Portland passes low-density zoning reform
sightline.org
sightline.org
This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.
Even these, IMO, are government overreach. Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. Then leave it up to the insurance company to decide what standards will lower your premium.
One insurance company might decide "look at Switzerland - they have very safe houses. Build everything to Swiss regulations, and we'll give you a 90% discount on the insurance price".
Over time, safety and environmental standards, as well as costs to meet them, will get much better much quicker than current layers of government bureaucracy.
The insurance should also cover for things like environmental spills on your land, the cost of pulling the building down and making the site nature again if the insurance is ever not renewed, etc.
> Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property.
I don't want any F*ing insurance requirements.
our failure is in trying to pawn off all responsibility to remote agencies and institutions, raher than the parts best-suited for them (bureaucracies are reasonably good at following rules and doing the same thing over and over), and accepting that we can't each absolve ourselves from some of that responsibility.
we want some best-suited regulation, the minimum needed to achieve reasonable safety, and no less, but also no more. regulation isn't good for every tiny tail risk we can imagine, as we see with the housing crisis (in major cities).
A key difference in this bureaucracy is their speed of change. Companies can react rapidly to new technology, new scenarios, and they do so on an economic model.
Gov'ts move slowly and lag technology or current events, they do so on a popularity/political power model.
bigger governments create more rent opportunities.
https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/introduction-rent-seekin...
Additionally- companies can react intentionally slowly to squander and choke new technologies and scenarios, also doing so on an economic model.
If the government requires an unnecessarily burdensome design, you're screwed.
If they do so then said technologies were not real opportunities. If they're opportunities then competitors will generate more value and/or less cost.
No amount of compensation can bring someone back if they've been lost to a fire, a deck collapse, a sinkhole, an electrical issue, etc.
The use of lead paint causes irreversible damage to nervous tissue, and lead contamination can lie undetected in soils for years after a property removes all the lead from the buildings.
Why would we want to invest a massive amount of effort into figuring out, e.g., the actual insurance risk of poorly built structures rather than saying, "No, you cannot use highly flammable plastic cladding on your highrise."
Especially if insurance companies can go bankrupt or refuse to pay out. How do victims get made well if the insurance company refuses to pay on some technicality? The last thing I want to deal with is more insurance companies.
Wouldn't the insurance company say the same thing? Or rather they would say "we won't insure that thing". Which amounts to "You cannot build that thing if insurance is a requirement".
Who are those insurers beholden to, what are their incentives to represent the consumer in any way?
Some people would like to see more things like that.
Their incentives to represent the consumer are rooted in the fact that the consumer can switch to another insurance company. Which means that if one has overly strict requirements without charging correspondingly lower premiums, nobody will use them. Then you get the incentives you want: People prefer both lax requirements and low premiums and the insurance companies have the incentive to find a better balance than competing insurance companies.
Two follow ups:
1) Isn't this inefficient? E.g. insurance is most efficient the larger the pool is. Doesn't this system introduce inefficiencies (and therefore risk) into the market?
2) Do you feel like there are adequate tools to choose between different insurers today, and do you expect that everyone who owns or improves property should be reasonably expected to make an informed decision about which insurance company to go with? It's hard enough now to insure my car, let alone all the individual decisions that go into building a house. (From materials to design decisions to occupancy rates to the health of the occupants, etc.)
Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency.
Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically.
In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up.
It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.
Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it.
So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that.
Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.
No, my solution is keep the dirt physically out of my house.
> So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place?
Poor upbringing and values. It has nothing to do with being poor. Even poor people behave ethically and rich people commit crimes. The common denominator between poor people that commit crimes and rich people that commit crimes is poor upbringing and values.
I can better and more safely prevent myself from being the victim of a white collar crime by performing due diligence. After a crime has been committed, there's often a paper trail and it's easier to seek retribution through the justice system.
The only way to protect myself from street crime and property crime when it already has a foothold in my neighborhood is more policing and vigilantism. The former is difficult right now because a bunch of misguided people think the police are bad and want to defund them. They don't realize that the safety they take for granted is a sign that the police are doing their job. They've never lived in a country with bad policing. With the latter (vigilantism), I place myself and my family at risk. It's easier and far more effective to keep the violence and property crime dirt our of my house and just deal with the white collar dirt.
Low intelligence, high aggression, high time preference. Mostly heritable. Sad but true. Wish it was different.
> how can we address that
Robust defense of private property (including protecting your community from incursion by criminals) or some way of reducing the number of criminals (most of which are politically untenable in the US, like eugenics, or no longer relevant, like extremely strict immigration restrictions).
Increasing density has definite externalities. Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested. Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property. We do need some way of balancing those concerns with development. IMHO, we've swayed too far towards one extreme. We should relax those restrictions while being cognizant that we don't swing too far back to the other extreme.
Counterpoint Bay Area. Industry hotspot, liberally allows office development, aggressively fights any new residential develpment and also freezes property taxes at the time of purchase.
Now suppose somebody could knock down your million dollar three bedroom home there, put up five condos that size on the same lot and sell them each for $750K. That'd make the property itself worth more than a million dollars, right?
On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially. You can even give your house to your kid, and they will pay the tax rate you paid. If you tear out your house and build 5 new condos, suddenly you are paying market rate property tax again.
Which is why the price falls from a million dollars to $750k for the same amount of square footage. But now you have five times as much square footage on the same piece of land, which is more than the decrease in price per square foot. And still would be even if the price per unit fell to $400k.
> On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially.
Which is just a facet of existing local tax law. You could get to the same place by just having very low property taxes in general.
Not really. Zoning specifies density limits but demand depends of far more factors. If you replace a mansion with a low density housing project, the reason the price will go down is not due to an increase in supply.
People don’t want to leave their homes and move away from family and friends just so a city can grow.
Life isn’t just about money.
I don’t want my city to grow any larger - higher density means lower quality of life for the people who have lived here for decades - aka my actual community.
Blaming development for your changing city seems a bit passive aggressive.
In practice, handing out veto powers against construction has had disastrous results for everyone not already owning homes.
Not necessarily. Just because you add a residential tower that doesn't mean you'll get a grocery store in its ground floor. If the urban plan specifies high-density residential area then all you can expect is residential buildigs.
A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.
> Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property.
People get so hung up on this, but that's just how it goes -- cities change. Just because you bought a place doesn't mean you're entitled to the exact same view forever.
While that's true, if you don't have a proper transit network, it's a real problem. And many cities aren't in a position to build a proper transit network at the drop of a hat. Don't get me wrong, I wish they did or could efficiently build one. But sometimes you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be, unfortunately.
Population growth creates the tax base, density, and demand required for a successful public transportation system. Demanding that the public transport comes first is simply backwards.
Listen, I am on the same page as you - I would love for it to happen. I would vote for it. I would pay taxes for it. But the reality is that it isn't going to happen, and if you densify the city without the transit, you will have these problems.
it doesnt have to be subways -- the willamette flood plain isnt great for subways anyway. portland should continue to build out its bus service and cycling infrastructure. portland is already pretty reasonable for living without a car, it will only improve with density.
How do you expect to put together a working transit network, which is very sensitive to urban planning, if you are also argue in favour of ignoring any restriction imposed by urban planners?
Traffic needs system-wide reform. No argument there. Walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, transit, etc.
Views - you don't (normally) own the views from your property. I live on a golf course; if it gets redeveloped into condos, I'm SOL.
Light - appropriate building setbacks mitigate this.
I'm not disagreeing really, just pointing out that your concerns are mostly valid, but have solutions.
The goal is to make it so that views of Vancouver's mountains are reasonably accessible by anyone, not just those that purchased a north facing suite in a tall condo tower.
It's pretty much the same underlying concept as why we create public parks.
The view cones are scattered around and are usually tied to areas of heavy public pedestrian activity, such as parks.
The policy is very popular.
https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va...
As a counter, Seattle doesn't have much comparable. You an buy "air rights" to protect your view, but there isn't a general protection for home-owners. It's fairly common for a small home to be replaced with a newer, much taller, structure, taking neighbor's views with it.
Meanwhile south of there there's about 50+ blocks of untouched single family homes.
The view cones has been no real barrier to development and unlike SF Vancouver is building constantly.
Thus you could use setbacks as firebreaks, firewalls, or say something exotic like aerogel barricades.
We need blanket legislation outlawing the notion that by virtue of purchasing a plot of land one is also purchasing control over everything visible from said plot at the time of purchase.
https://uclawreview.org/2017/11/01/drones-damages-and-proper...
The problem with this kind of thinking is that the denser housing is, the more its livability relies on things outside of the homeowners' direct ownership and control. So long as YIMBYs keep pushing this idea that keeping access to things like sunlight cannot be a shared act, it doesn't matter how many pretty drawings of wide sunlit boulevards of townhouses or towers in parks they produce to claim that density doesn't have to mean dark, dystopian hellscape - because the moment there's money in it, someone can just slap a big tall building right in one of those crucial empty spaces, and according to the YIMBYs the people affected would have no right to complain because they didn't personally and individually own them.
Rule: you can't build more than one story higher than your neighbors.
Under this rule your property will become more valuable when your neighbor builds up, because it just got upzoned for free!
Getting rid of the idea of owning the neighbors airspace entails figuring out how to fairly allocate easements that generally don't currently exist because of legacy reasons.
Developers a profit motived and are very aware of what sells and what doesn't. There are a million mechanisms by which we can avoid having a single story house surrounded by skyscrapers.
I used to be in favour of laxer planning regulations until I moved to Melbourne. A lassez faire approach just doesn’t work.
In most cases this really isn’t a problem though. The fantasy of “big tall buildings” being slapped everywhere is just that. NIMBYs are fully mobilized just to stop stuff like duplexes, townhomes, or the neighbor putting a pop-up 4th story on their existing row house, not imaginary 100-story skyscrapers going up in the middle of a suburb.
We already have that, in the form of urban planning. There are professionals in charge of ensuring everyone's rights are respected by defining and upholding an urban plan and construction regulation.
Otherwise a you get is a sea of shanty towns.
Portland has reasonable public transport and fairly good bike/ pedestrian routes.
So does endless sprawl. Arguably larger, even.
Everyone pays in life-seconds, in money, in pollution, in reduced societal interactions.
Cities exist for a reason.
Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this? It's not unreasonable for normal middle-class folks to not want to have to live in a problematic, crime-ridden, situation with high personal-security risks and property crime. That's why we pay for police, after all.
I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that.
There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.
But Appalachia bucks a lot of statistical trends, so make of that what you will.
You can call it cold, and it is, but it's also entirely rational.
if you want to move to a poor neighborhood with high crime in order to help save it then more power to you. However, I don't fault anyone wanting to avoid it either.
We could even take the money we put into an increasingly militarized, dangerous, and expensive police force and put it into the things that reduce crime by making it a lot harder for someone to fall to the point where the consequences of crime are less than the consequences of being absolutely broke.
We could raise taxes on the tiny fraction of people and corporations who hold the vast majority of the money in the West, and especially the US, and send it back out into the system at the bottom with a basic income scheme, with the actual numbers on these tightly coupled with an assortment of cost-of-living indicators. If companies want to leave places that start taxing them, let them - they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff to fulfill people's needs for whatever they were making, with the profits being shared among the workers.
"But that sounds like socialism! Or even communism!", some will protest. Why, yes, yes it does. The people and corporations who want to accumulate huge amounts of money and power have been telling us that everything that sounds nice is "socialism" for my entire lifetime, and to be quite honest I have been at the point where they are making "socialism" sound pretty good compared to the capitalist hellscape they've turned the world into.
There are, of course, many ways this can go wrong. Utopia's not easy. But the present system sure isn't working either.
But in reality, there's plenty of countries who've done it for a long time and had great success with it: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example.
Let's be honest: the only reason people in the US are scared of "socialism" is the fact that they've been immersed inanti-socialism propaganda throughout all their life.
Meanwhile, you can pretty much look at any European country to see how millions of people really feel about socialism.
Unless you confuse capitalism with an extremist Ann Rayndian neoliberal framework, and in that sense you can pretty much look at countries such as the Netherlands.
Capitalism is an economic system based on private property on the means of production, and collection of economic rents on the basis of ownership. All European countries have that. The fact that they also tax those rents and redistribute that wealth into welfare makes it welfare capitalism, not socialism.
> basic income scheme
Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.
Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
> they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff
It's just as likely to be burned to the ground in protest, these days. Much as the computer is more the OS than it is the hardware, the factory is more the business processes + engineering than it is the raw assembly line. Take that magic smoke out and even the nicest equipment will produce nothing. You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.
> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".
dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e
> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?
No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".
That's what the article is doing. Lots of people commit crime because they are homeless, or in financial struggle. If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street, and more people would have more money (from spending less of it on rent). That in turn should lower crime.
I think this is a very different approach from subsidised housing and other such strategies by the way. Because those just concentrate poverty in one area, without actually lowering cost of living. Instead it can make things worse, by keeping people who can't afford the area living in it.
Lowering the cost of living is probably a good idea, you're not wrong, but there are some people for whom it will never matter how much the rent is, because they're not with-it enough to organize themselves to be able to pay it or to be a reasonable tenant. Mental health programs are the only hope I have for dealing with that, but they're too underfunded and frankly too voluntary presently to make the real difference we seek.
It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have
Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.
The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems?
I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
When did I ever mention housing for the mentally ill?
What I'm saying is I think consenting, functional adults should have the option of living in a dorm-style setting if they so choose.
For one, it's a great way to build community.
For two, it should be a significantly cheaper way to live, which would probably appeal mainly to the poor, but would also appeal to the same set of people that already live with multiple roommates to reduce costs.
Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
You can monetize the service offering-- I could see charging a few hundred dollars more per month for an apartment that included a meal and laundry service plan. (obviously, some tweaks and fiddling would be necessary, but there's a lot of precedent on the math from college dorm plans out there)
The design of the buildings can be economized: instead of having to give up significant square footage for full kitchens, big pantries, and laundry rooms in most/every unit, you can provide a kitchenette and more livable square footage. You can likely cut out some of the high-amperage circuits necessary for cookers and dryers, and some plumbing for laundry rooms. I wonder if it would be viable to consider as an endgame if remote work hangs around after Covid and we end up with a glut of office-tower capacity, although I suspect the cost to retrofit in enough bathrooms/showers would vastly outweigh the cost of dropping in a dishwasher and stove into each unit.
Maintenance costs likely go down, as you don't have need to install or maintain dishwashers, ovens, in-sink food disposal units, and any sort of plumbing or electrical problems they cause. You have fewer noise, weird smell, and small-fire related complaints.
There's clearly a marketable business around "I'm waaaaay too busy doing Important Business Stuff/Living My Extreme Life/Some Other Self-Aggrandizing Fantasy to worry about the nuts and bolts of living" (See products like Soylent and Huel for people who find preparing food and eating a challenge) and this is just another step on the continuum.
Your casual use of "consenting functional adults" is overly simplistic. It is a fact that desperate people make desperate decisions. If you're only allowing such people then we should set an income floor so the poor cannot be preyed upon. Say, the true cost of living in the city? Anyone making less is not in a fair position to consent to such living conditions.
>Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
Hah. Maybe the ones you live in. Can't tell you how many apartments I've lived or been in that had mold, roaches, faulty wiring, dangerous appliances, and the like that went without repair despite repeated complaints over months and years.
So while in theory it's not a bad idea. In practice, because of the same societal problems that make this a serious consideration, projects like this are doomed to fail without massive community support and budgets that would probably rival just giving each tenant a custom ordered bare minimum trailer in a park packed like sardines.
1. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.sh...
Removal of high-density housing isn't solving that problem, it's just forcing those people into more desperate circumstances.
Honestly, great. Let the young catch it to act as firebreaks for the more vulnerable.
If you are going to college in person right now, you have already judged the risks and deemed them acceptable.
The thing I think is ridiculous is the number of universities shutting down completely at the first whiff of an outbreak.
What did they think would happen? Have the backbone to let it burn through.
Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.
Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and sometimes several family units are packed into a single 1br apartment in LA or in other high COL places as we speak. I've seen bunks for rent that look like they came out of a prison on my local craigslist, asking for $500 a month.
Cheap and communal housing would solve so many ills that currently exist for the working class simply because we refuse to build this sort of housing anymore. Housing that used to dominate cities like LA and gave opportunity to the working poor who couldn't afford a better situation. Housing that we sorely lack, and the lack of which push people into real tenement conditions today, or even on the street, while they work part or full time trying to make ends meet.
False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.
Multiplex homes also run a greater risk of falling into disrepair over the long term if you have a situation of split ownership.
The solution to our housing crisis cannot be more "missing middle" it needs to be larger scale projects with 50+ units each with strict standards around building quality.
- Purchase old home or lot.
- Tear down old structure.
- Build new 4-plex or 6-plex.
- Sell/Rent 4-6 units on a plot.
Example: "ABC" owns rancher on a single plot. Rents out rancher for $4000/mo. Current revenue is $48000/yr. "ABC" turns rancher into modern 6-plex on the same plot. Rents out each of the 6 units for $2000/mo. New revenue is $144000/yr.
Of course, capital required to build a new structure will erode returns for initial years, but as long as the demand to live in Portland is still high, it seems like a more profitable strategy longterm?
Unless I am totally off-base with these assumptions.
If your goal is to avoid benefitting developers, you will have a hard time encouraging housing.
Accordingly the "value" that one gets for their dollar decreases. While before one may have paid 1.2M for an house and full lot, now suddenly 1.2M can't buy a full lot, but 900k can buy a 1000sqft apt part of that lot.
There's an upside for someone that needed more room and could never afford a 1.2M house, or a renter that just wants more apt options, but there's a downside for someone who could afford an entire house but is now seeing the price of an entire house go up.
All this being said, in practice it is arguable whether the land values do increase that much. The fact that these changes are being applied city wide at once may limit the effect.
Hopefully, this will change in time. But I think that it'll be large developers building in neighborhoods with homeowners. The equity will end up in the hands of large real estate trusts, and not small time operators.
Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all. Because slum residents have to pay for the entire building upfront and build it themselves you can expect the quality of the buildings to be very low.
There are slums in San Francisco. Those so called "tent cities". You get rid of slums by fulfilling housing demand.
Your conspiracy theory makes no sense at all. The role of a government, if any, is to stop people from building shanty towns. That's what building regulation does: stop anyone from building sub-par housing. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that slums pop up because a government stops people from building slums.
I would argue it's a good thing because it reduces sprawl and uses present land more efficiently.
It's better than bulldozing hectares of land to build new developments in these isolated pockets.
Generally, buyers would rather have something new where they don't have to worry about the repairs/maintenance/annoyance that comes from owning older houses, where it ends up being a money pit for future value (not including historical/charming old homes). It's like choosing: would you rather drive a 1990 or 2018 Toyota sedan?
IDK, maybe this is an opportunity for a "home rebuilding" tax credit incentive or some kind of higher tax on developing new land instead of current land?
As someone who moved to the US, I think one realization why this has not really taken effect is that there is just so much land, there is seemingly always more to build on. Thinking about smaller, denser nations, that is just not a feasible strategy.
And cities were awful due to that, I'm afraid.
> Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use.
There's no need to pull out emotional conspiracy theories. Restrictions are in general due to the need to impose an urban plan that meets the urban planner's established goals for the community and also complies with environmental restrictions, such as traffic and noise levels.
> but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.
Letting people freely build "second buildings on their property" is an euphemism for wanting to build shanty towns with no regard to living conditions or environmental restrictions.
Each plot is defined based on a zoning expectation,which reflects real-world restrictions and an urban plan. If you want higher density construction then just work with your city to rezone and review the urban plan for your neighborhood.
Expecting to be able to just build "houses" in your backyard is how you get firetrap shanty towns that violate environmental and safety restrictions.
Just because you don't know why a fence is placed somewhere, that doesn't mean it has no purpose.
Here’s a fun thought experiment... Imagine if most streets became parks/plazas (aside from a few left for utility reasons) and everyone rode (electric) bikes, or similar relatively light transport options. To me that’s be idyllic. Imagine not being relegated to the sidewalk, not having to worry about being hit by some idiot driving way to fast in a residential area.
Edit: What’s with the downvotes? Geez have some imagination. Bikes don’t need to have right of way everywhere either... I guess vehicle-centrism goes far beyond cars.
Pedestrians don't mix any better with (electric) bikes that are trying to get places than they do with cars. Reasonably broad and well-maintained sidewalks are essential for everyone's comfort and safety.
This is from experience riding bikes and having people ride bikes next to me in fully pedestrian streets as dreamt about by GP.
Bikes may be slower than cars, but -- when they're being used for commuting, not toodling around on a Sunday afternoon -- they are much, much faster than pedestrians.
When I'm walking, I don't want bikes whizzing by me at three times my speed. When I'm biking, I don't want to be constantly worrying about people on foot -- or their kids, or their dogs -- suddenly stopping or changing direction without looking.
But that's one crowded bridge. On most roads, people walking in the roads instead of the sidewalk wouldn't matter to me. You could 10x the number of pedestrians and it'd be fine in most of my city (Austin TX). Maybe that'd change if it were pedestrian-friendly and we ended up with 50x the number of people walking, but this is a problem I dream of.
I, too, ride or walk everywhere I go, and have several shared cyclist/pedestrian paths that I use a lot. My least favorite thing to encounter on the path, walking or riding, is that asshole with the multi-thousand-dollar racing bike and no bell who just blazes past me with no warning. Fuck that guy, "share the road" works both ways.
I do have a bell and a voice and I'm ready to use them if needed, but I'm happier when they're irrelevant. I take pedestrian priority and safety seriously when I'm riding (as I hope others do for me when I'm walking), so if I can ride in an area where I have less of that worry, I will.
https://twitter.com/Cycling_Embassy/status/12981531351276462...
Note also that bike paths and rights of way are not designed in mostof the US to prioritize bikes OR walkers.
Imagine if roads and roundabouts were designed exclusively for bikes and pedestrians.
Before the massive efforts of the auto industry, this is basically what they were. Streets of small European towns still feel this way and the cars feel very much like the interlopers.
So, a return to normalcy.
In the UK where I live the government subsidise rail. Rail is very expensive, slow and unreliable especially compared to my diesel car. I would rather cycle to the train station, get onto the train with my bike and then cycle the other side to work. However it costs me almost twice as much to do and takes me 3 times as long.
Even with all the taxes on fuel, emissions and the price of repairing what is now an old car (my Car is over 15 years old and has done many many miles). Driving is cheaper, generally gets me there quicker even when travelling across the whole country.
Rail tickets keep on increasing in price and the service never improves and the whole experience is unpleasant.
In the rest of Europe cars are just taxed heavily and people still buy them. This idea that people don't want cars just isn't true.
The UK once subsidized a working system, then destroyed most of that system without any resulting cost savings, then sold it to billionaires who it now subsidizes.
I am well aware of the story. BTW British rail stopped being profitable back in 1955 (7 years after nationalisation).
It proves that maybe you shouldn't let government take public ownership of companies. Government will frequently provide the worse of both worlds as it tries to appease everyone and ends up serving no-one.
The result for the UK is that we have a very expensive rail service that is horrible to use and it is simply cheaper to drive.
Caro's The Power Broker details how Bob Moses was the agent of the powerful forces behind the automobile.
The only stakeholders not represented, or even consulted, were the average taxpaying citizens. Any dissent was ruthlessly squashed.
Urban planners and normal citizens have been critical since the very beginning. The debate really picked up after WWII, with the resumption of peace time economy.
By the 50s, the experts had enough real world data -- more highways creates more congestion, focus on cars to the exclusion of mass transit physically cannot work -- to invalidate the entire premise.
Eighty years later, here we are still clutching at pearls, trying not to faint. As if there's anything left to debate.
I shouldn't be shocked. But somehow I still am. Or maybe just disappointed.
The problem was never the automobile per se, but the emphasis on the automobile to the exclusion of everything else. Starting with land use policies which only accommodate automobile centric development.
The first cars were not that fast and did not accelerate easily, so it makes some sense that there would be advocacy to get every last bit out of the engine through highway design. Add to that the requisite hype for a new, impactful technology and you get the approach that paved the earth.
But we have gradually come to realize the point of traffic calming, roundabouts, transit-oriented design and other tools that make people stigmergically decide on appropriate trip plans and driving parameters.
Transportation is fundamentally about time and money trade-offs. Supply goes up and cost comes down or vise versa. If you want cost low you gotta have a lot of supply. It doesn't matter whether the wheels are steel or rubber you just need to have the supply. For an economy to flourish people need to be able to not be trapped going to a job or shopping at a particular store because the cost of getting there is workable but that is exactly the reality that transit scarcity creates.
If it was just about the cars they wouldn't have spent the 60s and 70s killing mass transit projects while also killing highways. Infrastructure development in the US ground to a halt because in the 60s the upper middle class managed to get far away from the poors for the first time in history and they wanted to keep it that way by keeping the cost of living outside the inner city from getting too low.
I'd only be guessing, but I think the highways and freeways were then defunded in turn because those same financiers couldn't figure out how to profit from further investment. Or maybe they decided to end their partnership with organized labor. Or maybe cashing in other rent seeking opportunities, like ending usury protections enabling explosion of consumer debt, were more promising.
Who knows.
Of course all of the above is a fraction of traffic that we have today. However don't pretend it doesn't exist.
This has been posted on HN before, but the Japanese zoning system makes a lot of sense: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20191002.php
(I have never learnt to drive, and rely on cycling, walking, and transit; I find I am generally a lot happier when I live with a lot of errands in cycling distance!)
Multigenerational families are not better served. If they're doing a new build, it can work. But imagine trying to purchase not one, but four houses on the same lot. That's a helluva coincidence to wait for, for them all to be vacant simultaneously.
I am right now and have done so in various ways for the past 25 years, it is vastly better to have some separation.
I'm not going to generalize. But for us, multi-generational homes happen over time as opposed to moving the whole family at once regardless. Kids grow up and need space, but can't afford to buy a place. Parents get older and move in with kids, etc etc.
I totally agree!
I didn't mean to imply this bit about house size is good. In general, this measure removes piles of restrictions on land use and that's one of the big reasons I like it. I was just pointing out that there are some work-arounds.
Edit: You need a place to plug-in your EV at night.
Not only do the very old still drive, many prefer it because they’re old.
Go talk to some old folks. I did when I put together a community funded Tesla Model 3 rideshare for them in a retirement community. The pool is their preferred exercise method to walking, especially in inclement weather (you ever walk a mile in the July Florida/Texas/Arizona heat? I have in all three, and I would not recommend it).
EDIT: @jeffbee Responding here as HN has throttled my comment replies.
> That's contrary to all available data. People over 70 are the least-likely group of adults to have drivers' licenses and have the highest public transport mode share or any group, take the fewest trips, and travel the smallest distance per day. The elderly are arguably the people who stand to gain the most from compact patterns of development.
And yet, they choose to live in low to medium density areas that require an automobile versus urban areas. Behold the revealed preference!
https://www.prb.org/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/de...
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
Not in the US! It's pretty common for them to continue driving until they have enough accidents that they're dropped by their insurance company.
https://www.businessinsider.com/young-people-drivers-license...
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/i...
The Florida retirement developments figured this out a long time ago: electric golf carts.
If I recall correctly in one they even recently conducted a golf cart based political rally in support of a presidential candidate.
Exercise?
Outside of the obvious downsides to a car centric culture, the united states would definitely have healthier people if it were feasible to walk to more destinations. And I don't mean this just on an individual fitness level either. Getting out of the car and actually walking and interacting with people is an important community aspect, which this country severely lacks.
...if not for the actual practical problem, which is that for a lot of people living in dense urban areas, there's no way to keep an EV charged up. Street parking and surface lots don't have chargers, old parking garages and almost all new parking garage construction doesn't have chargers, apartment buildings or shared houses with official or ad-hoc parking don't have chargers.
I have that problem myself: I'd probably have replaced my car with an EV already if only I actually had somewhere to plug it in.
However I agree with the rest of your comment. My wife and I looked into plug-in hybrids (all the tax credit, none of the range anxiety) but there's no place to charge it so we just got a regular hybrid.
Electric bicycles by contrast take up the same space as any other bicycle.
I agree that getting rid of government mandated parking will decrease government-subsidized car storage (which is good across the board). Sure that will affect EVs, but it will also affect ICEs equally.
Having a driveway/garage allows you to charge your EV while parked. An ICE you can just park wherever.
[1] although, my plugin has very good range on gas, and next to nothing on a full charge, so I really only charge if it's free, gives me good parking, or to exercise my backup generator.
I think the sentiment is good but I see it going wrong quickly unless you have some way to ensure that every neighborhood gets at least enough charging to adopt EVs in the first place.
As for on-street parking, I don't feel particularly inclined to subsidize (via my tax payments) parking for the public's gross overuse of cars. I'd rather my tax dollars go to transit and alternative infrastructure.
Personally, I'd like a private bathroom, but prefer the shared kitchen, dining room, and living room.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45420795#:~:text=The%20U....
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9732-2
or do you own search.
This desire for extremely large houses just seems to be a combination of prior expectations that houses will be large and status seeking. Expectations can adjust over time and I don't put much value on status seeking.
[1] The BBC article lists "4 rooms per occupant" as the threshold beyond which there is no increase in satisfaction.
Consider a 3/3 with a kitchen, dining room and living room. For 4 people (two kids and two parents) you have 9 rooms, or a little over 2 per person.
This family would need to double their house size before maxing out.
* moving to a larger house leads to a small increase in "housing satisfaction" in most cases;
* houses larger than 4 rooms per occupant bring no increase in satisfaction with increasing size.
I generally think that there's too much of a slant toward large houses in the new housing stock in the US, though - they're more expensive to buy and maintain, and generally not the best choice for young people.
Also, Europe's prevalent masonry construction might "feel" solid, but that doesn't equal a high level of "building standards". A whole lot of western safety/environmental/plumbing/electrical/accessibility standards have changed in the past 20-70 years.
Much in the way chrome-adorned '60s US cars "felt" solid, and older people scoffed at the inornate "plastic cars" of the '90s, this perception of quality didn't translate to actual engineering superiority.
Some of the over-sized chintzy boxes that are built in the US are actually built to pretty dang good standards, i.e.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Building_Code
To use your example, ending slavery took a civil war that almost ended the US. And we're still dealing with the aftermath (economic equity, police brutality, etc).
The change in housing size that you're talking about encompasses a 40 year period, your slavery example, much longer. Culture can change, but it doesn't happen suddenly, by fiat, it happens on generational timescales.
Students frequently enjoy larger communities, especially since it's often a lot more affordable to have a large house split 10-20 ways than a medium house split five. ("Medium" is a stretch, since five bedrooms is a large house in the US.)
These aren't the most common arrangements, but that doesn't mean they should be prohibited.
In my neighborhood, these are also duplexes (maybe coincidentally, maybe not, I dunno), which are allowed to be bigger.
In areas closer to colleges and universities, those homes end up being shared by large groups of students.
Yeah, but these big houses are probably old. In the universities near me, such large houses haven't been built in my lifetime. I doubt it's too much different in Portland.
If you want an existing home over 5000 square feet within city limits, expect to pay upwards of $1.2 million if you want to live out towards the suburbs, or $1.5 million for something closer to dense walkable neighborhoods.
Post-War homes (e.g. after WWII) in America were intended for the nuclear family and were typically under 1000 sq/ft. Most 60s and 70s ranch homes were 1200-1700 sq/ft and considered spacious.
A modern 2500 sq/ft house is at a minimum 3 bedroom, 3.5 bath, and a bonus room.
2500 sqft = 232 sqm
1000 sqft = 92 sqm
I am living in the latter with my wife plus one small child, and it's clear to us that we want more space for children later. 2500 sqft seems pretty large, but not crazy large either, especially with ~3 kids (=just two generations).
You can put a lot of people in 2500 square feet if you design it well instead of just slapping walls together.
It leads to interesting quirks in real estate listings, where identical houses get listed with very different sizes. Example, my house was listed at 1500sqft. Same model one row over was listed at 2000sqft. The 500sqft different is the basement - it's finished in both homes, but was not part of the original building listing (1972).
Another hallmark of these houses are complete lack of trim. They're just big boxes.
A more future-proof way to get around these building code limitations is 1) attic space, and 2) higher ceilings. You get a better feeling of space, and you can get more board-feet of storage in the same footprint.
Seattle is also full of illegal remodels, only some of which a lender will balk at (source: bought a quirky home, the owners had to remove features for us to buy it).
You do have to get creative with second bedrooms by installing Murphy beds or otherwise reducing furniture size and floor space. Modern furniture is way too big to fit in the rooms of a post-war house. A stacking washer/dryer is very useful. Basically anything that substitutes vertical space for horizontal space will help immensely. Ikea has stuff that's size-appropriate but very cheap.
The reason most houses are 2500 square feet nowadays is because you have to maintain a space for all the things you want to do inside your house. Whereas if you share space with your community for those things that many people do then you don't have to maintain a separate space for it.
Of course, we have more space than we "need" -- 2 additional bedrooms. But, again, they're just large enough for what they do. 1 has a guest bed (and not any room for anything else, really) and the other is an "office" which is handy during covid-19 for sure.
If we had kids, there would be room for them to sleep, but no playroom, for example. Our laundry is in the garage, as is our "workout room". That space is not counted in the official size of the house, because the garage is converted.
The additional things we'd want are all luxuries.
* Indoor room where we can work out (treadmill, bike, elliptical are all in the garage)
* Master bathroom with an actual walk in shower, space where we don't have to squeeze past each other getting ready, etc.
* Closet space
* Garage that can be used for parking cars and bikes, working on things, etc. (I've had a bike on a stand in the backyard for a month now, as I work on building it, and parts strewn all over a patio table)
All totally unnecessary, of course. But given that we have a decently-sized lot for silicon valley (6000sqft) it would be nice to have more indoor space. Especially since I spent all my waking hours in here now :)
Maybe if we didn't have a kid? Or if I could convince my wife to give up some things? We were just in the housing market and had to pass on these smaller houses very quickly. Not only that, but bigger houses were only 10-20% greater in cost than smaller ones...it was a no brainer to go with 2000 SQF.
> The reason most houses are 2500 square feet nowadays is because you have to maintain a space for all the things you want to do inside your house. Whereas if you share space with your community for those things that many people do then you don't have to maintain a separate space for it.
If you go to an office and keep your instrument in a locker someplace with practice rooms and your kids spend a lot of time elsewhere (outside, neighbors' houses, etc) then it probably is?
But yeah, for my wife and I (who only have one kid, but may want more) it was still the same thought process as you. We've been living in 1200 square feet with an 8 month old and we make it work but we're both working / studying / networking from the living room and going a little batty in the process, not to mention that our kitchen is tiny and probably not ventilated well enough given that the stove and oven are gas.
So we went for 2500 rather than enter the market and incur closing costs again if we want another kid or both wind up permanently remote post-COVID.
FWIW he's a single dad, and au pairs aren't always on duty. It's less lavish than it sounds.
Nothing in the legislation prohibits big houses. All it does is legalize small ones.
This is a prohibition on new big houses.
People in tech are so out of touch. Being able to hire people is lavish.
I have noticed that as houses approach 2000 Sq feet that luxury goes up faster than space, almost as if there is an asomtomic limit in that area. That is people buying smaller than 2000 seem to be looking for more space for the money, while those looking bigger are willing to spend more for the space to make it nice.
In that case, build a duplex or triplex designed with easy (but lockable) access between units. That gives you a lot of living area, and the same building is also suitable for housing multiple families if it ever changes hands.
> In areas closer to colleges and universities, those homes end up being shared by large groups of students.
Multi-unit buildings with each unit shared between two people, or (now also allowed by the new zoning) 'cottage cluster' arrangements with a number of physically separate homes sharing one driveway/common area.
Its a way of depriving city of property taxes, that would have otherwise have taxed multiple dwellings for the same amount of people. So the 2500 sqft limit is to collect more tax.
If you read a bit through the comment box, about half of the comments are from people scandalized and terrified that Portland will immediately turn into a huge dumpster rife with crime because of the new legislation. The gist of it is that having 3 or 4 apartments per lot (in a few select lots, mind you) will turn your city into a crack den.
That is a really quaint mindset. I can only imagine what those people commenting on the news would think about Paris, London or basically any major city outside the US where having dozens of apartments per lot is the norm and has been for decades or centuries.
> They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning. This forestry zoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/2020-republican-nationa...
But I don't entirely agree with this point. Regular folks that are getting rich off property are the single family homeowners. Density tends to increase land value. This law makes single family home land more valuable and easier to sell, since a developer can plop townhomes or a second house in the backyard and profit. So now on top of regular people, you've got builders competing for the same properties, hence prices will rise.
I'd be worried if I owned a townhome or condo, since I wouldn't have any empty land to be built on and that's the kind of home that will be built on the now upzoned land. But there are no swathes of empty land in Portland to fill with more single family homes.
Folks that own property the in the (now up-zoned) expensive neighborhoods are NIMBY because they want to preserve the low density neighborhood they live in that are close to everything, not because they want housing prices to soar more. Older neighborhoods like that just aren't built anymore--developers pick off the shelf of 1-5 nearly identical plans and fill a neighborhood with them. Old west coast city neighborhoods have a cool vibe that doesn't really exist in many places anymore, and can't really be replicated. With this up zone that will be going away over time.
That's OK, because these neighborhoods should have been upzoned a long time ago and the land needs to be accessible to more people. But the conversation is more nuanced than "my housing price will go down!!1"
This is a key thing. There is very little undeveloped land within Portland city limits, and the vast majority of it is lots under 1000 square feet. Most of what is there is in places that would be expensive, laborious, or unappealing to work with, like the sides of heavily sloped hills, lots completely surrounded by other lots without road access (have fun trying to work out right of way for a driveway), or waaay out nearly in the suburbs, at which point you may as well go five more minutes in that direction and save yourself some on the taxes.
As an investment a house is a place including neighborhood to live for a long time. You should be friends with the neighbors. When you get old it is a cheap place to live (you have it paid for). It is a place to save your memories (little Bobby tables bit the rail there...). A place to make what fits your life.
It isn't a savings account to get cash out of when you want some.
If you have the means buy a cheap SFH lot in Portland while you can.
If we really actually want to make housing not an investment then we need to empower our government to fund the development of publicly owned housing for everyone.
If you occupy a publicly funded housing unit, I can't - it's not a public good. And there are always developers and builders willing to stump up cash to build new housing.
Seems to me that there's a market failure here where the market cannot create affordable housing. It's not regulations alone that have made it so that developers can't make affordable housing. The construction costs are simply too high for a for-profit developer to be able to do it.
Housing these homeless people, thus reducing health costs and emergency worker costs is of course a public good. I would like to be able to use that park again.
But aside from all that I don't agree with your narrow thesis of what public dollars should be spent on anyway. If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends. If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
I don't know about Vancouver's specific problems. Why are the construction costs so high there?
In the Bay Area regulations, and tax laws that incentivize holding on to old housing, are largely to blame for the lack of housing supply.
> If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends
Who in turn pay taxes on those dividends. Maybe increase those taxes, and taxes on the property itself.
> If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
Lots of businesses are a good investment. That's not a good reason for the public sector to get into it.
There's no real reason why construction costs are high. As the amount of construction increases, the available labour pool decreases, and labour costs accordingly increase. There is always lots of construction going on. More highly trained trades would help, but easier said than done.
If anything it's more that construction costs are artificially low in the USA since there is a class of illegal immigrant labour which can be exploited and paid low. That does not exist in Canada.
It might be worth digging into why Vancouver has so much housing demand. It's a stunningly beautiful city, but the local economy doesn't seem to correlate with the price of real estate. There are no FAANGs paying senior engineers $400k, so why are people spending so much money?
So as I said it actually becomes more difficult to build the more you build.
Vis a vis labour demand there's also competition from non-residential construction projects (eg. Amazon building a big warehouse somewhere, dam construction, bridge construction etc).
Here in Seattle, the ADU boom, and infill in general, is slowly removing the green from our neighborhoods. As density increases, it is important to ensure that the resulting community is healthy and sustainable.
It sucks to watch the trees disappear, I love trees in neighborhoods too. But at an urban level if trees disappear that's about aesthetics not the environment. Density is really great for the environment because of reduced commute, better insulation(apt vs house), etc..
We considered buying a place out there for like 30 seconds, the U District just felt so depressing. We bought in Ballard which has a lot of townhomes (we bought one), but it doesn't feel depressing.
The U was a lot less depressing when I moved in around, what, 2012/3 I think it was?
While, perhaps, you moving might "contribute to that sprawl" that impact will be more than offset by multiple people moving into the greater density being created in Seattle. Overall it's a significant net win for the environment.
Seattle is expensive. If you want to live someplace that "isn't expensive" then....don't live somewhere that is expensive.
But to the degree that it is unnecessarily expensive because of laws that make it illegal for people to build sufficient housing on property they own, then those laws are bad.
If you don't want your city to grow, how about voting for anti-business policies? That will stop the jobs growth and stop your city from growing. Then you won't have to deal with change.
Another option is to go full NIMBY and try to block new housing. This will cause housing prices to skyrocket, which will harm all the young people who grew up in your city, the folks who come to fill all the new jobs, and the poor (many will become homeless).
You must decide by yourself what you wish to do. I hope you will make a decision that reflects your core values, even if it comes with some disappointment.
We do need more trees outside central Portland, particularly in the eastern neighborhoods [1], and I wish that they would plant fewer deciduous trees, because their leaves block storm drains [2][3].
[0] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/trees/
[1] https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/08/12/east-of-82nd-avenue-po...
[2] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/trees/60043
[3] https://www.kptv.com/news/workers-to-clean-storm-drains-afte...
Maybe this is what it takes to get zoning reform.
Buying out existing homeowners reduces concerns about the externalities of densification. Pay them a fair price for their property and the inconvenience/trauma of relocation and then get on with making a truly livable, dense, efficient city.
That all assumes a government is even capable of predicting future trends(will retail die? will the next generation flee the city? will mfg jobs return? etc). But if we're going to play that game, lets play it competently.
Property rights are essential in keeping society civil. Sure, I pay taxes and give up some of my property in order to provide common good. I’m happy to pay for schools and roads. Sure, maybe the government will need to build a highway over my property, I understand it needs a mechanism to do this for the public good. However, if the government forces me to sell to a private party I’m concerned that the reason will be less about public good and more about enriching the private party. It opens up the government to legitimate ethics concerns. It makes people begin to feel cheated out of their property. This is bad for society as a whole.
The more common ground we can find between tribes like this, the less, I think, it will feel like America is coming apart at the seams.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/25/snob-...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-...
Edit: I'd add that the book does a good job about explaining the sorts of motivations there were behind un-densifying cities (or keeping density from rising) in the first place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
For a progressive city that views itself no doubt as "believing science", it's pretty amazing they still stick these types of economic restrictions into law. Maybe we should start saying "believe economists" when it comes to these riders? Please just increase the supply of housing. Increase it at the top and the bottom.
One thing we know, based on over a century of data around the world: increasing density of housing has little effect on affordability, in the long run. More often than not, it has the opposite effect. More simply, we do it backwards: we claim--based on in-migration 'projections' that are nearly always overestimates--that there's a shortage and we must build our way out of it. Example: 20 years ago, Portland estimated a million new residents by 2025. Growth in that period: 105,000, in large part due to annexation.
This leaves out the realities of how things get built. Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups. If it doesn't 'pencil out', nobody will build it. And this is why 'affordable housing' demands, codes, agreements all get bargained down in the end. They have for decades in Portland, despite repeated promises of 'this time, we really mean it'. Developers hold the cards. I could list dozens of projects of thousands of units.
'But government can build/partner!', you say? No, that rarely works either, especially in Portland. 'But this is law and it must be adhered to!', you say? No, that's not true. When it comes to building, everything gets negotiated, and there's nothing that gets bargained harder on than public entities trying to set housing prices.
Sources, please.
There's only one guarantee - limiting density in a growing city with jobs does make housing less affordable. That has been the status quo in every major city in the USA over the past 50 years.
Here's (only) one example of analysis of the density<->housing affordability relationship. Spoiler alert: density always increases housing costs in the long run. https://www.newgeography.com/content/005183-what-price-urban...
There has never been a city in the US that has made housing more affordable by increasing density or legislating affordable housing. The 'why' of that is complex.
I hope you can see the logical flaw in your statement "density increases housing costs".
"The trend, however, is indisputable: Greater compactness increases housing costs."
The 'compactness index' they're talking about is centered around density (and the impacts of that on transportation, health, travel distances, etc.).
And my 'argument' is not about the negative effect of density--it's that I don't believe that density makes housing more affordable.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/01/apartment-rents-...
Based on your logic, we could build more apartments in a particular city than humans exist and rents would continue to go up, even if most of those apartments are empty. That clearly doesn't make sense.
Your last argument misses the point. As cities become more fashionable, not building more housing is a guarantee of increased costs due to supply and demand. In cities like SF, rents continue to rise faster than most cities. SF is also the hardest place to build anything. I wonder if those two are related.
https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...
People making capital gains on houses (whose values are determined mostly by local government and corporate investment relative to the national average) has always struck me as a sign of government being insufficiently aggressive about a) capturing the value it creates with infrastructure investment and b) wringing subsidy from high-paying corporations externalizing the problem of housing their work-forces.
This is famously untrue with housing. Because it's so hard to match units demanded to units built, housing growth nearly always precedes demand. How? By leaning on estimates of demand (in-migration, etc.), which I mentioned above. And those estimates are almost always severe overestimates.
Based on my own experiences with house-hunting, there is a severe lack of supply of houses rather than the opposite.
"""This suggests that consumption leads production during neighbourhood gentrification, and that developers are reactive, not proactive, in their investment decisions."""
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004209802094059...
Every time someone talks about something as brain dead as saying housing growth precedes demand they are just showing off their loyality to their political "tribe" because there is not enough ignorance in this world to believe something this stupid.
Do you know what 25 year olds are going to do if housing is too expensive but their parents have a nice 2500sqft house that they refuse to sell? They are going to stay at their parents house or live with a room mate because that's what they have been forced to do. If you build a house/apartment of course it is going to be filled immediately because there are already people in the city who are waiting for you to build the damn house. Not a single person has to migrate or come from a different region.
When you are saying "housing growth precedes demand" you are actually talking about "pent up demand" over several decades but trying to hide it via political speech with an agenda behind it. It's basically equivalent to saying "we have screwed up for 50 years now it's going to take decades to clean up the mess we have created so why bother? Let's just blame the few remaining people who are doing their part to fix this mess for causing the problems we have created.".
>One thing we know, based on over a century of data around the world: increasing density of housing has little effect on affordability
You're not getting downvoted for disagreeing. You're getting downvoted for asserting something that contradicts established economics with no sources, and backing it up with folksy us-vs-them demonization of such iniquities as "developers", "profit", and "negotiat[ion]". On a messageboard that was originally started for entrepreneurs, this is a particularly poor choice of strategy.
Whether it's the NBER
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/hier1...
or the Reserve Bank of Australia
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3149272
or the whole country of Japan
https://www.citymetric.com/fabric/tokyo-proves-housing-short...
the evidence is in fact clear: zoning restrictions make housing more expensive.
On the West Coast, there is a persistent hope (among some) that restrictive zoning will prevent people from moving to the West Coast, but this is an impossible fantasy; it's simply nicer there, and a net westward migration of Americans will probably continue for another century. The ongoing westward migration may ebb and flow, and obscure the impact of policy changes, but it isn't going to go away, and the best choice for the long-term health of the urban ecosystem is gradual densification.
Despite the inherent difficulty in comparing different countries, I do think Tokyo is an interesting place to study. If you've dug deeper on why Tokyo had a period of flat housing prices, you might have noticed the larger picture.
But more simply, you have to look at housing in long-term frames. And lo and behold: Tokyo is changing: https://www.rethinktokyo.com/news/2020/01/07/price-new-housi...
One tidbit from that article: "Low-interest rates increase the borrowing capacity of homebuyers, supporting higher property prices."
Housing is complex.
"Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia lost population through net domestic migration between 2018 and 2019, six of which had losses over 25,000, and three of which experienced losses greater than 100,000. The top states with net domestic migration loss were California (-203,414), New York (-180,649), Illinois (-104,986), New Jersey (-48,946), Massachusetts (-30,274) and Louisiana (-26,045)."
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/popest-n...
We also haven’t had a massive earthquake in awhile. Lots of unreinforced masonry structures in SF still, entire neighborhoods will be wiped out when it happens. New buildings will need to be much safer than existing ones.
Density sounds good and I’m all for it, we need to scale up our infrastructure though.
Also in SF pro-density movements are painted as pro-gentrification, getting the voters on board is hard.
This all costs money and convincing the locals to spend money now to support outsiders usually doesn’t work. The money will be spent on affordable housing for existing residents. This continues the cycle of new well off residents buying expensive homes and pushing more locals out of state or into affordable housing.
Honestly a big earthquake might be the only thing that forces the city to rebuild with safer higher density buildings.
Modern cities and suburbs have ZERO flexibility in how they can adapt to changing times. The reality is that zones of certain kinds of activity are fluid. The economy is fluid. The culture, the weather, and the land are all fluid! So why do we try and harden it into a concrete set of laws?
The way we have conceived of things in the US has created such a separation between us. We see our homeless neighbors and we are powerless to help them. They are homeless precisely because of all the ridiculous laws we created.
Creating property lines, and housing laws incentivizes all of us to build high walls, and protect our shit at all costs. We need a community model for housing. I'm not saying I have the answers at all, but it should be clear that what we have now is failing most of us. I say this as a homeowner myself.
citation needed
In Japan for 20 years there have been federal laws overriding local law that restricts zoning density. The result: in Tokyo they have been building 140,000 housing units per year compared with 20,000 in NYC and 90,000 for all of California. The cost of housing as not increased at all in the past 20 years because these market failures (in this case also called "rent-seeking") in real estate are not allowed to occur in Japan.
We need similar laws in the US as Japan.
"The average price of new condos in Tokyo was 71.42 million yen, or about 642,000 dollars, in 2018. This is the highest it's been since 1991" https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/406/
Housing is complex.
And second, today's luxury condo will almost always become tomorrow's "affordable" housing. Developers build something new and shiny matching all the trends, get their money and leave. When whatever style of countertop they are building now goes out of fashion, that place will be nice and cheap.
And lastly, even if that didn't happen, moving someone out of somewhere and into a "luxury" condo, still opens up the housing below. Even if it's someone new moving to town, they are still moving into the new condo, not fighting for the existing stock.
Say we have a city. Currently there are 10,000 old apartments. I decide to go in and build an additional 10,000 new apartments. Why would the price to rent one of the old apartments go up?
I don't understand what the proposed mechanism is at all.
None of these are enough to make the entire cities more expensive to live in but they are highly visible so those who need to justify their selfish actions (preventing housing) seek deniable plausibility in them.
There are few more efficient ways to make it sound like you're not arguing in good faith than to preemptively claim that all who downvote you are being unreasonable.
>Portland estimated a million new residents by 2025. Growth in that period: 105,000, in large part due to annexation
This is self-fulfilling. If you build no new housing, there will be no realized population growth.
>Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups.
Most people do most work for profit. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Developers will, of course, only build when they can turn a profit. That's what capitalism means. But we should be able to arrange things such that the community benefits. If you remove artificial costs (e.g. bad-faith environmental reviews, meaningless red tape for code- and zoning-compliant projects), then the cost of development goes down, and so prices should settle lower. And when the top of your demand curve moves into those new, expensive housing units, they move out of somewhere cheaper. Any supply removes pressure from the market - you want rich people moving into expensive housing, because it means they're moving out of less-desirable housing, which will then necessarily have lower prices.
This is a huge reason why the notion that our housing affordability problems can be boiled down to "simple" issues of "supply and demand" is false.
Developers don't over build supply. Why would they? There's no economic reason to. Whenever any sort of overbuilding occurs which would oversupply , it is always by some accident (eg. a pandemic), and the taps are turned off immediately.
We see an example of this in nearby Vancouver BC, where foreign buyer taxes and speculation taxes have cooled demand for expensive concrete condo towers which were often marketed in Asia. Suddenly these products are no longer being produced and housing developers have shifted to other things.
The conflict is that you two are saying the laws of supply and demand don't work because of two mutually incompatible reasons.
Those two things can't be true at the same time. So either of you must be wrong. And it's pretty obvious that your comment is the only one that doesn't violate basic logic. However, just because you're not wrong doesn't mean you're capturing the whole truth.
>This is a huge reason why the notion that our housing affordability problems can be boiled down to "simple" issues of "supply and demand" is false.
>Developers don't over build supply. Why would they? There's no economic reason to. Whenever any sort of overbuilding occurs which would oversupply , it is always by some accident (eg. a pandemic), and the taps are turned off immediately.
Building exactly as much housing as needed would still result in lower prices. When you have 10 houses and 20 people only the 10 richest people get a house because they are bidding up the prices. If there are 20 houses and 20 people then everyone gets a house. If there are 25 houses and 20 people then landlords will compete with each other and try to lower the rent they charge to fill their units. Villages with 1€ houses exist for a reason.
Do you know what the worst mistake in housing discussions is that everyone tends to make? Everyone talks about the price because that is what people can see and what people are familiar with. No one talks about housing in absolute numbers. Nobody thinks about the fact that one more house means one more person. Everyone is thinking about how an "evil" house is going to raise housing prices even further because people are only familiar with expensive housing because they made it illegal for inexpensive housing to exist, when policies like this reform are intended to allow inexpensive housing.
Stakkur is wrong :)
> Building exactly as much housing as needed would still result in lower prices
Yeah don't get me wrong here. Cities still need to allow developers to build.
Not building is not the solution and only limits supply and results in price pressure on the poor as we've seen in SF, as when a rental turns over a landlord jacks up the price.
My point is simply that private developer is not a panacea since eventually the profit motive stops them from building.
For prices to really fall you need a developer to build an over supply of housing, which means continuing to build in an environment where rental prices are falling and building more housing is worsening as an investment idea. You need developers without a profit motive.
This means that you need to have a government agency that is constantly building housing to meet a set vacancy target, regardless of whether or not it would be profitable to do so.
Anecdotal example - They're building an ~80 unit 3 story apartment complex at the end of a relatively busy street that serves as a main artery for accessing the light rail - so the neighborhood already sees somewhat higher than average street parking usage - and they're doing all of this on a lot that's barely bigger than the houses next to it.
If you're ever curious about how Portland's city council handles most of their issues, just take a look at where the vast majority of homeless shelters are located in the city (hint - its OldTown-Chinatown), compare that to the demographics of the area (Its as dark as Portland gets), and then take a guess where they intend to add more homeless shelters.
Here are the concerns that I do not see addressed with this:
1. Will the City of Portland make the required infrastructure improvements to support more density? For example, will the storm sewers, which currently overflow poo into the river, support all the extra.. poo.
1a. Will the city invest in roads and public transit? Walking and biking are both great, but Portland is cold, dark and wet for 7 months a year. No matter how easy and safe you make it, people won't want to ride in those conditions.
1b. Portland 911 systems are currently stressed beyond reason. I waited on hold for 4 minutes on 911 (not non-emergency) a few weeks ago. This isn't a rare occurrence.
1c. Will Portland address the tent in the room? Homelessness is endemic in the city, and it isn't _only_ due to lack of housing. The city has very few options for mental health and drug treatment. Will the city invest in that? If not, livability will be negatively impacted by this.
1d. Assuming COVID ever ends, will Portland be business friendly enough to attract employers to employ the expected glut of people? Right now, large business are leaving Portland (Google has halted its expansion plans for example).
1e. Will Oregon fund schools in a way that can account for the new residents? Schools are already over-crowded and Oregon has one of the worst graduation rates in the country. Will the city/state commit to building schools to support new students? If so, where? They are in-filling in neighborhoods with few plots available
2. This will disadvantage low-income workers who won't be able to afford the new houses. Though more density does lower prices, it normally lowers prices in the less desirable neighborhoods. People of means buy the new condos/townhomes that are built, leaving the poor to take the less nice houses or continue to live further out.
2a. The Utopian dream of a urban playground where everyone is walking and birds are chirping and there is Trek in every garage doesn't play for a majority of people. People rarely live where they work. This is not normally a personal choice. Other factors play into it. Being around their family, kids' friends, better schools, new job on the other side of town etc. I understand the myopia of the crowd on this site is to picture everyone has a well-connected and well-heeled tech worker, but reality is far different.
3. Tongue in cheek-isg: this is all celebrated within the same week as another story claiming people are abandoned the density of SFO, NYC, SEA to work remotely in towns like BOI, AUS, Bend etc. There is obviously a _desire_ to have land and space and privacy. If we go to a remote-first work world, why do we think that anyone would want to live in this density?
FWIW I currently live in comparatively non-dense socal and I'm planning on moving to Portland this fall. I plan to move into the Pearl district and work remote. I walk all the time (even when the weather is bad, it doesn't bother me) so I think it will be nice to have more than two coffee shops within walking distance. For context, my current city is just big enough to support a niche ice cream shop and some weird restaurants, but not big enough for there to be enough competitive pressure to force them to actually be good. It is nice when a market can be robust enough to force out poor competitors.
A lot of folks moving from real cities to rural areas may be shocked to find how bad the food, coffee, shopping, and arts scenes can be. There's nothing wrong with Walmart+Target, Starbucks+Dunkin'Donuts, Olive Garden+Outback Steakhouse, but it is IMO worth it to have more options, even at the expense of a large lawn and privacy from neighbors.
To follow up on the grandparent's point, the local and imported police are not really doing their job when it comes to breaking up street fights [1] and are trying to pin blame on recently-elected politicians [2]. We're not a shithole just because the fascists have come to town to have fights, and definitely not just because some of those fascists are employed by the federal government.
So, yeah, where are you from and what have you heard? It sounds like you don't know much of anything of our local situation, from "the other end of the world", although Oregon's antipode is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and you probably aren't quite so remote.
[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/zJ6dNxf
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-police-...
[2] https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2020/08/13/oregon-state-pol...
[3] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/22/1962969/-The-most...
[4] https://www.oregonlive.com/living/2020/04/a-drive-thru-strip...
The current mayor, Wheeler, is trying to walk a middle path. He might not survive re-election, as there are multiple candidates to his left who have indicated that they are more willing to tell the police to go home.
I find it telling that you cherry-pick which street fights reflect poorly on Portland. We have culturally been less and less accepting of street fascists over the past few years. And not all of us are violent, either; I've had heated but peaceful discussions with them up until last year, when the violence became an inevitable part of their platform.
Once the travel ban is lifted and the USA is safe to travel to, feel free to actually come and see for yourself what popular antifascism looks like.
I live 100 feet from the urban growth boundary. 20 minutes from downtown Portland. Nearest transit is a quarter mile away and the bus runs once an hour during daylight only. Nobody seems to mind that, houses in this area sell immediately. If you pushed the boundary out another mile it would take no time at all before it would be filled with new homes.