Why would they allow more housing to be built? That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. Discard any notion that all but a very small minority of policymakers are truly motivated by ideology.
In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart.
This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.
HN in general has this disease, but it's pretty prevalent in STEM fields in general- The "I know how to solve a differential equation so that means I am a rational decision maker" disease.
It's important to acknowledge that the more education a person has the more likely they are to reverse-engineer a reason to think something that they want to think, especially when it comes to emotionally charged issues like those that politicians encounter every day.
Having technical skills does not automagically make you a good leader or policymaker. It just means you have good technical skills.
I would go so far as to say there are probably more people with good technical skills that should not be making policy than the opposite.
In context, a STEM background is someone who has and can actually engineer or science. Writing some code doesn't qualify. Every human on the planet should be able to design an experiment and do basic statistics. I think the bar we have for our fellow human should be much higher than it currently is. The moniker, that person is an "Every (Hu)Man" , should be a badge of honor.
There’s a bit of both, but it’s not a conspiracy. Most cities have this problem (even outside US), because the issue is that most baby boomers have their financial health tied in real estate.
This makes those policies ideal, because they look like attacking the problem without really fixing anything.
Just because the policy makers are dumb, doesn't mean that the voters behind them are too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States#...
I also suspect many believe the solution to this problem is to "stop electing idiots" when in reality the solution is to stop expecting government to solve the problem, and recognize we should remove the power from the government and allow private actors to solve it
It's rough that talent in these large cities generally flows to the megacorps or private companies in general.
I'd personally love to leave my tech job temporarily for city govt if the pay/environment was similar.
Turns out I preferred studying Hamilton instead of Hamiltonians.
Is that on top of all the house building that has been done and is being done still? If they are so incompetent, why are new town homes, condos, and apartment complexes popping up all over the place?
Sure, it still can't keep up with demand...a 25% growth in population over the last decade is no joke. But Seattle is nowhere near as dysfunctional as SF, at the very least.
All the growth is concentrated on like 5% of the land and unaffordable for normal people. Open it all up for development.
Genuinely smart people are usually satisfied with their own line of work, or realize that politicians and their families in the age of (a)social networks are subject to constant barrage of unhinged hate messaging and threats emanating from the Internet. So they think twice before even entering the race for any public office.
We would probably be better off with sortition (basically, drawing lots and choosing random people to serve in legislatures).
It's not about whether they're smart people or not, it's about whether they're smarter than the problem they're trying to solve.
I, aware of the risk of Dunning-Kruger effect, nonetheless consider myself to be a pretty smart guy. I'm a well-educated a computer engineer; I score well in interviews, in exams, and also in Trivial Pursuit. But the steel, silicon, and copper that I work with and am respected for is highly predictable. Electrons and hydraulic fluid are intimidating to a layman but with a bit of education and experience can be broken down into understandable subcomponents and reliable mathematics.
Back in school, we engineers with our mathematical, physics-based hard science liked to denigrate the 'soft science' employed in educational, social, and political fields. However, after further growth, I've come to realize that physics is simple and people are really, really complicated.
The less popular narrative that’s just as true, at least in California if you pay attention to the politics, is that PHIMBYs who are mostly renters and insist on 100% affordable or nothing, play just as big a role.
If you look at who blocked SB50 or who pitched the “Mission moratorium , it was PHIMBY renters.
It’s easy to rally people up against greedy rich people. But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.
You can agree or disagree with the PHIMBY position but most people find it complex enough they just pretend that faction doesn’t exist despite the huge role it plays.
Basically don't exist. AHIMBYs do, but even people who demand affordable units don't want public units anywhere close to where they live.
> But the elephant in the room is that so much resistance comes from poor people who think “luxury housing” (aka anything market rate) will lead to more gentrification.
In any place without open space, the only way to build new housing is redevelopement; if you target the top of the market (which is what “market rate” housing means), you cannot have any hyperlocal (and wider, on a short-term scale) effect besides more gentrification.
The intermediate term, wider area (but still somewhat local) effect may be more affordable housing as existing housing becomes more down-market through competitive forces, but that also could be offset by further increasing nonhousing costs and reduction in nonhousing services targeting the lower income segment as the gentrifiers reshape local markets.
If the rent wasn't controlled then the nice apartments would be available at $3500 and the pee/laundry baskebetball ones would be available at least at $700/mo for those that need housing.
does it actually work that way? a large part of land value seems to come from network effects: the more densely populated a region, the more valuable each sqft.
upzoning a plot often seems to be an immediate profit, too. SFH worth $1M, gets upzoned, suddenly a developer can pay $2M for the plot and tear down the house + build high-density units that are very valuable.
maybe values fall once you overbuild, but i have yet to see that in my lifetime.
Long term they’ll be worth more, but short term prices will go down.
No one sees prices really go down because that could trigger another ‘08 style collapse. Banks are less leveraged, but there’s a lot of people with mortgages too big for their sake.
Yes, density drives up the price of land, but much of the value of a home isn't land value; poorer people in the neighborhood drives down the value per square foot of existing dwelling because people with money don't want to live near people without money by and large, both directly and indirectly. (E.g., better off people want to, and will pay a premium to, live near “good schools”, but there is pretty solid evidence that almost none of the difference in the things which people look to to assess that is due to the school itself, it is almost entirely incidental consequences of the demographics of the students attending the school: “good schools” aren't ones that make better students, they are made by better students.)
Until the potential realizable by dense redevelopment drives up the land value so much that the added land value exceeds the lost value of the existing improvements, it's a loss, and even then it's a gain that can only be realized by abandoning the home, which becomes a liability that needs to be dealt with to unlock the value.
Homeowners want the value of their home to increase, but often what they more specifically want is to continue living in the home while leveraging greater equity to enhance their lifestyle. This is not served by land value increases (even if they reach the level of net property value increases after decrease in value of existing improvements) that are only accessible by redevelopment. People who live in homes they own are not like absentee owners and tend to ascribe significant value to existing community character and significant negative value to moving, on top of theit investment interests in the property.
This is also why the most vocal NIMBYs are often senior citizens who plan to live in their home till they die. They don't benefit from the higher land values at all, because they never intend to sell the property, and will be dead before somebody reaps the financial gains. However, they have to deal with all the community externalities, and they're often at a stage in their life where they're least suited for that.
there was a time in this scenario when those schools and public infrastructure didn't exist. presumably, the thing which justified their build-out was an earlier increase in density. one would therefore expect further increases in density to justify more forms of (or larger scale) public infrastructure. what scenarios would lead one to value the existing public infrastructure but not value the future public infrastructure? is it just a problem of time horizons/discounting (i.e. that the negative externalities of upscaling are immediate while the positives accrue over a longer time period)? that would seem to align with the anecdote about seniors, at least. but then i'm curious how the original community ever overcame these tradeoffs in order to achieve enough density and construct the earlier forms of public infrastructure.
A cluster of 4 1000-pop villages will usually share an elementary school, with students bussed 10-20 miles to it. A 4000-pop light suburban town will have its own elementary school, usually one where parents will drive their kids 1-2 miles to it. A 4000-pop dense suburban development will place a 1-2 story elementary school and associated park & fields inside the middle of the neighborhood, where most students can walk to it via footpaths without crossing major roads. A 4000-pop urban neighborhood will build a 4-6 story schoolhouse on a major avenue where all the students are close by.
A cluster of villages or small towns will have 2-lane roads snaking between major village centers. A dense suburban neighborhood has a road hierarchy, 6-lane boulevards with commercial strip malls, fed by 2-lane residential streets. An urban neighborhood builds mass transit.
In each case, you can't really upgrade the existing infrastructure to the point where it's appropriate for the new density. You have to tear it down and build it a different way, at a cost that's usually higher and more disruptive than just building it a different way in the first place.
It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. That's how we got the infrastructure in the first place: land developers generally subdivided undeveloped farm/ranch/wilderness land, and sold it to people living in overcrowded tenements in the city. Or in the case of Europe/Japan/Russia/China, bombed the hell out of each other until all the infrastructure was destroyed and then built new infrastructure from scratch to house the survivors. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek-yet-actually-practical way of looking at this might be to treat cities as disposable, with a lifetime of a few generations, and then once the people outgrow them it's time to abandon the city and build a new one.
the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases.
this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).
This is a culture war first and foremost. It's racism, classism, and fear of the unknown.