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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Cities and their existing residents have a right to protect the quality of life and neighborhood character they want. They are not obligated to accommodate newcomers and population influxes, nor should they be. Why does every attractive and desirable city have to be affordable or accessible? People need to stop being entitled and just move somewhere else where they can make ends meet, if they cannot cut it in a place that is in high-demand. No one is entitled to live wherever they want at whatever price they want.

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> Cities and their existing residents have a right

Palo Alto is a charter city. As such, it has special rights only insofar as those rights are delegated to it by the state of California. California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement. As things stand today, Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California. As such, the residents of California have every right to tell the residents of Palo Alto that they must rezone to allow denser housing. The state has the upper hand both legally and morally.

Palo Alto is happy to see the economic benefits of increased commerce to the Bay Area, but it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires. A tiny minority of wealthy homeowners benefit at the expense of a great mass of residents. This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.

> California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement.

I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss the legal angle, so I’ll set that aside. I disagree on the right claimed from a moral standpoint. It’s dystopian to think that the rights exercised by individuals or individual cities are only delegated to them by higher powers. At best, a situation where local powers are overridden by others at the state level amounts to a tyranny of the majority. In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important. Palo Alto is not the only city on this continent. People, and companies, can go elsewhere - including into the interior of the country outside of California.

> Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California.

Another way to look at it, is that residents of Palo Alto made a smart investment, or a lucky one - but that’s okay, and they’re allowed the spoils of that choice. Or maybe they don’t care about those economic benefits and economic change just happened to take place, around them.

> it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires.

Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs. There are many open jobs across the country, in many different locations. If those other jobs don’t provide the same pay or other conditions - well, that’s just life. No one can be entitled to only have a specific job in a specific city.

> This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.

High prices discourage continued population growth. Companies looking to hire and expand can set up in communities that have room or that welcome growth. Workers will go there, home prices in the Bay will change, the economy will be more distributed, and things will rebalance accordingly.

"Tyranny of the majority" Sounds like something Louis XVI might have said before he was beheaded.

There is something as protecting minorities. But wealthy nimbys aren't a minority that needs to be protected.

> In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important.

If you believe in locality of power, why stop at the town level? The property owner is the most hyperlocal possible unit, so they should have the right to build whatever they want on the land they own. They are local to their own property, their busybody neighbors are not.

That’s a reasonable argument. My feeling, which is a bit arbitrary, is that governmental power makes the most sense at the lowest layer (local government) and should be increasingly thin and limited in scope the further it gets from the layer of individuals. This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit, while sharing some fundamental rights and very basic services like a military across different communities. Unfortunately the ever-ballooning size and scope of government at the federal and state level has threatened that decentralized notion of sovereignty.

I agree, and hopefully we can all transact using cryptocurrency, making our money decentralized and sovereign as well.

> My feeling, which is a bit arbitrary

And there's the crux of the problem. You want to base housing policy on your arbitrary feelings, not on things that actually make for good and successful housing policy.

> This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit

I'm sure you aren't intending this, but that's just another way of saying that segregation and red-lining should be legal. Because that's the end result when you allow these types of decisions to be made at a local level, without allowing interference from a county, state, or federal government.

The way for people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully is to refuse to allow subsets of those people to impose their values on others.

In what world is a city deriving its charter from the state "dystopian?" Californian municipalities are wholly creatures of California state law. They derive their authority from the constitution of California, which grants them the power to enforce only "regulations not in conflict with general laws." If the California legislature wants to pass a law saying, "No more single-family zoning," the municipalities don't have a special constitutional right to ignore that, any more than they have the right to pass a law saying their residents can't sell a house to a disabled person, or that their citizens don't have to pay state tax.

There are some matters which are of enough interest to the entire state of California that the state narrowly prescribes how local institutions may interact with those resources. One existing example is the issue of water, which, as a scarce resource, is heavily regulated by article X of California's constitution [1]. Among other restrictions, article X straightforwardly makes water distribution a state concern: "The use of all water now appropriated... is hereby declared to be a public use, and subject to the regulation and control of the State." The consequence: if a city wants to pass its own particular water regulation, and the state of California disagrees, the city is out of luck.

Another issue the state might have a compelling interst in is the issue of housing. Like water, housing is a human necessity, and a scarce resource. This is especially true in the Bay Area, which is not contained in a single municipality, and which is thus subject to the rule of a number of governments whose competing and parochial interests naturally restrict housing supply in the entire region. Specifically, every locality wants to house the Bay Area's jobs, but it would prefer that neighboring localities house the Bay Area's people. The state of California is the only legal actor capable of fairly adjudicating this issue in such a way as to further the interests of residents of the entire region. This is why it would be perfectly legitimate for California to write laws forcing Bay Area cities to abandon overly restrictive zoning regulations.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

> Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs.

That would also work against local landowners' interests, though. If all the new (and potential new) workers decide they are getting a raw deal and live elsewhere, all the economic gains the locals have realized (including their inflated property values) will evaporate.

It seems like landowners want to have their cake and eat it too: reap the benefits of the economic expansion, but not take responsibility for its externalities.

Cities are not entitled to drain away a lot of state or regional tax money to get all the transportation and water infrastructure they want, but then refuse to let anyone live there. That's plainly unfair. Berkeley today has the same population it had in 1950, but in the interim we built all the freeways and subways that Berkeley needed to have a booming job economy. In 1950 Berkeley had zero subway stations and in 2021 it has three subway stations. If Berkeley had wanted to remain at this population level forever, the time to have decided that was half a century ago, before all the investments.

The state or regional tax money is the taxpayers’ money - including individual residents and other entities like companies or cities. It’s a rhetorical trick to pretend the money somehow belongs to the benevolent and powerful state, who forcefully collected this money in the first place. As such, I don’t think a city “owes” something back to the state. If the state had certain expectations, the time to have decided that was half a century ago, in the form of contractual obligations.

I agree with the sentiment but the Berkeley subway is not a great example. BART was planning to build above grade through Berkeley. Berkeley wanted a subway and had to make up the difference in cost.

Are you genuinely asking why people have a problem with necessities becoming unaffordably expensive?

There is no societal problem for which "just move away" is a solution.

I don't agree with the person you're replying to, but this is a bizarre take:

> There is no societal problem for which "just move away" is a solution.

Why make such an absolute?

Here are a collection of societal problems where "just move away" would be a great solution (some are dumb, but I think they're still valid):

* The local community has pushed towards street art in local parks. You strongly dislike street art.

* Your neighbours like to get drunk (in a non-violent way) every night. They're not overly noisy, but they have gross yards and you have a level of concern that the drunks will eventually make a terrible choice that impacts you (such as drunk driving into your bedroom).

* Lack of kids. You have a family of 4 and the local neighbourhood is filled with retired professionals with no kids. You want to live somewhere that enables your kids to socialise.

* Wayne, your long term neighbour, is using meth. He's managing his addiction very well, but he openly shoots up in the shed with his roller door open. You don't like seeing needle drug users shooting rock.

You can't tell the poor to "move away" from their place of residence. They mostly can't Even if their neighbor is a murderer.

The nimby situation is forcing the less fortunate people to commute beyond what is humane. A 2 hour commute is not healthy. And they CAN'T move away, mostly.

I'm not disagreeing with that at all.

My issue is with this absolute claim:

> There is no societal problem for which "just move away" is a solution.

That's just untrue and useless to claim. It doesn't help the conversation. Moving away can be a solution to a lot of problems. It might not be feasible in all cases, but it would still solve the problem at hand.

I'm not advocating for this at all. That doesn't change the fact it's a solution.

I'm curious which societal problems you think are fixed by moving? Indeed moving can resolve the issue for a given individual but I cannot think of any situation in which moving solves the underlying problem.

None of these are what I would call "societal problems".

2 and 4 are problems with individuals, not a society.

That 1 and 3 are, in your words, "dumb", really does affect their validity. These are things you can live with. Unaffordable rent, not as much.

The problem isn't "My rent is too high", the problem is "The rent is too high everywhere I'd want to live". It's affecting a whole population; that's what makes it societal.

> Cities and their existing residents have a right to protect the quality of life and neighborhood character they want. They are not obligated to accommodate newcomers and population influxes, nor should they be.

A right according to who? Since when is infringing on other people's freedoms and property rights by banning them from developing their own private land, in order to satisfy your own aesthetic preferences, at the expense of making millions people homeless, underhoused, or forcing them to move away from their social and economic networks, a fundamental right?

From a conservative perspective, private property rights reign supreme and you have no right to tell people what they can build on their land. From a progressive, social-welfare-maximizing viewpoint, other people's need for shelter where they want to live supersedes your aesthetic preferences. Regardless of your ideological underpinnings, your brand of NIMBYism is completely indefensible.

> People need to stop being entitled and just move somewhere else where they can make ends meet, if they cannot cut it in a place that is in high-demand. No one is entitled to live wherever they want at whatever price they want.

I'm sorry, who is being "entitled" here:

1. The person who wants to build a multifamily building on the land they paid for.

2. The person who wants to live in the same place they grew up, and where all their friends and family currently are, and who is willing to enter into a consensual commercial transaction with (1) to procure said housing.

3. The busybody who wants to dictate what other people can build and where they can live because they don't like seeing a two-story walk-up down the block from where they live?

You are so warped by your own sense of entitlement that you don't realize you are the one making unreasonable demands of other people, not the other way around, because you see those unreasonable demands as your god given right.

> Why does every attractive and desirable city have to be affordable or accessible?

The only reason why many people have no access to these desirable things is because of bad policy, not because these things are intrinsically scarce. If we can fix bad policy to allow more people to have desirable things, that is good for societal welfare. More good things for more people is good, actually.

So, "I got here first" is the way that we want to manage an increasing population, increasing costs of living, and a shortage of housing in the important cities that are an major source of our national prosperity?

That is how national borders work. The rich love borders.

Ah yes, "neighborhood character", that pervasive dog whistle.

For a practical consideration, California might look towards the future and seriously consider the population limits imposed by water scarcity. But even there, sufficient political will and investment could start desalinating out of the readily available ocean. Sure, it's horribly power inefficient, but it's there, and so is abundant solar power potential, meaning that the only final concerns are NIMBY and environmental concerns, of which the latter, at least, are serious (but in the face of water shortages, should be discounted, and if the current long-term drought trend holds, we should probably start assuming shortages and boiling some fish sooner than later).

It’s not a dog whistle - come on, that’s just an incredibly tired way to dismiss arguments one disagrees with by insinuating something sinister. People have a right to protect what they cherish and the communities they’ve helped build. The entitlement of others who want the same doesn’t justify weird and vague labels like “dog whistle”.

Also, NIMBY is a tired and dismissive pejorative. It’s just an ad hominem attack that is fashionable among “urbanists”.

'Neighborhood character' usually means 'keep the minorities out'

What about the people that bitch when "Chinatown" is "gentrified", how is that keeping the minorities out?

That’s just it - I don’t think it usually means that. However I do think that’s what urbanist activists usually claim it means, because spreading such a claim is a way to demonize others who legitimately value different things from them. For me, neighborhood character means lots of single-family housing, buildings of a few stories at most along arterial roads, ample sunlight at street level, great driving infrastructure (limited traffic and easy parking), lots of greenery, low to no crowding at amenities like parks, knowing my neighbors, and other such factors. These things made my town a great place to live, and subsequently newcomers who wanted the same thing came, until there were too many desiring the same thing. Then they complained about the increasing costs from that demand, and now they demand that the entire city change its character to accommodate them - therefore destroying what incumbents slowly built up and also that which attracted these newer residents in the first place.

I am happy for all of us to have the same thing. But that means distributing the economy among many towns, rather than forcefully turning every thriving town into New York City. That requires time and effort. People cannot expect to get the same thing instantly at whatever cost they can bear. To me, that still feels like entitlement.

What do you think of the communities shown here:

https://twitter.com/AndrewAPrice/status/1459512492489592832

I think there is a middle ground between wanting a human-scaled neighborhood with character and beauty that you love and are committed to preserving, and also increasing density by more than the current SFH-only cities with big buildings on large lots.

I live in San Francisco, so I probably can't directly compare my situation with yours (I assume you live elsewhere, somewhere with even lower density). I moved here 11 years ago, in part because of things that no longer exist here because of rising property costs. I've watched my favorite restaurants, bars, and shops close because they couldn't afford rent anymore. I've seen great people move away for the same reason.

Also consider that last bit: how many people have had to leave your town because newcomers have priced them out? It's not just new people moving in who are upset with higher housing costs.

I like density. We don't need to turn into NYC, at least not into Manhattan. Brooklyn's density allows for a ton of 2- and 4-plex neighborhoods, with some SFHs mixed in here and there. Their density is at least twice that of SF's. If you want to live in an urban environment, it's ludicrous to expect any significant amount of single-family homes. And yet SF has square miles of exactly that.

The thing is, you can't snap your fingers and make housing demand go away. This is the thing that baffles me most about all the opposition to new housing here. It's like people believe that if they just stick their fingers in their ears and yell "NA NA NA NA GO AWAY NA NA NA" for long enough, all the newcomers will just go away. And maybe they will, in a few decades, but the increases in property values will go away with them. Which is funny, because as much as you talk about "character", the main reasons I see people wanting to "preserve their neighborhoods" is to preserve their property values.

Your argument is just as tired. It made sense in the boomer days when a good job and hard work guaranteed a home. My dad bought his first for about $6000.

Decades of under building, greed, nimbys and their needed character, have eliminated that guarantee, or even possibility. As well as any tears for incredibly rich obstructionists to progress.

I grew up in a small town in North Carolina. People used to openly oppose the county's (very limited) public transit and would outright say "we don't want n----rs bringing crime to our neighborhood".

Today, people don't say that because they know it'll get them put through the wringer on social media and/or immediately get their opinions discarded. Instead, you hear "keep out the riff-raff," "preserve our neighborhood's character," etc. from the exact same people who previously dropped the N-word like their salvation depended on it.

Same shit, different flavors. Personally, I prefer the former since you get to know exactly who to avoid associating with.

That’s not an unreasonable opinion, but to answer your question “why”, the answer is because a democratically elected state legislature has decided it’s in the best interest of their constituents to make it this way. And state power supersedes municipal power.

Nobody’s upzoned a state over one nice expensive neighborhood but when the crisis starts harming the state economy, then the state legislature obviously cares.

And no one is entitled to continually live in an unchanging, ungrowing, ever-appreciating in value community that is the same as 1970. We all live in a society. Though I am sympathetic to your argument too. Not everyone can live in manhattan and it should be more expensive.

Then they can quit complaining about people who get priced out, can't afford to leave, and end up on the streets.

I think that’s unfair. First off, most people I know who are alarmed at the upzoning pushed by activists would also be sympathetic towards the situation you are describing, within limits. The problem is that homelessness activists purposely conflate two very different groups - those who are homeless due to bad luck and those who are simply irresponsible (permanent nomads, drug addicted vagrants, and so on). The latter group needs to face the rule of law and experience consequences, not be coddled and encouraged to live at others’ expense.

Drug addicts are not irresponsible. They are sick. They can't improve without help: treatment and accompainment. It is a mental health issue. Stop dehumanizing people.

If you push them too hard they will either kill themselves or kill you. It is not a choice.

It's feels a bit weird to call "getting priced out of your home and out onto the streets due to bad housing policy" as "bad luck".

Sure, there are homeless people who moved here specifically because they know the homeless have a not-terrible deal here (not great, but often better than most other places), but I don't see the evidence that these people are in the majority.

Oh, and consider that a lot of the homeless people who are drug addicts or have mental health issues became addicts or developed mental health issues as a result of their homelessness. You have the causality backwards for a lot of folks.

> not be coddled and encouraged to live at others’ expense.

In SF at least, in many (most?) cases it'd be cheaper for the city to just pay to put people in permanent housing (and for mental health and addiction services), than it currently costs to keep them in temporary shelters, plus the cost to deal with disturbances, jail time, cleanups, drug use, violence, medical emergencies, and so on. But no, we can't have that... can't give people things they didn't work to deserve. We'd rather cut off our noses to spite our faces.

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