Why California liberals turn into raging conservatives over housing
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
But, yeah, it still tends to be the liberals who are the worst NIMBYs. That's just a result of them believing markets are unable to solve the problem.
https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2020pres...
It doesn’t seem to be genuine interest in solving the problem, because I’ve never once seen answers to even the most obvious concerns with one-track “build more housing in the already-densest areas with no plan to expand the already-overstressed infrastructure” advocacies that are seemingly so popular.
Walking through San Francisco is already an exercise in avoiding a never-ending canvas of human shit stains (some dog shit, but mostly human shit). Every public transit system underserves the transit needs and every terminal is overrun with discarded humans.
But yes let’s cram in a shitload more housing and just wave our hands about all the remaining infrastructure, social work, culture change and community-building that would actually make the city a better place.
In practical terms, a suburb HAS to be build with new infra — nobody will move into a community without roads and plumbing.
Conversely, it’s pretty easy to clear legal obstacles to various developments. You don’t have to spend, plan, organize anything to achieve that. But adding lanes, adding terminals, fixing roads, upgrading transit systems, connecting deeply-struggling with services that exist for them… all these things take human effort and non-trivial resources.
If we don’t have a political climate where you can pass your comprehensive raft of urban reform (each of which will have a variety of entrenched interests fighting back), passing JUST housing reform to open the floodgates to developers seems like far less of an obviously-good idea. It seems like it will make things net worse.
Yes fixing infrastructure is hard but what is your alternative here?
San Mateo County is 69% rural, Santa Clara County is 74% rural, Alameda County is 63% rural, Contra Costa County is 57% rural and Marin is 84% rural. There are plenty of places to put suburbs. It's just not allowed. Yes you would need to build more roads.
But progressives don't like roads. And progressives don't like suburbs. If they have to choose between new roads and suburbs on one hand and a housing shortage on the other had, well visit San Francisco. You can see and smell the choices they've made.
There's an exceedingly obvious third choice, increase density. There's no reason for transit connected areas of a major city to be legally limited to single family zoning.
That's exactly my point. You don't have a shortage of land in the Bay Area. You have progressives who would rather have people sleep on the street than build on that land.
That's called false dichotomy. If you took all the land in the bay area that people aren't allowed to build on and you allowed developers to build single family homes on all that land, that's what, a million homes? You tell me. You could do infill, zoning, transit, all that, and still build a million new houses too.
It's a choice. And the choice people are making is let's do none of that, let's do precisely none of that. Which is fine, but just stop with the whining.
People made choices.