing!

For existing home owners and landlords, that is a profitable strategy to weed out competition for their assets. For anyone else: Don't get fooled!

The high rise units downtown are undisputedly luxury though

>Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)

So, instead of flipping your house after 2-5 years for 5x what you paid for it, you'll have to stay in it for 10-50 years and only get 2-3x what you paid for it?

Repeat after me: it is not the governments job to insure every persons individual investments maintain their value.

Seattle doesn’t really have that problem, lots of new housing is being built, it isn’t the Bay Area. The problem is affordable housing that has little profit to motivate return-oriented developers, and homeless shelters that have huge impacts on the areas where they are placed.

Seattle does very much have a homeless problem.

Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers. Building more and better housing can accelerate this process.

And that happens. However, the flop houses that used to exist when I was in college have been driven out of the market.

Most boarding houses are not code compliant and would not be buildable today. That might have something to do with it.

A lot of them were just old houses that were unrenovated. They’ve probably been torn down and rebuilt by now. My first place in the U district (1994ish) was a cheap $225/month basement room with shared bathroom and a small kitchenette. The land lady was desperate to keep non-students out so it wouldn’t turn into a flop house.

The kinds of subdivisions that turned large homes into multiple boarding situations is also not code compliant and would require at the very least a conditional use authorization (years and uncertainty) in SF.

It was allowed in Seattle in certain districts (definitely at Greek row). Not sure about now.

Which brings us back to

"The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities.

If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone"

Nobody is going to build a flop house as new construction even in, especially in, Texas. Have you been to Austin before? It isn’t much better than Seattle.

This seems like a troll question, so apologies, but is it really an affordability thing? What's the average income (public assistance and otherwise) of a homeless person in Seattle? I live in podunk Ohio and a single bedroom apartment is still ~$650 per month. Would they be able to come up with that? Say the government splits it with section 8 or whatever. Same?

Is the idea that the public picks up the whole tab and the issue is just that the money just doesn't go as far with current rents?

I was paying 1900 or so a month in an outlying suburb and that was cheap for the area - the best you're gonna see for a one bedroom within a 20-25 mile radius around seattle is about 1200 a month, a two bedroom about 1500 a month.

Public assistance pays nothing, and section 8/housing authority has years or decades long waiting lists.

OK, good info, thank you. So let's say we carpet bomb the area with new housing capacity and cut rents in half. How does that help with the homeless situation? Doesn't really make any sense to me.

There is more than one kind of homeless. The mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti recently said something striking, "homelessness is trauma meets high rent"[1]. Often times, decades ago, there was housing on the margins of society - yes, it wasn't very nice, but it was a warm dry place in winter.

Often people who are homeless had jobs right up until the time they became homeless, and have marketable skills, but not ones that can pay for a median rent price, Basically the lack affordable housing puts stress on people who are already on the margins or in near crisis and puts them out of the street. Most of the homeless people fit into this category.

There is another group of homeless folks though, who are long term chronic homeless, they have other complicating factors, like drug abuse, mental health issues, criminal records that make it hard to rent a home or find a job - often being in the first category of homelessness can lead you to slip into the second category, by simply the on the street.

The first group of homelessness would be largely solved with affordable housing and a program to get people into it, Unfortunately for those of us who want to solve the problem the most visible homeless are the chronic variety not the people suffering from a life event.

[1] - https://www.marketplace.org/2019/12/23/interview-la-mayor-er...

> Often people who are homeless had jobs right up until the time they became homeless, and have marketable skills, but not ones that can pay for a median rent price

And, while I believe it's a minority, in the US a shockingly high percentage of homeless people remain employed.

> I was paying 1900 or so a month in an outlying suburb and that was cheap for the area - the best you're gonna see for a one bedroom within a 20-25 mile radius around seattle is about 1200 a month, a two bedroom about 1500 a month.

Even single bedroom apartments are too luxurious with regards to the homelessness problem. Aim lower.

Typical NYC residents live in Studio Apartments (granted, at $2000/month, but that's NYC pricing there). A singular building can house hundreds, maybe thousands, of 300 Sq. Ft Studio units.

If land is more readily available, then trailer-parks provide more room than a Studio and are probably cheaper to build out. A trailer costs $20,000 to construct, and maybe $600/month to rent out the land.

-----------

The problem is that low-end housing drives down property values. No one wants to live near a trailer park. But by golly, it fixes the housing problem really cheap.

I think people need to "wake up" and see the advantages that trailer parks can bring to their community. Yeah, trailer parks kinda suck for land value, but so do hoards of homeless people sleeping in the streets. And yes, I'm purposefully being callous: its the only real way to fight against NIMBY: you gotta "sell" how a trailer park can benefit a community in a callous way if you expect the NIMBY crowd to agree to it.

The real problem is getting rid of single room occupancy units, IMO. It's the cheapest minimally acceptable living unit: room enough for a bed and a desk, with a door only you have a key to, and access to shared bathrooms and kitchens.

Trailer parks need land...a lot more than a apartment buildings for the same number of residents, they aren’t urban solutions.

They often go on marginal land without sewer, so you need more land to make a septic tank work. Trailers in the boonies outside of Vicksburg MS where I lived as a kid got maybe electricity, you had to take care of your own trash (usually by burning); I had many friends out there who were living in squalor. A trailer park was actually a step up from these places.

>I live in podunk Ohio and a single bedroom apartment is still ~$650 per month.

I pay $1100 a month rent, no utilities/services included, for a 2 bedroom just west of Indianapolis, it's insane. The prices are that though because housing prices keep climbing.

Fiance and I are starting to look at homes so we can get pre-approved once she has a teaching contract here and... new construction homes a mile or so from me are starting at 250k for 1 bedroom homes with 2-3 bedroom homes stating around 300k. There's actually a home, bank repo, about 1/4 of a mile from my apartment that they want 320k for in a cookie-cutter addition, with a messed up driveway and exterior damage, that's not even 5-10 years old. The median household income is 59k here...

House prices have been climbing like crazy the past several years, but most people can't actually afford them. There are definitely not a lot of jobs around where I live that justify multiple new housing additions with homes at 300-350k a pop. I just don't get it.

> Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers.

And long after today, most of the homeless people, or the people currently getting displaced, will be dead or gone.

YIMBY people don't seem to understand that this response is the housing equivalent of "let them eat cake". People who are at risk of displacement are not really interested in hearing about the affordable housing they might be able to afford twenty years from now if they have to spend the meantime picking between sleeping on the street and leaving.

We obviously have to build our way out of an incredibly tight supply. But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.

The filtering down happens as soon as new housing is built. The yuppie with a high six-figure salary is moving into San Francisco, the only question is whether they get corralled into a gigantic glass yuppie box. If they don't, they're going to pay way too much money to gentrify the Mission or something.

There is so much demand that the filtering down is not happening, or going downwards quickly enough.

This is what I mean when I say:

> But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.

Is what you're saying valid? Yes. But if you just act dismissive of other people don't be surprised if they're not rushing to your defense, or even against you.

The free market will not solve this problem. Just look at all the major cities in the world; they all have a problem of gentrification and rising prices for housing.

Rent-seeking will always drive the prices to the barely-acceptable and thus will make it affordable for a large portion of the population. That portion is either driven to the periphery or denied housing altogether.

So no; housing will not automatically become affordable. There are forces in the market that prevent that.

The "major cities in the world" are among the most desirable areas to be in, almost by definition. So no, housing will never be all that affordable in Manhattan NYC. But does it really need to be, provided that resources are being put towards their "highest and best use"? Some people will have to live elsewhere - and NYC has very good subway transit that helps people do just that.

Homeless people in NYC aren’t generally commuting in from cheaper places in...maybe Mew Jersey? Connecticut? West Chester county? The subway and train there is great, it can allow you to commute from farther out...instead of paying $3k for a one bedroom you can pay $2k instead with a one hour+ commute. But it doesn’t really solve the housing problems at the low end.

> all have a problem of gentrification and rising prices for housing

We use prices to ration access to scarce resources. Why should housing in the center of a desirable city be cheap?

Good question. For that matter, why should high-value housing in the center of a desirable city enrich a bunch of private landowners, and not the surrounding community which creates that value in the first place?

Property tax is supposed to capture public good usage.

Which is why proposition 13 is such a wicked law: it insulates property owners from the downsides of increases in property values while giving them all the upsides. It takes skin out of the game.

> why should high-value housing in the center of a desirable city enrich a bunch of private landowners

Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.

Are you suggesting to violate property rights because you did not have the foresight, luck and/or the resources to make the same investment?

>Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.

Risk? More often than not, they engineer the growing of demand, help throw out old tenants (even with thuggish methods), select new tenants to drive up values (e.g. with redlining), use connections in the city government to develop specifically the areas they bought or intent to buy, and so on...

Because it's really expensive to build a house.

Who has the money other than massive developers? Of course they want to make €£¥$

They and their investors want to maximize their returns of course, why would that be weird? The developers who don’t want to maximize their returns are no longer in business.

Assuming the resulting house is worth more than the cost to build it, you can get a loan for the building cost.

This is basic stuff. Surprised that people are not aware of it!

This is extremely simplistic. Housing is relatively speaking cheap in places where people don't want to live. In places where people do want to live, the cost of land and the cost of heightened demand of construction tends to dwarf planning related costs.

Near me, in a London suburb, there are at least half a dozen ~40+ story residential buildings that have approval where no construction is currently happening because the market conditions are not there to make it worthwhile vs. simply waiting a couple of years, because scarcity in house supply keeps driving up prices to the extent that it's not always clear that building now is the right choice, especially not when there are other buildings going up - it's easy to just sit and wait until there's less competition and start construction then. If planning was all that was stopping them, we'd have plenty of these buildings going up right now.

Importantly, because these developers have a relatively safe bet in terms of returns once they eventually construct, they are able to find investors to finance assembling and sitting on relatively large tracts of land or low density housing, and thus participate in keeping the supply lower, and thus contribute to the house price growth.

There certainly are places where planning is the main thing driving prices up, including parts of London, but the point is that just addressing that tends to be insufficient to address this problem, as cost of increasing density goes through the roof very quickly, and so in hotspots where land is expensive you tend to end up with expensive housing anyway, unless you have governments prepared to force the issue and saturate the market to take out enough demand to drive the price of land down.

If you want to address housing prices in a less heavy handed manner, you need to address the centralization of jobs, which tends to mean addressing transport. A pet peeve of mine for London, which applies equally to a lot of big cities, is that addressing the housing and congestion issues in the centre is a net negative overall:

It costs a fortune to drive up the density and transport capacity in an already dense area, and it just attracts more demand until things are just as bad and the next "solution" is far more expensive. The more cost-effective solution tends to be actual planning on a larger scale to make bypassing the expensive/congested region easier and more attractive.

E.g. in the case of London there are a number of towns that feed a huge amount of people into London. Most of these towns would find it a lot easier to subsume additional housing density at far lower costs. What they lack is the ease of transport from a large enough base to be more attractive places for companies to locate. What's required to kickstart that is largely an initial willingness to invest in upgrading transport links to other places than London. Ironically many of these towns are "new towns" [1] that were in many cases constructed pretty much entirely from scratch to reduce strain on London (and other cities) after the war. And they achieved that, but instead of building on that and also decentralising transport to encourage these towns to grow as hubs in their own right, transport has instead become increasing focused on making commuting in to London faster, so even though many of these towns have their own small commuter belts they are to far too great an extent feeding the problems in London.

You don't solve that by letting planning loose, because a lot of these investments are beneficial to wider society but not necessarily profitable individually unless you can take into account how they affect overall economic growth and tax receipts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Good points, thanks for making them.

I don't know about London, but I suspect you don't know about the SF Bay Area.

I stand by my description of it!

I know the Bay Area reasonably well. While there are certainly areas of the Bay Area that are low enough density that you could alleviate price growth somewhat in the short term by changing planning rules, there's nothing about the Bay Area that makes it different to London in this respect. The limitation will remain land prices and congestion, and if you alleviate congestion the demand will quickly clog things up again.

This is overall not a location specific phenomenon anyway; it's a factor of the fact that the construction cost per unit goes up above a certain size because of overhead (e.g. lifts, structural elements and services makes up an increasing proportion of the overall building volume), and that network effects tends to drive up demand to desirable locations when accessibility improves. You simply can not increase density to a particularly high level without driving costs per unit of space up to levels that prevents you from cutting prices much. The inflection point changes over time, but not particularly fast.

This means that any area that is already relatively high density, like the Bay Area, faces a rapidly diminishing return on investment in trying to increase density.

Now consider the vast amount of pent up demand in this region, and you can increase supply dramatically without much impact on prices.

The fact that California refuses to build will be its long term demise. You need blue collar workers to keep the lights on in all cities, even those with minimum 7-figure housing costs. They'll lose to states like Texas.

Nevada is my guess; it’s a lot closer and more fun.

The replacement state --so long as it has a pro-building policy-- is arbitrary. Whether it's Arizona, or Nevada, or Texas, etc. could be up to debate. These places look mighty appealing for households that don't earn $300k/year, which is most households.

That's oversimplfying things quite a lot to say the least.

I see this sentiment shared often but the reality is that the major Texas cities are going through similar growing pains as companies and people move out here. The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards which has a huge problem in that traffic quickly becomes a disaster due to poor infrastructure and city planning.

Putting housing on land you own wouldn't solve much because it would still result in poor people being pushed further and further out of the city and congestion being made a major problem. This isn't to say NIMBYs aren't a problem, but rather that even if you removed them greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem.

> The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards

Citation needed. Most cities that have a lot of density also have a lot of people who don’t own cars.

Have you lived in Texas? My citation is that I live in Austin and living here without a car simply isn't possible for a lot of people. The public transit infrastructure is poor, walkability is inconsistent thanks to poor roadwork and sidewalk connections.

It's a fact that Texas cities have generally handled density through sprawl.

Yes, I have. I think you are saying something like “they have been designed to grow outwards” simply because that is how they have been built so far; I think it is about the same as saying an empty city-sized field is “designed to grow outwards”.

Cities grow out, until they grow up. Even NYC didn’t have skyscrapers at one time.

It will remain car-centric until such time density becomes sufficiently high that one can walk to enough different things, the achievement of which requires building vertically.

And lots of people already live car-free lives in Austin. It largely depends on the neighborhood you choose to live in.

You can live a car-free life in Austin (as I do), but that does not make it a good city to do so in.

Austin as a whole consistently ranks low in terms of walkability and the public transit here pales in comparison to other major cities. Just because a small slice of the city occupied by the upper-middle class have the luxury of living next door to work does not a good city make.

> but that does not make it a good city to do so in.

> Austin as a whole

Shrug, neighborhoods matter way, way more than arbitrarily drawn city borders. There are neighborhoods of Austin that are more enjoyable to live in car-free than ones in NYC, for example.

Then I'm not sure what your point is if we want to point to arbitrary neighborhoods, say they're walkable and call it a day rather than address the ninety others which aren't.

By your argument, we might as well say San Francisco is perfectly OK to live in because we can find one neighborhood that isn't a hellscape. You're not really addressing my points or arguments at all, just weirdly trying to sidestep it.

I just don't find arguments like "well if you lived in this random address in the City of Austin it probably wouldn't be walkable!" very interesting, sorry. Austin is 271 miles squares and SF is 46. Nobody should throw a dart (in any city) when selecting where to live and then make very location specific claims about the city (or region, state, country) as a whole based on their experience, IMO.

If I go up thread you say "[Texas] cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards" and "even if you removed [NIMBYs] greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem."

I mean... it's illegal to build anything except a single family home in most lots in Austin. NIMBYism is the problem. What else about Austin makes it "designed to grow outward" other than the zoning? How else do you push back against landlords and the high cost of land but via more units per acre? I assume you'll mention public transit, but I don't think any city built out a subway/rail system before it had some level of density. It's a chicken and egg problem and we need density in our urban core before we'll be able to pass more funding for transit, sadly. And we definitely can't afford to have a super great bus or rail system serving low density neighborhoods with low ridership.

Also, I live in Central East Austin and many of my neighbors are poor. I don't buy arguments about central living being only for upper-middle class people (at least in Austin). The fact is most people choose to add miserable car commutes to their lives because they want more space, or they're afraid of living near people different than them (I'm being kind...), or whatever.

> I just don't find arguments like "well if you lived in this random address in the City of Austin it probably wouldn't be walkable!" very interesting, sorry. Austin is 271 miles squares and SF is 46. Nobody should throw a dart (in any city) when selecting where to live and then make very location specific claims about the city (or region, state, country) as a whole based on their experience, IMO.

The claims I've been making have been about the city as a whole. Don't try and twist this around into me making the argument about a random address not being walkable, because your entire argument has been taking a random address, claiming its walkable and then trying to extrapolate that to the rest of Austin.

>I mean... it's illegal to build anything except a single family home in most lots in Austin. NIMBYism is the problem. What else about Austin makes it "designed to grow outward" other than the zoning? How else do you push back against landlords and the high cost of land but via more units per acre? I assume you'll mention public transit, but I don't think any city built out a subway/rail system before it had some level of density. It's a chicken and egg problem and we need density in our urban core before we'll be able to pass more funding for transit, sadly. And we definitely can't afford to have a super great bus or rail system serving low density neighborhoods with low ridership.

I never denied NIMBYism isn't part of the problem, but it is only part of the issue. The other half of the issue is the glorified car culture in and around Texas where people value driving more than they do other forms of transit. This can't be illustrated any better than the amount of sidewalk islands Austin has where buildings or malls are surrounded by sidewalk that connects to nowhere. Because everyone drives to the building next door, because cities like Austin grew outwards and spaced buildings and places accordingly.

Your second claim about subway/rail systems isn't correct because New York and Seattle both proactively added new forms of public transit to fit a growing population, rather than trying to retrofit public transit after the population has already blown up. Austin in this scenario isn't even trying to add more public transit, but rather expand highways while people complain about the metro rail being too 'cost inefficient'.

Most people don't chose to add car commutes, this era of white flight is less about moving to the suburbs and more about gentrification and pushing out the poor and minorities from locations closer to the city.

> Don't try and twist this around into me making the argument about a random address not being walkable, because your entire argument has been taking a random address, claiming its walkable and then trying to extrapolate that to the rest of Austin.

Uh, what? I've repeatedly stated that neighborhoods matter more than cities. My whole point has been that generalizations about the city/region/state as a whole aren't useful. I would no sooner live in many parts of Austin than I would in rural Oklahoma. But that doesn't mean there aren't great, walkable parts of Austin and many people living car-free here. Which is literally what I said to start this conversation...

You, however, stated: "Austin as a whole consistently ranks low in terms of walkability." I don't live in "Austin as a whole." Nobody does. They live in their house/apartment/condo/whatever in a specific location. The walkability score near the border of Round Rock matters as much to me as the walkability score of... well, rural Oklahoma.

> The other half of the issue is the glorified car culture in and around Texas where people value driving more than they do other forms of transit. This can't be illustrated any better than the amount of sidewalk islands Austin has where buildings or malls are surrounded by sidewalk that connects to nowhere. Because everyone drives to the building next door

I completely agree. Where we'd probably disagree is that since we're (again) generalizing to areas as large as a state (!), here are some other car centric states: California, New York... It's a true American problem.

> New York and Seattle both proactively added new forms of public transit to fit a growing population

I'd be interested in the data there. I'd be amazed to learn that NYC/Seattle dug out subway lines to neighborhoods that were anywhere near as sparsely populated as non-central Austin neighborhoods are.

> Austin in this scenario isn't even trying to add more public transit

Yes, it is. You might be interested in CapMetro Engage. In addition, CapMetro ridership is rising, which is great for the chicken and egg issue.

> but rather expand highways while people complain about the metro rail being too 'cost inefficient'

And we're definitely doing this, too. I agree it's a problem.

> Most people don't chose to add car commutes, this era of white flight is less about moving to the suburbs and more about gentrification and pushing out the poor and minorities from locations closer to the city.

We'll have to agree to disagree here.

Anyway, I doubt I'll convince you of much. Which is fine. I mostly post these responses so other HN readers know they can find a place to live here that isn't car dependent. Because they do exist, they are getting better, they are getting more numerous, and I'm all for more pro-city, pro-density, pro-urbanism, anti-car people moving here and voting with their dollars and, well, votes.

The problem is that many cities simply can't 'grow up' because they weren't designed to do so in the first place. What you're arguing simply doesn't play out in reality, or else cities like Seattle or California wouldn't be having this problem, now would they?

The reality is that it's a problem you have to tackle before it becomes a problem. You have to design your city with public transit in mind, or else you end up with issues like LA where you have endlessly expanding highways with zero ways of managing traffic.

> The problem is that many cities simply can't 'grow up' because they weren't designed to do so in the first place.

Pretty much every single city with skyscrapers stands in contradiction to this premise.

No city in history, except those entirely planned ones in China recently, was originally designed to grow upwards. I think you have created a false dichotomy.

Any city can build skyscrapers.

The problems in Seattle and California are neighbors and government, not some ur-plan that makes skyscrapers impossible. Look at the giant ugly salesforce building, for example.

Even ugly, I’d love to see a few dozen more built there.

“It has always been done this way” is not the same thing as “it must be done this way”.

You seem to think 'growing up' only means skyscrapers and not everything else around them. Why do you think American cities uniquely have problems with public transit, traffic etc compared to their contemporaries?

The answer is because again, we designed our cities with urban sprawl and car ownership in mind (see: white flight). I didn't create a false dichotomy, you're attempting to over-simplify city growth into 'builds skyscrapers / doesn't build skyscrapers' when there's a lot more math that goes into the equation. Especially when you start factoring in our cultural demand for parking space and inefficient forms of transit.

> the major Texas cities are going through similar growing pains

They're growing, so they're going through growing pains, sure. But it's different pains!

SF has decided to not grow. It's pains come from having to force a resident to move out for each new worker moving in.

> SF has decided to not grow. It's pains come from having to force a resident to move out for each new worker moving in.

San Francisco’s population is growing, it doesn't have to (and doesn't) force a resident out for each new resident, worker or otherwise. It's not growing super rapidly, but it's never grown much faster than it is now since it was fully urbanized; the faster-growing US cities pretty much all have surrounding non-urbanized land to expand into.

There is no formal resident removal program, but tons of people are leaving as they get priced out: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/30/18196549/san-francisco-every...

This is an unavoidable consequence of people moving in and the housing supply not growing (you're right that it's growing a little, I exaggerated somewhat to make the point).

Many of us, even with other liberal tendencies, think the homeless in Seattle are given too much leeway in the city, especially with the unpolicing and decriminalization of petty crimes going on. The few million used on anti-homeless structures isn’t going to build more than a handful of homes and won’t make a significant dent in the problem. I love Seattle, but it’s hard to move back with a family considering the situation, especially compared to Bellevue where the policing is much more serious.

I agree with you to an extent - but you cant criminalize just being homeless either - and thats the problem, thats what many cities were effectively doing (see Los Angeles).

It's a multi-pronged approach to solve the issue, which prongs you use is a matter of how aggressive you're willing to get to solve it however.

> cant criminalize just being homeless either

Yes, you can. It really is that simple. The homeless problem isn't persistent because it's technically hard. It's persistent because a segment of society is addicted to moral posturing in a way that blocks necessary and obvious solutions.

There is no legal or moral problem. Build adequate shelters in inexpensive locations and arrest everyone who camps on the street and refuses to go to one of these shelters. (This approach is also compatible with the recent SCOTUS stance on the subject.) Everyone needs a place to sleep, but there is no reason for society to support squatting on random public land as a lifestyle choice.

Morally you shouldn't and legally you currently cannot.

What's your proposal, arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever?

>arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever

At least then the homeless would have guaranteed access to shelter, food and medical care, and likely drug treatment and employment programs.

It's more humane than lining public spaces with spikes and caltrops to drive the homeless away like unwanted animals, and Americans would likely much rather pay taxes to jail the homeless than to subsidize "socialist" initiatives like public housing and food distribution.

You can criminalize pooping on the street. You can criminalize riding the bus without paying. You can criminalize petty theft, leaving your used needles in the park, etc...

Where would you suggest they go if there are no public restrooms available to them? I mean my neighborhood is rampant with people pooping in the street, but I’d never call the cops on them. What else are they gonna do?

There are public bathrooms downtown. If you ever have to use the ones at pike place market...

Whenever I go downtown, even the semi-public restrooms in the store are constantly used by the homeless (making it difficult for other people to use, another reason not to go downtown), so they have that also.

But they still poop in the parks because it is closer to their tents, what can you do?

I worked in downtown in the 90s at palace where the homeless would hang out at night (3rd and pine McDonalds), and it wasn’t so bad back then that people would avoid going downtown. Now its just depressing and stores are moving out (eg the iconic Macy’s is going to become an amazon office building probably).

That’s ridiculous. Making someone take a one and a half hour bus ride to take a shit is inhumane.

But I think the sentiment is probably correct - it seems unlikely that one party could solve the problem unilaterally. It's likely going to take many people coming together and pushing an agenda to produce an outcome that resolves or partially resolves the issues. Of course the problem here is that opposition parties (NIMBYists, corporates, etc.) are usually better organized with deeper pockets than associations and groups advocating for homeless rights, whose members are usually pretty disenfranchised, not organized, and without much money to advocate for their positions.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, while I'm a markets-first person in general, either the city itself needs to build the housing itself, or it needs to reduce the cost and difficulty of getting permits so the market will work. The reason we're in this boat is because the existing locals are rent-seeking, and don't want to live in a denser city - which causes a crisis elsewhere, because the people keep coming.

In general, West Coast Cities seem to have this idea, that if you ignore the problem of insufficient housing - be it the symptoms (high rent, no affordable units) or the causes excessive permitting costs/lengthy approval times and restrictive zoning, it'll just go away. There are prosperous bustling big cities without housing affordability issues, they build housing, either in the city, or in nearby suburbs.

The reality of it is people are moving there whether they like it or not. Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. it can't pretend to be an ocean liner, and pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"

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