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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

> Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.

You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?

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From what I've read, infrastructure for SFH is much more expensive to build and maintain, because each mile serves so many fewer people, and because the land is basically under-utilized, so the city collects less property tax from it. (One million-dollar SFH vs 8 500k apartments in a 4-plex, for example)

The most expensive infrastructure, schools, actually mostly scale with the number of people, not the amount of land used for each house. So throwing in a bunch of high density apartments can quickly overwhelm the local school system, requiring a decade or two to catch up (and why property taxes generally scale with occupancy limits). Having kids take classes in trailers is a bit of a bummer.

because of a series of ballot measures over the past 2 decades, CA/LA has plenty of money to build schools, so that’s not a problem here (e.g., our billion dollar high school).

It takes around a decade to build a new school. You also need space for it, but they can usually bring in a bunch of trailers in the meantime.

they’ve been continuously building schools in LA because of the luxurious funding. at least 3 new schools within walking distance have gone up in my neighborhood over the past decade. schools just aren’t a problem for densification here.

Has LA become particularly more dense over the last decade in your area? If not, then they should have no planning problems as long as they have funding. But someone decided to build a bunch of apartments over a few short years, you could quickly saturate your school infrastructure (and not to mention teacher hiring) until the school system could catch up.

to some extent, but that doesn't matter since the point is that we have plenty of schools and the money to build enough new schools, even if we built ten high rises in my neighborhood. sure, at the theoretical limit it could be a problem, but that isn't anywhere close to the primary limiting factor in the foreseeable future.

I didn’t mean for my comment to come off as a defence of the status quo there. I think it’s obviously a very stupid way to run a city. But fixing it requires very large capital expenditures, a decent amount of rather complicated planning, and taking on some big projects that could go wrong in any number of ways.

In addition to not being as simple as the only having to solve the stupid zoning problem, it presents a number of risks that you’d expect certain types of politicians to be averse to.

It also takes a long time for the benefits of any of those changes to manifest, which doesn’t really align with political incentives either. “If you elect me 2-3 more times then things will start to improve over the next 10 years or so” isn’t a very compelling campaign slogan.

In terms of funding those services, and specifically in the case of California, newcomers to a city bear an outsized share of the burden, because Prop 13 locked in low tax rates for long term owners. So if anything, new development would facilitate providing and improving those services. You can see that, in practice, cities suffering municipal bankruptcies are those who fail to grow steadily.

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