Why America can’t build | Hacker News Reader

Why America can’t build

palladiummag.com

537 pointsfra884 comments

It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians.

My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender.

I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!

I half wonder if you live in my city because your description matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all over the country.

As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community.

What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.

    What we need is real leadership from politicians 
    who are willing to stake their tenure in office on 
    pushing projects through.

Easy to say, but our current system proves that it selects for politicians of exactly the opposite ilk.

How do we change the system?

Maybe by getting younger people to vote more? (I know this has been tried since forever, but have we tried everything?)

And, holding public comment hearings outside of traditional working hours so that non-retired people have a fair shot?

IDK seems pretty hopeless..

I got some ideas:

Could just put a ballot at the end of tax forms. Just piggy back the ID confirm the IRS does. Doesn't have to be mandatory. Give a $5 tax credit for filling it out. People who don't pay taxes can vote normally or by mail.

Universal mail in voting. I'd go as far as to make mail in voting the only way to vote.

Make every state have the same voting day (primaries/general). This helps reduce media influence on the elections.

Get rid of first past the post voting. Allows for more political parties, increasing the odds people are engaged with one of the parties. Something like ranked choice would keep their vote relevant even if their preference didn't make the cut.

It's infuriating to me when people recognize there is a problem, yet toss up their hands and not try new things. How is repeating the same thing going to get different results?

You know what I hear in this thread? Combined, posts have said that NIMBYs, a tiny minority, who always vote, show up to council meetings, and politicians listen to them, and yet everyone here trying to figure out what is broken.

Well, nothing is broken, except non-NIMBYs dont care enough to do the same!

The answer is simple. Show up to council meetings and vote! If you don't, you don't care as much as the NIMBYs, and the result is clear.

Nothing is broken, it is called democracy.

That’s not true. There’s lots of ways that things are rigged in favor of NIMBYs. For example, environmental review laws enable a NIMBY minority to file bogus lawsuits that add years of delays (during which time developers still have to pay mortgages on property that aren’t allowed to start developing).

> except non-NIMBYs dont care enough to do the same! Show up to council meetings and vote!

The zoning meeting for my city is the same night as my kid has scouts. This is why I don't show up: I have other things going on in my life. Even if they did pick a night where there is nothing else, I really want to get into my shop and build something and this meeting is taking that time away from me.

There is another problem: the people showing up for school board and causing problems are not the same as showing up for zoning and causing problems. And there is also the library and parks board, each either their own meetings I could show up for. Different groups show up for each, and I cannot counter them all.

I feel you. It comes down to prioritise a d you have made yours clean. As many others act the same there are only very few at the meeting to voice with your side. We only need to mobilize a few to go to one meeting....

And it happens and it works, I've seen YIMBY groups "win" but it has taken them years of continually working on the same thing to finally get it through.

Sometimes it ends up going all the way to Congress: http://www.startribune.com/obama-gives-his-approval-to-bridg...

You can't YIMBY generic things like "more bike paths" or "better roads" you have to identify particular projects and build a group that will support it, and work on it for years sometimes. For lots of things, there are groups that can help out there, you just have to find them. And part of that "working" at it is listening to the NIMBYs so you can understand their concerns (even if the leadership of a NIMBY group is batshit, the people "on their side" at least resonate with some of them) and work to mitigate/solve them.

And be prepared to take advantage of disasters to push your side forward.

The problem is not just that a vocal minority us opposed. Our political ruthlessness and acumen is so high, that project that is longer than a politician's term will leave them open to sound bites they can't recover from. It puts them in a position at reelection time of having all the cost, and none of the payoff. And more than likely, the project is harder and more costly than planned. And by the way, the party can't afford to not control that seat going into the national election.

Neither side can tackle anything that can't be roi positive by election time. Most of those projects are "deck chairs on the titanic" value propositions.

    [any] project that is longer than a politician's term 
    will leave them open to sound bites they can't recover 
    from. It puts them in a position at reelection time 
    of having all the cost, and none of the payoff.

Yeah, this is my take. We've designed a system in which literally all that matters is continually preparing for the next election, which is typically not more than four years away for any politician.

I challenge anybody who thinks this is okay to take a long, hard look at their own lives and think about what they've accomplished in the last four years. Hell, it took me three years just to get my garage door replaced for a variety of reasons.

Four years might have been enough time to do something meaningful back when a mayor's biggest project might have been, I don't know, installing new hitching posts for horses on Main St. It's not enough time to do anything today, and that's why nothing gets done.

And yet, I don't know the answer. Longer terms for politicians seems like they would create as many problems as they would solve.

>Yeah, this is my take. We've designed a system in which literally all that matters is continually preparing for the next election, which is typically not more than four years away for any politician.

I'd go even further than that. It's not just politicians who engage in short-term thinking, corporations engage in even shorter term thinking as well.

In fact, I'd posit that much of the division in our society is related to such short-term thinking.

When manufacturing and farm jobs (primarily, but not entirely through automation) started to go away, it was clear that things needed to change in order to maintain a semblance of parity throughout the country.

Rather than slashing funds for infrastructure and transportation 40+ years ago, we should have employed those folks who were losing their jobs to build high-speed rail, housing and infrastructure throughout the country, making it possible for folks to continue living where they were and have jobs elsewhere.

And 25 years ago, we should have started building out municipal Internet infrastructure all over the country, even in rural areas, instead of giving giant corporations tens of billions to do nothing.

But instead we ignored these problems (as such projects would take decades) and folks in exurbs and rural areas became detached from the economic engines that drive the economy -- causing many folks (especially young folks) to abandon the places their families had lived for generations.

This devastated many communities. Having high speed transporation and Internet could revitalize many of these communities, through start ups, work from home and fast transport to regional population centers.

That would bring money into the local economies and create incentives for new housing, business (all those people will need stuff -- food, housing, household appliances, etc., etc., etc.) and include those areas in the economic engine that made the US so successful.

But since we didn't do that, folks in well connected (transportation and network-wise) areas have flourished, while people in areas that don't have seen their communities shrivel, their outlook sour and their futures crumble before their eyes.

Is it any wonder that many of those folks feel neglected and left out? No. Because they have been.

And as the population centers prosper, the folks who have been left behind see their fellow Americans as destroying their world by ignoring and neglecting their infrastructure, talents and the enormous human capital that they represent.

But no. The politicians won't think past the next election (although the infrastructure bill is a start -- just 40 years too late) and corporations rarely look past the next quarterly (or if we're lucky, annual) earnings reports.

And if we don't alter course to make all Americans welcome and part of the larger society, we're just going to see more suspicion and ill will that will continue to divide us.

I wish I knew how to fix that, but I don't. So all I can hope for at this point is that I'll be dead before we rip our country apart.

And more's the pity.

In my experience - certainly in the bike lane example I gave above - the NIMBYs are a minority. A vocal one, yes - but still a minority. If a politician is only concerned about their career, surely a popular project like bike lanes would garner them more votes the next time around?

Thinking about this more, at least in my city it seems like one of the problems is that for a generation now, politicians have consistently outsourced decisionmaking to a poll of the community.

In theory, one elects a politician to be independent decisionmaker for the constituent's interests, for the length of their term; and if at the end of the term the people didn't like their decisions, they're voted out. This gave politicians latitude to do what they thought was best, with the greater good of the community in mind.

In the past half century, (and again, only in my city) this model seems to have changed to politicians being elected, and then running every decision past the community as a kind of popularity poll. Developer wants to replace an auto lot that's been abandoned for a decade with dense apartments? Better poll the community to see what they think. Adding a protected bike lane to connect two existing bike networks? Let's ask the community first. And of course when they do that, the only people who show up are the NIMBYs, and the politicians get the impression that nobody wants development.

The NIMBYs have spoken, we better leave that disused auto lot abandoned and blighted! (And this is a real example from today's news!)

Politicians listen to the people who talk to them. NIMBY’s are highly organized and politically active, so politicians listen. Generally there isn’t a counter group or they are poorly organized and don’t hold much political weight.

You’d be surprised what you can accomplish if you’re organized. A prof I worked with was able to introduce a bill to congress (that he wrote with the congressmen’s staff) simply because he built a relationship and then proposed something the congressmen liked.

The issue is the vast majority of voters do nothing more than vote.

From what I've seen in Toronto and after having spoken with a local councillor, the thing is that those NIMBY show up to all consultation meetings.

Any new bike lane require a community consultation (which is a problem in itself!, but let's forget that for a minute)... but who comes to those? The working class families that have to take care of their kids in the evening? Or older folks that have no other plans on a random week night? Before COVID all those meetings were in person at some community center. Of course for any cyclist to get there, they'd need to bike on a street with no bike lanes. So who shows up? People in cars!

Things are slightly easier now because lots of those meetings moved online with Zoom, making it more accessible to a bunch of new people. But I'd recommend (if you're not doing it already!) to keep showing up to all consultation meetings, because that's the only way things get done.

Concillor was telling me it was hard to make a case to the civic servant that they should keep pushing for bike lanes when ALL consultations kept only getting opposition. Even thought they all knew it was likely more popular, but it's hard to argue with the "democratic" process.

How is that democratic? At best it's a farce.

If there was no vote then it's just some arbitrary evaluation of that consultation. I mean what's the procedure to calculate the for-against of a public comment?

Isn't the elected officials (supervisors, councilors) elected to do the campaign based on what they think their voters would want?

Isn't there a bike club or some other token NGO they ought to invite? :o

IMHO, the core of the problem is that elected politicians are asking constituents in the first place. I elected a politician to represent my interests for X years so I can get on with my life. I didn't elect a politician so they can constantly ask me if it's OK for them to build Thing X, then Thing Y, then Thing Z...

I wonder how much more a politician could accomplish if they simply stopped asking? Like, do the job they were elected to do, and not constantly be going to the popularity poll, where it's going to be nobody but NIMBYs filling out 'nay' forms?

Just do it! If it truly upsets the community, they can always knock it down at the next election, right?

No politician ever was embroiled in a scandal because they asked for too much feedback from their constituency. Expecting them to act counter to their interests is not very realistic, especially when you consider that the same NIMBYs who attend these meetings are the ones that vote in hugely disproportionate numbers. They might be a minority, but they have the time and the resources to use their political power and as such are very influential in modern policy.

I agree and disagree. I think it is valuable to get input from constituents, especially on infrastructure, but it also doesn't need to be the sole dictating thing. I think getting input to be able to nail down the pros vs cons is reasonable. Especially since, in a city, the project may be in a part of town they are rarely in or do not live in. But for sure, it should not be the full deciding factor but a way to get a scope of the full pros vs cons. Then evaluate if the points brought up were valid, then finally if the pros outweigh the cons.

Why not just do statistically valid polling?

The problem is that politicians run this weird highly skewed sampling method of "community input" and then think they've got the pulse of the community, where in fact they've just heard from loudmouths with too much time on their hands.

A statistical poll would at least show what the actual constituency wants, not the loud, bored subset.

The subset problem is also why we see much more extreme politics in cities among elected positions that have less visibility: city council members tend to be much more extreme than mayors, because the latter has greater voter participation.

You need to get a poll of people who will vote in the next election should this pass, and a different poll for people who will vote in the next election should this fail to pass. Note that different people will show up should this pass vs not pass, and it is people who turn up on election day that matter (show up means their ballot is counted, absentee ballots count as showing up)

This is very different from statistical polling.

This sounds like objecting to something much better than the awful practice today because it’s not theoretical perfection.

Also, politicians actually are supposed to represent all of their constituents, not just the ones that vote. There is no incentive to do so of course, but that is what they are supposed to do.

Polling is what you do to provide evidence to support doing what you already want done.

> IMHO, the core of the problem is that elected politicians are asking constituents in the first place.

Those constituents are the ones paying for said projects, so yeah it’s kind of important that everyone is on board before committing money.

>Any new bike lane require a community consultation (which is a problem in itself!, but let's forget that for a minute)... but who comes to those? The working class families that have to take care of their kids in the evening? Or older folks that have no other plans on a random week night? Before COVID all those meetings were in person at some community center. Of course for any cyclist to get there, they'd need to bike on a street with no bike lanes. So who shows up? People in cars!

I wonder if you could have something like jury duty for these meetings, where a dozen people from the community are selected to comment each week or something.

Pseudo randomly selected, then informed for like 3 days about the issues, discuss it themselves for a day then vote.

And we should do this for each issues

NIMBYs will just lobby these people. I've seen it happen.

That's easily solved: Just don't announce who was selected until after the vote.

Yup. aka Citizens' Assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_assembly

One example is Oregon State's Citizen's Initiative Review process, which is just like you describe.

https://medium.com/participo/citizens-initiative-review-help...

https://ballotpedia.org/Citizens%27_Initiative_Review

https://healthydemocracy.org/podcast/2020/01/06/podcast-demo...

If you really want to know what the locals want, make it easy for everyone to voice their opinions.

An admittedly straightforward example: in my city, each street gets to decide for themselves if they want paid parking or not. (Residents and businesses can get a permit for a reasonable yearly fee.) A vote can be requested by any resident at most once every two years, in which case every house in the street receives a letter with information, a voting form, and a return envelope.

I think this is a lot better than basing decisions on the opinions of what's likely to be a vocal minority that shows up on consultation meeting.

NIMBYs are a minority, but they consistently vote and are involved in political action. My city has elections in February when no one goes outside, because corruption. City council members win with 5,000 votes, routinely less, even though they have 100,000 constituents. Not pissing off the loudest people is like the whole job of local politicians.

How many political positions in contemporary democratic world are actually majoritarian or were majoritarian when they achieved their critical momentum?

Green Deals? Rainbow flags? Swings in abortion policies? Current levels and composition of immigration flows, be it in the US, Sweden or Greece?

A few of them perhaps, but the typical prime mover of politics is an active and loud minority which cares a lot - and whose cohesion and initiative puts pressure on politicians.

The NIMBYs are no exception.

NIMBY is just one kind of activist. We live in the age of the "tyranny of the tiny minority" where a small number of passionate people have their already-loud voices so amplified by the media that they drown out everything else. Social media tends to make extremes go viral, and traditional media looks for controversy and amplifies it.

Nuanced messaging and debate is a thing of the past. It doesn't fit in tweets and sound bites. Now, if you disagree with me, easier for me just to say you're evil than try to rebut your points. And this in turn feeds the media amplification effect. Who has the most emotionally compelling narrative? Who can parade out the most horrifying pictures? It doesn't matter if they're from a completely unrelated incident two years ago (and were staged), or that the "victims" are paid activists.

"Politician" is now a career. This means perverse incentives for such people; instead of ONLY considering what is best for constituents. They must also think about getting reelected.

Bureaucracies and government careers make decision-makers risk-averse, and most people react to having to make risky decisions by wanting more study before deciding. So the politicians and the bureaucrats only have up-side to accepting delays (they would call it "listening to constituents"), and suffer a huge risk of down-side if they green-light something that ticks off some noisy NIMBY or activist. And they rarely have the skill set or incentives to write contracts that result in the best outcomes.

The article talks about the perverse incentives associated with unions; these are only made worse with public sector unions.

Finally, our courts don't have loser pays and no longer are "speedy" by any reasonable definition. So you can tie things up for years with an activist lawyer on your staff, and make your opponent spend millions in legal fees to respond to all your noise. Plus, if you get lucky with a jury of people who don't understand the science of your issues and just buy the narrative, then you can win really big.

We need a lot of reforms in our republic. Most of them center around removing perverse incentives and externalities.

IMO the problem is that "politician" is a career. Now the municipal government is just one rung on the ladder, and the worst thing is not getting elected (getting fired). There is no incentive for career politicians to do anything other than what will help in the next election cycle.

Politics used to be a hobby for the already successful who wanted to give back. These people were bound by a sense of what was right. Elitist as hell, yes, but at least they weren't trying to climb the corporate ladder.

Crazy suggestion: Bar politicians from owning property or having any income (including gifts of goods or services) apart from the stipend for their appointed position. For life. Everything owned beforehand has to be given away as a condition of holding political office. They can retain a small allotment of personal items officially owned by the government but left in their care for their own personal use. No stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or any other investments. A pension for retirement is included, of course, provided they manage to avoid being convicted of any malfeasance during their tenure.

See how many career politicians you get under those conditions.

Literally no one would ever seek public office for any reason, at any level, if it meant losing everything they own and any ability to own property or gain income apart from a presumably meager stipend for the rest of their lives (so definitely no young politicians with fresh ideas) and then lose their retirement if (I assume, given the tone of this premise) they get so much as a parking ticket.

I know Americans hate politicians but we treat mass murderers better than that. We definitely treat billionaires who are far more corrupt and have far more power than most politicians better than that. Why not go full Thomas Jefferson as well and just hang all the politicians every 20 years?

No one with a profit motive would be interested, which is the whole idea. You'd get idealists and people seeking to make a name for themselves instead. (I'm not saying this is a perfect system BTW. I even called it a "crazy suggestion".)

> I know Americans hate politicians but we treat mass murderers better than that.

The point is not to punish politicians but rather to ensure that there can be no conflicts of interest, or at least none rooted in a quest for material gain.

> if (I assume, given the tone of this premise) they get so much as a parking ticket.

"Malfeasance" goes a bit beyond parking tickets. What I had in mind was more along the lines of bribery or corruption, not simple mistakes.

It's a terrible idea to give all the power to idealists (even granting this is possible). Corrupt cynics can be bargained with. The damage idealists can do is unbounded.

Hey, my answer is actually to eliminate the position and put no one in power. I don't trust all idealists myself, though I'm not convinced corruption is better. But the OP was pinning for the rose-tinted days of yore when great politicians ran for office to do good and not to make money, so I suggested a scheme designed to encourage exactly that.

why not go the other way and pay politicians well, and with that you can be really hard on all the soft corruption too. don’t we want the best people?

> Politics used to be a hobby for the already successful who wanted to give back.

When? It was just as often a way to have influence, power, and exploit them to get money.

> it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians

I don't think that's quite fair. Look at the statistics of who actually turns up to vote. The median voting age for mayoral elections is 57 [1]. Seniors are 15x more likely to vote than those aged 18-35. If I had to guess, this would only get worse if you get into even more obscure elections like city council. Incidentally, Boomers are much less likely to bike everywhere, so you can't really blame the politicians for catering their policy to them.

[1] http://whovotesformayor.org/

Part of the reason is that cities frequently hold off cycle elections which drastically reduces turnout. If mayor/city councilors were chosen with the same ballot as presidential candidate, the things would be very different

> What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.

Real leadership is to do what politicians are already doing because most people who pursue high-level leadership positions do it for selfish reasons.

Easy to say. Would you push through a project at your job that has a high risk of getting you fired?

I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to have become the most important thing to the home owning class and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs.

This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.

I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes, the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with comments like below is absurd.

"It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot.

"An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really.

Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.

Yup, exaclty. We seem to have become a nation of landlords seeking to turn a profit without an ounce of effort, rather than the industrious country we once were.

It's the same in a lot of US cities, but to play devils' advocate: this generation was basically told that their home was their savings and in many cases their entire capability to retire or take care of their health and other needs in old age is tied to the value of their home equity.

We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.

> This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.

I have my doubts. I suspect in 25yrs time it will be the same old story with the current generation becoming the previous generation.

Local politics here is run by real estate interests and government does little. A local business wanted an underground garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input into construction, and too little government oversight of it, not too much.

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building.

This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was so devastating to the people it affected that many processes were put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically again. It‘s a pendulum.

Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)

And its one of the best investments the government ever made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy, connecting communities.

The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...

It's possible there are far more negative externalities than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? How negatively has that effected the nation, or even just the economy, over decades?

It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.

>>What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race?

I don't see improvements in the physical economy appreciably increasing inequality.

Most inequality seems to step from housing scarcity driving up housing costs. [1] (see Figure 3)

Improvements in transportation could even mitigate this sort of inequality by overcoming spatial misallocations caused by housing scarcity in the highest productivity zones. [2]

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

The context you're missing, which is being alluded to in many comments, is that when the highways were put in place and they chose to put them through cities instead of around them politicians and planners had to choose where they went and what neighborhoods they bisected and displaced. Which neighborhoods do you think bore the brunt of that problem? Where do you think they decided to put the highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city, by relegating city traffic to specific overpasses and underpasses?

Class and race had a lot to do with it in many cases. You've possibly heard of "the wrong side of the tracks". That statement could be considered even more accurate in many modern context if stated as "the wrong side of the highway". The interesting part is why it's apt though, which is what we're talking about.

For one take on this, see https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...

> highways that made it harder to reach different parts of the city

One blatant example of exclusionary infrastructure was Robert Moses building bridges in New York that were too low for busses to pass under, in order to discourage travel to his parks and beaches.

I can also recommend the Well There's Your Problem podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oq0u2i4iHc

Highways certainly boost ROI, but there's devil in the details.

The interstates that linked up major cities certainly boosted investment. But Europe also built a network of such highways; the major difference is that they built their system to go mostly around cities, whereas the US just plowed them straight through cities. (The reasoning being that you don't really want to subject traffic passing through to high levels of commuter congestion, you want to minimize impacts to high concentrations of people and businesses, land acquisition is cheaper outside cities than inside, etc.) Because they did not impact nearly as many people to the same degree, Europe didn't experience the same overcorrection in terms of public process. (There is NIMBY-ism in Europe, to be sure, but they are definitely more successful at actually building things and keeping costs low compared to the US.)

There is also the subject of diminishing returns. Cutting travel time between the coasts from weeks to days is certainly a huge return on investment. Today most expansion projects look like "let's cut 30 seconds of waiting at this traffic light" at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at times. The report you linked is from ASCE, which is not exactly a neutral party for infrastructure development. Here's a critique of an earlier report from the same organization:

> Consider the following from the report:

> ASCE estimated the "costs to households and businesses" from transportation deficiencies in 2010 to be $130 billion. (page 3)

> ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to businesses will be $430 billion by 2020. (page 5)

> ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to households will be $482 billion by 2020. (page 5)

> If you add these together, the total cost to households and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that to reach "minimum tolerable conditions" (a pretty sad standard) would take an investment of $220 billion annually. Over 10 years, that's $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion.

Have you ever visited an urban area that has been cut up by a highway? I've never seen one that wasn't a dodgy neglected hellhole, even in traditionally denser east coast cities. The affected communities end up disconnected rather than connected to elsewhere, and the outlying areas that do end up being connected could just as well have been connected by a highway routed around the urban area.

There's an argument to be made for cut and cover construction and then putting in a park or newer homes or something, but surface highways through cities are not a goal to strive for.

It's kind of hilarious that that's your takeaway from this. Where I live in Dallas, all of downtown is walled off by elevated and sunken highways with only one or two bridges across them, all but guaranteeing adjacent neighborhoods are completely cut off for pedestrians, to prevent them from ever becoming larger communities. There was no reason for this whatsoever except the east, south, and west side neighborhoods were all predominantly black and planners wanted to keep them out.

We're still suffering from these decisions today, with all manner of proposal to make the area walkable dead in the water due to the expense that would be entailed by rerouting or rebuilding highways.

There is no return on investment anyone got from this that couldn't have been gotten from highways moved another mile or two away into the purely industrial districts where they wouldn't have disrupted anybody.

The Interstates between cities are a modern marvel whose impact can barely be overstated; the Interstates within cities were an unnecessary, destructive mistake.

Are interstates just supposed to end once you reach a city, and in order to continue on you’re supposed to navigate a series of roads that take you to the other edge of town, where the interstate starts again? Seems less than ideal.

Going around is an option.

We could have built the interstates around urban cores and connected them to existing thoroughfares within cities. Most of our urban cores have expanded out to where those highways would have been built then, anyway. There was no need to go right through existing neighborhoods.

Every city in the path of an Interstate should have a ring road around it, instead of cutting the city in two or more parts. Basically, a giant roundabout.

This is traditionally accomplished with ring roads that go around the city. Take Minneapolis for example, you'd be crazy to take I-94 through the heart of the city. If your driving through on your way out west your going to take the 694 bypass.

It is, but less so on the East Coast. Not enough to make the point irrelevant, but enough to complicate the generality some. Like, if you're going north from southern New England, for example, you're probably taking I-93 straight through the city. Which is a lot better than it used to be thanks to the Big Dig (which gets so much bad press but really is a great example of an infrastructure project that did, eventually, work), but is still not pleasant, and it's because taking 95 (or, further out, 495) all-the-way-around is as significant detour.

Circumnavigating the cities would be a reasonable alternative, and the Interstate system has incorporated many such "belt roads" since its inception. In retrospect this would have been a much better option than running them through downtowns.

Correct, interstates are not supposed to directly visit every home and business in the country.

The system was engineered to incorporate both loops and spurs, and it's encoded in the numbering system:

I think most folks know that 2-digit interstates with an even first digit are east-west, and with an odd first digit are north-south.

But 3-digit interstates exist too. An even first digit means it's a loop around a city (like I-475 around Flint), and an odd first digit means it's a spur into downtown. (I-375 into Detroit). These numbers can be reused, for instance there's another I-375 in Florida.

I think the argument here is that the _default_ should've been to loop around cities.

According to this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Prim... there is no encoding in separate digits, only the whole number being odd or even has meaning. E.g I-10, I-14, I-30, I-70, I-72 etc are east-west and I-25, I-45,I-65, I-83 etc are north-south.

Read down to the next subsection, "Auxiliary (three-digit) Interstates".

Did not find anything about 2 digits ones there, do you have a particular quote?

Weren’t a lot of those loops absorbed by later growth? Much like siting an airport, it’s hard to pick a route that will always remain outside a city without just going to the middle of nowhere.

Wikipedia says I-280 was planned in 1955, and I think Silicon Valley was mostly still fruit orchards at the time. The silicon transistor would be invented one year later.

The main thing favoring bypasses is that orchards aren‘t neighborhoods full of people, so you avoid the initial destruction and displacement.

What happens after the fact isn‘t as important.

Practically every major city with an Interstate has what is called a bypass, typically at least two. These look like a ring around the city in most cases and are (typically) the even numbered 3 digit interstates.

The bypasses are almost always faster to take if you're just moving on through to the other edge of town. These would have been totally sufficient in almost all cases w/o plowing the Interstate itself through/near the downtown cores in addition to the bypasses.

Every major city that I’ve been to has at least one and sometimes more than three loops around it. You drive down the interstate then take the loop around and back on the interstate to avoid city congestion. It’s like a round-about with the city in the middle.

Parent’s comment stayed neutral, but the homes and area that were destroyed weren’t from some random population. In almost every cases it’s poorer and/or minority neighborhoods that were run over and/or separated from the rest of the town by a huge highway, with redlining making sure they don’t come back the other side.

“connecting communities” only applies to some specific flavor of communities, and the ROI mostly benefited these specific groups as well.

> And its one of the best investments the government ever made.

I don't think the experiment is over.

The benefits of a highway-based society have been reaped during a period of 1) cheap fossil fuel energy and 2) cheap land. Both of these are becoming more scarce which threatens to tip the ROI negative. Strongtowns.org has done some research that most American cities and suburbs will be facing insolvency in coming years because their revenue is insufficient to cover the costs of a road-based infrastructure (including water and power lines) that scales quadratically.

To say that highways have been a good investment you would need to compare them with alternatives and examine their opportunity cost. A major problem with car transport is that it has worse scaling than most public transport: each household must personally invest in a car, garage, and fuel; private businesses must invest in parking, which drives up real estate prices; each car decreases the throughput of the roadway, requiring more roads to handle more cars--and when you run out of space for roadway then commute times increase. With most aspects of car transport you never get better than linear scaling.

So the real question is: if you took all the money that has been spent on cars, roadways, fuel, repairs, etc. would it have been better spent on trains, buses, or some hybrid system?

It's brave now to deliberately choose to route infrastructure through neighborhoods that have minorities living in them?

I think with today's politicians it's more of an issue of credit. These projects take a very long time, piss off people until they're done, and there's a high chance a different politician will be in the office at that time and claim credit.

It's interesting that the pendulum has swung, and yet it's still mainly impacting the same group of people.

That's because these marginalized people generally still have no political power.

Unfortunately, the dependence on enforcement from an adversarial legal system means that you need to be able to afford a lawyer.

You're only guaranteed one for a defense, and even then public legal aid is barely keeping it together with the workload.

Imagine playing sim city, except you don't get terrain shaping, bulldozer, or rezoning.

OpenTTD simulates some of this. If you piss of localities they stop letting you do certain things (including bulldozing, building new infrastructure etc.)

The difference is that SimCity is a game, while real life city planning has material impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. It shouldn’t be easy to demolish someone’s home or to establish a heavy industrial zone near a residential area just because the folks in charge feel like it. Conversely, if there’s an actually justifiable reason to seize property or rezone an area, that shouldn’t be impossible either

I have a justifiable reason, you have a respectable argument, they just feel like it.

What I'm saying, of course, is that you're obviously right but our problem isn't because anyone disagrees with your position, but because we can't agree on what constitutes a justifiable reason in individual cases.

Maybe this is the real explanation for why we're presently being overrun by churches.

>Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)

Absolutely. In fact, I'd like to take a moment and give a heartfelt "fuck you!" to Robert Moses[0]. I don't believe in an afterlife, but in his case, I hope he spends eternity in agony as repayment for all the suffering he caused.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

I saw somebody on Twitter express it as follow:

"Milennials/GenZ rule the online space, boomers rule the meat space."

Your angry tweet means fuck all.

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years.

Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't always translate into a political will that a politician can exploit.

This is the real issue. Almost nobody pays attention to or votes in local elections in the US. The 5% of the population that are NIMBYS may be >= 50% of the voters.

In the federal elections, primaries have the same problem: people who vote in them tend to be much more ideologically motivated than general populace.

That's how you end up with parties that oppose policies supported by a supermajority of their voters - that opposition doesn't matter because those voters won't vote for the other party (with whom they disagree on way more) anyway, so all that matters is winning the primaries.

People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.

Which is why I vote for third parties that haven't a hope of winning. It isn't my fault, but I voted. (both major parties have something in their platform that is a major no for me)

People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years.

You already explained it yourself. They write in. They probably also vote. Their representatives do what they're told.

Yep, they're overrepresented.

People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of pliers than set foot in a major city.

This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency.

In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms.

It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.

Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates, usually.

It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to "solve problems at the highest level" which is the federal government, and those often end up being heavy handed or failures entirely.

Australia's gun laws allow pump/lever/bolt action rifles for hunting along with shotguns for rural home defense (primary producers and farm workers can buy pump shotguns). Pistols and anything semiautomatic are mostly restricted to occupations that require them. There's also exceptions for sport shooters, so rural people can start an organized gun club and actively train in order to own shotguns or pistols (a "well-regulated militia"?). This means, though, that an 18 year old is only going to be able to buy a bolt action rifle without coming under some extra scrutiny of having to join a sport shooting club.

Which makes me wonder if putting state level structure around “militias” (open entry for anyone over 18, govern some aspects of sport shooting and training) would be an effective entry to reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in circulation (though the numbers there are so staggering that it feels somewhat pointless).

FYI this isn't super different from how it's culturally done in certain circles in the US (although it's not universal). When I was a young teen I took a hunter's education course that covered ethical hunting, firearm safety, first aid, basic wilderness survival, etc. I would support making that sort of requirement for owning firearms universal, but I would anticipate that a lot of people would view this as a registry which is not a very attractive prospect for a lot of people.

This is my experience as well. I grew up in a small midwestern town. I continue to shoot and do a little bit of hunting, but the temperature around firearms and gun ownership really took a turn in the 90’s. Lots of wild conversations happening down at the conservation club.

Edit: I guess my initial comment was more about a cultural/legal framework for reasonably reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in the general populace.

yeah the 90s is when the term "assault weapon" was pushed into the narrative in an attempt to blur the lines between a semiautomatic hunting rifle and an actual assault rifle.

So that's how we end up with people calling hunting rifles "assault rifles/weapons" or "military grade weaponry". It's like dude a freaking blunderbuss is military grade weaponry. The most popular hunting rounds in the USA were originally designed for military use.

Right. There really isn’t a clear difference between the two, so attempting to draw that line is foolhardy.

That said, the lethality advantage of semiautomatic weapons over manually operated is obvious.

There is a very clear distinction between the two.

Assault rifles have automatic (or select-fire) capabilities. One trigger pull can produce many bullets.

Semi-automatic rifles, which were later called "assault weapons," can only produce one bullet per trigger pull. What makes them semi-automatic is that they automatically reload after firing. Many other types of guns also do this (eg double-action revolvers) and many take minimal movement to reload (eg lever-action and bolt-action rifles).

This is a very big difference. A commercial semiautomatic rifle is only slightly more lethal than a bolt-action rifle. An assault rifle is much more lethal than both.

I didn’t downvote, but I don’t believe your chosen definition is widely accepted. Further, many elite soldiers will say that they rarely would put their weapons in full auto in a fire fight. I’m certainly not one of them and can’t speak to it, but I’ll take their word their semi-auto rifles are plenty lethal.

If you look up the definitions in any source, that is what you will find. If there wasn't a big difference, then it wouldn't be the case that every single military in the world uses assault rifles with select-fire capability.

Also, if you watch videos of actual military operations, you will find the 3-round burst used very frequently because it is a lot more lethal than semiautomatic mode. Only special ops troops tend to use semiautomatic mode for fighting (since they are better marksmen and are concerned about noise). Police also only use semiautomatic weapons, because they don't have access to automatic weapons.

>Police also only use semiautomatic weapons, because they don't have access to automatic weapons.

It's pedantic but while regular officers don't deploy full-auto weapons, police departments certainly have them.

If you are in a real war and hit by a gun on automatic it is your own stupid fault. If you are killed by a gun using any form of semi-auto (including 3 round burst) it is just bad luck. Automatic guns are very useful in war, but the purpose isn't to kill it is to force the enemy to keep their head down (ie in a bunker) while you do something else.

For your average soldier a automatic gun is just a waste of bullets. Which is why elite soldiers never use full auto mode: it is never a useful mode for them. It is still useful, but you don't need much training to run a gun in full auto mode, so generals put the non-elite troops on the automatic guns. (though sometimes an elite soldier will volunteer for the automatic duty - it is kind of fun to chew threw tens of thousands of bullets in one trigger pull)

Yeah I've seen videos galore of people firing bolt action rifles as fast as any semi-auto. Youtube has tons of them and it's outright impressive.

Your last point rather undermines your first. Turns out killing a deer-sized animal is a similar problem to killing a human-sized animal, who knew.

(Hasn't the US military actually moved away from fully-automatic weapons for regular troops in favour of three-round-burst? So it ends up as a very close convergence)

You're not wrong, but the rhetoric OP references goes much further than that - it specifically claims that .223, the caliber in which semi-autos like AR-15 are chambered is somehow more deadly than "normal" hunting calibers, and that is supposedly a big part of what makes it a "weapon of war" etc.

The actual story here is that regular hunting calibers tend to be significantly more powerful to maximize the probability of a humane (one-shot; ideally, instant) kill. In fact, many states don't allow hunting deer with .223 on the basis that it's not lethal enough. For similar reasons, most jurisdictions require hunters to use some kind of expanding bullet, whereas ARs are far more typically used with cheap military-style FMJ ammo.

Spot on. I hunt red deer and while you _can_ use .223 / 5.56mm, a humane kill requires very precise shot placement. It's okay for smaller deer (fallow, whitetail, sika) and chamois, but not really for the reds, sambar, rusa or tahr.

I use .308 Win, probably the most common calibre for red deer hunting here, but you meet people using fancy powerful rounds like 7mm Rem Mag or .338 Lapua.

>but the temperature around firearms and gun ownership really took a turn in the 90’s

The damage to this country's social fabric done by the feds due to the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres really cannot be understated. A LOT of people looked at that and said "ain't gonna be me, we'll kill em if they try that shit" and went and armed themselves, their families, and their neighbors to the teeth.

As they say, it's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you.

Materials we got from the NRA changed to.

Indeed. And it infiltrated gun culture completely.

Ruby Ridge especially. I did a lot of writing on the subject freshman year English. I think it scared the crap out of a lot of people already suspicious of authority.

You can see the change at gun shows too. Gun shows use to be 90% hunting or collectable/rare rifles. Now they’re ar15s and accessories as far as the eye can see.

I’m not sure what changed, maybe the ar15 patent expired, they’ve always been around just not that popular. Then, all of a sudden, they were everywhere.

AR-15s are dirt cheap to manufacture, super modular and customizable, and are really just all around great guns. There's a reason they're so popular.

The AR-15 is basically a gun version of legos. You can buy one AR-15 lower receiver (which counts as the gun) and then just swap out uppers depending on what you're hunting.

It's a combination of access to cheap military surplus ammo, light recoil making them approachable to beginners, a standardized platform, and rails for accessories. Plus a little bit of a "badass" effect from it being based on a military weapon.

Military weapons also generically have the advantage of having been tested for ruggedness, and not having to worry about being able to find parts or ammo in a decade.

There are a number of people who will use such a system as a registry they can abuse and once in a while they get political power.

This seems like borderline deranged paranoia to me; what do you expect these powerful people to do given the registry of automatic gun owners?

Are you expecting a WW2 French Revolution style situation where the moral resistance will be stronger because of the unregistered firearms?

Most of these guns are bought on credit or debit cards, so the information about big ticket gun buyers probably unregulated available through Palantir or whoever.

It doesn’t take any paranoia. There’s been several instances of journalists using FOIA requests to get the names and addresses of firearm owners and then publishing them. It just happened again in California post the recent USSC decision: An LA journalist requested the names and addresses of current permit holders.

And then what bad thing happened?

And if FOIA is really the problem (not the government knowing) then the registry could be made legally exempt from FOIA. The government keeps databases including all of your income (IRS) and your religion (the Census) but random journalists can't get the information.

I believe the paranoia is misplaced. I'm not aware of a single instance in the whole history of the US where a citizen was targeted by members of the public primarily on the basis of their owning a gun (or holding a permit)--are you?

https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/25/us/new-york-gun-permit-map/in...

What is they point of your link? The information was made public, but no one whose information was disclosed had any known negative outcomes of that happening.

It seems like evidence that a registry is fine: apparently even when a registry is public it didn't result in the owners being "targeted", so a private registry visible only to law enforcement would be surely even safer than that.

I think you're being disingenuous here. Having your name and address attached to a story about how damaging you are to society is not desirable, and if you can't acknowledge that I think you're not arguing from an honest place.

Imagine whatever opinion you might have that is controversial, even mildly so. Now imagine that a new story about how that opinion makes you dangerous to society also includes your name and address in it. I think the harm here need not be a physical attack on someone, intentional intimidation is a mild form of violence itself.

> attached to a story about how damaging you are to society

I reread the cnn link again and I still don't know about the article you're referring to; from the text of the CNN article it sounds like it was solely a map and all of the other quotes are from people worried about the potential harm like burglaries. The CNN article doesn't actually even say the names or specific addresses of the gun owners was published, it only describes a map with dots.

Overall I'm not sure that that map is actually more risky than a map of where the atheists live, and we don't stop collecting that info on the census. The census data has never been leak published to my knowledge.

So even if it is true that example of a published map was a horrible safety violation, that only means that the data shouldn't be available to journalists, which is different than saying the data shouldn't be allowed to be known by anyone in government. The census and IRS are examples of the government being able to maintain secrets, so I don't buy the idea that it would be inevitably leaked if a gun registry had similar legal protections.

And it doesn't seem to support some risk of evil powerful people who are going to do something nefarious with this data once they get into power, which is what the thread above is about.

It's not paranoia. Canada created a "long gun" registry to "keep people safe". Then they started banning specific long guns. The registry let them know exactly who owned what.

It's the same reason why some European countries don't include race or religion in their national IDs. When the Nazi's took over, the existing governments registry of individuals made is real easy to track down all the people they wanted to eliminate.

So the registry allowed laws created under a democratic system to be implemented, and that's.. bad?

Yes if your a person who believes those rights are unjustly being denied.

(The registry was eventually scraped because of non-compliance, less than 25% of estimated guns were never registered).

It’s not paranoia doxing gun owners from a registry has already happened at least once.

https://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/25/us/new-york-gun-permit-ma...

Hunter’s Ed was included in my HS Agriculture class, we all received the little card that came with completion of the course too. In rural areas it’s pretty standard stuff.

> Which makes me wonder if putting state level structure around “militias” (open entry for anyone over 18, govern some aspects of sport shooting and training) would be an effective entry to reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in circulation

At least in the United States, sadly that ship has sailed as SCOTUS precedent repeatedly emphasizes the 2nd Amendment as a purely individual right. The so-called preamble discussing states and militias is now formally a dead letter.

> At least in the United States, sadly that ship has sailed as SCOTUS precedent repeatedly emphasizes the 2nd Amendment as a purely individual right.

With the current court, yes, but that interpretation only dates back to 2008. It would be much less of a reversal than we just saw for a future court to find that Heller was decided in error, and unlike Alito’s pretense of research there’s far more historical precedent supporting the collective interpretation going back at least as far as what the people drafting the second amendment discussed when they did so, as well as two centuries of general agreement on that point.

> and unlike Alito’s pretense of research there’s far more historical precedent supporting the collective interpretation going back at least as far as what the people drafting the second amendment discussed when they did so, as well as two centuries of general agreement on that point.

And, also, the prefatory clause of the text of the Amendment itself.

Yes: it would not take a legal genius to say “these words were included for a reason, here are period discussions confirming that and two centuries without serious question”.

Back when the Constitution was written, the militia was "all able bodies males" who could be called to service. It wasn't a formal organization like the military today. It was basically all male citizens.

So that actually aligns with it being an individual right.

This is leaving out a lot: the militia usually had equipment requirements, was often restricted to men of property, and had training requirements. It especially was not all male citizens - for example, even in the north where the militia didn’t do slave patrols there were often racial restrictions excluding free black men, and the Whigs were big on restricting it to property owners out of fear of groups of armed unattached men being swayed against the local community.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-well-regulated-mil...

https://uncpress.org/book/9780807896419/citizens-in-arms/

True, but that eliminates people who belong to groups that we no longer recognize at all. We don't recognize slaves at all, so that slaves can't own guns doesn't matter. Nobody would complain about a law that makes it illegal for slaves to own guns: there are no slaves. Laws that blacks or women are somehow different and thus cannot own guns might be historically supported, but today we elevate those groups to the same level as white land owners, and so they get the rights of white land owners.

Sure but we also interpret all other Constitutional rights as belonging to everyone regardless if they were unjustly restricted in the past.

Your argument sounds like “we denied black people rights in the past so there for the 2nd amendment right doesn’t apply to everyone.”

Weird argument.

It only sounds weird because you reworded it to remove the main points: even if you ignore the portion about the groups of people who were excluded, you still have the militias being groups with rules and requirements rather than a free-for-all.

Rules required to make sure the militia was “well regulated” (functioning properly). But the rules (other than race, money) only excluded those without equipment, everyone was still a part of the militia otherwise.

You’re leaving out the other parts, most importantly the training and the concept that you were working in a group rather than acting as a lone wolf. Any remotely historical reading does not preclude safety standards and, indeed, American history is full of those and they were not considered controversial prior to 2008.

I'm not sure you understand what the militias looked like during the time the Constitution was created. It was basically "calling all men to service". There was no standing army, membership was fluid and as long as you were able to fulfill the requirements of physical health, bring a weapon, be willing to follow orders.

> Back when the Constitution was written, the militia was "all able bodies males" who could be called to service

You are focussing on what the militia is (and erroneously pretend that it has changed over time; it still essentially the same thing, see, e.g., the codification in Title 10 of the US Code.)

But my point is about what the second amendment says the militia is necessary for, not what the militia is. Because that's the part that is relevant to the claim that the 2nd Amendment provides a right of the type that should be applied by the 14th Amendment to be protected against the states or rather than that explicitly has a role for the benefit of the states and to which the incorporation logic of the 14th Amendment does not apply.

Incorporation of rights protected against federal encroachment by the Bill of Rights against the states isn't universal (the requirement of indictment from the 5th Amendment is not incorporated, for instance), even for rights that are expressly individual rights. Incorporation is a separate question.

Precedent itself took a beating on Friday.

Yes and no. For several decades even liberal jurists have made a joke of Justice Douglas' now infamous "penumbra" explanation in Griswold v. Connecticut that undergirds a general right to privacy. I remember thinking as a law student that every chuckle, every eye roll, especially by liberal leaning students and professors, was another nail in the coffin of that whole line of jurisprudence.

Stare decisis is critically important, but when it comes to substantive law the fact is that historically decisions don't have staying power unless there's some internalization of the underlying legal logic. Liberal justices walked away from Douglas' phrasing almost immediately and were never able to replace it with anything.

I never had a problem with penumbras. It's as apt a description as anyone could conjure to refer to positive rights which exist by implication. And in fact usage of that term goes back to jurists far more esteemed than Douglas. Conservatives have long tried to use the 10th Amendment for similar effect, but that likewise has failed, and frankly as an analytic device "penumbras" works much better.

I used to think Kennedy's "dignity" reasoning in Obergefell v. Hodges was awkward, but upon closer inspection of broader legal theory he's actually drawing upon a vein of jurisprudence that could become a cornerstone of American legal theory in this area. It's much more well developed outside the U.S., but that doesn't mean it's not consonant with American jurisprudence. Yet I haven't seen many law review articles, let alone case decisions, try to further develop this principle. I think like penumbras, liberal jurists are inclined to roll their eyes at it, even though they haven't yet got to the point where they literally roll their eyes at it. I suspect Hodges will fall quickly, unless Gorsuch is able to refashion a theory based on sex discrimination much like he did for Title VII in Bostock v. Clayton County. (But that's a stretch as Gorsuch claimed to be using a plain text approach to statutory interpretation.)

The fundamental problem with "penumbras" is that once you allow that as a way of reasoning, pretty much anything goes. At which point the Supreme Court becomes an insanely powerful body for something unelected and with a lifetime tenure, and SCOTUS nominations become worthy of scorched earth mode of political warfare.

Thing is, we have the constitutional amendment process for a reason - it is supposed to be a living document, true enough, but it's supposed to be updated through political process, not judicial. The problem, of course, is that the bar for amendments is so high that they become impossible in practice; but it's also impossible to fix that without an amendment. Thus, so long as enough political forces believe that the status quo is preferable to other options, it'll remain that way, and we'll see increasingly contorted Supreme Court decisions to reach goals of whatever party controls it at any given moment.

That leads to another problem, which is that SCOTUS, and the system as a whole, rapidly lose legitimacy. At this point, it already doesn't matter much whether any given decision is legally sound or not - it will be supported or opposed consistently along partisan political lines. The same people will castigate the judges for "inventing" rights in one decision, then blame them for not buying into the rights "invented" by other judges. I don't know how much longer we have left, but this passage from Federalist Papers (#22) comes to mind:

"... two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third."

or just pass a bill

> With the current court, yes

Given the ages of quite a few justices, the current court will remain mostly unchanged for decades to come.

Barring court packing.

FDR got his pee-pee wacked by his own party for trying to pack the Supreme Court back in the 1930's.

It's a non-starter.

It's not the 1930s. It's a very different country with different politics.

That’s far from a given. The current court’s willingness to just ignore long-standing precedent to take away major rights, the stolen seat, and Thomas’ massive conflicts of interest (not just Ginny organizing the insurrection but also receiving money from groups going before the court) have permanently damaged faith in an institution which relies on authority granted to it on the trust that it not do things like that (note how much more limited the court’s direct constitutional authority is).

I think it’s quite plausible that there’d be significant public support for a reform package: pin the number of justices to the number of lower courts (we have 9 because that’s how many there were the last time that changed), add term limits for new justices, and adopting the ethics rules which other federal judges are required to follow.

No, no, no.

You’re telling me the situation is more contentious than the 30’s when FDR was trying to pass his New Deal during the greatest economic collapse the US has ever known?

No. Your reply and your hyperbole suggest you don’t know much about the court’s history.

I find it interesting that you’re talking about hyperbole but offering only emotional rhetoric.

If you want to do better, note that I was talking about the legitimacy of the court itself, which is critical to an institution with a great deal of inferred power which is not explicitly spelled out. The FDR-era court did not have a justice whose legitimacy was dubious. Similarly, you could look at the various New Deal rulings for examples which completely broke with long-standing precedent or relied on cherry-picked history if you want to argue that those rulings were not unusual.

Not legitimate? It was seen as blocking some of the most progressive policies helping the desperately poor during the Great Depression.

If it was legitimate why would you need to stack the court. A legitimate court’s decisions would be accepted, not changed by adding judges.

And the reason why the idea to stack was defeated was because it was viewed as a run around judicial independence (e.g. making it less legitimate).

Again, please note what we’re talking about: legitimacy of the court itself.

New Deal proponents didn’t like those rulings but there was no question that any of the judges hadn’t been properly appointed, nor was there a huge break with past precedent on the same issue.

We’re living in a time where a majority of the court are acting in blatantly politicized ways, interfering on behalf of their party to prevent fair elections and flipping alleged legal theories whenever necessary to produce their desired outcome.

That is incredibly risky for an institution which has considerable power on the grounds that it not play games like that.

there was no question that any of the judges hadn’t been properly appointed

The same can be said today. Supreme Court appointments have always been political. Hell being "Borked" got its name from political games during Reagan.

Just because you don't think the process was "proper" doesn't change the fact they were all confirmed by the senate, as per the "proper" process.

Funny how many people complain about the politics of Supreme Court nominees only when it works against their own political views.

>the greatest economic collapse the US has ever known?

Jpow: Hold my beer.

The original interpretation is, quite frankly, largely irrelevant, because the entire BoR was written in the context where the chief concern was guarding the rights of states against the federal government. With 2A, they wanted to make sure that the feds couldn't suppress state militias, as the British tried to do. When it came to the rights of citizens against their respective state governments, that was what the state constitutions were supposed to protect.

But, conversely, the very notion that the federal government would even be able to ban state citizens individually from possessing arms would be just as alien to the authors - the constitution simply didn't grant that kind of power to it back then, not even close.

OTOH the notion that the right to keep and bear arms was widely perceived as individual by the American society as a whole has solid historical basis. Here's one simple thing anyone can do to verify this: go look up the list of 2A-like clauses in state constitutions, along with dates they were adopted:

https://gun-control.procon.org/state-constitutional-right-to...

You might notice that the earliest examples often specifically talk about individual rights, e.g.:

“The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned” (Pennsylvania, 1790; Kentucky, 1792)

Such language becomes rarer over time, though, until we get to the end of the last century.

An important thing to remember is that the discussion was about state militias being able to resist a federal army. Being in the militia was both a privilege and a responsibility - they had problems with people skimping on equipment & maintenance in addition to training – and that has to be understood in the context of the Whigs’ concerns about standing armies full of property-less men. They wanted militias tied to the local community, with their own property at stake, which is a rather different starting point than the late 20th century maximalist “no requirements, no restrictions” position.

Here are two books which cover the period discussion and the structure of the militia in early America. It’s a surprisingly under-covered part of our history.

https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Arms-Militia-American-Societ...

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-well-regulated-mil...

The other thing we have to remember is how much more powerful modern weapons are. At the time this was written there was no concept of some lone wolf being able to mow down a crowd - they’d be limited to a first volley with the loaded, not especially precise or long-ranged, weapons they brought with them before getting subdued. The founders were thinking in terms of armies because period firearms were most effective in large coordinated groups.

Unlikely as people are already producing semiautomatic firearms with consumer level 3d printer technology. There are even competitions out there already such as the Makers Match.

There are some firearms part manufacturers that utilize 3d printing for part production. The company that made the first fully printed .45 1911 handgun uses printers to produce parts for sale.

I grew up in the rural midwest so my firearm experience goes back to the single digits of age. It was expected I would take the firearms and hunter safety courses that the state provided. I believe that such courses should at the very least be the minimum required for anyone purchasing a gun.

I think the hunters safety courses should be a requirement for everyone, even those that aren’t buying a firearm — and should probably come around the age of 14/15 unless you’re going to be hunting earlier.

To be fair, it's only true that people are making firearms on 3d printers because what we consider the firearm in the US is unusual. In other places the portion of the machine that contains pressure is the firearm. In the US the portion of the machine that holds the trigger mechanism is considered the firearm. This leads to the easiest part of the machine to manufacture also being the only part that is illegal to manufacture in places where such a thing is illegal. It's exactly backwards from physics. Making a 3d printed firing chamber is exceedingly difficult, especially one that won't blow your hand off. Making a trigger - even a fully automatic one - is one notch above trivial.

I’m sorry but this is a dangerously inaccurate summary of Australia’s gun laws and how they are perceived socially. For starters, private gun owners are not actually allowed to use their firearms in self defence. There have been some cases previously where people have and have been acquitted on grounds of self-defence, but if you use a gun on a person you are 100% going to be arrested, jailed, and charged, at which point you better hope you have a good lawyer.

It’s also extremely uncommon for even farmers to have shotguns. They fall under a different, much much more restrictive category (similar to pistols) and are generally not used by farmers who instead opt for bolt action rifles for pest control.

Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that the idea that a country needs a “well armed militia” is very American (or at least, not at all Australian). None of my Australian friends or family want this, and everyone I know is very happy with our gun laws and the social safety they afford us. I’m sure there are some Australians that disagree, but the widespread sentiment is overwhelmingly that Howard did the right thing in rapidly enacting sweeping gun reform after the Port Arthur massacre.

Your assertion that a non-primary-producer can only own a bolt action rifle is also incorrect. Anyone with the appropriate license can own a pistol or a shotgun, the requirements around frequency of sporting event participation are just much greater for these categories of firearm as we consider them much more dangerous to society and so (reasonably, imo) dramatically limit their ownership to only those who actively and responsibly use them for sport.

Finally, the scrutiny a person comes under for owning a bolt (or lever) action rifle is fairly minor. You need a safe place to store it (the state provides requirements, and the police will inspect it before granting the license, and also perform occasional spot checks), you need to be a member of a sport shooting association, and you need to participate in one shooting competition that is certified by that association per year. This is easy to do for someone who wants to own a gun in the city, as the only legitimate reason to own a gun for a non-primary-producer is sport shooting at a shooting range anyway. The most valid complaint I can think of is regarding this is that the storage requirements make it practically impossible for a renter to own a gun, as the safe must be either really heavy (making it very expensive) or permanently affixed to the building (a modification most Australian rental agreements forbid).

The Australian government also put its citizens in concentration camps with total impunity last year. That sort of outrageous mistreatment of lower and middle class people is not feasible outside of a few cities in the United States. Cheran in Mexico is also a good example of how resisting state-mandated civilian disarmament can discourage the abuse of citizens by powerful organizations.

My friend, we in America have the most incarcerated individuals let’s not talk about outrages mistreatment of the lower classes.

Not sure what this has to do with Australia's gun laws. Talk about whataboutism. A country can have sensible laws in one sphere, but do awful things in another.

And as the sibling points out, the US's track record for incarceration (and concentration camps) isn't exactly great either.

There are plenty of ways to describe the Australian federal government’s handling of Covid, but to use the term “concentration camps” is unnecessarily inflammatory and not a sentiment that is shared by Australians.

The problems were not in the overall handling in general (in fact, everyone I know is ok with the way they locked down, at least the first 12-18 months or so anyway), but in the lack of a coherent plan for how to exit that situation. The federal government abdicated it’s responsibility, relying heavily on states to handle things that require more scale and coordination than they are capable of.

These discussions would be more productive if you didn’t project your country’s desire for “freedom” at all costs onto those that make different social trade offs. We are not oppressed by a nation state and we don’t need you to liberate us, thanks.

If getting a firearm is as easy as driving forty-five minutes outside of town, then access may as well be unrestricted.

Not if there's a border checkpoint to enter cities - I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of thing at some point down the line. Like customs.

Oof, no thanks. I'm pretty anti-gun, but that sort of thing is not worth it.

If only there was a way to check from where a person is...

True, but it could still be treated as a crime within the city and punished accordingly. This was the premise of DC vs. Heller which overturned a DC law that banned handguns in the district.

> I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency.

> In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms.

Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact.

Animal control may be available at the required speeds just because animal-related emergencies generally allow for more time. If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.

Unless the mountain lion is attacking your children or farm animals out in the yard.

Humans are extremely slow runners compared to most dangerous large animals. Even black bears, who really only attack to protect their cubs, can sprint a hell of a lot faster than humans.

>Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact.

While this is certainly true, we're talking about the difference between minutes and hours out in the country. I am reasonably comfortable walking around town unarmed because, whether it's accurate or not, I feel like there are enough police and people around that i'm not on my own. I do not have the same level of comfort 10 miles into the mountains.

>If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.

This might not be obvious to someone who hasn't dealt with this problem before but the issue is not just seeing one outside your house, it's coming across a moose with cubs or a bear on a hike 10 miles from home. That is a situation where being able to make a lot of noise best case or using deadly force worst case are the different between you living or not.

Indeed where I currently live there's been several black bears spotted recently. Black bears generally are fearful of humans except for certain situations. Accidentally stumbling on to some cubs is a quick way to a mauling and a slow death.

Then there's the mountain lions, coyotes, feral dogs, etcetc..

> the issue is not just seeing one outside your house, it's coming across a moose with cubs or a bear on a hike 10 miles from home.

But that first issue is something that is plausibly different between urban and rural residents. Once you start talking about purposefully traveling far from your home, why would urban residents be any different from rural residents?

> I am reasonably comfortable walking around town unarmed because, whether it's accurate or not, I feel like there are enough police and people around that i'm not on my own.

This is a strange argument to make; surely the law should be concerned with whether your perception that you're safe in town really is accurate. "I should not be allowed to defend myself because I feel safe, even though in reality I am unsafe" is unlikely to convince anyone.

"far from home" in this case, could just be a couple of blocks. I'm not really in what I would call a rural area, but a coyote den is never too far away. Can hear them most nights.

Granted... I don't feel I need a gun. But I am sympathetic to the idea for the folks that live nearer to animals larger than coyotes.

Once it becomes a battlefield in the Culture Wars, you may as well stop trying to use logic. Only your own side is going to listen.

To people on the anti-gun-control side, NO such law is acceptable, because it's just the thin edge of the wedge.

"The pro-gun-control people are just going to pocket these gains, and push for more." Can you honestly say they're wrong?

I agree completely.

In the current political climate, there's no reason for the anti-gun-control crowd to compromise with the pro-gun-control crowd: their opponents do not hold strong principles. There's no middle ground or end goal at which they would be satisfied. It's not like they're gonna throw their hands up and say "Welp, we finally passed the Ban Attachable Whatevers Act, this is enough gun control, let's go home now"

This is true but also somewhat incomplete.

A big source of guns in areas that do have strict gun control in the US is other states. The recent shooting in the NYC subway, for example, was perpetrated by a man from Milwaukee, WI. With no such thing as internal border checks within the US, it would be quite difficult to maintain a two-tier gun control system.

Are you saying you consider Milwaukee rural? Half a million people live there and it's the most populous place in WI.

More meant to illustrate how porous state borders are with guns despite the varying legal regimes en route.

Rural-urban borders are even more porous, if anything. So many roads to cover.

The distinction between rural and city life is absolutely fundamental, since the dawn of civilization that's been the case.

For a relatively recent acknowledgement of this; the Kentucky flag is a frontiersman shaking hands with a city slicker. This distinction between rural and urban was still very keenly felt, only two centuries ago.

That started to fray when the car allowed the city to engulf the country-side; people wanted to have their cake and eat it. The wealth and splendor of the city, with the bucolic serenity of the countryside. Cruel irony that the majority of our living environment is that we now have neither.

I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when "public transit" means taking the L with no connections during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting). Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets.

Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on.

Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.

>Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights

Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums start using public transit.

Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are angry about terrible conditions in public transit they are dependent on using, and force the government to kick the bums out. If this is viable, why won’t the government, you know, kick out the bums now? That it does not do so, I take as evidence that it won’t do it in future either.

I increasingly get the feeling that the only winning move is to not play. I have no idea how we got to this point either.

NYC kicked the bums out of Manhattan in the 80s and kept them out through the early 00s. It worked really well. Wealthy people used public transit to get to their wall street jobs, and many people walked home alone at night. Fast forward to today, and it's not progressive to go after the bums any more. Now the subway is extremely dangerous and smelly, and nobody but the desperate takes it. The streets are a lot less safe than they used to be.

You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives, who happen to be the voting base in big cities.

Eventually, things will get bad enough that the progressives leave, and then the streets can get cleaned up again.

I agree with you, but I only have one lifetime, and by the time it plays out in its entirety, I’ll be long retired. Point is, government needs to first clean things up, and then the civil society will move back in, not the other way around.

Extremely dangerous might be a bit much. I ride the subway a fair amount. And there's been an uptick in crime (all over the US), but I wouldn't really call the subway dangerous.

NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF.

But shelter conditions are pretty miserable as I understand it so you can sort of understand the hold outs.

And we may just not have enough space. But yea, NYC's a big city, there's definitely some homeless, but I'm not sure my lived experience here is as dire as you make it sound.

That being said, some areas are certainly worse than others, and there's definitely some aggressive mentally ill people you'll see here and there.

NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF.

This is true, and is the most clear example of how immoral the "housing first" policies in California are. It is a pipe dream that creates a horror show of homeless misery on the streets in LA and SF.

The vast majority of the city’s approximately 50,000 homeless people live in shelters — about 30,000 in family shelters, and about 18,000 in shelters for single adults.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/nyregion/nyc-homeless-eri...

> You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters)

There's your problem, I think. In the US, at least, the elements of our polity that favor "taking the bums off the street" are mostly unwilling to pay for things like shelters and mental hospitals.

I'm a moderate liberal and I would love for my tax dollars to go to pay for shelters and mental hospitals.

The dearth of mental health institutions is not (directly) because “elements of our polity” don’t want to pay for them. It’s a legacy of actively closing them in the 70’s-80’s due to inhumane conditions and civil libertarian concerns around institutionalizing people against their will.

Now - we certainly aren’t having a very productive public conversations about the obvious negative outcomes of that policy shift.

"With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states." https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_leg...

I don't see how anyone can claim that austerity and a deep cynicism toward the very idea of mental treatment didn't play major roles.

No, of course that is a large part of the story, but things like the Willowbrook expose also caused left-wing politicians (in that case Robert Kennedy) to also attack institutions.

Maybe that’s true, but it’s not like Salon would ever pass up an opportunity to blame Republicans for something.

It's a result of not funding appropriate community-based supports after deinstitutionalization. Deinstiutionalization could have worked out very, very differently, if we'd been willing to pay for the alternatives.

You're so obsessed with turning "progressive" into a derisive term that you're not being consistent with it.

> You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives,

Progressives are absolutely for building more low income housing, and making it available to street bums.

It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any neighbourhood where they might be in.

I don't know what happened in the 80s, or where the bums went. Maybe they all were shipped off to California, where it's warm, and now HN posters complain about IT'S progressive policies.

Maybe they all died and nobody in the 80s cared but now they do.

Either way, the economic forces that led to them being created in the first place never were fixed, so there is a steady supply of new bums throughout America. Why? What is Europe able to do to keep those people at bay that America isn't?

> It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any neighbourhood where they might be in.

That’s why, I presume, cities that are thoroughly controlled by Democrats, like San Francisco or Seattle, have no trouble building low income housing and putting it all around the city, right? I mean, conservatives have no government representation in those cities whatsoever, so the Democrat politicians are simply listening to the wishes of their constituents, and as a result, low income housing projects sail through, and housing prices are low, correct?

San Francisco is extremely progressive in some ways, and extremely conservative in others. There seems to be a general assumption that because SF is very visibly progressive on some high-profile social topics that it must be progressive on all topics, but it's not.

More generally, the idea that Democrats cannot be conservative is incorrect, and not just in the leftist "Democrats are right wing" sort of sense. In an effective one-party state you see a lot of people who are ideologically much more aligned with the Republican party running as Democrats, and vice-versa in Republican-dominated states.

Respectfully, this seems like it’s veering toward a “no true Scotsman” argument.

I don't think that's the case. The parent's opinion lines up pretty well with what I observe in San Francisco. Our mayor calls herself a Democrat, but most of the policies she pushes feel pretty conservative to me. The Board of Supervisors (our "city council", which has quite a lot of power) is all over the place, but definitely has what I'd consider a conservative element... but of course they still call themselves "Democrats", "progressive", "liberal", whatever.

I can't speak to the opposite phenomenon, where places controlled by Republicans tend to have quite a few "liberal" Republicans, but it seems plausible that would be the case as well.

It’s possible that you just have an extremely left-wing view of what it means to be progressive, such that people who identify a s progressive to you and who would be called progressive by most Americans appear conservative to you. This is definitely the case with Republicans who call an insufficiently conservative Republican a “RINO” or “Republican In Name Only” (although the Trump wing which isn’t conservative has colored it to refer to Republicans which aren’t sufficiently extremist).

It’s also possible that SF tried more progressive policies, but found they didn’t work in certain cases (for example, the recent DA recall). Note that I’m not trying to litigate whether conservative policies would work better than progressive policies or any such thing.

I’m not even sure it’s a majority of constituents so much as a review process that takes the smallest objection very seriously and makes overcoming them very difficult.

If the politicians don’t like the process, why don’t they change it? It’s not like San Francisco Board of Supervisors is deadlocked 50-50 and requires filibuster-proof majority. If the construction can be blocked by a single complaint from the last remaining conservative in SF, it is only because SF government allows it to be the case.

Frankly, I find blaming “conservatives” for inability of coastal liberal cities to build anything to be rather ludicrous. It can only be true if you define “conservative” as someone who blocks construction in order to conserve status quo, but that only makes it a vacuous tautology. Truth is, there are plenty people in SF who are as progressive as it gets when it comes to both social and economical concerns, but are also not blind or stupid, and know that low income housing project in their neighborhood means dirt, decay, and constant petty crime. Instead of blaming people for trying to live in clean and peaceful places, try to figure out why low income housing projects in Vienna or Amsterdam don’t decay into dens of crime and despair in a way those same places in US do.

Instead of blaming people for trying to live in clean and peaceful places, try to figure out why low income housing projects in Vienna or Amsterdam don’t decay into dens of crime and despair in a way those same places in US do.

This right here. How have we constructed a system in which we can pour thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars into a neighborhood and make it a worse place? That's the big question, and until it's answered I can't blame people for voting in their own best interests.

Most cities are run by people who would call themselves very progressive, and have been for a long time. New York, SF, Chicago, LA, and other big cities have all had 100% progressive leadership for a very long time. These same cities, which purport to have "fair" "progressive" policies have huge problems building affordable housing (mostly because they want to regulate its construction to hell). It is not due to conservative opposition, it is generally due to opposition from the left, often on grounds of "avoiding gentrification" and "keeping the character of the city."

Look at Calle 24 in SF for a good example - in order to preserve diversity, a progressive organization has blocked a lot of projects that would add low-income housing to their neighborhoods. In addition, progressive mayors and city governments make it comparatively pleasant to be a bum in these areas - you can do whatever you want, including committing petty crimes, and you will get generous amounts of money for it. Economics 101 tells you that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. It's true for solar panels, and it's true for homelessness.

By the way, what happened in the 80's in NYC is that the professional class had enough and started electing conservatives. Those are the people who actually cleaned up the city by forcing homeless people to take shelter beds (they often don't want to end up in shelters because shelters have strict rules), and making it unpleasant to be homeless. At the same time, they invested in things like brighter lights, subway cleanups, and other nonsense that improves quality of life (but is not "fair" according to progressives). They also empowered police to enforce criminal laws on petty criminals.

So yes, this is a problem with politicians who claim to be progressive. I used to call myself "progressive" until I learned that this is where "progressive" politicians lead things. As a progressive yourself, it's up to you to call this behavior out if you want people to think that your ideology actually helps people.

NYC has low street homeless because they build enough shelters and are next to New Jersey, which is good at providing affordable housing (Mt. Laurel doctrine).

California has high street homeless because housing is expensive not only in cities but everywhere in their exurbs as well. Most homeless people in California are locals who just can't afford their rent; they're not "bussed in" and didn't move for the weather.

Being mean to homeless people has very little effect compared to giving them homes. California governments are good at being mean to them; the police constantly raid them and steal all their possessions. It of course doesn't do anything.

Note, it's not related to drugs because the parts of the country with the worst drug problems (like West Virginia) don't really have big homeless populations, since they can still afford somewhere to live.

Use the subway every time I’m in Manhattan and I barely even see any crazies. It’s about on par with Boston. It’s got some notable events that make it in the news but I think that’s more a function of the population size rather than a noticeable increase in the crazy percentage

Have you been since the pandemic?

Not the parent, but I've visited Manhattan and Brooklyn a couple times in the past year, and I didn't find the subway scary at all, even when taking trains fairly late at night. Maybe I was just in the safer areas, though.

Yes, I was there 2 weeks ago. Mind you I didnt go to every single line and section of the city, only in Manhattan, but literally no issues.

Also spent about 3 hours outside smoking until 4 am and only had a single person approach me to bum some change and left with no issue when I told him I didn't carry cash. I have no doubt there are rough parts of the city, but its not all lawlessness and mentally unwell in the streets everywhere.

I used to use it until the pandemic. It's a horror show in comparison now. Some lines used to be horror shows before, too, but it was mostly only bad outside of Manhattan.

The most viable (and likely cheapest overall) option, would be to give the bums access to housing, healthcare, etc. Then there would be far fewer bums in the first place. It's a win-win, but alas tends to be politically unpopular. Especially in the US.

Most of them have access to housing (shelters, if they feel like following the shelter's rules) and healthcare for free. That's why there are so many of them.

Where I live (San Francisco), many homeless people refuse to go to shelters, because the shelters have strict rules around belongings, enter/exit times, and alcohol and drug use, among other things. Personally I am of the opinion that we should just say "tough shit", and require homeless people to stay in shelters if there are beds available[0], but apparently that's not "humane" or whatever.

It's somehow more important to give someone the right to sleep on a street corner at noon (something I witnessed just today, in an area where there usually aren't many/any homeless people), than it is to help get them on their feet, plus allow the rest of us to feel safe and not have to deal with garbage, human shit, and needles all over.

[0] That's the other thing, though: I doubt we have enough shelter beds to cover all the homeless people here. Yet another thing that needs to be fixed. I hear NYC is able to house around 95% of their homeless, and we're a much smaller city.

Earnestly, these rules are in fact arbitrary and tough. When you’re a bum, genuinely all you have is your sense of your own personhood. Being assigned strict rules like a government mandated bedtime (aka a closing time for the shelter) is a huge pill to swallow because you’re giving up what little you have when you already have little. Additionally, shelters may not be safe for you! You may get robbed, raped, or otherwise violated by other people there, with no accountability or guarantee of safety.

On top of this, if you are addicted to drugs, you might be unable to safely detox. Cutting cold turkey in a shelter sounds like a nightmare and I wouldn’t be surprised if a bum would prefer remaining addicted on the street than vomiting/sweating/sick in a shelter full of strangers where you’re too vulnerable to fight back if anything goes wrong.

More realistically, I’ve known folks who refuse to go to shelters because the shelters demand them to give up their pets, aka their family and what’s getting them through the traumatizing experience of homelessness. Or they’re told to give up their possessions for being too bulky or much, even though there’s no guarantee they might not need all that gear back if they’re later kicked out or age out or housing falls through.

There's significant research showing that housing-first policies (which means getting people into housing with basically no strings attached) are effective not only at reducing homelessness but also at improving mental health and addiction outcomes.

Literally incarcerating people just for being too poor to afford decent housing is also ethically abhorrent, of course, but it's also not the most effective way to reduce the problems that are bothering you.

Chicago definitely doesn't have an "only the bums use public transit" problem.

I stopped using buses and trams in the US out of fear for my personal safety. I'm not going to wear a bulletproof vest and carrying a handgun concealed just to get around town. Now I drive between safer areas to do things and meet people and don't have to put myself in danger by exposing myself in the in-between areas. A metal box goes a long way to prevent an assault. The whole situation is just pathetic.

Where do you live? As an outsider it’s crazy that anyone in the US can think like this.

Have lived in multiple top 10 US cities by population. It's the same story everywhere. Watch the interviews by charliebo313 to learn the story.

I'm not a hardcore anti-car person, but realistically you're safer taking buses and trains and so on in the US than you are driving on the highway. Of course, if you're just taking trips across town a car might be safer? Ideally though major cities would police public transit better, but we really reversed course on policing in this country beginning circa 2014 and crime has risen commensurately.

After witnessing how 911 and the police treat my reports I am convinced that crime stats in all major US metro areas are cooked and rife with under-reporting and lies. The crime rate is much higher than the stats show. Imagine my horror when I was put on put on hold for 5 minutes with 911 in the nation's capital after being attacked while jogging and the dispatcher was annoyed at me for bothering her.

That’s a fair point and one I agree with. Police across the country have either pulled back or been pulled back such that proactive policing has been dramatically reduced, which has been driving up crime, but it also means police aren’t looking for crimes like they used to do, which would also contribute to an “underreporting” effect. And homicides and other not-so-easily-overlooked crimes are way, way up so it would be surprising if the forces operating on homicides (“I can get away with murder”, basically) weren’t also operating on other crimes.

I just can't imagine living life in this much fear, and I ride transit in LA county. The things I've seen would probably send you to some bubblewrapped environment in the midwest, but at the end of the day they are just things that I've seen and not things that have personally affected me at all. Someone smoking meth on the platform ultimately doesn't affect me. Someone selling loose cigarettes doesn't affect me. Two crazy people getting into a fight over nothing also doesn't affect me. A guy tagging MS-13 on the schedule map similarly doesn't affect me.

You don't make eye contact and keep to yourself, and nothing happens to you. If something does happen, every single train car has an intercom tied to EMS, and every single bus has a driver who is trained on how to deal with these situations when they do inevitably come up (pull over and call EMS). If you got beat up I'm sure you'd have a case against the city and the city attorney would probably be happy to settle and pay you versus deal with a lawsuit and potentially more seriously have to address something. The odds of you getting killed are just too low to even seriously consider, you are probably a lot more likely to die crossing the street to get to the bus stop than you are to die on the bus involved in some situation.

>I just can't imagine living life in this much fear

>You don't make eye contact and keep to yourself, and nothing happens to you.

This sounds like you are living your life in fear.

Oh please. Making eye contact is a surefire way to draw the attention of someone who is acting erratically. If you have the time and will to engage directly with every single one of these people, then be my guest. But to call this living in fear is laughable to anyone who's ever spent an appreciable amount of time commuting via public transit.

If there are people erratic enough to be a source of danger from mere eye contact, thats a good reason to be carrying concealed.

I don't think "danger" is the right word. Sure, you might run into someone who could physically attack you if you act toward them in a way that sets them off, but I think most would either just act out (without actually touching you), or yell at you, or something like that.

No, it's not great, and I wish our elected representatives would actually do things to fix these situations, but the idea of "I need to carry a gun" to solve this "problem" is just bonkers.

Someone mentally unstable yelling at me is not a worry, it's not their fault. I had misunderstood the statement to mean that eye contact was enough to warrant a physical confrontation with violence. I agree with you yelling and such doesn't necessitate a gun.

US is not the place to be if you want to tell others how to live their lives…

I'm not living my life in fear by doing that, I'm just aware of the fact from learned experience that people on meth tend to not react well to the fact that someone might be staring at them, and that there is also a certain type of person in public who tries to draw confrontations. This is being realistic. I don't stare at my feet at everyone who walks into the train, but there are some characters who you are wise to not do anything to draw their conversation, and its often pretty obvious who they are the second they step foot on the transit vehicle (e.g. the one looking for fights will be posturing the minute they are on the train and accosting people).

Isn't that like saying a minefield is the same as any other field as long as you know where the land mines are and step around them? At the end of the day is it that surprising that people choose to walk somewhere else?

You can see where the mines are, it's the guy in the back of the car muttering to himself about Dr. Phil ejaculating in the water supply. Don't step on him.

These "landmines" you speak of aren't stationary targets. They can walk up to you.

Breaking news, man on subway car capable of locomotion.

No, it's more like I am aware that a bear is not a big large cuddly cat, and when one approaches I act appropriately.

It would be quite appropriate to fear a bear.

I take transit a lot and many times of the day and while I've seen all of these things, most of the time you see harmless stuff. Mostly it's teens (kids who can't drive yet), doing dumb things like drawing graffiti on a map or putting silly stickers on things. Occasionally someone smelling like booze and weed ends up on the train. Someone who hasn't showered in... days gets on. Sometimes you notice a person who is obviously not fully there and talks to themselves a lot or mumbles and shouts with no pretext. Occasionally you see a person with untreated visible medical conditions (like an abscess). If you have headphones in or have a book in your face, you probably won't even notice what's happening. The numbers back these up as it's statistically much safer to take transit in most places than drive. I do have friends in the suburbs though, so I know there are folks who find safety and comfort in appearances. And for some folks they find genuine solace in their car which is fine.

You don't even _know_ who you're driving next to on a freeway. The driver next to you may be driving home dead tired, "microsleep"ing along the way. They could be very drunk, trying desperately to get home and crawl into bed. Maybe they got fired at their workplace cause they were on meth. Someone driving might have a seizure and lose control of their vehicle. You can just look at traffic crash statistics; the US is the worst developed country for traffic incidents by far. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean their conditions don't actually exist.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see America pay actual attention to the folks with these physical and medical conditions, and the fact that we don't is terrible. But stuffing them into cars or forcing them to an underclass where they can't drive isn't the answer. And it's not particularly unsafe to take transit.

The idea of successfully suing the city over transit crime is almost as laughable as people's overblown fear of being a transit crime victim.

See Lozito v. New York City.

I'm not sure about NYC, but it does happen at least in California.

https://okhovatlawfirm.com/train-accidents/whos-liable-if-yo...

https://hhjtrialattorneys.com/domestic-violence-in-californi...

https://trellis.law/rulings/%22LOS-ANGELES-COUNTY-METROPOLIT...

That sounds much more fear-filled than the actual risk you run.

The police in my city in the US (2+ million pop.) are there to document the aftermath of crimes (only if substantial damage was caused or they won't come out) and to take photos of deceased bodies. Your life is purely in your own hands despite the illusion. You simply roll the dice daily. I called the police three times to report crimes in progress and have been blown off, the police responded after a few hours each time, or my police report was "lost". I needed it for an insurance claim when thousands of dollars of my property was stolen.

In another city I have even called 911 and been put on hold for 5 minutes. In the nation's capital after being attacked unprovoked while running at dusk in a large central park but managed to barely slip out of his grip and book it. Thinking back it would have been very easy to make a body disappear there without a trace. Zero follow up or news about attacks occurring there. The 911 dispatcher was annoyed that she had to be bothered by me. I should have known better I guess after seeing a car laying in the middle of Missouri Ave with all four wheels sheared off after a police chase. Thankfully it's easy to protect yourself with a concealed handgun. Just kidding, it's illegal to possess or use weapons in Washington D.C.

I was shot at from a car while walking down the sidewalk. I could hear the ricochets off the pavement near me. I ducked behind a tree and called 911. They took my name/location and hung up. I never saw an officer.

/this was in Dallas Texas about a month ago

Jesus christ. I have heard of similar incidents happening as being part of a gang initiation, especially if the attack was purely unprovoked (i.e., you weren't targeted for political or financial motives). I reckon this kind of stuff is a special kind of behavior usually reserved for areas within a day's drive to the Mexican border.

Nope. A gang initiation happened in Cincinnati Ohio in front of a Target. Random young man was accosted on trying to enter the store. He didn't bite on their attempt to goad him into a fight and they shot him when he left the store. There was a girl taking video of the whole thing. She jumped in the car with the shooter. Still at large.

Totally innocent student shot dead on a trip to a very busy store in a very "nice" (expensive) area.

I pay attention to the get-away situation of areas now to assess risk of criminal activity spawning.

Sounds hellish. Is the money really worth living in such a place?

Maybe it’s a form of the Stockholm syndrome? I can’t make heads or tails why someone would want to live in that environment either.

It's difficult for Americans to change anything because all changes are potentially racist and they can't escape either because immigration to safe foreign countries is only feasible for those that can claim and prove unbroken ancestry or exceptional talent. The only solution Americans have is to universally liberalize handgun concealed carry and make bodycams in public ubiquitous so you can exonerate yourself after defending yourself. Americans are swimming in an ocean of criminals if they decide to be out in public. It can't be fixed at this point because all changes are perceived as harming some minorities or racist. Nevermind that in the places where most life threatening crimes occur, minorities are not the minority. Americans' mindset is so warped that it will take generations of suffering and unnecessary death to sufficiently correct the cultural zeitgeist. This is why concealed carry and bodycams are so essential to normal Americans today. You can't fix society so you have to protect yourself and exonerate yourself with video footage.

This is the craziest thing I’ve read this week. Yes, we have too much violent crime, but it’s not worse than it was in the 90s. That’s a lot of regression in a short period of time, and we don’t want to continue on this trajectory, but it’s not nearly as extreme as you suggest.

I suspect you’re making a couple of errant assumptions:

1. Looking at the sheer number of homicides in the US without accounting for the US’s very large population (our rates are still high for a 1st world country, but not as much as they seem without the population adjustment)

2. Assuming that crime is evenly distributed across our country. Most of the violent crime in the US happens in so-called “inner cities”. Most of the country is very safe, but a few places are very unsafe.

Basically the US is a biiiigggg and diverse country by 1st world standards.

US crime is only "low" because such a huge number of people can live dispersed. And it's a terrible way to live. To make a meaningful safety comparison between interesting places low population density areas need to be excluded.

If you look around you and see only criminals, then the only answers you will come up with involve rounding them up, and moving them elsewhere.

Those people on the streets that you're 'swimming in' - the homeless, the untreated mental health cases, the drug addicts, the ex cons, the unemployed, the slum dwellers - they are not criminals. Except where catch-22 laws make their existence criminal.

They are the marginalized, and made so by the day-to-day actions and inactions of their fellow citizens who look down on them, block them from participating in society at every opportunity.

There are well known solutions to these problems: economic, social, and humane. But as long as the voting public can keep coming up with reasons these people do not deserve a proper solution to their problems, you're all going to have to live with the consequences.

Pray tell what are these well known solutions? My personal solution is a Glock 9, a body cam, and praying that I can away run fast enough to never have to use either.

While many of these problems are never going to go away, they are absolutely manageable in a humane way. If you look at cities around the world there are many examples that are as large and diverse as an American city, but much safer and cleaner.

Why is that? It's not like they don't have their share of unemployment, mental health or drug addiction.

In most cases nothing surprising - just well funded and unhobbled versions of things most North Americans already know about but vote against. Just listen to your local Social Workers and Nurses, they usually have a very good idea of what's missing or critically underfunded. Here are some examples:

Homelessness and unemployment: Various social safety nets, affordable housing, back to work and education programs, well funded social work programs

Mental health: Treatment, accessibility, in- and outpatient programs, well funded social work programs

Drug addiction: Decriminalization, access to safe use, needle exchanges and treatment programs, well funded social work programs

Ex cons: Stop giving people lifelong records for drug offenses. Re-entry education and training programs. etc. etc.

Maybe you live in a war zone, and a glock really is necessary for you to make it from your condo to your armored car. But until you start looking beyond just helping yourself, things are just going to get worse.

Which could be pretty easily done in some locations by making more expensive copies of the same transit (think "express" busses that are double the cost vs the once an hour bus that is cheap or free).

Then the people who care about it (read: not poor) will pay to ride the bum-free version, and then more people will use it, and it will begin to improve.

Of course, that cannot be done because then it's called "making the poor version crappy" and so everyone is forced to use the crappy version and it remains crappy forever.

Where do you live if you believe bums pay fare? It's definitely not the case in LA, SF and NYC. Make it 10x expensive and they still pay 10x0 i.e. 0.

Hell, a few weeks ago I was on a train in SF, and saw a family of five get on the train (definitely on their way to see a basketball game), and they didn't pay. If people who can afford 5 tickets to a Warriors game during the playoffs/finals/whatever it was won't spend $12.50 to get their family to the stadium (after they probably spent $75 to park their car), how can we expect homeless people to pay?

Enforcement is also nearly nonexistent, and I expect it's even more nonexistent since COVID started. In 12 years of riding transit in SF, I've only once witnessed a group of transit employees board a bus to check that everyone had paid. Anyone who rides transit frequently (and doesn't pay) is likely saving money even if they have to pay the vanishingly rare fine if they're caught.

Which indicates it's an enforcement problem, which can be solved by more thorough checking, gates that read/charge, or just giving up and declaring that everyone "living in the city" gets a pass.

I've often suspected that metro fares are basically an excuse for the cops to kick bums/undesirables off the train.

You need to make transit come every 10 minutes or less before it is really worth it. In places with really bad traffic - Manhattan for example - you can sometimes get by with worse service, but 10 minutes between service is minimal service - cars are overall cheap and they go when you want to, transit needs to compete with that.

The problems do not go away, they just become more present for more people. I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars. It doesn't let up when the traincars are full of people commuting to work either (which despite the car centric image, many people actually do use the trains in LA to get to work), it just gets more sweaty and hot inside and more noisy as more portable speakers compete with eachother.

These are societal problems. More people using transport doesn't make people with issues simply poof into thin air or suddenly en masse take up private transport to go places to free up public transport for the sane. More asylums would certainly improve the situation getting unwell people into care and safety, along with better drug treatment programs for the addicted, but these aren't transit department problems to solve. Even if security got harsh on the train platforms and meth users were readily kicked out of the train, it would just amount to kicking the can down the road without having a mechanism to institutionalize more people or force people who don't want to change their lifestyle into care.

>"I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars."

People actually smoke in the train cars? I'm curious is this a common occurrence then?

People smoke weed and cigarettes on the train in Chicago too.

Yeah some people will smoke weed, cigarettes, or meth or crack too but those are usually done underneath a blanket or a sheet thankfully. A lot of smoking happens on the platforms as well which at least get the pneumatic subway pushing air through it every now and then for ventillation, but air is pretty stale otherwise and smoke can linger in the underground stations. Here's a video clip of this happening on the bus:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uu6gki/metro_in...

Amazing. There's two guys, one is clearly smoking a cigarette and the other either is smoking crack or weed. Neither of them looks homeless either. They are both wearing stylish clothes. I haven't seen exactly this but I've seen similar thuggish behavior in shared public spaces where people clearly know their behavior is unacceptable. I feel like there's been a big uptick in this anti-social thuggery since the pandemic started. If you say something to one of these folks it's almost guaranteed to start a fight and they clearly make everyone around them uncomfortable. It's this odd form of self-assertion that says "I am going to do whatever I want to do and you won't dare do anything." It's like a new machismo.

Yeah, anyone who makes eye contact with these people is liable to get chewed out or worse. I've seen it almost get uglier than that before, but luckily a bystander with a boxcutter managed to break up the two and forced the instigator off the train before it came to blows.

Its one thing if you need to leave this sort of situation with a train being able to step into another car, but with a bus it could be as long as a half hour before the next one shows if its off peak hours.

The problem is that some folks insist that “we can’t inconvenience automobile users until public transit is perfect” and others say “we can’t justify investing in transit unless way more people start using it”.

I'm pretty adamantly of the opinion that the only politically viable way to increase public transit usage is positive incentives. If you just try to punish drivers (as many in the anti-car crowd are want to do, even if it means punishing bus riders too), you will end up creating a bunch of political opposition. I think you really need to convince people that investment in transit will beget more ridership, and if you can't make that case then more public transit may not be appropriate.

The problem is that drivers consider practically any changes to the status quo to be “punishment”. Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic? Punishment. Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment

I guess what I had in mind was stuff like "removing one of three highway arteries in the third largest US city thereby pushing tons of traffic onto side streets (where pedestrians and cyclists are) and removing all of the bus routes that depend on said artery just to spite drivers".

> Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment.

Drivers in general aren't going to object to a particular bike lane, although obviously drivers who park on that block probably will (and understandably so). Also, "with hundreds of spots" isn't significant if there are hundreds more drivers than spots in that neighborhood.

> Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic?

I don't know. I would be open minded if you could convince me that the bus lane is actually going to move more people (yes, the capacity is greater, but that doesn't guarantee that the throughput will be greater, for example if there aren't enough buses running to saturate capacity or if the buses aren't full or etc).

> Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment

Well, they are public streets, which suggests that everyone pays for them. But at least in my major city, we do pay to park our cars on public streets, once in the form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many cases) again through meters. We could talk about drivers paying more for parking, which will of course be unpopular among drivers, but it's not like cyclists are going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public transit users likely to support a rate increase to finance improvements to buses and trains. Everyone wants the public to pay for the infrastructure they use, but public financing of infrastructure they don't use is less popular.

> Well, they are public streets, which suggests that everyone pays for them.

Right but if the street only pushes for a single modeshare is it really a public street or is it a street for that modeshare?

> once in the form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many cases) again through meters.

Right and transit users/cyclists pay the same road taxes that motorists do and also pay per transit trip. Motorists just pay for a gas tax in lieu of a transit trip. Importantly, motorists are payed a hefty subsidy by the Federal Government for any highway project but transit projects are not. Moreover this piece of funding does absolutely nothing to benefit anyone who does not drive or use a bus.

> but it's not like cyclists are going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public transit users likely to support a rate increase to finance improvements to buses and trains

... Who do you think are advocating for these new bike lanes and transit lines?

So it's unclear to me where your cynicism of:

> I don't know. I would be open minded if you could convince me that the bus lane is actually going to move more people

comes from. If anything it's more indicative of the parent's opinion that drivers perceive any change in fees to be punishment.

> Right but if the street only pushes for a single modeshare is it really a public street or is it a street for that modeshare?

I mean, I don't think anyone would dispute that sidewalks are a public resource even though I can't drive my dirtbike on them. Just because a public resource has a designated use doesn't make it private or otherwise less-public.

> Right and transit users/cyclists pay the same road taxes that motorists do and also pay per transit trip.

Where on earth do cyclists pay per trip? Anyway, I pointed out that drivers pay for street parking (contrary to the parent's implication that they do not), and you're refuting that with "cyclists and transit users also pay for their transit" which doesn't actually address my claim. In other words, arguing that drivers pay for street use doesn't imply that users of other modes of transit don't pay for their transit.

> ... Who do you think are advocating for these new bike lanes and transit lines?

Advocating for new lanes and lines is not the same for advocating that those new lanes and lines are financed by cyclists and public transit users exclusively. This seems like it should have been obvious...

> So it's unclear to me where your cynicism of ... comes from. If anything it's more indicative of the parent's opinion that drivers perceive any change in fees to be punishment.

Well, as I explained above, just because someone votes against dedicated transit lanes doesn't mean they're perceiving them as "punishing drivers". For example, intuition suggests that they reduce the overall throughput of a street (at least in Chicago, buses aren't running at capacity, so increasing the bus capacity isn't obviously going to increase street capacity, especially at the cost of a lane). So absent information to contradict my intuition, I would vote against a proposal for a dedicated bus lane on the basis that it seems like it would reduce the throughput of a street, not because I perceive it as "punishment".

> Well, they are public streets, which suggests that everyone pays for them.

But only car drivers get to dump their vehicles there. If street parking was open to motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians leaving their luggage then I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that argument.

> But at least in my major city, we do pay to park our cars on public streets, once in the form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many cases) again through meters.

All of which still adds up to much less than the land value you're taking up, generally.

> We could talk about drivers paying more for parking, which will of course be unpopular among drivers, but it's not like cyclists are going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public transit users likely to support a rate increase to finance improvements to buses and trains.

Where I live cyclists are very happy to pay for decent parking, and public transit users already pay for every journey (in contrast to drivers who pay some flat costs but don't pay any extra for using city center roads, which creates the wrong incentives).

> But only car drivers get to dump their vehicles there. If street parking was open to motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians leaving their luggage then I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that argument.

This is silly and factually incorrect. First of all, you can park your motorbike on a street (and maybe even your bike, I really don't know). More importantly, just because one particular public resource is reserved for a particular purpose doesn't make it "not public" nor do we expect users to pay for it. For example, public schools are still "public" and we don't make families pay to send their kids there, instead the whole public pays whether or not they use those schools. Similarly, we don't charge pedestrians to use sidewalks despite that motorcycles aren't permitted to use them. Same deal with bike lanes--cyclists aren't charged for them, the whole public pays for them.

> All of which still adds up to much less than the land value you're taking up, generally.

I would imagine it's a little bit less (considering it's a public resource and the public pays for some of it), but meters can run $8/hour whereas an off-street parking space is often ~$300/month in downtown Chicago (or so it was a few years ago when I lived there, not sure what has happened with inflation). Of course, not all streets are metered and meters don't run around the clock, so it's not a super easy calculation. In whichever case, cyclists are may a much lower share for their use of bike lanes, and that's fine--it's a public resource and the public should pay for it.

> Where I live cyclists are very happy to pay for decent parking

But are they happy to pay for use of the bike lanes like you're proposing cars do for use of street parking? The point is that no one wants to pay to use a public resource.

> public transit users already pay for every journey (in contrast to drivers who pay some flat costs but don't pay any extra for using city center roads, which creates the wrong incentives)

I'm not following your point about incentives--it's not like public transit users pay more during rush hour. And drivers could pay more to use the city center roads ("congestion tax"), but that's generally considered regressive because it effectively reserves city center driving for people who can afford the congestion tax.

Public transit users do pay more during rush hour, at least where I live. The metro has rush hour and non rush hour fairs.

Huh, never heard of that before.

> More importantly, just because one particular public resource is reserved for a particular purpose doesn't make it "not public" nor do we expect users to pay for it. For example, public schools are still "public" and we don't make families pay to send their kids there, instead the whole public pays whether or not they use those schools.

Public resources should be for public benefit. Sometimes there's a legitimate public interest in something that only a subset of the population uses directly - e.g. there's a general public interest in having children raised well, it's something that even people without children benefit from. When public money is spent on something that mostly benefits the rich or the middle-class, pointed questions are and should be asked about that.

And I don't think there's any general principle that public resources are always free to use. Public transport is generally charged for. Publicly funded museums and art galleries are free in some cities but not in others. Public sports facilities are almost always paid, at least for private individuals to use (they might be used for free by a municipal team or club). Even stuff like getting a copy of your tax records often costs money.

> But are they happy to pay for use of the bike lanes like you're proposing cars do for use of street parking? The point is that no one wants to pay to use a public resource.

It seems a little unfair to compare drivers' parking to cyclists' road use. Where I live there's virtually no street parking (for bikes or cars), everyone pays for parking, and no-one pays for road use (except for expressways). If we were talking about replacing paid car parking with free bike parking then I can see how that might be seen as unfair, but that's not the issue AIUI.

> I'm not following your point about incentives--it's not like public transit users pay more during rush hour.

Public transit does cost more during rush hour in many places. More to the point, congested lines or lines that use a lot of expensive land tend to cost more, whereas there's no equivalent for roads.

> And drivers could pay more to use the city center roads ("congestion tax"), but that's generally considered regressive because it effectively reserves city center driving for people who can afford the congestion tax.

Right, and this I think is the real issue; people see attempts to make drivers pay their fair share as regressive because they assume driving as the default. Whereas at least in the city, being able to afford a car at all puts you well above the bottom.

One bus lane or bike lane won't make a difference and isn't worth doing both need very extensive investment before you get enough different that they are worth using. Sure you make the bus take 10 minutes less, but if I can drive in 20 minutes 1 hour 35 minutes isn't better. The above times were from a real trip that I once looked up making by bus. Good service is hard and expensive, I don't know how to get there, but most partial measures are not big enough to be worth the bother.

The bus taking 10 minutes less is multiplied by the number of people taking the transit. Boston only added in a handful and it drastically improved traffic as it also made the buses more reliable instead of getting stuck in traffic.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any sort of data that backed up cars over buses as a more efficient transit system other than people comparing their personal trip time as equal or greater in importance than everyone else having transit times reduced

The only thing that matters is individuals, all however many (million) live in your city.

I never made any claims that cars are more efficient. I only claimed that most tranist expansions are too little to make a significant difference.

And improving the transit system helps many more individuals than trying to improve car speeds in a city. That's what I mean. You cant compare car time to bus time you have to compare total man hours saved

> I don’t think I’ve ever seen any sort of data that backed up cars over buses as a more efficient transit system other than people comparing their personal trip time as equal or greater in importance than everyone else having transit times reduced

I think some of that is because public transit is unsexy, so people come out with dubious comparisons or at least ones which misleadingly appear to support a pro-public-transit conclusion. For example, I saw a study that showed that a dedicated bus lane has a far greater capacity than using the same lane for car transit. I completely believe the finding, but people pass share it around as evidence that dedicated bus lanes are a no brainer; however, this ignores that buses are rarely capacity constrained so adding a dedicated bus lane would likely decrease the throughput of the street even though the capacity increases (of course if more people start taking the bus as a result, then maybe the throughput could increase?).

I want public transit to work out, but my experiences with public transit and driving in Chicago make me realize that public transit has a long way to come (not only with respect to all of the unpleasantness of public transit, but even with sheer convenience--driving in Chicago is much faster, I can bring my dog and more easily transport other things, etc).

I'm not sure it's feasible for most people to do without owning a car, but we probably can get to a world where people need to use their car less, and we can also work on improving car transit too. Work on city/suburb design that encourages cars to take highways rather than city streets, continue making cars safer and lighter, etc.

The goal of bus lanes isn’t to maximize throughput, but rather to decrease bus travel time. Pointing out the peak capacity of a bus lane being radically higher than a mixed traffic lane is only meant to justify why a bus lane can be worthwhile even if it usually looks empty

If you believe that the only people who matter are the ones driving cars, then of course you're going to conclude that anything done to benefit other road users isn't worth it. But people do take the bus today, so improving their experience can be a net good for society even if no one else decides to start riding the bus

There's only one way to eat the elephant, one bite at a time. The buses are already being used even as they are now, the more we improve them the more people can shift to them and the more momentum builds.

> Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc.

The problem is not public transport, the problem is not homeless people, the problem is not mentally unwell people. The problem is poverty and there is a solution: housing first policies and healthcare for everyone.

I hadn't been to Chicago in a while, but I ended up taking a taxi from the airport due to how slow the trains were

I've been living in Germany for quite a while.

It's about the same distance from my home to the airport as O'Hare is to downtown Chicago. About 25km.

The top speed of the L is 55mph/90kph. Plus all the dwell time on the route, it takes 41 min and 17 stops to get to downtown.

For me, there is a regional train that gets me pretty close to home (10min walk) in 17 minutes and 0 stops.

From there if I have lots of luggage there's a bus and a tram that get me right to my block.

Chicago needs to vastly speed up their trains, and provide express trains between major destinations. 20 minutes from airport to downtown is completely feasible with basic commuter trains that can reach 160kph like the Stadler KISS trains that Caltrain will be using.

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities

Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.

>Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.

As a native New Yorker, I have to disagree.

Your standard bike ride in NYC is a mix of exhilaration, care and outright terror because the motor vehicles just don't pay any attention at all to bicyclists.

I've been hit (from behind) by a bus without ever changing lanes. I've had taxi passengers open their doors three feet in front of me (no way to stop or get out of the way) and way more close calls than I care to remember.

Cars are a blight on the city.

Likewise dense construction shouldn't be forced on people who are happy with their suburb/exurb.

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it.

I'm sure it is a great idea to divide the people of a country in city-livers and non-city-livers. It will bring wealth and happyness in this new world. And maybee the next big civil war...

There is this thing called trains and public transport.

I don't live in a city. I don't have or need a car. I can do nearly everything with a 10 minute walk. There are two city centers available to me within a 20 minute train ride and many more with a 1.5h train ride.

You don't need cars to have "access" to cities.

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities

And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends.

The people waging war on the car rarely seem to be car-free themselves. There seems to be an attitude of 'To deal with climate change, pack all the poors into tiny apartments in megacities and take their transport away. Then the wealthy people can have the rest of the planet and its open roads!'

> And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends

Nope. It just means you take the train to your weekend getaway or the airport or the long term car parking or whatever.

Trains are effective for moving people between cities, or around cities, but will rarely serve destinations out in the countryside. For that, you need a car.

My grandparents live in a village with a few hundred inhabitants, and have a train connection to the "big" city(30k) nearby multiple times per day. In the poorest country in the EU.

Of course that's not feasible anywhere, that's why there's the concept of Park and Ride. You take the train to a station which has a big car parking and you can use your car from there. The usual use is for people commuting by car to be able to leave their cars there and take the train into the city, in order to avoid traffic (and this concept gets abused in the US and Canada with train stations and lines only for that single use case and unusable for anyone without a car), but it can go both ways.

Have you been to Switzerland?

Going on a hike where you don't need to go back to the place you started is pretty convenient.

I'm not sure NIMBYism is to blame here. Not every idea should be executed. I understand that it's a problem if projects always cave if there is resistance, because there will always be resistance, but that is not NIMBYism. That's just politics.

The problem is there's just no cost to passivity.

NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.

What is your concrete solution? Create a fine for not-voting in local elections and local initiatives?

If you block development for X number of years and it turns out you had no grounds to do so, you need to compensate the developer (or even more broadly - damage your opposition to the project incurred to the common good)

Remove the private right of action from CEQA etc.

that could stay, but make them prepare the assessment.

also the whole problem is that the timelines are ridiculous.

there's no need to create a report that goes over 99.999% of the whole problem space.

do a 95% job, check for the past fuckups (ie. are we literally trying to pave over homes of disadvantaged communities? are we promising very fair compensation for this but then just scam them and leave them with some half-assed dilapidated boarding house on the outskirts of town? are we willfully ignoring some group with real data?)

it can even go to court, but make it quick. have a standing tribunal for this and they should be bound by law to decide whether the claim has enough merit to proceed based on 1-2 weeks of examination.

simply put there are not enough standardized and well structured parts of this bureaucratic pipeline. (and there should be very very few non-standard parts. and standard parts should be quick and transparent to evaluate.)

>there's no need to create a report that goes over 99.999% of the whole problem space.

I agree, but the threat of lawsuits is why they have to be so exhaustive.

yes, hence my wonky dream of laws that take this into account.

Tax political involvement?

Tax non-constructivity. Someone wants to build a bike lane. Someone says no, because X, Y, Z. Okay, but let's propose something else.

Many times there are solutions that at least would seem to satisfy the involved parties, but no one has the money for that. Okay, so the difference between the original and the 100%-satisfaction solution now has more stakeholders, so let's involve them in the financing.

Obviously (?) there's no ready made framework for this, the problem is very hard in general (game theory, sociopolitics, plus the various concrete engineering constraints of the problems), but at least some kind of approximation of it would help to uncover the hidden externalities, clarify the positions of the various stakeholders, quantify the difference between the possible options, and so on.

Yes, in practice (eg. in case of a bike lane) it might be that the just do it solution costs 1000K and the 100%-satisfaction one would cost 15 trillion dollars, and we're absolutely no closer to deciding whether the problem that the bike lane would solve is one that needs solving, but at least now there is a design space, at least the parties acknowledge the problem, and so on.

Basically, it would be good to tax situations where the high-high-high level solution is to get out of that situation. (Eg. if you don't like a region and you bitch about it for decades and stop any kind of change, then maybe you should have found one that you like a long time ago.)

Would this help cooperation and would this help smooth out local decisionmaking? Maybe eventually. Maybe it's a complete abstract pipedream that would just pour some nice hypergolic fuel on every low intensity city conflict... :]

From my experience NIMBYs are typically local property owners who don't want their view, neighborhood, etc. to change. These folks could be better off financially than their YIMBY counterparts who maybe don't own all that same property.

If there's a group of people with money and a group with less debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to support the party most likely to make large campaign contributions.

I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken seriously in this context.

I think it's less likely the donations and more likely that the politician is a member of the well off property owner group.

This is what I think of as Consensus Paralysis. There are usually many reasons to do a thing, and many reasons not to. A sane person or organization would weigh those reasons against each other. However, in most political decision making there's an important asymmetry: any one reason to block action is sufficient, but no number or weight of reasons is sufficient to ensure its progress. In our earnest wish to avoid the tyranny of the majority by requiring full consensus (or close to it), we've handed all of the trump cards to obstructionists. Often a tiny minority, not even pretending to believe in the nominal reason for their objections, can unilaterally block any progress.

The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off topic.

It's easy to vilify NIMBY, but those are ALSO the people stopping developers from tearing down historical buildings just to put up parking lots or worse.

Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the government should spend as little as possible, and new projects are even worse.

I always end up qualifying as a NIMBY, because all of the projects proposed are endless 4-on-1s that look exactly the same as everywhere else with no parking, or godawful commercial real estate. If there was any taste in development, I'd be a YIMBY.

Yeah that's the problem. If taste is important enough an objection that you block infrastructure that could save lives or house folks on the edge of homelessness, then do we really need to take the objection seriously? As a GP said, there's always a list of pros and cons. We can't let any tiny con, namely something as subjective as taste, get in the way of building life-saving infrastructure.

Ah, get real. None of that infrastructure is life-saving, most building is happening in rapidly growing areas, and most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed transplants who are coming for local industry jobs. That's who new development is for: people who will make rent that will cover the loans that were taken out to finance the property.

No one seems to understand this: developers develop when they predict an increase in housing prices. Their builds will accompany a massive increase in demand. The number of people who need their "lives saved" will only grow as a city grows in popularity and density, and the rent only goes up.

If you want to look at what continuous "life-saving" no-taste development looks like, go to Houston, or Chicago, or SF, or really anywhere that's very populous. The people still need their lives saved, but everything is disgusting and falling down after ten years anyway.

If you want to get serious about housing people in America, you need to think about supporting policies that would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every year, each of who needs housing.

> most building is happening in rapidly growing areas, and most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed transplants who are coming for local industry jobs

If you don't build for them, they're going to buy up whatever property they can, raise rents, and destroy existing communities instead. Or you can somehow stop... them from moving in? America has never blocked freedom of movement so this seems unlikely.

> If you want to get serious about housing people in America, you need to think about supporting policies that would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every year, each of who needs housing.

No I don't think I need to stop population growth for building aesthetics, sorry I don't like to count my cityscape in lives blocked to maintain it ("ah that genteel cul-de-sac was worth 300 people #blessed"). Unless you can make a convincing argument as to why this very moment in history is when America needs to add blocks to development, as opposed to the development of the trans-American railroad, the creation of Route 66, or the establishment of the Interstate Highway System, then I'm going to say you're just the garden variety NIMBY that everyone else seems to think you are.

> Or you can somehow stop... them from moving in?

This is done by:

> Buy up whatever property they can, raise rents.

That's going to happen whether or not they build new developments.

> No I don't think I need to stop population growth for building aesthetics, sorry I don't like to count my cityscape in lives blocked to maintain it

I'll keep happily blocking ugly, poorly-built new developments from people like you until you all get real about sprawl and start proposing buildings that make sense and cooperate with existing living patterns. I actually like living in a town neighborhood with a community, not a transformed economic region with several dozen 6-story apartments stuffed full of transplant yuppies, which is the only thing YIMBYs are capable of rubber-stamping. As I said: go to any town in the US that's had a lot of development recently (Chicago, Boston, SF, Durham, Houston, Austin, Denver, Boulder, etc.) and that's what you'll find.

You need to understand that for "NIMBYs", this is a zero-sum game. Either people who live in a nice area keep their claws around that niceness, or YIMBYs get ahold of it and it becomes a paved, crowded area that houses either apartment stacks or commercial real estate. Either way, the rent goes up.

As I said in my first post: start proposing some nice development instead of the shell-corporation aluminum-siding wood-frame crap that everyone is building now, and you'll convert me as well as, I suspect, many other people to the pro-development side. Leaving a nice town in the hands of developers is a recipe to get the exact result that the developers have perpetrated on the other towns in America.

> No I don't think I need to stop population growth

This is the real kicker. How many more people do you want in the country? 500M? 1B? What's your end goal? I don't want to live in a crowded, extremely dense area, especially not if I've already bought property in a less crowded area. What do you expect me to do, roll over for you and the "we need to save lives by building shitty apartments everywhere and opening the borders" train?

Americans need to start realizing that a 100 year old building isn't historical; it's just old and may have outlasted it's useful life. That said, we also need to start modeling our cities based on the success we see outside America, because you're right, a lot of the new projects are much worse.

In the words of the Joni Mitchell: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"

More and more these are culture war arguments rather than NIMBYism.

NIMBY is the wrong term for this. What we're really talking about is eminent domain.

To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking away someone's property for public use.

If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of murder and then having another person pull the switch for the electric chair.

Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their constituents.

I have to agree with your take on this. We were recently sent an 'offer' by the local water district to buy 15' of frontage along our property for a new water line that will be a major service upgrade for about 8 homes.

My issue came when I discovered that the current water line and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even started planning.

I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with this sort of thing.

I would go even farther, and say you'd have to be comfortable with someone taking away your property to build something you don't think should be built at all. It's easy to say "they should take somebody else's property and build something I want." Anybody can do that! But if you think of it that way it makes more sense why you get people blocking these projects.

A huge amount of NIMBYism (although certainly not all) is about what other people can do with property they already own, or what the gov't can do with property it owns.

The GP groups eminent domain in with NIMBYism, you are grouping NIMBYism in with eminent domain. Oversimplification dilutes the conversation in the same way that substituting terms does.

His example of building a protected bike lane on a city road does not require eminent domain and in my opinion requires far less scrutiny than project where a person's property is considerably affected (as far as I'm aware most people interpret the backyard in NIMBY in the metaphorical sense rather than the literal one). I would assume that the GP feels similarly given the type of projects they want to see completed. They seem primarily concerned with local projects which usually don't need eminent domain because they have a decent level of flexibility in their location, unlike highways or train tracks.

I think you might be right.

Admittedly, I was projecting my own disgust about neighborhoods around me being razed to build row houses and 3 story wood apartments to house the endless influx of out-of-staters into the city where I live in the northwest. And also my dismay at government corruption seeping into every facet of our personal lives.

To rephrase: I'm concerned that terminology distracts from core issues. Spin sways the masses one way or another so that they can be manipulated into voting against their own self-interest. Without context, there's no way to know to what extent NIMBYism or eminent domain plays into these debates. So we should generally consider 2 or more perspectives, but infotainment often only hits us over the head with 1 to achieve a political goal through propaganda.

You don't need eminent domain for dense apartments to be built. You just need to rezone. Unless you the government are building the apartments (and want to build them), e.g. for public housing.

I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years.

Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the polls in November.

We have NIMBY here is Switzerland too but we try to find a solution most of the time if we see a need for it. In the end it's usually a compromise everyone can live with but sometimes a project can also fail. Like the subway that was proposed in the 70s to run under Zürich. The subway station at HB was even built but then people voted against the whole project later. Today that station runs a regular train (S4 and S10) not a subway. There is also another tunnel with station that was supposed to be part of the subway which was built (near tierspital) but is now a standard tram line. What's interesting is that there is almost no room for the tram. The tracks are as low as they can be and the trams pantograph gets almost completely compressed. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0

…and the trams need to switch sides when entering/exiting the tunnels, because those stations are the only ones in the city with center platforms.

The biggest NIMBY opposition these days is against the new soccer stadium, which is supposed to both warm up the area too much and throw too much of a shadow.

There is another center platform where this occurs. Bahnhof Enge and the Tram 5.

Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR, whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past, America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges.

Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

> Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.

You don't need to do anything of the sort. Housing is one of the most tightly regulated form of capital expenditure in the US.

Most of the US is zoned to SFH-only zoning. What this means is that real-estate developers and property owners are not allowed by law to build anything other than a single-family home. This is accompanied by mandates to achieve certain minimum lot sizes (lots have to be at least a certain size), maximum FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), and minimum setbacks (a residence has to be set back from the street by a minimum number of feet). You cannot build low-impact businesses in these areas like corner stores or barber shops/salons. These rules result in the suburban American homogeneity that you see throughout many neighborhoods in America. This doesn't even cover the role of HOAs which are additional local bureaucracy which control what residents are or are-not allowed to build when and where on their property.

Relax (but don't get rid of) zoning and other mandates around US building and empower property owners to make the changes themselves. If they don't want to, they don't have to either. But give them the choice.

> if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing

This sounds great on paper, but in practice it tends to break down. Consider, for example, building a highway. The road is gonna have to go in roughly a line between point A and point B. How much is that land worth? Since there's not a lot of flexibility as to where the road can go, there's no competition, and the owner can basically charge anything imaginable; there's no notion of a "market rate".

While my example was a highway, this applies to pretty much any transport infrastructure, and this exact scenario has actually happened in the case of both the Texas and California HSR projects.

If you have no flexibility as to location then you have no bargaining power; of course the prices will be sky-high. So you plan multiple potential routes (the road or rail doesn't need to go in a perfectly straight line) and make the purchases through intermediaries, just as with any large-scale commercial project.

The problem is that basic infrastructure is never economical. Say you live in the midwest and your house is only worth $40k. If we looked at everything from a neoliberal market theory angle, the city would never ever rebuild the roads or sewers in this neighborhood, because that would cost millions of dollars to serve a couple hundred thousand dollars of property value for individuals who aren't making more than a couple tens of thousands a year, and they might as well live in mud brick huts because that's about the only way you can turn a profit while building infrastructure with these paltry tax revenues you can collect. This is why we have public services versus anarchy and privatization (the neoliberal paradise), because necessary things for everyone are not always going to turn a profit.

>what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain-

They're not even willing to do that any more.

> But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender.

That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers.

And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them if you must.

This is not a US specific thing... people here in slovenia build a house at the end of the by-the-street village, and then complain when someone else does the same, claming the the village is getting too large.

One reason that there is pushback and needs to be pushback is that there are frequently really dumb vanity proposals because small-time politicians want to do something big.

Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute highways in a decade long project where the highways literally just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project.

There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for what would happen to the rest of traffic.

There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences.

>worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences

the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency, which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources than to build nothing at all.

China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war military projects were no different. Better to go big and get something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the two choices.

Efficiency matters because if you are efficient you can do more. There is only so much money you can get to build, build well and you get reelected and get more. Build bad and the project is cancled, or maybe it completes but it is too small (all you could afford) to be useful.

Efficiency matters but it cannot be the paramount driver to growth. If it is, then there needs to be minimum metrics agreed upon for efficiency or you're just asking for a project with no end goal aka every construction project in an American city.

Nobody said anything about that though.

Your examples are all wrong though, projects with no end goal are not efficient almost by definition.

That said, the nature of most projects is they will only last for a short time without maintenance. How much of what you are accusing of being projects with no end goal with projects with constant ongoing maintenance?

The problem with local input, and for that matter even the traffic engineer's input, is basic lack of thought about it.

For example, almost nobody knows about Braess' paradox, where adding roads and cause more traffic. This is not induced demand, it's simply worse traffic for the same quantity of traffic through expanded routes.

And there are tons of examples of getting rid of highways where the traffic just disappears, and everybody is happier.

Or, locally, people are advocating against a small commuter rail project, in economic grounds, while the same people are advocating for spending 10x on highway projects that carry about the same number of people.

Blame the politicians, but they are mo stupider than organized groups.

NIMBYs get taken seriously because they show up in large numbers.

I totally understand the reaction many people have to government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to win.

If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings. Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will motivate them.

NIMBYs get taken seriously because the secondary and tertiary effects of their NIMBYism aligns with the dominant ideology of the state post-Civil-Rights-era.

See also: the 1970 Congressional report from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check)

John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"

You may know the above as "WTF Happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

If you scratch a NIMBY you'll find a fan of Ehrlich underneath. You have no idea how quickly a Berkeley zoning board meeting devolves from ordinary discourse into Malthusian debates about whether young people are entitled to exist. Of course Ehrlich was a gigantic racist, as are his followers, which was recently covered very well at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population...

> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!

Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build.

I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas.

Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem.

Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital.

That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide.

So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.

> City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists

Curious, what city is this?

Portland, Oregon. Note I was referring to a period in the 1970s when the hospital and freeway stuff happened. This city had a very different reputation just 50 years ago, and Oregon as a whole had defacto sundown towns until quite recently.

As you might expect from headlines of recent years, things still aren't exactly great in terms of black Portlander's trusting the city will protect their interests, but progress has happened, mostly due to stubborn people pushing on it.

No easy answers to this kind of problem, but there is a pretty clear moral compass pointer imo.

If you'd like more about my neighborhood specifically: http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEED...

The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they aren't really NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against Virtually Everything.

I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.

If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.

These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either.

If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement.

Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.

These sound like hypothetical scenarios. Do you have some real world examples?

There's a completely bland, ugly, brutalist movie theatre in the downtown of my city [1]. Probably from the 80s? There was talk about tearing it down and replacing it with a much nicer looking (IMO) modern mid-rise [2]. A local news organization posted about it, and the comments were flooded with old people who live in the suburbs moaning. One just posted a link to a YouTube video of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("they paved paradise/and put up a parking lot"), absurdly.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6...

Kind of funny using Victoria as an example. Having lived in Victoria on and off for the last 20 years I can remember the "tall-building ordinance" that finally got removed to allow for the construction of taller condos in the downtown area. Up above is also someone posting the lack of progress for bike lanes in their city but Victoria has been pretty good about that with the mayor going ahead with them even despite significant outcry about them. I think Victoria could be faster at adjusting to change but when I think about the changes over the past 2 decades, there has been significant development.

Not to mention the movie theatre is right across the street from a larger, nicer movie theatre.

Not that it matters but, while that theater may be ugly, it's certainly not brutalist.

The quintessential "bad faith NIMBY" proposal is probably the infamous "historic laundromat" saga in SF where a laundromat had to do three studies on shadows and was proposed for historic preservation in an effort to stop an apartment building: https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...

A lot of small parks in SF are also there because declaring some land a park is a good way to stop affordable housing projects/senior housing/anything that doesn't sound as cute as a park.

My college fraternity purchased a former sorority house turned retirement home, with the intent to turn it back into a fraternity house. Neighbors objected.

We had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court to use the dwelling as it was originally intended and zoned.

Can you blame the neighbors for not wanting to live next to a frat house? That’s pretty much the embodiment of partying, booze, loud music

Sure but that’s not how laws or zoning are supposed to work. A retirement home is zoned the same as a fraternity.

It is like suing your neighbor because you’d rather they have 2 kids instead of 3. Or suing the corner business because they opened a coffee shop instead of a donut shop.

The idea that you think you have a say in your neighbors private business is the real problem.

As long as you tag your hypothetical neighbor's business as "private", saying that it's inappropriate to think you have a say in it is tautological.

The idea that you have a say in your neighbor's business is not a problem, it's a fact. The fact that you have property at all is an agreement amongst your neighbors to respect that claim. If you want a place where your neighbors don't get a say in what you do, you should shop for another planet.

Wow, I almost never see a comment to this effect on HN. So very few people understand this, and that it also extends to all property, not just land.

I wouldn't even think you need to shop for another planet - there are plenty parts of world where it's essentially free-for-all what people build on their own land. They're variously known as favelas, slums, shantytowns etc.

And you think there is a power vacuum there? Try build there and see for how long no-one bothers you.

I suspect one of us rather missed the point here.

Haha, have an upvote. :-D

In my town you to have all of the neighbors within view of the proposed building sign off on your project.

Hopefully you find everyone with a claim before you build and that the person you missed doesn't give a shit.

Most other countries don't have this concept. Strict zoning, permitting, and your neighbors suing over everything is kind of a US specialty.

Can't do nothin like that in supposedly collectivist Japan.

I find it really interesting that in the supposedly "land of the free" US people constantly try to invade each other's private business. So many regulations telling you what you can or cannot do, especially in your private property. And of course people willingly(!!!!!) joining organisations that regulate where you can park on your own driveway or what's the regulation height of the grass in your garden.

In other countries you want to open a business out of your garage? Go ahead, why would anyone stop you. It's your private property. Your neighbour doesn't like it? They can talk to you about it. The local council isn't going to invervene because.....it's none of their business. But somehow in US that's flipped on its head - like somehow the "freedom" means "freedom to tell others how to live their life" instead of "freedom to live my life how I want".

PREACH. If they wanted a say in what happens on a piece of land, they should have bought that land!

I've heard of people moving next to schools and playground/sport field and then complaining to the council about the noise. Some take it even further to enforce restrictions on the use of the public grounds.

Beverly Hills routinely approves single family home teardowns as long as you replace with another single family home.

But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!

And even those teardowns are subject to people trying to get the balloon framed single family home designated as a historical entity and preserved for all of time

That's one flavor of NIMBY anyways.

There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter)

Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values)

The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-991223...

The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower" (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The Millenium Cell Tower".

We got that issue here to mixed in with a bit of anti-5G.

It pisses me because I can barely get LTE signal. For some reason, most carriers except version are dead where I live, which is odd because I live inbetween suburbs and a busy road. It's not like I'm in the middle of nowhere. Even with version the signal strength is crap.

Version? I assume you got attacked by auto-correct and really meant Verizon.

Yes, sorry, that would be correct.

Hey, welcome to Germany.

Property values generally go up with bike lanes?

https://www.icebike.org/property-prices/

I get that article is probably biased, maybe you can find the opposite "proof"?

I'm kind of addicted to "Not Just Bikes" (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A) and he claims studies show massive increases in property prices with more bikable / walkable areas.

Sure, but they only need to find one exception to force you to end that line of reasoning.

There is a ton of evidence from urban planning that proximity to transport hubs (metro / subway / light rail stations), bike infrastructure, small parks, street design, neighborhood cafes / retail, etc., and overall "walkability" boosts property values significantly.

It's called "Locational Advantage" and there's a few decent studies here:

- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10527001.2021.2... - https://www.redfin.com/news/how-much-does-walkability-increa... - https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/walking_the_walk_cortright.pdf - https://www.housingwire.com/articles/better-walkability-mean... - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642... - http://www.reconnectingamerica.org/assets/Uploads/2009Walkab... - https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Etc.

But it doesnt go up during the 5-10 years of construction time when roads are blocked and jackhammers are operating. People today want to sell/flip thier house long before any newly-started improvement will be complete.

That's an argument for opposing metros or light rail (though I'm not sure it's true even there). But a bike lane takes weeks, not years.

If bike lane or cycleway takes 5-10 years of construction time then something is deeply wrong.

That's the point of the OP. For a variety of reasons, projects sometimes take exponentially longer than expected. It might only take a few days to paint some lines, to convert a car lane to a bike lake. But if the project instead means either making the sidewalk smaller, or expanding the road overall to accommodate the new lane, then timelines start growing. And, of course, a bunch of other improvements and maintenance are layered atop the project. Generally speaking, the road is brought also up to whatever safety standards have been changed. That might mean new sidewalk bits and pieces, new electronic signage or streetlights. Before you know it you are staring at traffic cones for years, mostly as the project waits for one or another subcontractor to do X or Y before Z can begin.

Their excuse at that point typically becomes "crime"

"Property values" are a cop out objection. They're almost impossible to prove one way or another, but they are a dog whistle for people who object to change in general.

It's almost impossible to tell what buyers will think of any particular change to a neighbourhood, and buyers are the ones who determine property value not the owners. But owners hear "property values" and they see their nest egg evaporating away and so of course they join in the objection.

It makes more sense when you read it as "people values".

They don't want the blue collar or lesser crowd moving in.

I originally had bit in the post about classism and racism about how people moved out to the suburbs to escape higher density housing but deleted it because I thought it would be too contentious.

Plus, that's more the "crime rates" crowd, which is often thinly veiled racism.

> Plus, that's more the "crime rates" crowd, which is often thinly veiled racism.

There's a lot of that in Naperville as well. It is that kind of place.

In my city, which for the last five years has been in the top ten in the country for year-over-year increases (as a percentage), at least 10, up to 15% property value increases, a proposal, "Missing Middle" was introduced, to help increase middle-density housing availability.

A study was requisitioned by the city, and found that "worst case, the effect on property value would be to reduce the -increase- over the next ten years to be 7-9% year-over-year".

Holy hell, you'd have thought they were executing people's grandmothers in the streets. All of a sudden what I assumed were just people's homes were their "investment in the future" with some hitherto unknown to me guaranteed access to double digit home value increases. People who lived on dead end streets that would not have been rezoned (access to transit and arterials was a consideration) screamed that there'd be "constant traffic through their neighborhood", etc.

And it's a hideous brutalist thing that towers over the park it is in, frightening the children. It looks like something out of a futuristic Lord of the Rings reboot.

Brutalism‽ Won't somebody think of the children‽

I think we don’t have ENOUGH frightening architecture. Where are all the gargoyles? The Dark Arcos?

I’m talking about REAL character, here, the stuff children will remember the rest of their lives and tell their grandchildren.

You must not have attended Catholic school as a child.

This article has a photo: https://www.positivelynaperville.com/2020/09/04/2020-carillo...

I suppose it is vaguely terrifying.

Ah, I've seen that one before! It's from Lord of the Rings, isn't it? Thought it was destroyed by the flooding those environmental activists caused...

The return of investment on bicycle infrastructure is estimated to be 8 Euros for every 1 Euro spent. This includes property values.

That sounds like nothing more than a very straightforward description of conservatism.

Agreed! Except in american (and increasingly global, english-influenced) vernacular the words "conservatism" and "liberalism" have begun to stray so far from their "original" meanings that they can no longer be trusted to accurately convey meaning.

> Except in american

What? In America liberal is very much displaced from its "original meaning".

> [alas], in american vernacular, and hence also increasingly global, the words [..] have begun to stray...

Except is used more like an interjection there (agreed, except that...). They didn't mean to except the american vernacular from the rest of the sentence, just to clarify why they didn't write "conservative" in the first place.

I read the parent "except" as "the above is true, but..." not as "in all Englishes except American English"

This literally sounds like American "Conservatism".

Most city democrats are actually conservatives. They just don't believe it. They'll still vote "democrat" but typically the most conservative ones.

The problem if you only have row options (liberal/democrat vs conservative/republican) is that totally unrelated things have to fit this incredibly coarse framework. If someone is against constructing anything and afraid "outsiders" will come into the neighborhood, but they are for tighter gun control are they conservative or not? It's just random labels now from a policy perspective.

I feel like everyone should find a balance between being liberal and conservative. There is no one size fits all approach to life. Sometimes one needs to be conservative and other times progressive. Explore/exploit if you will.

Moreover, I don't blame people for NIMBY. A house is extremely expensive. It only makes sense to be conservative and protect that investment.

Not sure what the solution is, but I have found it very comfortable in smaller cities. Less commute and hassle than living in a big city, well worth the sacrifices.

Not here to disagree, and I say this all the time, but I feel it bears repeating in this context: Left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative are ridiculously reductive ways of categorizing people's political opinions. Even allowing for people "in the middle" is reductive. That people are so attached to the idea of a single-axis political spectrum in the US plays into the two party system very well and helps keep voters from having any meaningful impact. We ought to be able to place ourselves independently on many axes, i.e. data privacy, gun ownership, taxation, consumer protection, energy policy, and so on. If we didn't lean so hard into the partisan tribalism then you might see movement on more of these issues where it's not such an even split of public opinion.

My intuition is that the inutility of voting afforded by the left vs. right meme may be the end-goal for many reinforcing it, perhaps in support of those with the most money sloshing around in political spheres. If I intended to buy certain unpopular policy with political donations, I wouldn't want voters breaking out of their ideological silos and crossing party lines to oppose the candidates doing my bidding. Maybe that thinking is a bit too conspiratorial, though.

If nothing else, it's a way to lock down a large swath of the demographic you must appeal to, and lets you then pander to only those are are sensitive to an actual position, and not just being endorsed by a group (or even just professing memborship in a group).

In some respect this is useful for the average person because there's just so much going on that being fully aware of the the different candidates stances on many different topics and trying to juggle all that is hard, and doing a good job of it in some cases is next to impossible. That said, it's taken advantage of in the extreme by politicians (of all groups) now, who seem to have purposefully divided the populace so they can rely on this. To all of our detriment.

Not just the house, but the neighborhood itself. I get NIMBYism if only because i understand sticking with the devil you know

It’s not limited to the city. In the countryside you’ll find “conservationists” who don’t want to lose the small-town character and zone everything outside a tiny village as farmland or single family housing on 10 acre lot sizes with huge setbacks. They then take their giant piece of property and put it into a conservation trust - a tax shelter that keeps your land from being developed and taxed at its productive value. But they’re usually democrats so it’s conservation not being conservative.

You can do whatever you want on farmland. Skyscraper? Pyramid? Go for it.

Anyone who is confused by this should go to a school board or school planning meeting in a deep-blue district. You find "deep blue" citizens absolutely going nuts to ensure their school abides by little of the values we typically think are progressive values.

Well yeah, does anyone really believe people fit into neat little boxes with extremely broad labels? Blue folks can be pretty small government when it comes to police and the justice system, conservative when it concerns gentrification, individualist when it comes to welfare programs, bodily autonomy, drug use, and pornography, and free market when it's about immigration and global trade.

Thank you for this. We pretty much have two main political labels for people in the US, "republican" and "democrat". Sure, some people identify as libertarian, some as independent (which to me means nothing), green, whatever. But either you're a Dem or a member of the GOP, for the most part. And do we really expect that everyone in each of those buckets as the exact same needs, desires, and policy plans? C'mon...

People do not vote for Democrats because they share their values, but because they like free money that Democrats typically promise.

People vote for Democrats for all sorts of crazy reasons, including agreement with one of their many policy platforms. People also vote for Republicans for reasons that aren't "I'm a fascist".

I think it's less about free money and more about the following general policies: no jail for thieves, drugs for everyone, homeless++.

In general democrats seem to be doing anything they can to make society worse in exchange for more votes.

does these labels make any sense any more? Not that they made sense to begin with. Liberalism and conservatism aren't polar opposite. The opposite of conservatism (those who don't like change) is radicalism (significant changes). In general, anyone who favors the long standing status quo is a conservative. Conservative label itself doesn't convey anything about one's political believes without knowing the contemporary social and political history surrounding the person. Every longstanding blue-state democrat by definition is a conservative. On top of all that you have the uniquely american problem of having to pigeon hole everyone into just two labels, and labels gradually losing their values to identities.

A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that these people are mainly against the externalities that construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.

How do you distinguish between externalities and end results? Aren't both are the sum total of the outcomes?

It's all about the commute and the noise, and if someone who's retired is staying home all day they have A LOT of time to dwell on the small stuff like hearing a jack hammer for a few hours one day.

I've gotten more sympathetic to this over time. A few years ago I lived in a young (and constantly under construction) neighborhood. after weeks hearing jack hammers and other construction noise, it starts to get old. especially if you work night shift and try to sleep in the morning...

If it ever stopped that would be one thing, but it never does. It just moves around a bit but never stops. The noise, the bad traffic, the unpredictability, the random power outages, etc start to get really old and for the several years we lived there, it was never "done." Maybe I'm just old now, but I really understand the appeal of an established and static neighborhood that doesn't change.

I'm not sure how likely you are to avoid this problem. Even in a static neighborhood, you need maintenance on utilities and change dealing with advances in energy and information transmission.

That said, understandably there are benefits to staying in a constant neighborhood. The problem is that nobody wants to live in the static neighborhoods as there are few jobs or attractive businesses there. You can get a static area by moving to a rural area.

That's not true at all there are tons of static neighborhoods all over major cities. But they are wildly expensive.

Don't worry, in those neighborhoods we have leaf blowers.

Electric leaf blowers kinda rock and are somewhat quieter. I feel less bad about the environment (my electricity is hydro) at least. Though I use it more in autumn than my old petrol version. So it's probably a wash.

The emissions of leaf blowers are pretty terrible because they use small two-stroke motors designed for power-to-weight above all else. Even if you had a coal-rich electricity mix you would have to use the electric version a lot more to come close.

I've got a backpack-wearable one from Ego and I love it. That said, my comment above was mostly a joke. :)

Around here it seems to be a guy chasing around no more than five leaves for several hours.

I'm not sympathetic. I've lived with a lot of construction noise over the past 5-10 years, and yes, it's annoying, but I would never object to a project on those grounds. Cities are not static, and if you want to live in one, you have to accept the fact that there will be construction noise. Invest in a good pair of comfy earplugs, or a white noise machine, or something like that.

For me, it's more painful, because I tend to stay up late and wake up late. Construction usually starts between 8 and 9 in the morning, and by then I've usually only had 5 hours of sleep or so. But that's life! I can choose to move, or to adjust my sleep schedule, or just deal with it! I don't think any of this should give me the right to torpedo useful projects that others benefit from. The people that do are just exceedingly selfish and un-neighborly.

> I would never object to a project on those grounds.

The thing is, it's not a binary. There's a lot of possible mitigation. Noise-absorbing panels can perhaps be placed around where the jackhammers work; or around the first row of residential buildings in the vicinity. Neighbor windows can be replaced with double-glazed ones, reducing noise. Of course this costs money, but it might make the difference.

Another option is offering people to move away temporarily with the rentals being part of the project costs.

Of course this all costs money; but there's a multi-parameter tradeoff, it's rarely just "do it" or "don't do it".

How quiet and convenient was the construction of that established neighborhood?

In my experience (studying Nextdoor) nobody cares about suburban noise pollution, which really is far worse than anything they do care about. What they care about is

1. a 2-story building might cast a shadow on something

2. a person under 50 years old might walk in front of their house, causing gentrification

3. there might be some traffic, somewhere

4. tech employees are too poor to live in their city and will lower property values

5. tech employees are too rich and will park their sports cars in front of their house, attracting crime

My preferred term is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.

"BANANAs" -- I love it.

As Groucho Marx once sang: "Whatever ya got, I'm against it.'

If it’s the case in Athenry, that individual had a competing data centre project shovel ready in Wicklow.

>These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that unguided "forces" can make things better either.

I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here.

For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports.

>If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.

We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.

It's always easier to say no. Happens in orgs and happens in neighborhoods.

Or NOPE ("Not On Planet Earth")

I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.

The Sierra club is more of an outdoorsman club than an environmental club. The interests overlap sometimes, but often they do not and you end up with situations like this. They want to preserve nature, not the environment. And no, this doesn't cause cognitive dissonance in them somehow.

Maybe 100 years ago it was as benign as you suggest, but it's since been hijacked by other interests, including a eugenicist and a leader who was kicked out of Greenpeace for being too radical.

The Sierra Club is chapter-based, so it doesn't matter who its leaders are - they don't pay attention to them anyway.

The SF Sierra Club is just a NIMBY front though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycity...

I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term.

First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement.

We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.

If you want people to live in your neighborhood and not be "transient" (aka not homeowners), it might help to build enough houses to let them live in them. Although I don't know what being a homeowner has to do with being transient, as you can always sell the home again.

This kind of opinion being popular suggests many Americans would love it if we had a China-style hukou system; if you could forbid other Americans from moving to your town you'd never have to see a younger person again.

In the bay area of CA, where NIMBYs are really powerful, we call the super-NIMBYs BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything

> I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.

I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters."

These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.

> to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist

Painting these people as cynics is not the entirely right characterization imho.

I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick. Their imaginary adversary is always a nebulous "they", generally people they suspect to be wealthier, either in money or cachet or political leverage. That pervasive fear of getting taken advantage of is hard to explain. To use the example of the parent, you can show CAVErs a popular bikelane addition in another neighborhood, and still they would block it in their own.

I think that fear and distrust that animates the CAVErs (great term by the way, hadn't heard it), is because they really lack imagination. An almost physical inability to imagine something else, that's aspirational, outside one's own experience. I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.

> I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.

Because, at least from an European POV, y'all are constantly getting the short stick in life. Rich people can do whatever the fuck they want with absolute impunity (remember Trump claiming he could shoot someone on 5th Ave [1]?), meanwhile the poorer you are the harder you can get screwed over. Even if you are in the upper classes of employment, such as a high-paid programmer, you can be fired effectively immediately in 49 states [2] for no reason at all. You can go bankrupt from hospital bills even if you have health insurance.

Obviously that leads people to the desire to have at least one thing they control - their homes and neighborhoods.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump...

[2] https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment

Great point, thanks for the links. I can certainly see that, nimbyism as some sort of compensation for impotence.

I think you’re describing a lack of Openness as understood in the Big Five personality model.

> I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick

I mean... perhaps they have been taken advantage of a lot.

I feel like the US has become a society basically built on taking advantage of people, so... it's not actually unreasonable to worry you are being lied to and misled for someone else's advantage.

It's a mess. It all becomes circular and self-reinforcing, but we're going to need some fundamental changes to society to get out of it... that are made harder by the very conditions we're talking about.

> These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.

Sure they do, they're on Nextdoor.

https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv

That's the nature of large open forums. It can feel like they are hypocritical, but actually it's just different voices from the same group.

I can guarantee you that removing bike lanes to add in almost anything else will get almost zero resistance from a typical NIMBY. Until cyclists in a city reach a critical mass they have the least valued infrastructure out of any group.

This won't be popular, but special interests play a far greater role in the chilling affect for modern urban infrastructure than the so called "NIMBYs" do...

. Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar . Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well . Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor . Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it. . Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.

Everything you listed sounds like a good thing to me. Infrastructure should serve the people.

> How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing

This one is called IZ (inclusive zoning) and is an extremely popular weapon with SF and Portland "left-NIMBYs". They know if the number is set too high, it will both make them look good and cancel literally every housing project in the pipeline (as noone can afford to build it anymore), so set it too high they have, and so their project pipeline collapsed.

When it's used at low levels it can work, but only if you accept that it fundamentally makes the project more expensive, which means the more "luxury" projects are more likely to survive, and means the cost of the market-rate units goes up.

I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. In my experience the points you made are used as justification by those responsible for delivering those things as to why they are not doing so. Essentially, house builders want to maximise profit and not build parks. Neo liberals don't want public transport to be subsidised as a public good etc etc.

When we build, to we absolutely must build the right thing because changing it later will be much harder. That does involve lots of hard work persuading people of the benefits.

Then I think you misstate my conclusion.

Simply pointing out that NIMBY/no builders aren't the sole or even dominate factor of 'Why America can't build.' Or rather, special interest groups who seek to impose their will on public infrastructure excerpt their own form of Nimbyism -- they block development until it conforms to their interests. One can certainly argue the merits or determents of any of this advocacy, but as you state... it makes the outcome harder to achieve.

There is a documentary about a guy in Michigan who had the idea to purchase all of the blighted, abandoned homes so he could tear them down and restore the area as a community farm (or something like that). The locals flipped the fuck out, apparently they didn't want anyone solving the blight and drug problems in the area. To them he was rich, and that meant he had to be stopped. Took him years to convince people that he wasn't the devil. Turns out their only real opinion was that change made them nervous.

they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better

The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.

You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.

This really rings true for me in NYC. Any project get decried by Working Family partisans as being too pro developer, insufficiently full of affordable units, likely to cause gentrification(even in predominantly white neighborhoods), or doesn’t include enough “green jobs”. If they can’t stop it in review, they appeal to their council person to veto it. Failing that they call on the sainted congresswoman, PBUH, to intercede. If she leans on city council in public, the project dies. This is exactly how a locally popular rezoning of Industry City failed.

These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.

This video from Reason.com does a great job in explaining what is happening in these big cities[1]. I see it as the major downside to utopian thinking, you miss the bigger picture for the small, less significant details.

They don't want an apartment project because of a litany of small, sometimes insignificant issues that get dragged out. I'm sure the activist feel righteous in thinking that they are keeping the big bad mega developer from building apartments that gentrify the community.

This line of thinking misses big picture, if you want more affordable homes, you need more supply. On the one hand you can say that this is in fact a complex multi faceted issue and the activists may not be understanding the way their actions will backfire. But on the other hand you think there is no way, there is no way someone does not see the most basic of economic principles at work: supply and demand.

[1]: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho...

It's shocking to me reading about some of the litigation involved in that case. While I can appreciate that there are interest groups that want to ensure affordable housing is built, all approvals should have come to a grinding halt until the special interest groups and the development company could come to a private contractual agreement. In the absence of an agreement, the appeals process should be one of arbitration, in which the court can enforce a compromise that makes neither party happy.

Instead it seems like everyone is just submitting documents to approvals committees independent of talking to each other. And the judicial system is forced to deal with an overwhelming number of individual cases.

This reminds me of the Oakland A's new stadium project. It seems like the team wants to stay in Oakland, build a nice newer stadium and build a bunch of apartments (including low income) and amenities. The stadium is planned to be basically all privately funded as well. However, it's been caught up in battles where people want more affordable housing and concerns about gentrification and all this stuff, and so nothing is happening on the project. Because of this, the A's are sandbagging the team, the attendance is dropping at the current stadium, and the A's are looking to move to Las Vegas. It's really sad, because the A's are a huge part of the community, but now the community is practically kicking them out.

This is literally the Conservative ethos at play

Another way of looking at this is as, "institutions tending towards prudence" which is an after effect of inheriting the anglospheric intellectual tradition (Hume, Burke, Adam Smith). This is classic empirical conservatism-- there must be a very good reason to implement new policy if the system tends toward stability, solutions must be vetted, and new policy should be, "test-driven" at small scales before being implemented more generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.

Are you describing Twitter?

> is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians.

That x 1000 !

It takes politics to change politicians.

This is a many year process: to bring into public office people who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and department values and priorities (street / public works) and budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger number) of voters to pay attention.

Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same rules you complain about.

The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public buildings, including schools, court houses, social services, and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.

There's no shortage of Atlantic and New Yorker sob stories about how some abutting farmers are taking it in the ass over some new development.

This isn't an America problem.

It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are building" problem.

If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would actually give a F about other people's property rights this problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private developers could buy what they want and develop what they want. But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the next big box store or freight terminal is more important so that means no new anything gets built.

I'm a NIMBY, unfortunately. Not because I'm anti-progress or whatever, but because so much of my financial life is tied to my house, and whether I like it or not, there's a lot that can adversely affect its value. So, if building a new apartment complex nearby is gonna reduce my property value by 5%, taking around $50K out of my pocket, of course I'm going to oppose it. I don't feel like that makes me a bad person. Who wants to flush $50K down the toilet?

Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit to their quality of life than to their finances.

In areas of economic growth and growing density high rises going in around you only leads to higher property values. Eventually the dirt under your house is worth so much a developer will make you an offer you can’t refuse.

There is basically no evidence increasing density leads to anything but higher property values for everyone.

Respectfully, I disagree. I have a handful of friends/colleagues who had apartment complexes built nearby their suburban McMansions, and each one had the same story: increased traffic and vehicle congestion, decreased available street parking, increased noise pollution, increased pedestrian traffic, and yes, increased crime. All of these things will make property values go one direction, and it ain't higher.

Extreme example: Back in the 90s, a friend bought a brand new, suburban home. Two years later, an apartment complex was built on a vacant lot about two blocks away. Two years after that, the apartment complex started accepting Section 8's. The crime started almost immediately. His car was broken into. His house was broken into. Loud music all night. Beer bottles on his lawn in the morning. His once quiet suburban home was no more. He eventually sold and took a significant loss. I know I'm the bad guy for pointing this out, but facts are facts, and money is real. Increasing density where it was never intended will negatively impact your property value.

(^^^ I was told there were lawsuits, but California officials got involved and squashed it, saying basically, "We said they could accept Section 8's, and there ain't shit you can do about it. Suck it.")

I want to see the numbers on this. I have heard of something like this in LA before, but it's literally the only time somebody has come close to providing evidence that this actually happens, and is not just fear.

I suspect it has more to do with racial politics than with density, and goes back to something a lot like white flight and block busting in the past. At least, the LA example I'm aware of was largely because of that.

I mean, this is all just anecdota. So here’s mine.

Meanwhile, a single family home was turned into a 4-plex directly next to me, the units are each _renting_ out for more than my mortgage (which I got only a couple of years ago), and my property values went up… $350k in 1 year?

Yes, that dramatic. Because the apartment was a concrete signifier for the demand of the neighborhood.

Since I’m seeing some commentators mention something about LA: this is also in Los Angeles

Not from my experience. I lived in a neighborhood that was previously dominated by SFH and has since transitioned to mostly townhomes/apartments.

It's lucrative for a select few (i.e. early sellers) but once it passes an equilibrium point (i.e. too many apartment buildings, townhomes, etc.), developers move onto more lucrative areas and would-be SFH buyers no longer find the area desirable out of fear that a giant apartment or townhome will go up right next to them.

In my city, SFH-zoned homes are skyrocketing whereas SFH in non-SFH zones have still grown in value but at a far lower rate.

5% is 50k? Wow. That is a full on mansion, compound, some cattle, a nice truck, everything where I am. Just curious, is this a fairly fancy home in your area or just one of the jones's?

A million bucks is a standard 1500-sqft, 3/2 house in many (most?) areas of California these days. My house is anything but fancy.

Congrats on home ownership. That makes me sad. Must be tough for young folks to get a house.

Nowadays a million bucks is a 2BR condo in much of the Bay Area.

I disagree with this outlook, but wanted to commend you for being straight about it and not trying to cloak your vested economic interest in some bullshit about "neighbourhood character" or something. It's only when we can be honest about the rationale behind these types of views that we can take steps to address the underlying issues.

There's also opposite of this problem sometimes. Some kids built a bike trail with jumps by a river in a local park. The local newspaper started running articles how these kids are destroying habitat and nature. Then followed it up with an actual altercation with some Karen and the kids. After a few more articles. The city paid for a bulldozer to go in an bulldoze the ramps the kids build. A year passes and the city awards a half a million dollar contract to local company build a trail and pump track in the same park. The newspaper raves about it. Moral of the story, no one makes money if things are left alone. Also moral of the story, don't trust your local newspaper. Moral outrage can be paid for.

I mean, a portion of the population probably just simply disagrees with your ideas. They'd rather the car infrastructure actually be improved and expanded to meet the demands of increased population, rather than continuously crippled in every possible way. They're not very interested in having yet another lane of travel removed so that an average of 2 bikers an hour can ride down the road.

Hah my city did this recently. Took away two lanes of traffic on two major roads to add bike lanes. I’ve never seen the bike lanes used ever.

Do the bike lanes connect to anywhere or to any other bike lanes?

My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course in a nearby subdivision to build an athletic facility. We’re not talking Texas football here, but a track and some tennis courts for a school where theater is a bigger deal than sports. The neighbors tied us up in litigation for close to six years. (It only took about a year to build the facility itself.)

I have seen this in my city with changes to the schools. No matter what changes are suggested, a group of people gets upset. I suspect they want to make all changes difficult just in case there is a change one day that they actually don't like.

It makes them feel important. They could get the same result by pushing for beneficial development, but that's much more difficult. Mostly because of everyone opposing it to feel important.

Here’s the reason:

In the United States, zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils. Voter turnout in local elections is extremely poor. The only people who vote are A. older and B. homeowners. The young and renters scarcely show up. Thus, local city councils by and large represent homeowner’s interests. These older homeowners adamantly oppose new development like apartments, bike lanes, and mass transit. They fear developments might affect the value of existing homes, change the ‘character of the neighborhood’ (read: attract the wrong type of minorities), increase traffic, compete for existing parking, etc… the list goes on. In general, homeowners are opposed to any type of change that might affect the value of their home or mildly inconvenience their lives.

Local politicians are loathe to cross homeowners. They will be voted out if they do. Further, these politicians are usually homeowners themselves and are complicit in maintaining homeowner’s best interests at the expense of the broader public.

The only solution is that cities be stripped of their absolute control over zoning and power shared at the federal and state level.

I am not from the USA and I don't live in the USA. I've read about this issue several times, and I'm not sure whether I understand why it is an issue.

> zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils

What's wrong with it?

People opposing the status quo usually look to imply that every citizen of the USA should have the right to go and live where he likes the most, at the price and at the conditions it prefers.

Why should I be able to force, for example, San Francisco to build cheap homes for me to move there? If I can't afford San Francisco, I'll go live elsewhere.

Instead, if I live in San Francisco, I will participate in the local political life and vote according to my preferences.

> > zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils

>What's wrong with it?

it excludes people who would live there but the zoning doesn't allow it.

On the scale of a single town this doesn't matter, but on the scale of an entire metro area all these little zoning groups make it impossible to anything anywhere in the entire area and so it destroys the whole. zoning is good for any one small area, but across the entire metro area the sum total is bad.

> it excludes people who would live there but the zoning doesn't allow it.

Let me be cynical: so what? They'll go and live elsewhere.

> it destroys the whole.

There is a huge difference between slowing the growth (or even stopping the growth) and destroying a city.

A usual problem with successful cities is they attract more people, which attract more business, which attract more people and so on. It's time we learn how to keep the economy in good health without our cities turning to anthills.

You compare people seeking a better life in a high opportunity city to insects. There’s a fine line between NIMBYism and misanthropy and you just crossed it.

> so what? They'll go and live elsewhere.

What is you get San Franciso where you cannot find enough people who can afford to work in your city to take care of the basic jobs.

It's simple, money rules everything in the US. Homes are investment vehicles above all else and property rights trump all. This is one reason good public transit can't be built and when there are big public works projects, the contractors who win have political connections either through campaign contributions or politicians owning stock. They also know how to game the system and milk the city for money causing massive budget overruns and go way over completion date. See Tutor Perini in California.

Auto manufacturers and oil companies have had massive political influence, they've prevented good public transit from being built and they've bought public transit and ripped up the lines or bought bus companies and shut them down.

Capitalism, shareholder value, and profit rule everything in the US. And don't even get me started on our foreign policy.

Who is todays generation?

The reason NIMBY types are taken so seriously is because they also are the types to mobilize and vote at the local level. So a local politician is taking a nontrivial risk to their employment by going against those groups.

Unfortunately , China's autocracy beat USA's democracy in infrastructure building.

In the UK, at least, local councils are continuously trying to shoe-horn high density housing into unsuitable rural areas, ignoring urban brown field sites.

If you have a society with stagnant wages and the only route to a decent retirement and some generational wealth is rising home prices, then you will do everything to protect that investment. Even if that results in, long term, making your city an overall worse place to live.

In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.

> It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians.

And it is not just about public infrastructure projects either. Basic private projects are also bureaucratically difficult to pull off, simple things like tearing down an old house and building a small multi-unit low rise in its place, needs an army of lawyers and consultants to approve. With that, only big companies have the bureaucratic resources to do it, so "regular people" are locked out of the opportunity to redevelop their own home, and the city gets less variety of developments as the few able players keep copying and pasting the same stuff, focused only on the same target market.

This is basically the root of so called cancel culture. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The problem is that once a minority opinion gets an outsized amount of attention others will join it to get some of that attention. We have developed a culture of any press is good press where certain people are highly motivated by getting attention from others. These people will seek any outlet for attention and join in with many contrarian viewpoints simply because the attention ratio works in their favor.

This isn't entirely new and Ben Franklin had a solution for it that allowed much of the American revolution to take place.

Secret societies. Many many very small interconnected secret societies, much like an MLM scheme but where you only know your immediate downline and your single sponsor. Everyone was member of at least two secret societies, each with 6 members. The first they were invited to join and the second they created themselves. They just enabled the exchange of pamphlets, but in this fashion ideas gained wide dispersal and support before ever truly becoming public.

The basic cause of this is there were a lot of government projects in the 60s that were bad and activism successfully stopped them. That's "urban renewal", the Embarcadero highway, etc - city planners would basically knock down black neighborhoods just for the joy of building highways over them even if nobody used the result.

So the government was taken over the people who stopped things and rebuilt to make it very easy to stop things, and impossible to actually do them.

Another part of this is that era's environmentalism (under some names like "cities as growth engines") basically thought that doing things = bad for the environment and not doing things = good for the environment. That gets you national parks but also suburban sprawl, which is less "intense" than cities, and so more "natural".

I never liked the term.

It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.

> due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes > But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars"

That's your problem right here. Adding 1 mile of bike lane is counterproductive. It does not really help biking and at the same time it potentially hurts other modes of transportation. You need commute network.

What you need is a robust, modeled plan for end result and transitionary period. Building a 1 mile stretch of bike lane and building 100 miles of bike lanes in 1 mile increments are entirely different things. One is more subject to both populism by politicians and opposition from society.

One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research.

Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity.

I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service.

The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.

NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing rail lines.

> I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better.

Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.

The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost

I don't think it's just that simple to be honest.

Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.

Not to make you feel old or anything, but this sounds a lot like what happened with my dad. I'm 6 years into my career and he's mostly through his. His highest-income years were doing software development in the law department of one of the big oil companies. It basically broke him to learn what they were doing. Now he's trying to find the motivation to do contract work in his 50's because he doesn't want to deal with corporations ever again...

lol nothing you can do to make me feel older than i already do :)

Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've been there before and I've been thinking about doing the same myself.

We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to salary. We’d get better pay for civil servants, remove the incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states more financially sound all in one shot.

Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people and digitized+automated government like the private sector, you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will never happen.

You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.

In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially, with no change in educational results.

The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.

I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.

>>plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year

Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the students can't actually read when they graduate. Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades and fudge results to make them look better.

Naturally, the teacher won't be in charge of evaluating their own students.

And of course the people who are won't have any conflicts of interest of their own.

There are well known techniques to deal with this. It's hardly a new problem.

But there is no real firewall between teachers and administrators - most administrators are former teachers - it's a pretty cozy club in most schools.

I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's union contracts from the other side of the table.

Do what other organizations do. Have a separate organization to the evaluations.

> Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it

Of course they will. Those unions are absolutely, irrevocably committed to the idea that teacher merit is totally determined by length of service and having a master's degree.

There are factors other than teacher's merit that affect outcome. You're saying that a teacher who gets two learning-disabled students (who need to be paired due to sibling issues) is less deserving than their peer who didn't have the disruption of two learning-disabled students?

The moment you tie income to results, you incentivize teachers leaving behind students who won't perform.

The idea is to randomly assign the students to teachers. Sometimes teachers will get students who will never reach grade level, and sometimes students who will effortlessly achieve. By being random, it evens the opportunity out.

The concept sounds good in theory, but I think it's going to be nigh unworkable in practice. The NCLB/high-stakes testing era exposed many problems with tying educator pay to student outcomes -- chief among them that student outcomes didn't improve.

As I recall they had the teachers themselves graded those tests, so naturally they cheated.

That sounds horrible. Right now, schools try to give each teacher an even number of high-performing, average, low-performing, and “difficult” kids. But the numbers are so small it’s hard.

An average sounds like a shitty, shitty system. Imagine finding out your kid is in a classroom with every low-performing and difficult kid in the grade just because it was random.

It's amusing (and sad) that almost everyone involved with a school can quickly point out the best and worst teachers there, but there's no way to "programmatically" encode it so that the bureaucracy can do something about it.

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. It's the same in every office in every organization.

Because it's not that hard to measure teacher quality. But once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It gets gamed and manipulated. When it was just a measure, no one bothered to game it, so it wasn't that hard to tell who was good and who wasn't.

Imagine a system where of 500 teachers, 25 that have a track record of doing much worse than average are let go. You then roll the dice to get new teachers.

Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that situation and get better overall value for the kids being taught?

So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top teachers and then have parents do assessment of their children's teachers and then average the results over 3 years, you could come up with something that has virtual no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.

Evaluating teacher quality is difficult and impossible to do perfectly. Even a simple effort to evaluate quality would be vastly superior to the current state where quality isn't even a consideration.

I agree with the ensemble of evaluations approach - student tests at the start and end of year show student attainment, student and parent feedback, peer feedback, and administrator feedback. Come up with a weighted average and experiment with it. Retain average and better teachers, reward rockstars, train underperformers, and let the bottom ranks and those who don't improve with training go.

That last has been basically tried, and you end up everyone always "exceeding expectations" unless you tie it to some sort of standardized testing (which has its own issues).

Your best bet may be removing the obstacles that people who want to do a good job encounter (for example, the best teachers seem to often leave higher paid public teaching jobs to go to private schools that pay less - investigate why?).

There are always going to be issues around evaluating student achievement. But by and large, compensation based on results works very well in the marketplace. And we certainly see the results in the public schools of no merit pay. It's hard to see how it could be worse.

BTW, MIT has gone back to SATs. The reason is simple - despite all the controversy about SAT validity, when the rubber meets the road the SAT does a better job than anything else at evaluating candidates.

So all the teachers want to work in rich suburban schools where students perform above grade level and no one wants to work in poor inner-city schools where they don’t? The only reasonable thing you can base merit pay on is a delta. You test a performance difference between incoming and outgoing students. If a student starts a year at grade level and makes no progress you shouldn’t reward the teacher for having them at grade level.

All the teachers want to work in a rich suburban school already.

Basing the bonus on the increment is probably a good improvement.

Plenty of teachers are willing to work in an environment where they feel they could make the biggest impact. My mother spent her whole career working in schools that could be classified as inner city with high percentages of new immigrants. Not everyone wants the easiest job possible in their field, some people see rewards in being able to make a bigger difference in people's lives.

That doesn't seem to line up with your previous post?

My point is don’t actively screw those people by coming up with a dumb compensation formula that punishes them for students underperforming before they ever entered their class. If you have merit based pay you need to evaluate how much a student improved under a specific teacher’s watch.

Even a blunt results based compensation would be far better than the current situation.

It wouldn’t if the obvious consequence of the bluntness was to chase good teachers out of the schools that most need them. And that’s what a blunt policy that punishes teachers for having students enter their class at a low level does.

Cool, so no one will ever teach anywhere except a rich suburb.

Same as now.

> The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.

Agreed - to me it seems like paying teachers more is a tool. This enables you to offer incentives to improve student performance, but it also enables you to raise the bar (in some way) when hiring to get better teachers. If you just raise existing salaries across the board, you'll see no immediate change other than more people applying to be teachers. In theory if you have a good way of filtering for the "best", you might be able to then slowly overtime replace your existing teachers with (on average) better teachers.

Once hired, good people still need incentives to perform. This is well understood in the private sector.

Great Idea!

We just tell the teacher that "hey you'll get a bonus if everyone in your class gets an A"!

Who's in charge of giving their students grades again?

Grade inflation has been around a long time under the current system. It's also why the teachers union tries so hard to get rid of all testing.

> In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially,

Can you cite where you saw this data, what time period it refers to, what "substantially" actually means, and include a comparison against inflation, please?

> ... plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.

I think basing teacher pay on merit is a great idea in theory but I have some problems with it. Most of all, student performance is influenced to a greater degree by things outside the teacher's control like the student's socioeconomic status, their attendance (or lack thereof), their parent's education, and even the air quality in their school.

I also don't know how "teacher" raises based on "meeting grade level expectations" would work past elementary school when students are cycling through seven teachers a day? Just because one child excels at math do you give the math teacher a greater raise?

Finally, what if a student does NOT meet grade level expectations, but shows the greatest improvement year-over-year against any other student. Do you fail to recognize the achievement of the teacher who improved this student's outcome because the student does not meet grade-level expectations?

These are just some of the problems which make this a much thornier issue and worth greater consideration. It sounds good when you say teacher pay should be based on merit, but it oversimplifies things quite a bit.

> Can you cite where you saw this data

Not offhand. It was the topic of the Seattle Times for months.

Let's take a look at the private sector. Pay is based on accomplishing goals. It works well. Sure it is imperfect.

> it oversimplifies things quite a bit.

It would be hard to be worse than the current system, which simplifies merit as "has a masters degree". I answered your other points in other replies in this thread.

This is just muddy thinking and hand waving. “Pay in the private sector” is not based on accomplishing goals at all. If it were, there wouldn’t be a huge disparity between men and women, or between those who live in Kansas City vs those who live in San Francisco. Or between those who are over six feet tall and those who are under. And you also say this as if accomplishing goals isn’t figured into teacher pay.

> “Pay in the private sector” is not based on accomplishing goals at all.

Where does one start with such an egregiously wrong statement? Companies go out of business if they have employees that cost more than they produce. They can't just raise taxes like the schools do. They can't run deficits like the government can. What do you think regular performance evaluations of private sector employees are for? Why do you think a lot of employee compensation is commission based?

> those who live in Kansas City

Think about it. The only reason pay is higher in SF is because it is more productive to have people in SF, i.e. people accomplish more being in SF.

> as if accomplishing goals isn’t figured into teacher pay.

It isn't, other than getting a master's degree. Which teachers in the government sector are paid based on how well their students do?

I've known people who work for various government agencies, some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well. They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and shuffle titles around.

No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.

Citation please? Everything I’ve seen implies public sector employees in California make massively more than their private sector counterparts.

The article doesn't:

"Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours."

I mean that public sector employees are underpaid. Comparing consultants and in-house cost is always going to to result in 2-3x disparity (you’re paying a premium for swing capacity). I’m willing to bet the state employee is overpaid Vs his private sector non-consultant counterpart. You then have ask why hire a consultant and I think the answer is that it’s some combination of not being able to fire state employees after the project, or that those employees are actually ineffectual/incompetent.

(As an aside I’m willing to bet the #’s aren’t apples to apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast, and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)

I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?

Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.

In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.

You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?

Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.

Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...

You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.

How is it a problem to recognize that in Real Life things are rarely as binary as they are made out to be on the Internet? Shade of grey and all that... most things exist on a continuum that ranges between the extremes, and not only as a binary dichotomy.

The person you're responding to never said or implied there is no spectrum. But if someone says "I'm very much anti-NIMBY" and then goes on to point out his hypocrisy, it's fair to call him out for it. Especially since said someone specifically asked for criticism and seems open to a conversation.

Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to change themselves.

Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect house prices in this area".

What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could hurt residents I mean things like gentrification, legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights, relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of confused :P

I definitely think that's NIMBYism because it stifles construction, and lack of supply is the problem.

Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.

I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a bit more polarization on that front. California in particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's very acute there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's institutional investors! But the data never supports those accusations.

I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help. Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment to create some basic right to build housing on your own land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn this tide.

I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good professional fortune and generational wealth have led me to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now I'm hoping to open that community up to more people. Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.

Consider that as house supply increases, house prices should keep dropping, towards the cost of construction - right now supply is so constructed prices are limited by buyer ability to pay rather than sellers cost of construction.

So supply will allow much more than just the few people on the edge of ability to buy - it will also help everyone else at lower price points.

It's rarely the cost of the house that is the problem. It's the cost of the property. And property within a certain distance from any attractive city center is limited, by its very nature.

To a point, anyway. https://www.builderonline.com/land/local-markets/californias...

Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars.

Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.

The main way to make affordable housing is to make more housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want to dwell.

But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed.

Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota [1] which approached rent control in very different ways. Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it needed to apply rent control to all units including new construction.

> housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed

Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions.

> Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed.

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

> Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density".

High density is a terrible way to live. I thought we learned from the pandemic that high density living is unsanitary and promotes the proliferation of disease, and that a 600 square foot box is a really depressing place to be when you're stuck inside working from home.

The solution that the current generation loves to hate is to go back to a more suburban lifestyle. But it's possible to do suburbia without making it completely car-dependent. Look at planned cities like Portland, OR, where they have a lot of mixed use development paired with good public transportation and bicycle infrastructure well into the more suburban parts of the city. In a country like the United States where we have vast expanses of land, it makes a lot more sense to spread out than develop vertically.

Single-family homes can get surprisingly dense, depending on how you move the numbers and sizes around.

But more importantly, all towns and most cities were at "suburban" densities years ago (check the "old towns" of most towns, etc) - the key was "travel to services" was limited by walking or sometimes subways, etc.

If instead of one Walmart every 30 miles you have smaller stores every 2-5 miles, suddenly density isn't as mandatory for livable cities.

Mixed usage and transit backbones are the key - you could design "pods" that are about two miles in diameter centered on train stations that would be entirely walkable/bikable - then you can even have the massive city centers.

People having cars isn't a problem if they don't use them for commuting, and some small changes in city design can lead to that.

The reason that the current generation hates suburbia to me seems like a result of a cultural process that can be considered borderline indoctrination and the fact that for whatever reason suburbia doesn't move on with the times. I can understand those who are dissatisfied with the current state of suburbia (e.g. lack of entertainment options, lack of public spaces that don't look like a repurposed commercial property), though many of those issues may be attributed to the scale of the land as a whole, but you'd be surprised that the idea of moving to an apartment block from say a generic suburban home is not viewed as a downgrade by some. Another thing is that classic suburbia often has a uniform look, which might negatively contribute to the entire perception of suburban housing, but then again, same people who complain about it have no problem with same-looking generic apartment blocks.

The reason why apartment minded folks say little about generic 5-over-1 units and a lot about suburban housing is because most folks live in dense areas for access to their services. Due to SFH zoning there's little to do in most of suburbia outside of your home, so a lot more focus needs to be on the home to be attractive and entertaining.

As for cultural reasons behind preferring apartments, everyone has various reasons. I doubt you'll find consensus among those that dislike SFH development over what it is they dislike, but they're unified as a bloc in their desire for density.

Public housing can be made properly like in Vienna. You have to build a lot, build nice, and worry about having many different socio-economical tenants in the apartments, though.

And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in many places they just want to set up some buildings and forget about it, and that way it will never work.

It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of getting problematic people out of the streets, but that shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so they can save more money and use their increased disposable income locally.

If you build enough and make private developments easy enough everyone benefits.

In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their conservative government (I think they have a coalition now) doesn't want to spend money on the program and private developments have a set of restrictions that allow price gauging.

> And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person actually living in a city knows this, which is why many people protest having public housing built anywhere near them.

Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but they they don’t seem to be aware as to what it takes to get there. One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin: you’ll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist, jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is happening in many UD cities, which claim that their policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the underclass lifestyle, is “harm reduction”, and continue to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.

  > One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy)

interesting, because thats the opposite of what i thought...

any good charts/data for that?

See eg. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincomedistributio... which states that the United States has the most progressive tax system among developed countries. It has not fundamentally changed since 2008.

Well, then you guys have to do something because, honestly, some famous cities in the US are in a deplorable state.

You know what your problems are and you don't even have to come up with anything new or revolutionary, as solutions are already invented and tested.

The US can build public housing and can manage it properly. The money is there, and it has already been done (built, not managed properly). Mix public housing with transit oriented development, mix-use zones, more lax private development and you'll get nice neighborhoods for modal income people which is what's really important.

As for cars, you can build multi-story car parks with commercial and/or residential development on top too. Not cheap but necessary given your constraints.

The US has IMO very strong civil society organizations. Take advantage of that and go advocate for this.

CA is working on mixed income public housing. I think it will avoid the faults of the previous projects we built. See AB 2053.

"a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"

A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.

YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1].

The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw permit applications rise in the same time. It should be plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units reduces the demand to build them.

https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.

I see almost all of our housing problems as direct descendants of the original sin of making it too hard to build and use structures. Any form of rent control is another form of NIMBYism, just this time with a progressive coat of paint.

This article has a bunch of cringeworthy prose, but has some worthwhile graphs of data showing that price-fixing isn't the answer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...

See also numerous Planet Money stories about rent control:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077086398/is-it-time-to-cont...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707908952/the-evidence-agains...

Note that even very-progressive Jerusalem Demsas was once against rent control and has only switched sides as a palliative measure because fixing the root cause of the problem is proving too difficult.

Freakonomics also did a show on the topic:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-wor...

In many California cities at least, you can connect all of the rent control measures in the late '70s to significant downzonings which occurred in the previous decade or so. I wonder if it could also be be considered a factor which contributed to the passage of proposition 13 in 1978.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...

edit: So I actually consider rent control to be a result of low housing production rather than the other way around. Associate Professor Shane Phillips from the Lewis Center (linked above) also considers rent control to be a very reasonable policy as long as there's plenty of realistic zoned capacity for more housing. Everyone is always arguing that if we build more then that would keep rents from rising so why not have rent control anyway then?

I don't follow. If you don't have a problem (in this case expensive housing) why would you need to do something about that problem (in this case rent control)? It's extra complexity serving no purpose. And that will inevitably come with enforcement issues, disputes, lawsuits, etc.

But yes, I think you're right that rent control is typically a political result of insufficient housing production. But it's a bad policy. Price fixing is never the answer to a supply problem, even if it's a popular one.

> rent control and moratoriums on new construction.

Literally the worst way to make housing more equitable. All rent control does is give long term residents a handout at the expense of everyone else while increasing commute times due to being unable to move and lowering the quality of the housing stock.

Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane, obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon future urban development is, there's really a TON of opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually get things built.

See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/

From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil. Someone built the place you're living in.

Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.

I don’t know what they are like in California, but where I live in Canada developers are generally disliked because

1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example it’s rare a developer will include parks, community spaces like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else to make the housing tracts livable

2) They don’t tend to expand infrastructure to match, so you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts strain on the existing community resources

3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat, so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad view of developers

Combine all this with generally extremely poor build quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries for the most part.

It's not a developers job to build infrastructure IMO, it's the city's job to build infrastructure and zone appropriately.

> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?

Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum.

Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.

Government housing can work, but it needs large, sustained amounts of funding, which is not really a reality with cash-strapped local and state governments and extremely low federal appetite for such a program.

There isn‘t a realistic path to a solid, pro-public housing bloc of 60 senators.

> Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use.

This is not necessarily the case. Social housing in Vienna has both low-income residents who are subsidized and higher-income residents who are not. We haven’t done it as well as they do historically here in the US, but we could!

> I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap

Good. It is real estate "investors" like you that have contributed to the Bay Area, and California in general, pricing people out and becoming a rent-only housing economy where only the rich of the rich can even dream of buying a fairly modest house. Housing should not make you investment-style returns like the stock market. You're profiting by rent-seeking, arbitrary zoning requirements, and NIMBYism driving up the price of housing constantly just so you can make a nice "investment." Housing and shelter are for people to live, not to extract money for real estate investors.

> You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building

Have you considered that poor people also need a place to live and maybe that doesn't involve you leaching every percent of profit you can?

> Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away

Section 8 housing in LA - as house prices have surged to multi-million two-bedroom homes since COVID - can lower prices at least as low as $400/mo after the voucher. You are simply and transparently lying for your own benefit and it is shameful.

It's a lack of development of new housing for decades that caused the high prices we see in places like the Bay Area.

And the ones that do get built are promoting “luxury living” when people just want “basic living”. None of the new construction is no-frills apartments, they’re all glitz and glam with stupid high rents - 2br is about 5K in some of these places. That’s ridiculously high. There’s even an apartment complex that advertises a redwood grove in the center - that’s just extra cost that could have been saved and passed on to the renters.

You need to fill out the highest tier, as that opens up mid-tier housing for lower paying renters. Otherwise it pushes the highest-paying renters into the mid-tier housing stock, raising the prices for all below.

I really don't understand this logic. Just income-cap the rentals, so high paying renters aren't eligible for the low-tier housing. Only filling out highest tier means that only high tier housing gets built.

So if you catch a raise you are evicted?

Not necessarily - maybe your rent can just go up to market rate + 10% (or some nominal fee because you’re taking up spots in the low income section). Maybe an extra clause that you have to move out within X months after going above the limit.

The laws just needs to disincentivize staying there when you’re not eligible. You obey traffic laws because it’s costly to ignore them. There can also be some buffer to income so you don’t have drastic changes just because you earn an extra 5 to 10K or something per year (depending on family size).

Nope. Primarily, people moving into the new housing lower cost pressure on lower tier housing. And pretty quickly, the highest tier is saturated and lower tier housing is built.

Or higher tier housing is overbuilt and drives down costs of all tiers.

> And pretty quickly, the highest tier is saturated and lower tier housing is built.

That’s definitely not what happens. Highest tier is saturated, developers say that “the market only wants highest tier housing”, and so more of the same gets built.

> Or higher tier housing is overbuilt and drives down costs of all tiers.

The opposite is what’s happening - the highest tier gets more and more expensive, and the lowest tier goes up too.

> That’s definitely not what happens. Highest tier is saturated, developers say that “the market only wants highest tier housing”, and so more of the same gets built.

If it's actually saturated, them prices will begin to drop.

> The opposite is what’s happening - the highest tier gets more and more expensive, and the lowest tier goes up too.

Because it's not actually overbuilt - they're still just trying to catch up. Most metro areas are still in a state of housing shortage.

It could just be where I've chosen to live, but I have never seen a new "lower tier" apartment building go up. It's been "luxury" apartments (though actually built fairly cheaply, just expensive to rent…) 100% of the time.

It's not that surprising. The housing market is in a state of shortage in pretty much every major metro area.

I think this comment pretty much sums up my issue with these movements.

> I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity.

This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

At the same time, private investors and builders are pushing back on tools that make the lives of these less profitably people easier (rent control, public housing).

From what you're saying, if I want to promote more affordable housing, I keep you away from it. Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

If you want to promote affordable housing, you shouldn't demonize the people who are going to increase the housing supply. You'll leave behind blustering politicians, and no capital - public or private - to develop anything.

The problem is the ones wanting to increase the housing supply are for-profit investors, and affordable housing shouldn’t be about profit. That’s my takeaway of this deadlock. Perhaps the government should directly build housing, or subsidize the cost and have it be owned and operated by the city.

Why do you think the government is more efficient at building housing than private companies?

Every city I've seen try this ran into substantial cost over runs and ended up with 12 1 br condos to rent to poor people at the cost of 6 million dollars.

Why shouldn't it be about profit, we use a profit motive for the manufacturing of everything else in our economy, why is housing the exception?

The government is far more efficient when it's competent because it has access to eminent domain and is recession proof. It doesn't need to deal with margin calls during recessions, has much less risk doing development, and doesnt need profit to fund new investments, so it can move faster and cheaper with greater scale.

You've never seen it work because you're presumably American, and as the title points out, America can't build anything anymore. If you care about you're country's wellbeing, that needs to be fixed, and building affordable housing efficiently and more hands on without piles of unaccountable subcontractors is a great way to get started.

In which countries can the government build housing more cheaply and efficiently than the private sector?

Sure. Singapore and Vienna (not a country, but done at a city scale) are good examples.

I'm pretty sure Singapore usings contractors to build the HDBs and doesn't employee labourers themselves.

But also Singapore's construction per sq ft isn't insanely cheaper than the US. You're looking at $120 per sq ft and you would expect Singapore to be much cheaper because they have $2-3/hr labourers, less labor laws, and far less environmental restrictions.

And the HDBs don't really house the poor but the middle class. The poor live in cramped dormitories for foreign immigrants.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with public housing being extended to the middle class or even the upper class. As long as it pushes housing prices down.

Labourers in Singapore do not make 2-3$/h anymore. Nowadays it's closer to 10$/h for the bare minimum. Yet prices are still at 120$/sqft or thereabouts.

The HDB in Singapore owns a controlling stake in many contractors, but yes the general construction is often handled by contractors. That's still different from the US methodology that subcontracts everything from design to maintenance, and it maintains the structural advantages of the government building housing I put forth above.

Housing should be an exception because it’s a place for someone to stay and necessary for survival. Food can be prepared at home, people can take public transit to get around to earn money, and entertainment isn’t necessarily required for survival. But a house is a cornerstone for building your life out, and as such I don’t think it should be about maximizing profit.

If it costs the government more money to build shittier housing should we still use it government to build housing?

I genuinely believe that it’s a fallacy to try and build affordable housing. Build housing, and some housing will become more affordable.

I think the problem is that a lot of investing in real estate isn't creating more housing, it's extracting wealth from people who have a need to be housed. like if you buy a second home to rent out, you didn't create housing. You just made it less affordable for people to build wealth.

> This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

This only happens when supply is artificially constrained. The private markets want to serve as many people as they can - that's how you maximize profit. But when you can only sell 100 units and there is demand for 1000, obviously you want to sell to the richest 100 buyers.

The solution to the problem is to increase supply. Rent control, zoning, et al reduce supply.

Real estate investors are not typically developers. They also generally are opposed to things YIMBYs support since as mentioned it would cut into their profits. YIMBYs, though not a monolith, largely support rent control and public housing. They also support private development. The goal is to reduce housing costs, and a variety of means are necessary.

> Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

1. The size of the housing problem grossly outsizes the budget of the public sector. Its not even close - this problem can only be addressed through private capital. 2. Private capital will only build things that are profitable with a comfortable margin considering unexpected costs and other, possibly more efficient allocations of the same capital. 3. Every regulation/requirement you throw at housing developers increases the minimum cost of new housing. As it currently stands, its mostly a physical impossibility to build middle class housing in SF profitably given existing requirements (which effectively add a couple hundred thousand to each unit). This means that no middle class housing will be built.

If you want more affordable housing, you fundamentally need to change the incentive to build affordable housing. You can't do this and chase off developers at the same time.

I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input to projects.

I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.

>I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't.

I think that's the core issue with most of our political dialog. "Regulations are bad." The person saying it is thinking A, B, and C and is probably right. The person hearing it is thinking D, E, and F and is also probably right. They aren't even talking about the same thing. It's no wonder they can't come to common ground.

"Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

To your point, words certainly matter.

> "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

or the person may see the contradiction clearly and oppose the idea of social security benefits, while also being opposed to having it clawed back after they've spent their entire working life paying into the system.

Social security is not an account you individually pay into and then draw from later, it is a wealth transfer program that taxes presently working individuals to support presently retired individuals.

You are correct. Nonetheless, those paying in to the system today acquiesced to the plan under the assumption that they would one day be able to take their place as beneficiaries. They gave up significant amounts of money which could have been invested toward their own retirement to pay those SS taxes. Simply ripping it away without compensation is neither fair nor realistic.

> those paying in to the system today acquiesced to the plan...

No, they didn't acquiesce to anything. They were required to pay whether they wanted to or not.

This brings up and interesting question: If more people enter the work force and pay taxes every year, how is SS (as im told) "drying up"? I don't doubt that it's dwindling, however, what happened?

In 1945 there were 42 workers paying SS taxes for every retiree collecting benefits. For equal pay / retirement income after SS taxes, each worker only needs to provide 2.3%.

Today (actually since 2009) that ratio is three workers per retiree. Each worker has to provide 33%. By 2050 the ratio is projected to fall to two-to-one.

You can find the historical ratios here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html

Did we get more people not working and paying taxes, or did we get more people consuming this resource? If it is the latter, how'd that happen?

Mostly people are living longer. When SS first started only 55% of males and 60% of females who made it to age 21 would have survived their working-age years to retire at age 65 in 1940. By 1990 that figure had risen to 72% and 83%, respectively. Life expectancy after retirement also increased, from 12.7 (M) or 14.7 (F) years in 1940 to 15.3 or 19.6 years in 1990. (https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html)

I didn't mean to imply there was anything like voluntary consent involved. I'm on your side here. But there is popular support for this program which wouldn't exist if it were presented purely as a wealth transfer with no upside for those forced to pay in. They gloss over the fact that paying SS taxes doesn't formally entitle you to any future benefits, but in practice cancelling it without offering some compensation to those who paid so much in would amount to political suicide.

yes and no. that is how it's actually implemented, but from the outside it does look similar to a defined contribution plan. you pay into it during your working years and then receive a monthly payment in retirement. the payment amount is related (albeit not directly proportional) to the amount you paid in.

in any case, I feel pretty confident saying that most people see social security as a deal where they pay in now to receive benefits later during retirement. they may or may not think very hard about the fact that they might be far better off if they had the option to put the money in a 401k/IRA instead, but they surely would not be happy to pay now without the expectation of getting something later.

that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem" moment when you find someone close to retirement who "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social security go away (for them).

>that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem" moment when you find someone close to retirement who "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social security go away (for them).

It wasn't an attempt at a "haha gotem," sorry if it came out that way. It was more of an example of the irony of being for and against the same concept by having different understanding of the meaning than someone else.

SSI was probably a bad example, anything useful will fit. "Socialism bad," but "please fix the potholes in my road, pick up my trash, put bad guys in jail, put out that forest fire, keep the shipping lanes clear, etc. etc." All those a person could like and they are socialistic, but ask that same person what their opinion on socialism, he thinks Castro nationalizing US industry in Cuba, not all the service he finds infinitely useful day to day.

I guess that's the complicated way of saying we should talk about political ideas in a much more narrow sense, like "lets lower the medicare age to 55; we're already paying for the most expensive demographic," rather than "Socialism good."

I dunno, it seems the people who say "socialism is bad" these days use it to explicitly mean those contexts that have little to do with actual socialism, like paid parental leave or universal healthcare. They may not be including SSI there, but for all intents and purposes they could, with the crucial difference that SSI is something that exists and the proposed "socialist" policies don't.

Well, SSI, Medicare and Medicaid aren't socialism by any, let's say, "internationally recognised" definition.

> We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place

Careful about the phrase "building quality" there. If by quality you mean safety, then yes, absolutely. But there are quite a few regulations that describe themselves about "quality" that do things like: prescribe a minimum number of parking spaces, or a minimum size for a kitchen, or number of bathrooms, etc. And all of those absolutely need to be eliminated.

Two thoughts, 1) it will be impossible to get out of our current housing hole without making developers rich. 2) We are so far into the hole that any availability will be gobbled up by those with money or those with connections.

I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".

I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.

By “homes” do you mean buildings here or housing units? Because if it’s the latter, doesn’t that preclude most apartment buildings?

What about renters? People who own multiple residences usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to own the buildings.

People don't rent for the fun of it, they rent because they can't afford a house. Pretty much anybody would be glad to swap paying rent for morgage payments. As it is, you often have the messed up situation of your rent going to pay somebody else's mortgage interest

Renting is not always just an intermediate step to being too poor to buy a home, it can be a freeing experience to not have the hassle of a home.

With WFH especially now you can work in various parts of the city or move all over the world and at most be tied down to a place for about a year.

Homeowners also never talk about things like paying tens of thousands of dollars when a pipe burst or the roof needs repairing.

That's not true. Owning a home is a hassle and ties you down. Like I said, most people in Montreal rent, and Montreal has some of the cheapest housing in Canada.

NZ banned foreign investors and average home prices are up about 50% in the couple of years since that happened.

Foreign buyers just don't make up enough of the market, and neither do people with 5+ residences.

The lack of any capital gains tax plays a big role in this case

The only reason people bother owning multiple dwelling units is because they're a "good investment" because there's more demand than supply.

Let supply outstrip demand and suddenly they're not a good investment anymore, so people go back to owning them for living in.

My parents own three, none of which they keep as an investment. One is their primary home, a second is their winter escape, and a third was supposed to be a place for my grandmother. But she died shortly after my parents bought it, and they can't be bothered to sell or rent it to anybody. So it's a storage unit now.

Not that this is a good use of a perfectly fine basic housing unit, but it isn't an investment.

So your parents are preventing two young families from starting their lives.

Seriously, a "winter escape"? Literally noone needs that. Literally noone should have that until everybody's basic needs are met.

Which won't happen with all these "storage unit" houses there are.

I don't necessarily agree that "nobody should have X until everyone has Y" is a workable general rule; no family should have two cars until everyone has one; no family should have two jobs until everyone has one.

The second home is already slightly tax disadvantaged compared to the primary residence, perhaps it should be "punished" more.

Which is why I assume the parent post mentioned 4, I would have said two or three myself (as your example shows).

If that third house had some form of tax penalty associated with it being unused/empty they might bother to sell it.

But the housing crisis isn't perpetuated by empty homes in general; empty homes exist because there's an investment aspect of it. If the grandma house was losing at IRS depreciation rates, it'd likely be sold (though a storage unit might cost a similar amount).

I keep trying to convince my parents to sell it. They're spending a lot of money on it for property taxes and HOA fees (it's a condo unit) but they simply don't care enough. On the bright side, it's in a town that hasn't yet been swept up by the housing crisis. Only a matter of time though.

YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant protections. On rent control it’s more divided; some are in favor and some aren’t. It doesn’t seem likely to solve the housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so I’m generally I’m favor of it personally, but only in tandem with building more as well.

But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.

There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO.

One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.

The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.

> I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO

This is a common problem in American policy. You're going to have the thing and it's going to be nice, or you're going to be priced out of having it at all.

See minimum floor space regulations, (non-fire related) residential occupancy limits, regulations requiring certain coverage in medical insurance plans, etc. There is a reason that short term insurance plans (STLDIs) that are not subject to as many regulations are much cheaper.

I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.

> Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it.

Yes, because they're rare, and the only way to not be uprooted. How are you posing this as a bad thing? If there were more rent control, then this wouldn't be a problem. Why should rent get to rise so drastically above inflation? The core reason it does today is because people are buying them endlessly as investments, and as the property exchanges hands at completely arbitrary values, the new owners have to raise rents.

Pretty sure you have this backward. Landlords don’t get to decide how much people are willing to pay to rent. They charge the market clearing price (or as close to it as possible).

This isn’t based on what they paid for the property, though the value of a property will at least in part be based on the income it can generate.

If rents seem too high, it is because demand has outstripped supply, and the marginal renter in the market has more money than you do. If you want rent to come down for everyone, you can:

1. Reduce demand by making the area less desirable.

2. Increase supply by making more rental units.

Rent control is just a lottery that benefits the people lucky enough to get it at the expense of everyone else.

I had a rent controlled apartment for 5 years in San Francisco. Which, incidentally, I was subletting from someone who had moved to LA but didn’t want to lose his place in case he came back. In no way was I deserving of special financial treatment, I had a high paid tech job, and a wife making decent money. Anyone else who moved into my neighborhood was paying literally double when I left.

It was nice to randomly get a $20k/year windfall, but did not feel like sound housing policy.

Sounds kind of similar to the idea of bringing gas prices down through a "gas tax holiday"...

Rent control is well studied. Several bad things happen in rent controlled areas. Non-controlled rents rise. Gentrification accelerates outside of the protected buildings. People live somewhere they don’t necessarily want to be. Units are converted into lower density housing to drive up price. Commutes lengthen. If the city becomes less of a draw in the future, the controls don’t allow graceful lowering of prices.

In contrast to most economic issues, rent control has robust bipartisan opposition.

Rent control needs to be implemented well to work. Badly implemented rant control doesn't work. Everything you're describing comes from rent control not being universal, to prices being allowed to increase between tenants, and to zoning laws allowing the construction of low density housing in high density areas instead of only allowing low and medium density.

You can encourage graceful lowering of prices by putting in inoccupancy taxes.

Rent control is easy to fuck up, and almost every place in the US that implements it half asses it by either making it only apply to part of the city, allowing unlimited rent increases between tenants, disallow reasonable rent increases for improvements, and so on. Rent control has to be implemented well to work. There are plenty of examples of cities where it works wonderfully, and plenty of places where there is multipartisan consensus in favour of them.

Occupancy taxes and codified reasonable increases can’t create a dynamic rent market. Even if an entire city were to be put under a construction freeze, which would be incredibly unhealthy, problems would spill into suburbs. The rest is just re-assertions and a wish for perfect city planning.

The purpose of inoccupancy taxes and reasonable increases is to remove any disincentive to move out from your rent controlled appartment. So as long as there is not massive influx into the city outpacing constriction, there will be a dynamic rent market.

I don't understand what you're getting at with construction freezes and so on. The basic principle is that badly implemented rent control in badly palnned cities can exacerbate problems, while well designed rent control in well planned cities can solve problems. It's not a magic bullet but its not a curse either.

Construction freeze probably wasn’t the best term. You were saying that workarounds to increase revenue wouldn’t be permitted and those would have to be comprehensively restrictive.

This is a big topic; I guess I’d say to just read more about how it’s gone historically and why “just do it better” isn’t viable. Appreciate the zeal.

There are no needs for workarounds to prevent an increase in revenue. There are no restrictions on improvements or additional construction as long as the rent increases are justified by the cost incurred. Revenue can be increased as long profit stays reasonable.

I've read a lot on how it's gone historically, and you'll even find economics literature over natural experiments showing positive outcomes for rent control.

I gave you a set of characteristics of well implemented rent control laws. If you could show me an example of where those failed I'd appreciate it, because I can give you examples of where those succeeded and are still working.

> How are you posing this as a bad thing?

It should be self-evidently a bad thing that a small number of people benefit from artificially low prices, up to 1/3rd of whom are not low income (from what I've read).

I don't have a strong opinion on whether rent should be "allowed to rise above inflation", though I don't think you understand how pricing works in a market system. There is a market clearing price, which is not dictated by the price that the owners buy it for.

I'm not opposed to more radical solutions to housing distribution, as a lifelong renter I'm certainly not happy about the money I pay in rent annually, but I don't see how the status quo of rent control does much to help control prices.

I also pay a very high rent currently, but my landlord also loses money on the building maintenance and upkeep, as well as regulatory compliance costs. So it's not that simple.

> It should be self-evidently a bad thing that a small number of people benefit from artificially low prices

1. Nothing artificial about it.

2. Just expand the fraction of rent control and more people will enjoy it.

3. If X% of renters are in rent-control apartments, they don't contend with us on non-rent-controlled properties. That's not a huge effect but it's _an_ effect.

4. "My landlord also loses money" - ok, I call BS. Either you're not a renter or you have some other kind of ulterior motive. Your landlord makes money off of you, and is not renting out as a form of charity; plus, they're already rich, owning (most likely) their own accommodation and the apartment they rent out to you.

i live in Montreal. Every appartment is rent controlled. People move out en masse every year. The issue is rent control only applying to a few appartements and not every appartment, and not having allowances to keep prices low when tenants move.

That's an issue. It's debatable whether it's the issue. But yes, obviously if every apartment has the same rent ceiling nobody will have a reason to stick in one of the lottery apartments forever. Good luck getting that passed in NYC/SF.

Deep down, another goal isn't just to lower rents, but actually to lower property costs, and well implemented rent control helps do that. I agree it's going to be hard to get that passed, but that's going to be true for literally any real solution to housing because they all imply hurting the mass of current real estate investors very hard.

Because one only need to look at history in past times of housing crisis in our history. The response and solution to times of housing shortages and high prices has always been to build out more supply. There was a housing crisis in the 1940s due to decades of stagnation of building homes from the great depression and WWII, and homes were unaffordable, until the 1950s brought on supply that was not generated by government intervention but by private developers and even the Sears catalogue. About all the government did was stimulate the private market by providing capital in the form of the GI bill, and coupled with the available zoned capacity surrounding cities, developers were able to build and meet demand that now had capital to afford supply which was able to be built thanks to the available zoned capacity.

Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners.

1. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717

YIMBY Action (https://yimbyaction.org) member here.

You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections.

I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.).

But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most.

We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism.

Come join us!

You are probably just getting too much anti-YIMBY propaganda from the high level overview. The problem is that developers built nearly everybody's home, yet people want to hate developers.

Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk.

That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.

While the replies are jumping onto rent control (which is bad) the other parts of your suggestions bare a much better solution imo: public or for-public housing. My native germany also fucks this one up, but the best thing would he to use some form of eminent domain to kick out stratefically located villas and old homes, tear them down/renovate them and build up public housing in small-but-cheap apartmenta that can then be given to resident coops or other democratic-but-not-the-state entities. Vienna does this (public housing, not evicting millionaires or old-settles-residents) and it works quite well because it addresses the demand side. Induced demand for housing of this type is limited I think (it's a big decision and people don't generally choose cities only because od the price) and you could even adress the "granny loses her old house" to some degrew by offering evicted tenants extra-nice apartments as a reimbursement on top of the eminent domain reimbursment (at least in germany this one exists, government cannot simply take your land).

Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control

My impression of Burja is that he’s better at the writing - there are always interesting details - than average but not generally a superior analyst.

For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.

> depth of research

I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?

On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only really accrue if you “put in your 20” - making government service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn’t want to be a lifer…

It may depend on the author, as some articles in the publication are inconsistent with the characterization of “in-depth research.” Previously, the publication wrote about “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” but made some omissions that misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford’s supposed demise.[1]

Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2]

These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will.

[1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944

The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The justification for KA losing their housing was entirely unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he just happened to be attending the party.

My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.

EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.

Not an alum so I can’t speak to the first person experience, and the quirks of Stanford are not interesting. My comment’s purpose is limited to that of a discriminating reader seeking to become more informed.

I think these observations would have been fine independently but the context is important, if only for the sake of refuting it. The failure to acknowledge it, and the license taken with respect to other facts is what is unsettling.

I agree that context is important, but context here is that they were put on probation four years later for something completely unrelated. Criticizing its omission without pointing that out might mislead people.

The quirks of Stanford may not be interesting to you but it is literally an article about Stanford social quirks. If there's any criticism to be made of the article it's not acknowledging why SAE or Sigma Chi were removed from campus as their behavior was far more abhorrent (a targeted harassment campaign against a sorority member and a roofie incident by a non student friend of the fraternity members.

I think that’s a worthwhile discussion, and readers would have definitely appreciated a discussion of, “Does reputational damage precipitate organizational dissolution in the context of college associations?”

It would have been enlightening and gotten to the heart of the nominal issue with respect to both the theme houses and the fraternity houses, I think.

That was not what the article was, however, and I think we can acknowledge Stanford’s failures and the failure of authorship in the article-publication in the same breath.

Other countries that can build major projects better than the USA don't have merit-based pay and promotion for their civil servants.

>Like the detail

Whats interesting is that it was the “parent” company ACS Grupo that was successful. (They bought a decisive stake in Dragados)

Seems like old school corruption=>incompetence=>credential laundering to me.

https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-f...

People generally call out NIMBY-ism as though it's just some sort of irrational bias that people have, but I don't think that always explains it. Sure, in a lot of cases, people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities. But where did that attitude come from? I'd argue it came from decades of corporate greed and government dysfunction that bred a general distrust of large institutions. It's not like people have no reason to feel like big business doesn't have their best interests in mind.

Another commenter gave the construction of highways as an example, saying that people used to look at large infrastructure projects like that with a positive attitude. Well, I'd say look where that got them. The way highways were built in this country completely wrecked communities (especially poor ones located in less desirable parts of town) and eventually led to the uniquely American aesthetic of the urban and suburban wasteland.

If large organizations in this country want to undertake large projects, they have to first work to regain the trust of the average person by acting like they actually give a damn and really want to the world to be a better place for their efforts.

In SF people could read up on the history of the Embarcadero Freeway. It took a half a century and the Loma Prieta earthquake to work through all that.

https://medium.com/@UpOutSF/old-san-francisco-a-look-at-befo...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/san-franci...

we need planning, not just building

Planning (specifically urban planning around cars over the last century) is a giant failure. Hopefully you can understand why people like myself would be skeptical.

The interesting thing about planning is that NIMBYs will insist that a years long planning process is required, right up until the point one is completed saying how a bunch more housing can be added. Then all of a sudden they insist that the plan was flawed and the whole process needs to go back to the drawing board

Tried that. Didn't work.

We need building. We've done enough planning for 10 lifetimes, and all it got us was a crushing housing crisis.

Exactly! We have a small amount of carbon budget left before we exceed 2C. Using it needs planning. If anything, global warming is a sign that we have basically failed at planning as a species. We glorify our past ability to build but we fail to see that we have overbuilt to the detriment of our future.

Planning is pretty much one of the worst failures of the past century.

It's hard to think of a single place where planning has created an amazing city. Maybe, Vancouver, maybe, but that's mostly a success because it enables a small number of towers in the downtown core.

Despite the huge amount of construction over the past century, the best parts were made when there was the least of contemporary planning methods.

I think a lot of it comes down to the planning for required cars. But the entire field is a complete failure, once you look into how it practices itself in the US.

And if you talk to planners and call them out of the failure of the field as a whole, and for the particular projects they are in, they will say "it's not up to us it's up to the politicians." Which is rather revealing. "Planning" isn't planning but instead a thin veneer over politicians following the whims of NIMBYs.

We'd be better off without the entire field. Let's start from scratch.

"...people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities." Me: huh, people seem to finally get why NIMBY is a thing! "...it came from decades of corporate greed and government dysfunction..." Me: nevermind...

NIMBY is simply people wanting the things to be as they always were. That's about it. Say you lived in the area for 10 years, you've made friends there, you're used to things. Suddenly someone comes by and says that it's time to build something that you don't really care about. What would your reaction be other than NIMBY? You like everything as it already is, there is no need to change anything, now let me watch my game in peace and then i'll go fishing.

"... look where that got them. " A system that allowed for easier travel, transportation of goods, a system that created a brand new (for the time) travel culture? I can go on and on, but mind you that railways weren't exactly the most community-friendly (whatever it means) thing either.

"...urban and suburban wasteland." Lesson learned: don't build roads or connect states of a huge country, allowing people to travel wherever they want in the comfort of their vehicle, otherwise in the future you'd be ostracized for the actions of those who came long after you and decided not to innovate in the infrastructure industry.

A friend has worked in construction project management for almost 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 million over budget, and finally completed this year. The project essentially added a median and some bus lanes to a two mile stretch of road through San Francisco and took 19 years.

During his time in SF, no construction took place—so he told me he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.

If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it. It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is ultimately a part). People want to complain about the participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness is really the central cause. A working system should be able to handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect people to show self-restraint.

(The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)

The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.

What would this justice software system do that the currently used software doesn’t do?

Eliminate people

Automate and speed up courtroom proceedings. Could also greatly speed up the inclusion of new information - instead of recessing, good software could give access to new info in real time (e.g. connect it in advance to all possible data-sources).

SFMTA likes to point out that in the course of the project it was necessary for them to excavate and replace all the underground utilities along the route. Basically 100 years of the municipal equivalent of "tech debt" showed up on the SFMTA balance sheet.

It's true that the tech debt of utilities was addressed as part of the VN BRT project, however it's also true that the tech debt didn't need to be included in the scope of BRT and it was an intentional (and I would say foolish) decision to do so.

NIMBY-ism is just an example of people not caring for one another in our country. Everyone in the last 20 years or so seems only out for themselves. I remember when the interstate was being built through my town as a kid and people would say it's going to be great. Nowadays I feel every new report about new construction projects only reflect the negative impacts like cost, environment etc. It's just as if everywhere I look all I see is negative outlook from society. And take from that how people's first response is how they can protect themselves.

You can easily look out for you own interests and not go out of your way to shit in the pool. Most of the NIMBY-ism is see in NYC is old busy-bodies interfering in things that probably won't effect them at all.

I don't think I'd put it that way. For the average NIMBY their friends and social circle are often suffering or benefiting from the same projects as them and from the inside it feels more like protecting their community than protecting themselves. But of course a community is just as much defined by who is outside it as who is inside.

However, in the typical case suffering means "The view from my window changes". And somehow that's a valid reason to stop a housing project for hundreds of people.

The article lays out a lot of the problems with American projects, but doesn't do much to explain why European projects are able to manage a better track record. Are their unions weaker, or are their goals better aligned with the projects?

Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we need to remember why these provisions were created in the first place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff, but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be affected.

US unions are uniquely dysfunctional.

I wonder with NEPA if we could do “existing negative impact” studies, i.e. if this is not built, how will the environment be affected? And if the answer is “on net the status quo is worse environmentally” then permitting can proceed without further in depth reviews required for each sub-component. Like high speed electric trains should be extremely easy to pass: they remove car and plane traffic, so even if they hurt some local environments in the process of being built, the net result is better than the status quo so those micro problems are considered outweighed by the macro, unless someone can prove otherwise.

Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they can provide impact studies for projects the government has not planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and more expensive to maintain, these “impact study libraries” could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn’t need extra regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction Rebellion, could reasonably fund “status quo” analyses for carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).

I think this is an interesting idea, though I suspect "on net the status quo is worse environmentally" is a hard question to answer w/o the aforementioned in-depth reviews (at least to an extent; obviously the current system has problems).

I tend to agree with your notion of negative impact studies. We tend to favor the status quo, even if the status quo isn't sustainable in the long run.

I do have concerns about private groups bringing in third parties. In practice, these third parties would have incentives to produce whatever results please the organization that hired them. It'ss tricky to arrange conditions such that these third parties are truly neutral.

part of it is probably that some things that US unions have to fight for are protected by law in europe. as far as i know at will employment doesn't exist in europe for example. i hear in france it is almost impossible to fire anyone at all.

in germany every company with more than 50 employees has to form a workers council that gets a say in how certain things are done in the company. they deal with things like work conditions, safety, office benefits (do we want a rec-room or better food in the cantine?) without any union needed to step in. that reduces unions to negotiating collective pay and related questions like reducing work-hours or other topics that are relevant for a whole industry, not just one company.

i also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.

but apart from that, even in europe not all projects go well. politicians that try to profile themselves by attracting large projects, missmanagement, are not uncommon either.

as the article says, for example germany has similar problems. like the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link between germany and denmark. denmark ratified the plans in 2015. germany took 5 years longer. local communities, a few shipping companies and individuals sued to stop the project. one documentary made the joke that a project that gets done in denmark in a year, takes a decade in germany.

The article specifically points out that Germany has similar regulatory and cost overrun challenges, so in general it can't be used as a counterpoint - the example case where things went well for Germany is attributed to waiving procedural requirements mandated by the EU.

Even when with guaranteed EU protections, the system can be inefficient.

you are right, i have reworded my comment to acknowledge that

> I also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.

A German union has to make sure that it doesn't negotiate anyone into uncompetitiveness. If you negotiate for too high a pay, or absurd things like useless jobs, the company gets outcompeted and all those jobs vanish. In the US some unions seem to get around that by either being big enough to cover enough companies (construction), or the companies themselves are local monopolies (e.g. railway). That doesn't work for most European projects because Unions usually don't span borders, but you can always get a construction company from anywhere else in the EU.

From the article: "A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S."

The article spends alot of steam making an argument that unions drive up costs, then proffers data that shows it's not a solid argument, then just kind of waives it away by saying their argument is "widely recognized" to be true.

This article is idealogical drivel published by Peter Thiel.

Yes, that section you quoted seemed strangely incoherent.

Looked up the "published by Peter Thiel" to check, and found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570.

It's not hard evidence that Thiel publishes or funds the project, though.

Yep, I reached that point and went "Okay, so regulation bad, considering environmental impacts bad, unions bad, I can see where this is going".

> Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.

Among my favorite images are hulking segments of unfinished CHSR viaduct dominating the skyline of Central Valley towns that didn't want it in the first place. A man-made monument to hubris.

E.g. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d88bcf176aba93cb014bff7a9be14...

Why is that above grade anyway ?

Likely to get over something else somewhere else (highway, building, roads, river) without having to climb and come back down. High speed rail doesn't want to climb at all if possible, certainly less than normal rail (and much, much less than light rail).

Not sure about this specific stretch, but there is at least one stretch where they elevated the track to get over a stubborn farmer's land who refused to sell.

Apparently eminent domain can take a really long time if the landowner is dead-set on mucking up the process with lawyers, so they just went over his land instead of dividing it, mainly to send a message to any potential future holdouts. (i.e. He could've just accepted the generous offer, but instead got paid nothing.)

Because that photo is part of the section that has to cross over a preexisting freight railroad.

Transcontinental freight railroads have insane godlike legal powers. Immune to eminent domain, property taxes, even get to ignore the IBC when they build buildings.

HSR is the biggest fucking joke ever. We now have one of the most expensive train systems that literally goes nowhere (fresno - bakersfield). SF and LA aren't even on the table yet. Most of the people who voted for it probably won't see the original plan completed in their lifetimes. If there's any dig to be made at democratic leadership & dysfunction, its the HSR project.

The kicker is right at the end:

> Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain damaged the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville Dam, creating the risk of catastrophic and deadly flooding in the Sacramento valley. Over 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River in Northern California were evacuated from their homes. As in the current German case, the risks posed by inaction necessitated a bypassing of the usual rules.

> Within 10 days of the damage incident, Kiewit was awarded a contract. A little over two weeks later Kiewit’s team and equipment were fully mobilized at the site. After only 165 days Kiewit had brought the dam’s main spillway into working condition. It then completed a second phase where it built a 1.2 million square foot spillway—an area so large that 25 NFL regulation-sized fields could fit inside it. The combined project was completed in only 18 months.

Same company, two different bureaucratic contexts. The US legal and bureaucratic system is a legacy codebase. It’s done well and continues to work but is vastly inefficient. Now, how to reboot America with a new codebase? That’s the real question…

Dan Carlin has a podcast episode in "Hardcore History" where he describes the US as a "schizophrenic giant" (though I think he is quoting someone). Essentially he describes the US as being ineffective at making decisions, but when they do, they move quickly and with great force.

The Covid vaccine is a great recent example. A truly astonishing amount of scientific work was done in an incredible time-frame when the need for the vaccine became clear.

any sort of military deployment as well I think

America can build; but America does not want to build, or at least a large portion of America doesn’t. And they try their darnedest to slow everyone else down.

And there may be a good reason for that. Consider this nugget from the article:

> The entire $160 million-per-mile road lane project, and the five years of gridlock it created, were justified by the promise of shaving one minute per mile off commute time for its users. The final indictment of the project was a Metro study that found that Sepulveda had actually made commute times longer.

Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. Roads are added and they are soon choked with traffic. New homes are built but prices go up anyway.

Or worse, they are actively harmful. The “big project” urban highway builds of the late 20th Century ruined waterfronts and neighborhoods and in some cases were weapons wielded at minority communities. It took a horrible earthquake to reclaim San Francisco’s waterfront from the highway. It took a famously difficult “Big Dig” to reclaim downtown Boston.

Or look beyond roads at the huge ecological damage done by the big project dams of the 20th Century. Look at abandoned mines and coal power plants all over the country.

So: it’s hard to build because so many people are against building. And so many people are against building because there is so much evidence that most building projects are pointless or harmful.

The end result is a much higher bar for projects to clear to get started, and a higher bar for them to clear while underway. These may be good things in the long run.

> Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop.

this feels like an incomplete metric to me. if you value getting from point A to point B in 30 minutes, surely other people do too. so you add another lane. now instead of 10000 people making that trip every day, 15000 do. even if the transit time doesn’t decrease (or goes up by a couple percent), that new lane still adds net value?

sure, if adding a lane doesn’t decrease transit time nor increase trips, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an improvement. but you gotta look at both of these things before you make that claim.

The problem is that "inducing demand" for people who would otherwise take public transit doesn't actually increase efficiency. Putting more cars on the road is not necessarily a net benefit.

See this video from CityNerd for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ

You are making the assumption that deliberately causing an undersupply of road space so that people are forced to use public transit is a net virtue, while in reality it's just acting against the market.

Not to say they've found a good strategy(!), but when the market fails to price in externalities like pollution from cars, acting against the market would be the right thing to do, wouldn't it?

Yes. The market is not a good in itself. Nor is it a perfect system.

And you are making the assumption that acting in accordance with the market is automatically a net virtue.

Publicly funded road infrastructure is has nothing to do with the "market."

I think on the whole America is in decline quite a bit. We don’t see it yet in terms of GDP or economic output, but the politics have changed considerably over the years and that is going to have a lasting impact. Mitch McConnell is singly responsible for this. One party doesn’t vote for the other party’s initiatives, not even one vote. If anyone votes they are targeted and primaried. We don’t realize it but this is what happens on a much worse scale in poor countries as the only objective in those countries for poliiticians is to siphon money for themselves. Getting things done is never on the cards. We are on that same path.

i dont think that explains SF or CA dysfunction, though...

There are whole regions of America that are almost post apocalyptic. People dying of drugs everywhere, rampant hopelessness, mass murder and gang violence, millions of people in prison, etc. Then there are other parts of America that look like paradise. America is a big place. It's like 50 countries lumped into one. In some places it's the best of times, in others it's the worst of times. We tend not to hear too much about the bad places. They are like a shit stain on America's underwear. We keep it hidden as best we can because no one respects a poopy pants.

I remember watching a documentary about a ghetto in some U.S. city. There was a lady who had just moved into a new appartment. She was thrilled that her new appartment was double the size of her old one, but there was some downsides... in particular, stray bullets from gang shootouts kept coming through her window. She showed the interviewer the bullet holes on the wall. Then she was like, "Yeah, but other than that it's a nice place."

It was a shocking reminder that people tend to just adapt to their environment and try to make the best of things. A lot of people have adapted to poor conditions in America, but they try to make the best of it and most people remain silent as they quietly try to eke their way through this world.

If you need to do so much work to make a single carpool lane you really have to think if that is the best solution in the first place. You already have too many cars. The obvious solution is reducing the existing number of cars. Open a couple extra bus routes and turn one of the existing lanes into a bus lane.

I'll tell you why that is a non starter. I live 25 miles away and I'm not riding a bus or chain of buses for 2-3 hours for work.

I will drive myself directly to work and save myself 2 hours. I don't care if it's worse for the rest, you couldn't pay me to sit on a bus for 2-3 hours just so I can sit in an office for 8 and then make the whole trip home at the end of the day.

Sorry not sorry.

The extra bus routes are not for you, but for other drivers that do live closer and can trade their car commute by a bus ride. This, in turn, alleviates road congestion for everyone else, _including_ people like you who have no option but to drive!

So, ironically, what you are complaining about (and would probably vote against if given the choice) is something that could benefit you.

But hey, at least you have your freedom or something.

This is really important to understand. Someone explained to me once how small changes (low single digit reduction) to cars on the road leads to huge congestion benefits. I'm sure someone on HN will have a good citation. Public transportation helps you have your luxury experience.

Here's a video on the topic: ("Why Traffic Congestion Grows Exponentially, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSCmQnGH9Q

You say that you won't ride a bus. But what I'm also hearing is that you really don't want to pay for a bus lane, either. That the very existence of public infrastructure that you will never use is a deep, personal affront to you. Am I hearing that clearly?

More people on the bus reduces traffic for you.

And your example of a poor efficiency bus system (for your specific commute) is common but is usually a symptom of poor investment rather than an inherent problem with transit systems.

This is a straw man argument, where you’re using a worst-case scenario for buses. A quick rail line could get you to the office in under an hour, and would beat traffic if it was designed well. Hell, buses ought to skip traffic via dedicated lanes since they’re carrying so many more people than a car.

But it’s important to note that only takes 2-3 hours because public transit doesn’t get the investment it needs to be good. And even when cars do get an extreme amount of investment, it still takes you an hour to go 25 miles.

It should be clear at this point that driving is not a scalable, general solution for quick, effective transit in areas with lots of people. The pretty simple reason is that traffic congestion is an exponential problem (https://youtu.be/cHSCmQnGH9Q).

As a result, investing in car infrastructure is actually not a good way to improve your commute time. It may seem backwards, but since more car infrastructure encourages more drivers, and since more drivers increase congestion at an exponential rate, more car infrastructure tends to (at the best case) not improve the situation at all.

This is why people like myself really try to push for investment in other forms of transit. If you have multiple, high-quality transit options, some people will pick the train, some will pick a bike, and others will pick a car.

If biking and taking the train or bus is good enough that it gets a few drivers off the road, that makes the experience significantly better for you, as we are now decreasing congestion at an exponential rate. Even a handful of people using something else on a busy road can make a big difference in how long you wait at a traffic light.

I’m advocating for you to have more freedom: more good choices and options available to you. Right now you have one choice, driving, and it isn’t even that good because you have to wait in traffic. Why wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 excellent transit options? Even driving would be better. (https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k)

This isn’t so much about individual choice. (Though every driver is the congestion simply by using a car.) This isn’t so much about rural and remote areas either. This is about what we invest in to improve the quality of life and transit effectiveness in dense areas.

Nobody should have to drive 25 miles to work in an office all day. At least not every single day.

Another creative solution to reduce traffic is to work from home or a smaller satellite office that’s closer than that. Neighborhood coworking offices near local cafes, gyms etc make for nice walkability, bikability and drivability.

I like cars. It’s comfy and it’s freedom. I don’t care if you have the fastest, cleanest, cheapest public transport in the world. I don’t want to ride with other people.

The existence of a bus doesn‘t force you to ride it. But if others do, that‘s less congestion for you.

There are still plenty of drivers in NYC; one of the big plusses of the subway system is that it makes room for other people who want or need to drive more. Every single time the subway is out of service the roads totally lock up because the subways divert a lot of people.

As usual, the Onion nailed it years ago: https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-...

Except the real issue is those who don’t want to spend or approve anything on public transit, even for others to use.

“We should build transit infrastructure so everyone else can use it and I can keep driving” would be an improvement in mindset many parts of the country.

No one is arguing for that. Supporting public transportation for others will help you maintain your luxury driving experience.

Then you should be in favor of more high-density public transport to get the ever-increasing traffic off of the roads so you can still enjoy your car.

Having a car when other methods are available is freedom.

Needing to own a car because there is no way to get by without one, isn't freedom.

In a sufficiently car centric society, owning a car is akin to owning a home but at 1/50th of the cost. You can lease a cheap car for about as much as you would pay for a monthly pass on public transport.

Sure, but nothing's freer than being able to handle a great deal of the travel you need on your own two legs, or maybe with a $20 bike you got at a garage sale. Engineering society such that even city-dwellers need a car in order not to be hugely inconvenienced or badly disadvantaged isn't a pro-freedom move.

Don’t forget insurance and gas.

> it’s freedom

Freedom from…?

Freedom from the emotional challenge of interacting with other human beings you have not met before.

Not even interact, just being really close to.

To be fair, some people stink and the concept of "personal space" might as well be some Outer God madness

And I say that as someone who's all for making public transportation better and reducing reliability on cars

Disclosure: I love driving, even across the country.

That said, the freedom to drive is a publicly subsidized freedom, paid for at the expense of the taxpayer and enjoyed unevenly by the population. Society made a choice to build many roads. We could make the decision, too, to make rail and other public transit so ubiquitous, clean and affordable that the need to have a massive, costly and pollution-generating asset just to get to work and get groceries could be a thing of the past for more people.

It’s not uneven. 92% of US households own a car.

the cars vs public transit thing is a distraction though; the existence (& public costs) of cars is not what makes our public transit bad.

thats cool but you should pay the costs of the externalities

Probably not viable where you are, but being able to take a bike seems like it'd fit your mindset. (Sadly, most of the US doesn't know what bikeable areas are like.) I can highly recommend the youtube channel "not just bikes"

https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes/

That's the most shocking/appalling part of this.

> A carpool lane was to be added to reduce congestion on a 10-mile stretch of Los Angeles’s I-405 freeway, the second most congested road in the U.S.

From https://www.vox.com/2014/10/23/6994159/traffic-roads-induced... :

> By way of illustration, consider the following situation: there's a store where you know you can save $10 on something you need to buy, but it's 10 miles away. If you assume there will be terrible traffic and it'll take 30 minutes to get there, you'll just buy the product at a closer store. However, if a new lane gets added to a highway that will speed your journey there, you'll decide it's worth it.

> Over time, thousands of people will make this calculation - along with similar ones, like deciding to drive a few blocks rather than walk, because it'll be faster, or choosing to move farther from work, in exchange for a bigger house, because they assume the distance can be covered quickly. Eventually, they increased miles they drive will go a long way towards filling up the new, expensive roads that municipalities went to so much trouble to build.

I think we need to go even further back with our thinking before cars even come into the picture. City planning with great public transit and walkability first, then think of cars.

Most of the comments here seem to be decidedly pro-building-big-stuff. As though that were obviously in the interest of the greater good, and everyone should just get with the program.

But the primary exhibit in the author’s opinion is a project that, by his own account, probably should never have been undertaken.

So let’s ask a question. What if the hurdles and pushback, (which the author identifies as environmental reviews, pushback from local communities, and unions) are performing a necessary function (but doing so inefficiently). What if they are saying something that shouldn’t be ignored?

What if we shouldn’t be building huge freeways (odd that all the examples are roads and bridges—-what about energy projects)?

What if that investment went into methodically reshaping our cities to be walkable, livable, sustainable, fed from locally grown food, integrated with wild space…

Just consider the amount of concrete it takes to build one of these megastructures. Concrete alone accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions [0]. What would happen if you accounted for that cost in addition to the billions of dollars spent on a one-minute-per-mile faster commute. (If only there were some power to the irony of wasting CO2 emissions for the sake of enabling more cars on the road. See Braess’ Paradox [1] and Jevons Paradox)

Maybe environmental concerns are right. Maybe labor concerns are right. Maybe we need to integrate the values they represent into planning, rather than making them file lawsuits. Maybe we should think more carefully about what we should build.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

I stopped reading at "Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track" for California High Speed rail, which is completely false. There are 119 miles under active construction and they've been putting down track since 2018.

It's hard to find evidence that his statement is false. How many miles of tracks have been laid, and where?

I was able to find this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#/me...

There is no "constructed" key here. Which suggests the furthest along is "under construction". I'm not sure what all that constitutes.

Laying track is clearly the last part of the project; they're working on all the important stuff that goes under the track. The fact that they haven't laid track specifically is a false concern.

Then the issue was with his elevation of the claim as pertinent, not the claim itself. He is right then that no track has been laid? It seems simply a shorthand maker of progress of the project.

>is clearly the last part of the project

All that tells me is they're not really close to the "last part of the project" then. And this last part could be very far away, because "working on" sections could mean anything. Until track is laid (especially as you claim it being near the end) the project is vaporware is it not? And that is useful information for the general public who can be bamboozled by project tracker graphics documenting "progress" that never delivers anything.

I see a few articles highlighting with pictures the construction of various concrete elevated platforms, that seem to have stopped or are abandoned. So ultimately work can be done for a long time and not amount to much at all.

"119 mile under active construction" does not disagree with "the state has not laid a single mile of track."

Under active construction could simply mean the land is being graded and prepped, or with modern weasel wording it could mean a dozen different surveys are under review. But given there was a time with rail was laid at a mile per day, 119 miles being "under construction" for the last 4 years does seem to make the author's point.

Rail was laid at about a mile a day, and a worker on said project died every two-four days (up to 1,000 deaths across 7 years). We could probably build rail faster if we threw safety out the window too.

Yes, that's not the only difference between now and then, but it is an important factor to include in your analysis.

We discussing safety, or track laid?

The statement is technically true, since while they have been building lots of elevated viaducts etc, there are no actual steel rails on those viaducts yet.

"If we could just get rid of environmental and worker protections, costs would be lower!" - Every Company Ever

How about actually making environmental regulations matter?

Blocking infill development with CEQA? You need to say how much more driving will happen as a result.

Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it down to an acceptable level given the benefits of the project.

I think getting at this type of issue is specifically what I wished the article had done more of. It's easy to say "Well, environmental regulations are causing the problem." Which I guess is good to know, but the real important part is what's the next step or how could things improve.

Otherwise, it comes across as "The problem is that environmental regulations exist."

The Cape Wind project, which was going to be the US's first offshore wind farm, was famously killed by wealthy and powerful people worried about their views with environmental causes as a pretext. I think that bureaucratic review could be much better than the current case of "anybody wealthy enough can sue to stop the project" but that would have required spending money spinning up the department when the law was introduced and relying on lawsuits from the public looks free.

EDIT: And of course recently fossil power interests were able to stop some power lines to bring hydro electricity in from Canada.

The problem is that most environmental protection laws predate climate change being a primary concern. So even something where it is blatantly obvious that it is going to be a net good for the environment can get bogged down in years of reviews

the complaint is not environmental regulations, but how they are used to stonewall projects with heinous "environmental review". some obscure "endanger animal" is dug up local activists and cited as being threatened delaying the whole project

"This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees."

Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process paperless. Go out with drones, phone apps, and ground-penetrating radar, tie all the info to location. Hook this up to AR goggles, so the people involved can see all the data when on-site. Much of the environmental paperwork could be generated automatically.

Drone-based ground penetrating radar is now available.[1] It's a lot cheaper than finding pipes and cables during construction.

[1] https://integrated.ugcs.com/gpr

It seems from outside the problem is not the process itself took long. People take advantages of some procedure loop-holes to effectively delay this forever for NIMBY reasons (there are some limitations on how long it should take, but there are loop-holes such that the EIS didn't kick off entirely, bypassing the time limit requirements).

getting government contracts isn't about competence/efficiency, it's about connections. You could make the best solution in the world but it wouldn't matter. In many cases these processes are created for the exclusive purpose of legally funneling millions of dollars to people

there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient. The only people I know who support large government initiatives are people who have never worked in or with the government

>>there's no incentive currently for the US government to be efficient.

This is also true in many large corporations - I have worked for a few - and the inefficiencies and waste is mind-boggling to someone that mostly works for small and mid-sized business that actually like to watch their pennies. If you are a manager, and you are given a budget, you make dam sure you spend 100% of it by the end of the year, even if you have to basically throw it away on some useless spend. There is zero incentive to save money - if you do, you will see your budget cut for the next year too, or criticized/penalized for having asked for more than you needed. Last thing you want to do is bring in your project under budget; wouldn't have believed it if I haven't seen it played out this way time and time again.

Filling out the paperwork is not why you pay consultants $$$, their knowledge of how to write the application to appeal to whoever's reading it is. It's just like lobbying in Congress.

You can't tech your way out of fetid politicians.

>Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process paperless.

There's some precedent: the enterprise content management company Documentum was started as "DocPharma" -- a software system specifically design to shepherd the documentation required to get drugs approved by the FDA. After they saturated that market, they generalized it beyond the original purpose.

If I learned one thing in countless city planing videos on youtube it is that car centrist ideology combined with car centrism enshrined in regulation combined create the urban sprawl that is so common in North America. The main problem with it is the extreme inefficiency: Because of the big surfaces needed for parking and driving a large fraction of the land is not only failing at generating a revenue for the city, it is in fact a liability, because when that street needs to be renewed the money will not be there to do it.

In Europe when a new distric is built outside a city the first thing put up is the public transport. This leads sometimws to the absurd situation that you can take a subway to what looks like a barren wasteland with a station in it, but 10 years later it will be a living place full of flats, shops, bars and so on. Living close (<10 min walk) to a public transport hub is a major factor when I look for a place.

I grew up on the country side and had a car (I was even driving as a job), but haven't had a car in the past 12 years. The places I need to go to are typically faster to reach by bicycle or public transport, the few times I need to transport something car sharing works perfectly fine.

What are peoples thoughts on palladium? I’ve found their articles and podcasts to be a refreshing analysis on modern socio-political issues with minimal culture war or partisan interference. Any other podcasts of similar quality and rigor anyone is listening to?

Wary. See this article about its founders.

https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...

Yikes

Yea, very high quality, and focused on the most important big picture issues.

Doesn't this article display a classical fallacy when it attempts to equate vastly different construction projects (building an additional highway lane vs. building a factory, for example)?

Megaprojects are mostly wasteful and don't deliver on their promise. They appeal to dreamers and idealists, and the GCs make out like bandits while residents are harmed and the promised benefits don't arrive. We don't build because private industry would rather issue buybacks to the oligarchic class in Arkansas and Kansas than invest in infrastructure used by the rest of too stupid to be born generationally wealthy with family offices.

I have to disagree with you on the mega projects being wasteful. Here in Switzerland we dug a 57km train tunnel [1] which has enabled a large number or cargo to be put on rail and travel at much higher speed.

Another large project at Zürich main station involved digging an additional underground station with a tunnel up through the mountain underneath a river. [2]. It has enabled a much tigher train schedule especially for intercity trains which can now travel through the main station instead of having to back out. Well worth the 2 Billion it cost.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel

Some aren't wasteful. I could have written my post more clearly, because I was talking about all proposed megaprojects, not just those that have been built.

I think this could have used a bigger disclosure, too. The author, Brian Balkus, works for a major construction company, MasTec (which has had its issues with labor law violations). There is a clear editorial bias.

Without megaprojects, we'd all probably still be living a subsistance agrarian lifestyle. It's hard to tag specific dollars to a specific public project, they often work as multipliers across the economy.

Suing contractors for the bureaucratic nightmare you create means that every future bid will now have a buffer to cover the expense of that.

American cities, being large and complex systems, are not centrally planned or managed to the extent that would allow for optimization of logistical concerns. The financial motivations of large development firms, coupled with their political power (aka bribery of elected officials) has resulted in cities that are disorganized and unoptimized for the movements of goods and people. These systems are very good at creating profitable projects for those with enough capital, however. The federal highway system is about the best thing one can say about America concerning large scale construction projects - the relic of a bygone era.

The title is misleading. Why something cannot be built on time or on budget in Los Angeles versus the rest of the country is apples and oranges. Given the complications inherent in LA I'm surprised the project is actually finished.

I would say it's not an issue about democracy or bureaucracy, it's because the responsibility is diluted. Someone is not happy with this? Great, it is now not because we do not do it, it is because we take every complaint seriously. The dilution of responsibility may appear in different ways. Leave the issue to some dedicated committee, they will work very hard to make sure the project won't start in a millennium, and cost possibly even more than actually building the project. In case people are concerned about the endless delay, all the process is transparent and no one is to blame.

This is not limited to building project. We all remember that when covid started, it took the CDC a long time to acknowledge that masks are effective, and even longer to acknowledge that the disease is airborne (in Oct. 2020). Why? They based their guidelines on "science and evidence". In events like, any delay in the decision leads to many deaths that could have been saved.

Ironically, in current America, only the fanatics are making prompt decisions. Look how fast the red states are passing abortion laws after the RvW overturned.

NIMBY is the least of the problems. The real problem is the private sector that exists to siphon money off the government spending. They amplify the cost of each initiative many times, making it utterly ineffective to invest in any infrastructure.

There is a reason why China's infrastructure industry is largely state-owned or dominated. It prevents such profiteering.

This seems correct. A lot of the infrastructure people point to as examples of a time when America could build (such as the interstate highway system, or the old Penn Station in NYC) were built mostly by government, not private contractors.

I don't find this thesis to be true at all, at least from the perspective of someone living in the Seattle area, where we recently:

- Hugely expanded the light-rail system and should have a major east-side extension opening within 2 years.

- Tore down an above-ground waterfront highway and replaced it with a tunnel underneath downtown Seattle.

- Currently reconstructing the waterfront to connect to the historic pike place market.

- At least one major new ferry terminal in the region in the last few years.

- Major expansion of the bike-lane network to where it's now easy to bike pretty much anywhere downtown, largely on protected bike lanes.

As far as I can see the only issue really is funding that pushes the timelines out on further expansions. The federal government seems to give peanuts for major transportation projects so the state/city/county pretty much has to fund it all themselves.

The costs of growing complexity cannot be exaggerated. Note there's a new effort to help create more effective government in CA that's worth checking out: https://effectivegovernmentca.org/

What do we do when software gets too complex?

We redesign and start over.

That may or may not be an option with government. If it's not, we know the consequences. Paralysis.

I remember a musing Elon Musk had on Lex Friedman's podcast. He noted that there was no cleansing function for laws. Something like that might be a step in the right direction.

> We redesign and start over.

I feel like its better to do greenfield development and migrate.

Frequently people forget what happens when they do that. People love refactoring... but forget how that spaghetti got there in the first place.

Spoiler alert: it's because life is messy and doesn't fit neatly into buckets & code. You throw out so much testing bug fixing & corner case fixes.

For every reg that is abused by bad actors, there's a dozen that are written in blood.

There are other reasons. I live in a major city that has difficulty completing infrastructure projects. In grad school, one of the projects we did was to evaluate the city’s contracts, which were publicly available. What our team found was that the city routinely contracted subsequent projects with higher bonuses for earlier completion than the penalty on prior contracts for being late. Since many of the projects were going to the same handful of companies, it became a lucrative pyramid scheme with local taxpayer dollars. This was in the late 80s and things are better, but no one ever went to jail or was voted out of office. But I did get my MBA as did the other team members. In the end, it all felt like a game.

The NIMBYism crisis in Canada has also reached a fever pitch:

https://www.tvo.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-cmhc-says-aba...

That's the Ontario provincial public broadcaster.

Canada currently builds a measly 286,000 homes per year, but the housing crisis is so severe that the government thinks we need to build 5.7 million homes over the next 9 years to alleviate the crisis. Which is basically impossible. And the municipalities are still crying about Character Of The Neighborhood and the importance of democratic local control.

> the government thinks we need to build 5.7 million homes

Last time I checked, Canada had plenty of space to build a few million houses. What is the problem?

1) Green belts. These exist for good reason -- while Canada is enormous, some of its cities are located within narrow zones of super-arable land that has food security implications if it's developed. Also, greenbelts prevent climate-change-destroying sprawl.

2) Red tape. Canada has a similar problem as Cali, where municipalities have basically declared all buildings larger than a 2 storey detached house to be illegal. The only way anything gets built is through zoning and planning variance committees and provincial quasilegal arbitrators, which take years and add ferocious amounts of carrying costs and legal fees. Provinces are only just getting started tackling this.

3) Industrial capacity. There isn't the available skilled manpower and equipment needed to double and triple our per-year output.

Brightline is being built and it is a private railroad. The local highway authorities are attempting a shake down.

Perhaps policies should tie transportation, rezoning, and real estate to incentivize private construction of transportation infrastructure.

I think the general trend of giving “highways” their own departments, agencies, and budgets is a big part of the issue.

In many cases there’s no agency with the authority to say that spending $2b on transit infrastructure would have a better traffic outcome than spending $2b on a giant road widening project.

The highways department has a budget and whaddaya know they spend it on expanding highways.

This if often used as a positive and accountable outcome for tax payers, ie “my gas/road tax should only be used for roads not other projects!”

And especially once that is tied into privately operated toll roads, you have entities which stand to lose out if that budget is redirected to things that aren’t highways.

This article could have been written about any industry at all, like healthcare, aerospace, or fast food, and have made essentially the same points, on the same timeline, and with the same conclusions.

Maybe something happened in the 1960s…

>Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.

Surely this is the worst way to do a project. Not even having the land yet?

I mean even a kid would now know the incredible amount of leverage the remaining land owners have over you. They can ask basically any price for it now.

In the past we have made cities because of economy of scale effects, and because we are social animals. In the very past we have made them because we do not have had effective quick enough transportation systems, for defense, water proximity etc.

Nowadays at the actual evolution state, at the actual needs the economy of scale effects do not happen in cities anymore but in Rivieras, witch differ from USA suburbs because they are not residential-only areas but a mix of residential and work areas, a bit dense but not too much to have no room for evolution, not too low do have no benefit of density scale. That's is.

In the very past when cities were little and made of rocks and wood changing them was moderately easy and normally happen after a not infrequent catastrophe, now with concrete thing have changed much, we can't "source raw materials where we are, recycling the past mess" and that's another important issue: we know concrete do not last forever and we made big stuff with it with no real plan on what to do when will be time to decommission them. We allow keeping up crappy things because of someone interests against all others and again no plan how to sort the issue out. That's why not USA in particular but essentially all other the world we can't build.

USA have showed and tested why differentiation fails: suburbs fails because they are residential-only, you need a car just to get a bottle of milk. Cities fails because of density. EU give even worse example of dense-cities issues. BUT all other the world we see that Rivieras keep going. Surely they are not universal, we can't made a mining industry with that model. We need some "districts" but some with a single purpose, a single owner, aside that we can a day erasing them and restart over.

Such model is implicit in the Green New Deal, even if people, even UN New Urban Agenda deny it, we can evolve single-family homes with a bit of land around, we can't for tall buildings and dense areas. IMVHO the Green New Deal also tell without telling their "solution": pushing poor in modern cities who happen to be like prisons, of small size to be manageable, and live few wealthy aside. I doubt such model can scale, I doubt such "separation" can work in nature though...

I think we’re all dancing around the real issue which is that this is what happens when you have a low trust society in which everyone is trying to get theirs and there is no social cohesion or sense of common purpose. You get nimbys.

The only thing that has held the country together up till now is “free” real estate and prosperity due mostly to luck and abundant natural resources. Take that away, and suddenly everyone is attacking each other. It’s no wonder we don’t get anything done.

Regarding just the Public-Private-Partnerships: Alon Levy doubts it's benefical (at least for transit), partially due to high ongoing costs https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/01/15/friends-dont-l...

In the last bit he leaves out Bell Labs, which was de facto the national research laboratory for decades, funded by a system that was a tax in everything but name, and which was encouraged to try new things even with the assumption that most of them would fail.

Because there are too few builders.

I am trying to get an old house updated and keep hearing no one goes into those jobs anymore. The crews are aging and backed up on work.

This rag makes a huge philosophical social statement without looking at the reality; there are more office workers than builders.

You can’t build anything when everyone is preferring computer jobs and high salaries to go along.

America does not need to build more industrial nonsense. Or even homes. It needs to use empty space that it built better.

This whining about how grand greenfield projects cannot get off the ground is propaganda. Pay trades people what a programmer makes and America will build again.

But that won’t happen as Thiel, Musk and company would not have their way with human agency if it could afford it’s own.

In USA you are lucky, at least you don't find unexploded WWII air bombs or mines or even underground nazi weapons storage rooms...yes, we still find them in Italy and it costs a lot to deal with, both time and money.

"build" has turned into one of those zero-entropy words like "content". Let's build back better our ability to build because [insert massively simplified view of society] means we can't build.

I called BS when the author claimed that dock workers make $100,000/year.

The article seems to imply that the main part of the problem is organized labor and the need to follow environmental regulation. I don't buy that.

America can build if it wants to. It's just got to want to.

It is good to want things if they are good for you! There is merit in wanting what is right! And little kids can't do anything but want what they want to want. Just want.

Concomitantly with my Idealistic Christianity, let me share the Atheistic perspective running in parallel: I developed an algorithm that can solve any problem in a math textbook, but it can't want anything. And I'm not going to automate that, that must always be left to someone in flesh and bone.

Seek, and ye shall find.

As a NIMBY, for some things, and a YIMBY for others, I sense my power in this situation is significantly smaller than other costs and consequences. Nothing I think seems to be vested with much power.

Do people think NIMBY have more power than YIMBY? I think it equalises. It might be NIMBY power is indicative of risks, and unassessed costs and consequences?

You get sold on Global Warming, Healthcare for All, and Social Justice and end up with a Byzantine System 57 bureaucratic layers deep, mountains of paperwork, legal problems, and grift whose total government size is 44% of the GDP - with big plans to grow. Good luck building anything.

We really need this generation's Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson. Someone with the ambition and political saavy for cutting through layers of bureaucracy, though maybe today's setup would be too much for even them.

I assumed "build" meant "erect buildings". Appparently the story is that USA can't lay roads. Is that the result of a timely regulatory reaction to the USA's car culture?

>>Appparently the story is that USA can't lay roads

Also high speed rail lines.

The california HSR has spent 44 billion dollars over budget and still hasn't even gotten the first leg's real estate done?

I hope most of that was for the land, which is not a sunk cost/lost asset.

The total estimated cost has increased by 44 Billion. Only ~10 billion has been spent on the project so far.

Why? Because successfully completing large infrastructure projects is - at best - a "lip service" priority for most people. But it is an actual priority for very few people.

Why are bike lanes held up as the optimal solution in small municipalities with an aging population?

I think a major reason is simply is that it's not a high priority by voters.

Oh noes, too much democracy…

Construction should never stop; build, modify, tear, repeat.

Has anyone in the Congress proposed NEPA reform?

The US needs dramatic, progressive change, but instead we're failing and regressing in so many ways and places. I expect cascading failures to continually compound.

Meanwhile, China is building high speed rail, roads, and bridges around the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Africa. Biden has announced a competing initiative: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1106979380/g7-summit-2022-ger... but we all know this is empty talk. The US cannot build in its own land; outside of the US, it is hopeless.

Environmental laws/regulations, Cheaper building costs, Chinese speed of building. Pick only 2.

You also forgot to mention the terms on which China does that and at whose cost. Also, it's one thing to "just" build something, but a whole other to maintain and service.

litigation for every little thing + courts that move slow + large legal costs = America

My favorite NIMBY story is of the Golden Gate bridge:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Golden-Gate-Bri...

My favourite NIMBY story is the Edinburgh inner ring road:

https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/edi...

a better question? does America need to build? The answer is a resounding no. Japan and China are building bridges to nowhere. Their ethno-nationalism is holding them back. If they take in immigration like the rest of the rich world, they'd have a better luck to tackle their aging population issue. But they wouldn't for ethno-nationalistic reasons.

America already has fantastic infrastructure in the form of roads. they don't need all these bullet trains etc. It's propaganda. Spain has one of the largest bullet train network but their economy is still sluggish. If the bullet trains were such a good idea then a Elon Musk-type would've invested in one. U see, that's how the railway system got built in America. Think Rocker-feller.

The fact that America doesn't have it just means it doesn't make economic nor political sense.

Also, if an enemy nation like Mexico invades, do u want them to have fast trains to move soldiers around? Do you want Mexico to take back the city of angels?

All in all. It's asking the wrong question. The assumption is that building good, not building bad. Which is the fundamentally wrong. China will not overtake the US just by building. The US is fine just the way it is.

Where's Pete?

We are a nation where those who can are blocked by those who can't.

Better things could be accomplished in international waters, at this rate.

PANIC: 666 - ERRTOOMANYLAWYERS

do construction workers in US have reputation of working under the influence too?

those who work on those "simple" projects like renovation of homes and stuff

Uh, I don't think so. It's a hard job and often involves heavy machinery. One of my cousins works construction and does enjoy drinking but always after hours afaik.

Contractors who work in the home, not really. Construction workers might crack a beer at work, but it's nowhere near the "builders" stereotype the UK has.

depends. drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north america. other professions, like electrician, not so much since you could end up dead.

Painters and roofers too. All that I know are borderline or actual alcoholics. I don't know how the roofers manage to be drunk on a roof and not fall off, but they do.

Roofers are easily the roughest crowd. Not sure where they find those guys.

> drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north america

I thought dry masonry was a stoner job? (OK, I'll show myself out...)

From what I have heard, something of the opposite problem on the office side of civil service. It is hard to find applicants who have not exposed themselves to weed in the last two years (still a requirement for many jobs), greatly reducing the talent pool for hire.

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