Hacker News Reader

Comment by heyda | Hacker News Reader

I think you're thinking about the problem in the reverse order, it costs money per foot to lay down a street, sewage lines, internet, electricity, gas ect. If there are more units per square foot it makes more economical sense for everything. It's the reason rural regions still use septic tanks and DSL internet, it's expensive to lay it down. Think of it this way, if it costs 10k/year for a quarter acre lot to have access to a city municipality and to pay for the road maintenance but you double the units of housing on the lot, all of a sudden it costs 5k/year per unit on the quarter acre lot (plus a little bit for a second hookup.) This means not only do you have more units of total housing but a more economical infrastructure.

View on HN

Money per foot is one thing. But the actual total infrastructure on that street has to be up to snuff before you build, while money can be taxed later.

I think the reasoning behind this is "create a problem, solve a problem". If you never create the problem there's no incentive to solve it. You have other problems instead, like homelessness and crime.

In mathematical terms, you're stuck in a local maxima, and to get to a higher global maxima you need to descend the gradient a little bit and put up with some short-term pain.

It's supposed to work with the promoter applying for a permit, and if it makes sense either it's granted or the infra is built.

Failing infrastructure can have disastrous impacts. It's not somewhere where you can afford to move fast and break stuff. There is no alternative to competent government here, no easy way out.

It's not really possible to move quick and break things, there are only so many home builders, carpenters, electricians, plumbers ect. I agree that failing infrastructure can absolutely have disastrous impacts but city councils in America are not run by the most competent people with decent foresight from what I have seen, they see that a bus route runs 95% capacity every morning at 9am, do nothing, a few months later, it's 105%, people start complaining, then they add another bus during that period and repeat the cycle. The only time I have seen infrastructure be built in advance of new housing is when a construction builds the infrastructure along with a new suburban housing development, which is great for the first 30 years, the taxes on those new houses only needs to be like 3k/year for police/fire/ect because everything is new, except after 30 years then the roads need to be repaved, sewers redone, ect, a 10k+/yr bill starts hitting and the local government is all confused about how to pay for it with the 3k/yr they are collecting, rinse, repeat. Local governments just aren't good at predicting usages until they happen.

The root of the issue is the competency of the local government. That has to be fixed.

Things can get built fairly rapidly in many places if all restrictions are removed. You can definitely move fast and break things.

This is precisely why municipalities are permitted to impose exactions on a project--so that developers can't unfairly offload infrastructure costs on the public. If the additional sewage volume of a project is going to overflow pipes 5 miles away, municipalities can and regularly do exact fees as a condition of approval to cover the costs of upgrades.

Unfortunately, these days exactions are also abusively imposed to offset the supposed costs of "gentrification" and other unquantifiable social phenomena, and sometimes the dollar value of such imaginary costs conspicuously set so high as to make a development financially unviable. This is how cities like SF force developers to include below-market-rate units or to make cash contributions to low-income housing projects, even when a project is not actually displacing any pre-existing tenants.

That cashflow problem can be addressed through bonds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com