Marc Andreessen says he’s for new housing, but records tell a different story
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Often this is called the "Grand Bargain," that new housing can be allowed, but only if it is constrained to a tiny area (which becomes increasingly dense), while the bulk of single family homes are left untouched.
The challenge for voters is to discern between those that are calling for more housing that are genuine YIMBYs, that want to build more housing for everyone more equitably, everywhere in all neighbourhoods, and those like Andreessen, which merely want to continue on with Grand Bargain thinking, and want to continue the status quo by which the poors live as far as possible away from him.
And hey, I honestly want all low density parts of the city densified. But it’s striking how big those houses are in that neighborhood and how low density it must be.
EDIT: I think what bothers me about this neighborhood is what it represents. While so many people in the city are struggling to get by, these people have these huge homes with elaborate finishing work, huge gardens, fountains, the works. It feels gratuitous to me. And if you know anything about the history of red lining in this country, this would have been one of those areas with racial covenants in the deeds to their homes. All the power brokers of the city past and present must have lived here, and all manner of political maneuvering and disenfranchisement would have come from this place. I’d rather see it torn down, and used to build affordable housing for those in need. I just can’t find myself sympathizing with people who feel they need this much for themselves while so many people struggle for the basic necessities. I wouldn’t mind if no one had that. It doesn’t seem justified to me.
EDIT2: Someone asked me what neighborhood so I looked on google maps (it's Sea Cliff) and was reminded that they also have THEIR OWN GOLF COURSE adjacent to this neighborhood. Yikes.
What I want is: 1. Anyone be able to build any type of housing anywhere. 2. Really steep land value taxes
I have no issue with a clique of hyper reach folk living in a low density neighborhood, as long as any of them is be able to defect and build a tower if they feel like it _and_ they all pay their LVT.
In terms of property tax, I thought there was some research that the best way to do that was actually irrespective of the development on top of it? I think the idea being that would encourage development because you’re not taxed on the improvements? Or maybe I’ve got it backwards.
I think it's close to “for 90% of people who pay property tax that would be a tax increase”; the people it will be a tax cut for are the people with relatively high improvement value on their land compared to the bare land value, like corporate HQs and landlords of high density apartment complexes.
I disagree with the 90% number for the LVT switch on multiple fronts: for starters all the people with historical discounts will pay more. Secondly, the typical SFH pays more and there is a lot of SFH in California.
LVT is still worth doing but making it actually happen is politically difficult in the best of states and California is the worst one due to Prop 13.
Why is regressive property tax better than the progressive income tax?
If you also tax the improvements to the land, you discourage people from building denser housing on it, because the tax itself goes up the more you build.
You seem to be ignoring that the presence of the corporate HQ raises land values across the entire city. Landlords of high density apartment complexes should be applauded for not wasting precious land in locations where many people want to live in, using land wastefully increases rental payments and causes homelessness.
But...California has a tiny overall property tax rate. A revenue neutral change to an LVT (unless it's revenue neutral on the far side of the Laffer Curve) might better meet some abstract concept of fairness better, but isn't going to have a meaningul impact on price of... anything.
There are ways to fix that too with gradual phase-ins, not allowing people to pass their tax assessment on to their heirs, etc. But anyone who stands to inherit property will vote against such a move, and most people who will be passing along that property will vote the same way.
If art has meaning, these “works of art” represent oppression and selfishness.
The reason more housing doesn't get built is not because of this neighborhood.
Prop 13 that was passed in 1975 is not because of this neighborhood.
I get that you see the neighborhood as a symbol for something that angers you, but this is a nationwide problem where we do not build enough housing in general.
Hell, bulldoze Golden Gate Park in SF and build a ton of cheap housing there! Same with Central Park in NYC.
No more fun until more housing gets built.
/s
I definitely agree that golf courses are inefficient uses of land, but even if we built mid-density housing on all of them here, it wouldn't solve the problem. There are plenty of other low-density areas that need to be upzoned if we're going to solve anything.
There's also the Presido Golf Course (on the grounds of the former Presidio), and a total of six in The City, AFAIU.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/golf+course+san+francisco...
Did a quick look via street view. There are some very nice houses indeed. I might even say it’s the perfect location: golf course, beach and huge park adjacent to the neighborhood. These people will probably not actually visit the beach nor the park as these seem to be public areas.
I know people in Berkeley who own homes in neighborhoods where those kinds of covenants are still on the books, even though they're illegal and unenforceable. It's so weird, and disgusting.
Same with parking. In LA there is the popular Runyon Canyon. On weekends it's parking hell because so many people go there. Interestingly one block down there are some side streets with huge houses and (not surprisingly) street parking isn't allowed there.
We need to find a way to rebrand the American dream to be this.
If it's me, I'm authorizing all the 10-story buildings too. But we don't have to rip the band-aid off all at once; municipalities could start by letting up just a little bit and letting two households share a lot.
The progressive position in the 90s was anti-gentrification, anti-greedy rent-seeking developers; “the evil developer” was a common trope in pop-culture.
Now? Dust off your ceremonial hard hat and golden ground-breaking shovel, because apparently, facilitating a massive and permanent wealth transfer to those same greedy developers is now progressive orthodoxy.
Density proponents are just unpaid lobbyists.
I don’t know about America but in Germany apartment buildings are often owned by the residents and they have to work together in a financial collective for certain things like roof repairs, city negotiations, fencing, etc. But then internally to their unit they are able to make many permanent alterations within limits.
I don’t list these constraints claiming them as benefits. No these are the hardships one must endure but the benefit is of course property ownership. The benefits of property ownership in general are well known, it’s primarily a matter of accessibility to those benefits that is being discussed.
I do think we should encourage individual home ownership, even in dense developments. And would have no problem with legal nudges towards this. I.e. upzoned for density only if units which will ultimately be individually owned.
Furthermore, in the majority of desirable areas, creating high-density, individually-owned homes would increase access to home ownership, as the unit economics would allow lower pricing than equivalent single family homes in the same location.
(And before someone pulls out the construction cost economics / high-price-only rebuttal, that's yet another topic, with a different set of fixes)
I live in the 14th floor of a 18-story building (4 apartments per floor), and next to me there are other ~20-story strictly residencial buildings. Life is amazing here, I have swimming pool, gym and sauna in the condo and it costs me next to nothing since the costs are shared between all residents. And it's never crowded. But the best part is that there's a positive side-effect: since I have everything at hand, I don't need to leave my home often and that made me switch to remote work full-time (the office started to seem boring).
It means, I'm living in a densely populated building and commuting less than I was when I lived in a smaller apartment complex.
I really think cities should consider this for their future: taller buildings with built-in amenities, ready for remote work. Make people want to live there and also don't want to commute. You get the density without the associated traffic congestion.
Life is amazing here. I exercise outside, explore the landscape and the hiking trails surrounding me, and not only is it never crowded, it’s also safe, quiet, and beautiful.
The best part is that since I have everything at hand, including natural beauty, I don’t want or need to leave my home often, and have worked remotely for a Bay Area company for several years.
I often walk out my front door and go for a hike before starting my work day.
Living in an 18-story building surrounded by 20-story buildings would be, for me, a hellish existence.
You couldn’t pay me enough money to want to live there.
Since I've grown in the countryside, surrounded by all the forests and hills, I really find the cosmopolitan life I've there more exciting.
It may change overtime, sure, but at least I will never have to complain about having lost my time commuting.
In theory? They can coexist. If you want density, move to a dense city.
In reality? Activists and developers are constantly pushing to upzone and pave over everything in sight.
You’re not taking school taxes and costs into consideration.
In my school district, they spend $18,211 per student each year. Average school taxes per house are $8,100.
So a house with 1 child costs $10,111 per year. But the average house with children has 2.1 kids costing over $30,000 more than is paid in.
This is a very common problem and why development, especially of larger homes (with likely more children) is a net drain on the local tax base.
True, but doesn't seem relevant to the discussion. GP said homes pay as much in taxes as they receive in services.
I disputed that by pointing out that even with very large homes, the people in the home receive far more educational services than their taxes pay for.
Your response to that is to say children need education?
That somehow is because they tax people that don't have kids in school. In fact, municipalities can nudge this.
Approve a 55+ community and it will give the community a net tax benefit. Same thing with a condo community. But approve a plan for a community of single family homes with 4+ bedrooms and you will have a huge drain on the tax base literally forever.
A neighbour gym would also be crowded all the time, all my friends that have to go out for the gym always complain about that.
The public sauna seems ok, but I've never seem any of that in the streets besides "erotic saunas" that are not really intended for the same purposes...
It is as hygienic as any other swimming pool. Unless you literally have your own pool in your backyard, which overwhelming majority of swimmers dont, you are not getting more hygiene.
> A neighbour gym would also be crowded all the time, all my friends that have to go out for the gym always complain about that.
This may depend on locality, but fair solution to that is allowing simple capitalism and more businesses. Someone gonna build second gym.
(Former) private pool owner here. I'd bet most public neighborhood pools are much more hygienic than a private pool where we'd only test the water when algae started growing. Public pools have proper maintenance and much better systems for chlorination/salt cleaning.
Meeting other people might be scary at first. But ultimately sharing is caring.
I have family in Europe too. They live in a 4 story townhome in a small German city with their own garage and driveway and front door very similar to American townhomes. It's the middle of town next to a three story American style mall built right into the town center near a castle tourist destination. But it's also so rural there's nothing if you drive even 10 minutes out of town. And there's nothing to do at night.
They also own a small piece of land nearby where my grandparents hang out all day and grow food. In essence it's not much different from an American lifestyle just with excellent walkability and a train direct to Berlin or Hamburg
The point is that you shouldn't need a car.
Enough better for transit is complex. It is a factor of cost, how nice it is, ability to get places when they want to, traffic, and a few other factors. The denser the city the more likely it is that transit is better.
The first problem is that we don't need to frame this discussion as "cars vs no cars". I'm not advocating for getting rid of cars because that wouldn't make sense and would be wildly impractical. Instead, what is being advocated is not having car-first infrastructure.
The second problem is that this preference, like other "decisions" is done without complete information or a feedback loop besides a monthly payment and gas prices. You don't feel the weight of the maintenance and taxes that go to paying for new highway construction. You don't really experience climate change in a feedback mechanism. You also aren't presenting equivalent options. Would someone prefer to walk over to the neighborhood grocery store to get their groceries or drive 5 miles away to a big-box retailer? I bet if you actually polled people you'd get 90%+ preferring the former. Framing it as "I want a car" versus not having a car presents the person being asked a question which implies taking something away from them, which is bad practice.
The third problem is that people prefer to own cars because we intentionally design our cities such that owning a car is the only choice. There's no competition. But you can clearly see that this isn't society's actual preference, because walkable neighborhoods across the country built before cars were prevalent usually have higher property values than the suburbs in the same city. If there was a mechanism such that people could choose neighborhoods they'd vote for or buy medium-density mixed-use neighborhoods where they can have a car with street parking or in the garage behind their house for less frequent activities and then they'd walk to the local grocery store, let their kids walk themselves to school, etc.
You can see that this is true because when you visit an actual neighborhood there are lots of people walking around and bikes and greater levels of economic activity. I'm not sure what metro area you live in but if you live in one I bet you have an area like I'm describing. It's probably where you and your friends or significant other go out for a nice dinner. Most of the country could be like that and you could still drive your car to Costco once/week.
Even if you disagreed with some or all of the things I've said, dismissing them as an "invented problem" is pretty unfair.
In this case, the people who don’t want to own cars are the small minority. And I was one of those people for about a decade.
Would they? Because I have actually had it both ways and I much prefer driving to a huge supermarket. Prices are lower, quality is better, selection is better.
> But you can clearly see that this isn't society's actual preference, because walkable neighborhoods across the country built before cars were prevalent usually have higher property values than the suburbs in the same city.
Per acre of land, sure, because you can cram in tons of apartments in the same area that one house would take up. That doesn’t mean more people actually prefer to live that way.
It is nice to be able to walk to school or church or whatnot, but when it comes to commercial retail, my experience is that suburban car-bound freeway mayhem is pretty fucking great. From my current suburban house in Texas I can reach almost any retail or commercial business I need within 5-15 minutes, and those are full size, full service retailers. Instead of a “neighborhood grocery store” that’s barely one step above a convenience store, I can go to H-E-B and get almost any kind of food I can imagine for extremely reasonable prices. Instead of a neighborhood hardware store I can go to Home Depot or Lowe’s. Either one. I used to live in an apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, close to an actual supermarket (which kind of sucked), and even then I had nowhere close to the same access to retail. Maybe the biggest point in favor of walkable neighborhoods was that it was relatively cheap and easy to go to bars, but at some point I realized I could save money and drink with my wife at home (especially if we can drive to a cheap big-box liquor store!)
I do understand the appeal when it comes to things that are more community oriented than commercial. For instance, I understand that Orthodox Jews tend to live within walking distance of their synagogue because they can’t drive on the Sabbath, which means they live within walking distance of everyone else who goes to their synagogue, which means they can have physical communities. And that sounds really nice. But for the typical secularized, atomized American, what’s the point? Living cheek to jowl with total strangers and learning to ignore homeless people fucking sucked and I’m glad that part of my life is behind me. And the reason most of this country is built out the way it is, is that most people actually feel the same way.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21841151/
I somewhat agree, it’s a delight for the wealthy or middle class. But the lower class often have a much more negative view (having come from said lower class). The reality, is the upper and middle class dominate in politics and try to do things that are the opposite of “good”. Take for example, “cheap housing for everyone”. Nah.. they want the opportunity to own a nice house, not a hand out. Frankly, you’d be right, if I had any faith the upper class wouldn’t have a god complex to try and “make things better”.
Hell even the California countryside is like this, once you get far enough away from the big cities
This is the key statement.
Build more SFH suburbs, gonna take you longer and longer to get far away from those cities.
What people really want is their work, stores, school of choice within walking/biking distance, which is harder to accomplish.
You're absolutely correct that there's heaps of wilderness in the USA, but the more SFH there is, the more sprawl that is required, which means that that wilderness is further and further away.
I'd rather get to the wilderness faster and not have to drive through hours and hours of sprawling SFH suburbs.
Then people shouldn't be allowed to ban their neighbours from building whatever housing they want.
Singapore has a size of 728.6 km2, and a population of 5.7 million people. For a density of 8,400 people per km2. (That includes water reservoirs, military bases, an international airport, areas for heavy industry, nature reserves, garbage dumps, power stations, 1.5% of the world's crude oil refining capacity, a few semiconductor fabs, etc.)
There are 7.96 billion people on the planet. That means if you scale up Singapore at the same density, you'd need 952,000 km2 to fit everyone.
Texas has a size of 696,000 km2. So our mega-Singapore would need about 1.37 Texases of area.
That's pretty close to your number.
Wikipedia gives New York City's population density as 11,313.68/km2, but the borders for that calculation will by necessity be drawn a bit arbitrarily. And I assume that doesn't include as much of the support infrastructure as Singapore does.
Denser cities make it easier to leave them for a short stint, too, because there's less sprawl.
Yes, it's probably a good idea to live outside a city for a while in your life. Though that's up to individual preferences.
I'm not quite sure whether it makes much sense one way or another to say that the US is 'still not very dense'.
In some literal sense, that is obviously true. In another sense, just because eg Russia has huge empty lands in Siberia bringing down the average density on a federal level, doesn't really make a difference to someone living in the suburbs of Moscow.
Similarly, if Russia lost Siberia tomorrow, the person in the Moscow suburb wouldn't experience density any different either.
I only chose Russia as an extreme case example. You can replace Siberia with Alaska or the flyover states, and Moscow and its suburbs with eg San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
After spending years in quite a few different places around the globe, I'm quite happy to live in Singapore these days, one of the premier global cities.
In the US it is sad that because of building restrictions so many people are excluded from its most productive cities; unnecessarily setting back the economy and thus the prosperity of the people. Including even of those people who wouldn't want to live in those most productive places.
This will be my koan for the day.
By the time I graduated college all of the empty fields and forests where I had roamed as a teenager were now developments.
Little to no green space, no riding your bikes down random streets until it’s get dark. No exposure to nature. Cramped in tiny $1M apartments immersed in the rat race.
It’s like San Mateo. The Main Street is more dense but very few choose to live there. It’s mostly endless single family homes.
Hell, I’d call a good part of SF “practically” suburban. Sunset is mostly block upon block of single family homes with maybe 1 corner store within a 10-15 min walk. Transit is easy on a narrow strip, otherwise you’re screwed without a car.
I personally don’t see much difference between that and what people rail against as suburbs.
I spent time in Singapore. Incredible transit system, carefully designed "Garden City" with plenty of outdoor areas, modern, efficient, affordable public housing.
And what did people aspire to? Single family homes, with their own yard and a car. What HN sees as "people are forced to live in the suburbs", is in reality, people just choosing what they like best.
Same in all the other countries I've lived in. Sure, 20-somethings love living in "hip" cities with "trendy" restaurants and "fun" bars to go and are willing to trade all that for tiny apartments. I don't deny that.
But a very substantial part of the population don't want that. They want space, quiet neighborhoods and are willing to have to drive to get that.
https://www.singstat.gov.sg/find-data/search-by-theme/househ...
That is an obvious statement, but the analogy breaks down a bit as in Singapore, whether you live in a GCB or in HDB (social housing), everything is relatively close by regardless. Hence, there isn't really much of a trade-off at all - living in a GCB just affords more space and privacy (at an exponentially inflated cost).
There are townhomes (shophouses), duplexes, single family homes as options as well.
“To qualify as a GCB, the property must have at least 1,400 square metres (approx. 15,070 sq. ft.) of land area, and the bungalow itself is limited to a maximum of two storeys in height”
People in HDBs want to live in condo, condos want to live in shophouses, shophouses want to live in detached freehold homes.
Everybody wants more space. And despite the great transit system, parts of Singapore can be more remote to the point a car being almost a requirement. And that’s what many people strive for.
The point being we need to figure out how to not destroy nature while allowing people to live meaningful lives and the suburbs ain’t that.
The US has enough land to give every single person (man, woman, child - not household) almost 7 acres of land.
The idea that we need pack ourselves in to <1% of the land mass in dense urban cores or else, as you put it we can't live "meaningful lives" (do you decide what's meaningful?) or "destroying nature" is just wrong.
And the best part? We can afford it! We don't need the federal government backing "jumbo" leans for $1M apartments in San Francisco - instead they can back mortgages for 5 homes in the mid-West.
And this is a big shocker - a lot of it's already developed because we need places to grow food!
I know you're exaggerating for effect, but every degree that you spread people out means greater and greater investments in infrastructure and utilities you need to build and maintain, and some things we take for granted today just become infeasible.
And I agree that it's ridiculous to pay $1,000 per square foot (or more!) for housing in San Francisco. But that's not because of some sort of natural consequence of things, it's actually because it's not dense enough, and the political will to force more building just isn't there. Housing is so expensive here because, despite all the bad things about the city, despite the alleged COVID exodus, we still have far far more people who want to live here than the available housing can support.
I take you’ve never asked utilities the costs for hook ups? They are happy to give you a quote.
It’s sure not the taxpayers the next town over paying $50,000 for a sewer hookup.
Like sure the space exists (ignoring the fact that most of that land is inhospitable and/or already used for agriculture), but maybe we should leave something for the other species?
But hey, maybe your 7 acres is at the top of the Sierra and you can get some good fire insurance.
I live in the center of a 1M+ city and went for a 1.5 hour bush hike 15 minutes drive from my house.
When people talk about how wonderful it is to live in a dense, walkable city, they are thinking about all the nightclubs they can go to, the bars, the restaurants, art galleries, libraries, etc all within a few minute’s walk. But that’s not everyone’s vision of an ideal living environment.
Folks who move to a suburb want more stability, less noise, fewer people, more open space, nice lawns, a pool in the back yard, a deck to sit on in the summer while you watch the kids swim, etc. They don’t want a nightclub on every block. Even a convenience store would not be very well regarded (especially if it’s really a gas station that also sells candy bars; Japanese–style stores that are part of the owner’s house would actually fit much better).
I don’t know much about what folks living in very rural areas like, but some of my relatives who live in a quasi–rural area value the fact that nobody in the area mows their lawns. Instead the local farmers bring their tractors over once or twice a year to harvest the grass out of everyone’s back yards to make hay.
Sort of, but that's not all of it. I like that there's a corner store a half block away, and a small but well-stocked grocery two blocks away. There's a hardware store four blocks away. There's a park four blocks away, and another six blocks away. I can go for a six mile run without having to drive myself to a gym (and my partner can walk to her gym). My partner walks a couple blocks to get her nails done or hair cut. If I need to see my doctor, I walk 20 minutes to get there. Sure, I have to drive sometimes, but it's rare.
I wish there was a way to get the best of both worlds. I do have to drive to go on a hike or find a forest to wander around in. I don't feel safe cycling in many parts of my city. As I get older, I go to bars less and less, and nightclubs pretty much never. I cook at home more often. I get annoyed rather than smile knowingly if I hear a pair of happy-drunk people walking home from a bar at 2am on a Friday night when my windows are open and I'm trying to sleep. But damn, I love being able to walk everywhere to get normal everyday things done. I hate driving for simple things; it just adds so much overhead to everything.
Not trying to say dense urban living is objectively better, just trying to point out that "I like walkability" doesn't merely mean "I like bars and restaurants and clubs". I agree that my particular city might not be a great place for kids to grow up, though, frankly, I don't see many kids out and about on the occasion that I need to drive into a residential area of a suburb, so I feel like in general it's just not the same as when I was a kid in the suburbs.
But I personally feel trapped in a dense urban environment. Going out to restaurants and bars and shows are neat experiences, but they aren’t fulfilling for me never mind the enormous expense of it all. I would rather live where I have access to nature and visit the city for its attractions on a weekend when the mood strikes. I want a house that my wife and I own and can do projects in without worrying about the condo association rules or disrupting my neighbors. I want at least a little bit of yard so my elderly dog can lay in the grass off-leash. I want less crime, a saner politics, and a local government that isn’t so dysfunctional. I really think a little bit of space is good for the soul, but I also think the American model of suburbs can be improved to get more of the benefits of urban life.
it feels like the whole NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy loses sight of the fact there are other development models besides midtown manhattan or the exurbs of tuscon.
One thing I miss since moving to San Francisco from the UK is now I need a car to access nature. There was something very pleasant about taking a train to the edge of the city to go on a hike and ending up at a pub for a few beers before taking the train home again.
In Oslo in the winter you'd see people with cross country skis on the metro since the forest trails at the edge of town were easily accessible.
Living in the city is great; access to museums, art, culture, food, and transit is tops.
Suburbs are more welcoming to kids in general because here we have more parks for kids than dogs. Here we don't have museums - but we don't miss them because we know from experience our kids can only stand being in one for about 10 minutes before they start doing that will get us kicked out if we don't leave first. A good portion of your art not kid friendly. Culture is everywhere, we don't get the "high culture" of the cities, but we have our own culture that works for us. We do a lot more cooking at home as we can't afford eating out as much, but I will grant when we do go out there is a lack of choices. All you really have that we would even use is much better transit.
It doesn't have to be that way. I'm told NYC is still welcoming to kids. Most cities though are not places where they have things for family.
As a kid, I loved going to the natural history museum and the science museum. There's plenty of museums that caters to kids and that are really great with kids (not sure in the US to be honest but at least that's true in Europe). Museums doesn't mean art only.
Likewise for theater plays, that's the kind of things that are only available in bigger cities but can be tons of fun with kids.
I know plenty of people who grew up in NYC and have happy memories of childhood (and as an adult, I know several people raising kids in NYC, and they seem fine). I grew up in the suburbs and have happy memories of a lot of the things people are praising here. But my mom also took my sister and me on the 45-minute bus ride to the city a few times a year, and that was a different kind of adventure. Ditto for tagging along on my dad's business trips to Baltimore and DC.
Neither is better, neither is right or wrong. They're just different, and we establish many of our preferences and attitudes toward things based on our experiences as kids. That doesn't make those preferences correct or incorrect. It just makes them preferences.
* The choice of city is due to personal experience, but I doubt it's unusual - e.g. I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same in/around Miami.
I also wonder what sorts of distances people think of as "far" in this thread. I've lived in both suburbs and in NYC. It's easy to walk a mile in the city without realizing it, whereas that is sometimes unthinkable to suburban folks. But if I walk a mile from my house I hit: woods, trails, the downtown area, the train station (to NYC), a school, fields, and etc.
At least in the U.S. - think it matters quite a bit where you are. Lots of areas in South and West were developed entirely around car use whereas suburbs in the Northeast can be quite tightly packed.
In my mind, this is another the under-rated aspects of parts of NYC - grids. Simplify the process of walking, judging distance, knowing where you are.
The main downside is often the houses are packed in such a way that there's no path without going through someone's yard.
Everybody just biked from place to place and spent like 18 hours a day outside of the house, playing basketball, duplicating cassette tapes and making music in various garages.
The US suburbs are now generally so bike-unfriendly. Big and dangerous cars dominate. Speeds in residential areas are high, so dangerous to play in the streets. The suburbs you grew up in are no longer the same.
What happened? Why did you all stop biking around and got a car instead?
Just how many cars do you think are zipping around in a suburban neighborhood at any given time? The roads in a neighborhood are empty most of the time. I find it rich that people talking up the benefits of riding a bike in a big city would seem concerned about the safety of using a bike in a low density neighborhood.
> Speeds in residential areas are high
What? No they’re not. In any given neighborhood the speed limit usually tops out at 25mph.
And my point is that at some point, kids stopped biking everywhere. But it's the same people that used to bike around as kids now driving them everywhere. Hence my question: What happened?
What happened to a lot of activities kids used to do? They got replaced by ubiquitous internet-connected devices that allow them to watch any video or play any game at any time. They’d rather do that than play outside, and childhood obesity rates track well with these developments.
To put it another way, the neighborhood I grew up in 30+ years ago still exists, and the roads are the same size, the sidewalks are just as non-existent as they used to be, and there’s no more traffic than there used to be. But as you point out, sure there’s less kids out and about in the neighborhood when I was a kid.
But I would note two things about that. One, when I was a kid, there was much less inside that could occupy my time than there is today. And two, I’d argue that if you’re an adult who has to work all day during the summer, you may not be noticing how many kids are actually playing outside during the day.
If there were always 30 kids outside in your neighborhood to play with and you didn't need permission or help from the adults in your life, I really bet a lot more kids would be having a lot less screen time.
Kids use the devices because there is not much else they are allowed to do, and playing by yourself or a sibling you are sick of in your back yard gets boring quick for most.
Adults need to create an environment where there is something better, and that is the sad truth for most children.
I would have to agree with this.
I live in the same neighborhood I skateboarded in 35 years ago. Packs of us roamed the streets. We were all over and we got into all sorts of trouble.
Not only can't I remember the last time I saw a kid skateboarding around here, I can't remember the last time a saw a kid in the neighborhood doing anything outside without an adult present. I know there are still kids around because I get the property tax bill every year that's supposedly paying for schools, but kids don't roam the streets around here no more.
That world is gone. Which is good, because if there was a bunch of kids on skateboards fucking up the handrail on my front steps I would have to go try to run them off like the oldsters tried to do to us circa 1988.
The rise of structured activities. Now kids don't have free time, they go from school to soccer practice to a math tutor. Gotta have extracurriculars if you want to get into a good school.
And paranoid, really?
This exists in a lot of the newer larger metros, places that have seen lots of growth in the last 10-15 years.
No different than when I was growing up. Don't play in the street unless it's a quiet part (cul-de-sac's are great), or block it off with stuff you can move when cars come by.
I had great memories of living in the suburbs. I would rarely be indoors and had half a dozen friends within a minute or two bike ride. We'd hang out in parks, in front of people's houses, spend our quarters at the store buying snacks, doing kid stuff.
The above is of course a generalization and thus there are exceptions all over. It is still fairly true though.
> Speeds in residential areas are high, so dangerous to play in the streets.
Speeds on trunk roads are ridiculous, but the streets with the actual houses on them are not the nightmare you describe.
Other parents hear it and it creates a huge chilling effect. As a result, there are no other kids outside to play with, so for the few parents willing to buck the trend, it doesn't matter anyway and helicopter soccer mom has to play chauefer and sign them up for a million structured activities and play dates so the kids don't go nuts inside their houses with not being allowed to do anything.
NYC was by far the most depressing and soul-crushing for me. It's lonely despite being crowded, it's filthy, it's unreasonably expensive, it's hard to get anywhere, and it's unfortunately full of people with a similarly condescending viewpoint about people/places outside the city.
I now live in a large southern city with lots of sidewalks and love it, and returning to New York makes me incredibly sad for the people who still think it's the only city to live in.
My point is not that I'm correct. It's just how I feel. Rather, I suggest you examine how you talk about your viewpoint to avoid sounding so confident about things you have no actual experience in.
It is easy to find scapegoats for the poor urbanism of the United States, but very difficult to think of a solution without a radical change in the nature of governance.
It's not quite a fair comparison.
Compare Pittsburgh suburb (https://goo.gl/maps/bFBWcsJ6EeL1kgVe7) to the suburbs of the town that I was born in (https://goo.gl/maps/ktkWzAUa3tyz37hQ7).
This is an even better example: https://goo.gl/maps/cAECdLXaBVoErtsFA vs https://goo.gl/maps/oBmruFK2Sqaxg6TW7
EDIT: Same goes for the Bay Area, staying by YC offices for the interviews was depressing too. Look at this: https://goo.gl/maps/ERCkS7zrHw8tM2or9
You can certainly cycle in New York. Cycling has increased dramatically in New York City over the past decade or so with the installation of more cycle-friendly infrastructure, including over 100 miles of protected bike lanes, city bike sharing, e-bike rental apps, etc.
I’ve lived here since 2008 and it is unlike any other major world capital.
Also, while you're right in that comparatively many people in Berlin are smokers (although that might be a commonality of cities as opposed to the countryside), they're still a minority of <30% [1], so more like 1/3 than 3/4 (it can feel like every second guy in the street though).
[1] https://www.abnr.de/tabakpraevention/daten-fuer-deutschland/...
The rules are not enforced.
I bet that even if a place managed to hide it from the public health authorities (they DO regularly do unannounced inspections anywhere food is served or made, after all), it would just be a colossal competitive disadvantage in most places. How strange that Berlin is different!
It's not hard, not far to reach.
As you sort-of implicitly suggest, it doesn't have to be a choice between a soulless suburb with no sidewalks and a piss-soaked urban hellscape-- with NOTHING in-between.
What we do need, however, is more urban centers with walkable, complete streets, human amenities and a broad mix of different housing types for a wide spectrum income levels and NOT separate isolated enclaves for the wealthy and the poor. Especially important are appropriate and truly useable "third-places" rather just bauble shops for the wealthy, dollar stores for the poor, and distant megamalls for the middle-class surrounded an ocean of asphalt.
I am just saying that NYC is not the best example of where we want urban centers to aspire to. For one thing, nothing in the USA is as big and or has the financial resources of NYC.
Towns in the US that want to improve their housing situation need to look towards what OTHER SIMILAR towns are doing and are successful at. NYC is such a weird case on the basis of scale and density.
I think that's all basically fair. I'm interested in how some places in Utah are trying to tackle housing, but haven't spent much time reading about it yet.
I'm not being condescending about living in suburbs or rural areas, just the design of a large portion of car dominated suburban areas of the US. As an example, I just got back from Pittsburgh, where I was staying in an AirBnB that was only 2 miles north of the city. I was really excited to explore Pittsburgh and was hoping to bike or walk down to the city after work but it would have been a 50min walk down a narrow road that's dominated by F150s and mini vans, something that even as an adult I didn't feel safe doing. I got to see a large portion of the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh and most of it looked like that, as I was driving through it it hit me that there are no kids out even though it's the middle of Summer, the only place we saw any was at shopping malls with their parents.
NYC is not a soul crushing place full of condescending people if step outside of the touristy areas of Manhattan. I grew up in Queens (Ridgewood / Kew Gardens Hills) and lived in Harlem and northern Brooklyn as an adult, all of which are some of the most diverse zip codes of the world with a ton of friendly middle class people. As a teenager I was able to bike or take the train to any basketball court in the city, say hi and play with people from all over the world. These days with all of the bike lanes that they added I can bike to almost anywhere in the city in under 30min and it's my main mode of transportation.
EDIT: Good biking video demonstrating soul crushing new york https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77nmYdbJSJ0
I’ve also done road trips through large parts of Europe and can tell you that none of it is littered with strip malls, parking lots and houses on streets without sidewalks.
It sounds like your experience in Pitt was bad and I'm sorry you didn't have fun. I'm glad you found a home in NYC that you love.
What's not okay is projecting your suburb in Pitt onto the entire Midwest. There's a large geography to the US with many different cultures. What you wrote felt condescending and classist when framed alongside your projection that doesn't ring true for most of the towns in the Midwest.
To frame this with your example, if I only spoke about the worst parts of NYC and then projected them onto the entire city I doubt you'd have a very high opinion of me. That's why people don't like what you said.
In Europe, small town life is not necessarily suburban life, there are a lot of of walk-able villages connected via a train line that you could take to commute to your job in city, and they're wayyyyyyyyyy better than the sadness that is US & Canadian suburbia.
Honestly, I am very frustrated that this forum struggles so repeatedly to empathize with voices outside large metros, but I will attempt to break this down shotgun-style for you.
> As a New Yorker driving around middle america is super depressing.
Imagine if I called the place you're from, the place you grew up "depressing". All for a lack of sidewalks? As others shared we have woods, parks, lots of activities, etc. Yeah, it's not the same culture as NYC, but I don't think it requires being insulted. It's also not factual that you can only get around with a car. I survived til I was 16 with just a bike and rode everywhere. Still do, and now I live in San Jose.
> I can't imagine growing up trapped in my own home on a street with no sidewalks, only being able to go where my parents take me and finally growing into driving age so that I can go from parking lot to parking lot.
To most of the midwest and south, this is an extreme exaggeration but conveyed as commonplace.
I don't owe any more mental energy to this thread, so this is my last reply. I do hope that you (and him!) can be aware of the microaggressions in this thread and why they're not okay.
Some suburbs in the SF South Bay and Orange County, CA are even worse in this respect, though. The sidewalks are there but there's no walking in places like Yorba Linda or Placentia.
I would take no offense to anyone calling the places where I grew up or have lived depressing.
There are also (many) more suburbs with housing across all price points that are primarily accessible by car, and the families that live there that are happy with this arrangement.
As someone who lived in NYC and now lives in Houston, I much prefer the latter.
It would be cool if there were more trees or a sweet bar along my walk, but I still try to walk two miles per day.
Public transit was cool (and I was a HUGE fan of the NYC Subways), and I wish we had a commuter rail station somewhere, but I much prefer the privacy and freedom of my own car.
Also, public transit in Manhattan is much more convenient than public transit in South Brooklyn or Forest Hills, where you're usually looking at a 30 minute trip minimum to get _ANYWHERE_. (I owned a car in NYC and all but stopped taking public transit once we got it.)
I like a lot of things about Houston and Dallas, but one thing I particularly like is that you don't _have to_ live the urban experience if you don't want to. We have something for almost everyone. I personally don't think that urbanization should be foisted on everyone.
So you pretty much agree with the person that you're implying is an elitist, and live in exactly the same neighborhood they would choose if they found a good job in your city. You're not defending McMansion-dominated neighborhoods very well.
I don't understand the aggression.
They feel sorry for people who are different from them and want different things. Some people love being able to drive places (my disabled sister is one of them).
I feel sorry for people who don't know they're in a bubble. Maybe they truly want to live in a cookie-cutter McMansion suburb and just won't allow themselves to consider it for cultural reasons. That specifically is unlikely, but some version of it is probably happening, and they're missing out as a result.
NYC isn't perfect, its just better than everywhere else ive lived.
YIMBYism is about options: those who do prefer to live in an area should not face artificial restrictions like bans on new homes in desirable areas near well paying jobs.
Condescension toward people who don't fall into that category is what isn't my cup of tea.
Sucked, it did. Tragic really. Almost child abuse, if you think about it.
I had to wait until adulthood to see a pile of festering trash taller than me sitting on the curb. Robbed!
I went on a business trip to NY, and I immediately felt alive. The 'energy' of people even though you don't know any of them, seeing so many faces, late night hustle & bustle - all very invigorating.
Village life you see in Europe is a world apart.
Part of this is because we hover over kids and let them do less. I'm from middle America, and when my dad was a kid, he and his friends would bike 100 miles round trip and it was fine.
Speaking only for myself - and yes, I am keenly aware of the injustices many groups have faced here over the years - at least some of the American dream was to create an environment for both of us to share these mutually exclusive stances in harmony. I am grateful for the ability of some percentage of Americans to have more space between their neighbors than simply one wall, even if that percentage is much smaller than it ought to be. And I grow increasingly resentful of the mechanisms both internal and external that keep that number so small.
Millenials moving back in with their parents because there isnt enough housing is the true introvert nightmare playing out right now tbh.
[1] https://twitter.com/cayimby/status/1259679621785759744?s=20&...
Then again maybe that was just my neighborhood and no other densely populated area has ever dealt with such things.
The crackheads on the street phenomena is an American thing, not a dense housing thing.
(Homelessness is caused by most of the old cheap forms of housing like SROs/boarding houses being made illegal, causing locals to fall out of the system when they can't afford the nicer types - this is why you see it in cities and not in, say, West Virginia.)
Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs.
It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.
Homelessness in the US does not correlate with drug use, or else the homeless would be in Appalachia with meth and opioid users. It's in SF because housing is expensive there. And they're locals[1]. Now, they might be getting into drugs, but that's because there's nothing better to do when you're homeless and the police keep taking your stuff.
NYC does better because they build more shelters, but more importantly because New Jersey is next to them and is good at building affordable housing to make up for New York's NIMBYism.
[1] Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation.
A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes.
That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC.
> The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south.
The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything.
UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.
I am actually asking: why shouldn’t the San Francisco’s of the world spend $12 on a banana to ensure that their grocery baggers make $60k a year? This is how we actually fight the problem rather than having arbitrary amounts of low income housing courtesy of Title IX.
If you want to live in an expensive place, be prepared to spend some goddamn money. Or let’s hurry up and get to a post scarcity world. I don’t honestly care how it happens. Just pick and stick.
What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home.
And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.
This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses.
You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand.
When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently.
What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.
He doesn’t even only block them in his backyard; they’ve ignored member deference to block one in Matt Haney’s district before.
The language he uses makes him a left-NIMBY, but that’s just what they look like in cities. Found in NYC too. In suburbs the same people switch to talking about property values and 50s rural neighborhood character.
You and he agree 100% on building new apartments, Preston hates them, and as a rich man living in a very expensive single family home in one of the most expensive cities in the world, he fits right into the NIMBY mould.
However, Preston also believes that homeless people should still be treated like people, a position he shares with YIMBYs. Due to that commonality, but also having irrational hate for YIMBYs, he is sometimes called anti-YIMBY rather than NIMBY.
I've been a month in WV. Huntington and Charleston are plagued by visible users, but not by homelessness. Even daily users there haven't been priced out yet.
https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Citie...
You have the causality reversed; mental illness and drug addiction is caused by the stress and hopelessness of homelessness.
Ehh I think it has just a _little_ bit more to do with it than just “lack of housing.” If you think the only thing keeping the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk and shoots up heroin in broad daylight from being a functioning member of society is a house, you are being quite naive.
San Francisco’s housing costs don’t help, but people waaaay underestimate just how much having a permissive attitude towards “the homeless lifestyle” (for lack of a better term) plays a part in attracting people who are incapable of living within the margins of society.
Some of the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in the world are also some of the densest. NYC’s Upper East Side, for example, is it’s most densely populated.
I'm a brit, that spent a year living in USA. That term, "bad neighbourhood", is a term that I learned refers to a predominantly black neighbourhood. I was told things like "Don't go past this road junction on foot, that's a bad neighbourhood". The neighbourhood in question looked exactly the neighbourhood I was standing in, but with black people.
Those are also the cheap areas, and black families tend to move there just because they are poor. Of course the gangs in the area thus can recruit young local black kids (not being a member of the local gang can be dangerous). It isn't racism though, it is just reality - one that is very hard to escape for black people.
There is racism in the US as well, a lot of the current problems are rooted in the historic racism.
Nope.
Actually, I was standing on the street, not driving. This "bad neighbourhood" was 50 yards from where I was standing. If they wanted to rob people, they'd have found better pickings where I was standing than in the "bad neighbourhood".
I didn't have a car; we were visiting my sister-in-law. I'm accustomed to walking everywhere, unless I have an inter-city journey. The town was Charlottesville, VA, but I was told much the same when I settled (briefly) in Richmond, VA.
> Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
What I noticed was what's obvious. In a majority-white city, the so-called bad neighbourhood had exclusively black people on the street. And I noticed, for example, that every time I drove to work, there was a car pulled over on the freeway, with two black guys lying face-down, with cops pointing guns at their heads. I never saw this with white guys. My drive to work was just 15 minutes, but I saw this daily.
Do they actually do block-by-block crime statistics in these places? Because what I find shocking is that the granularity of this "bad neighbourhood" thing appears to be the block.
Also, council housing wasn't all concentrated in one place; typically you'd get a block of council houses embedded in a neighbourhood, which might be poor or prosperous. Basically the load was spread around.
The neighbourhoods that I like least are where a large-scale greenfield estate was built on the outskirts of a town, far from the centre and the shops. These estates were typically under-equipped with pubs and shops (but they had schools).
We don't build council houses any more, since laws were introduced requiring councils to sell such houses to their tenants at a discount. The closest thing now is housing coops, which buy and do-up individual houses. Coops don't build estates.
Ah yes, let's make sure to put all the new poors who want to move in with all the existing poors. Can't let them live anywhere else, or they might start getting ideas.
Do you really think this plan is equitable?
It just means all classes share the same problems equally (emphasis on equally)
The history of my youth in the city is knowing practically a trail of dead friends lost to drugs, abuse, murder and suicide. And I went to private school.
When I was in middle school some kids I knew at the school behind mine made national news for murdering a guy in Central Park. During the OJ Trial.
IMO anyone who raises a kid in an environment like I grew up in is insanely wreckless.
Same goes for drug overdose rates (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...), for which the state wide rate is skewed by more rural northern parts.
I spent a large part of my time in the more dangerous areas of NY (Jamaica, Bushwick in early 2000s, Harlem) and never felt really unsafe.
I was specifically referring to those described dense mixed-income neighborhoods where every classes's tragedies end up being spread equally. If you have means ans you raise your children in one of these environments, you're stupid.
I cannot understand why cities in the US are built the way they are.
I live in a relatively big city in Germany in a somewhat dense neighborhood (most buildings have 3-5 stories). I have two grocery stores within five minutes of walking, a great Italian restaurant around the corner. If I want to go to the city center it is a ten minute train ride, going to the lake is a 12 minute ride. I can quickly get around the city center by using the subway and all of this for a fraction of the cost of owning a car.
I grew up in a more rural area and personally, living in a denser cities feels more "luxurious" than living in a town where I can't get anywhere if I don't drive. The cities are still far from perfect, but this is mostly because they desperately try to accomodate the car obsessed public (but not as desperately as American cities)
I did an exchange to a rural village in Germany, and anything other than going to a party at someone's house in the village involved convincing (or bribing) one of the 18 year olds they knew from two years previous at the Realschule, so the most common evening event was drinking beer (or Diesel which was half beer, half cola) with friends.
This place was not even remotely rural by USA standards, being maybe 20 kilometers from the state capital, and even closer to another city.
This has been my experience growing up as well with the only difference that we had a somewhat decent train connection to the next bigger town (30 min train ride, but last train departured at 10 PM). Anything that was out of the (small) village required either an expensive (and unreliable) Taxi ride or someone who loosed out and became the dedicated driver.
I grew up in the suburbs and felt *trapped* until I was able to drive. Legitimately didn't feel like I could be independent.
This is most people's experience, whether they realize it or not. I only became aware of what car-less life could be like when I lived in Chicago (the city, not the burbs). Even then it took me a year to realize how convenient everything was because I could mostly walk or bike to what I wanted.
IMO - the resistance to developing density in the US is because people associate independence with the automobile; and it's a very, very deep association. I don't think people understand that density can actually make you more independent because they haven't really experienced it.
And to be clear I don't want to ban cars. More so, just want to see our country have more options for actual cities other than NYC and Chicago.
I don't think banning cars would even solve the issue. Cars are legitimately a good option for many people. But governments many governments want to pretend cars are a good option for anyone, which is just not true. Transportation modes should be treated equal, depending on the starting position this would necessitate taking back space dedicated to cars.
The junior high, however, drew from a larger geographic area so it was far more diverse. Junior high is always a bit of a culture shock, but I can't help but feel it was more-so for us. A white kid got suspended for bringing in a hunting knife because he was afraid one of the black kids was going to beat him up -- kind of a mini racism-in-action lesson for all of us, though we didn't know it at the time.
Now my daughter just finished seventh grade. Her elementary school cohort had one Spanish-speaking kid, in a district that is 59% Hispanic and 18% English language learners, and had a bit of a similar culture shock. I checked if I could have done better in retrospect, and found that, while I could have done slightly better, the public schools were all either over 75% Hispanic or over 80% non-Hispanic, with the one exception being a school that required a lottery to get into.
The only real diverse schools I found were the parochial schools, which are a strange combination of your traditional Hispanic Catholics, and "white flight" of kids at schools that were nearly entirely Hispanic.
Many people apparently disagree. Why try to "rebrand" it for them? I have grown up in Moscow, lived in Yaletown in Vancouver BC, Richmond BC, Bellevue WA, and in SOMA in SF (all slightly different types of walkable, dense places), and I hated suburbs. Then I moved into suburbs and realized they are so much better! I wish I'd moved earlier, and to suburbier suburbs instead of the still-walkable ones that I have chosen. I've lived in dense neighborhoods for 34 years and now I don't think they have any advantages for me, other than perhaps it's more convenient to be drunk, and it's more convenient to be a kid who cannot drive.
Oh and yeah, mixed income. I've heard quite a few middle class and higher immigrants say that one major advantage of the US compared to <their home country> is that you can move away from poor people. In Russia/Mexico/... the poor are fellow Russians/Mexicans/..., so it's not based on race either. I grew up surrounded by "mixed income" (well to be fair we were lower middle class if that, ourselves). Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather live in the cheapest house on the best street :)
I used to buy groceries by bike or on a walk from the bus every 2-3 days, turns out buying a bunch of groceries every week or two is much more convenient.
It's much quieter and somewhat safer (could be safer yet if I moved further away from town). One of my apartments was on a busy street and it's kinda funny how I notice a single car rolling by now when I used to have to tune out constant hum of traffic, sirens and honks.
There is much more greenery, birds (from hummingbirds to eagles), trees, animals even. My friends who live in a really distant suburb had a bear in their backyard once, I guess that could be a disadvantage :) More space for the same amount of money (that actually translates into even less need for density - e.g. I have a squat rack at home now so I don't need to go to the gym).
One hassle is that if I go somewhere to drink I need to take an uber. Also house is more pain to maintain than a flat, that actually does kinda suck, I am particularly averse to that kind of stuff... I wish there were condos in suburban areas, or e.g. some company where you pay a fee like a HOA and they have to keep track and do all the maintenance :)
There's ones like Marc that are pretty classical.
There's also ones that will push back on the kinds of property people can own, but fully support saturating an area with rentals.
I don't think there's a challenge for voters here either. As the author points out, the real problem is listening to community feedback at all. It's undemocratic. Someone else needs to be in charge of how to fulfill the demands of the community at a higher level.
? Never seen this before, elaborate
In reality, the kind of density increases that would actually meaningfully lower their home's value is well beyond what is required or feasible. But most people aren't economists or real estate experts, and don't know or believe this.
Regardless: the guidelines ask you not to comment on voting.
You seem to say that in a negative tone? Isn't increasingly dense exactly what most housing advocates wish for?
If the city needs 10,000 new homes a year to keep up with population growth, and I support building 10 new blocks of 100 apartments downtown but oppose everything else, am I a hero or a villain?
I'm not really expressing a preference here, but in my comment noting that with the Grand Bargain it's not likely to result in the outcome of a broad amount of low density apartments, but rather the situation of extremes where you have ultra low density single family houses and then in slivers of downtown where apts are allowed, ultra tall 20+ story residential towers. This is commonly seen in Toronto and Vancouver.
Specifically, apartments to be built in poor neighbourhoods exclusively next to busy highways, where the residents can enjoy chronic exposure to toxic gases, tire dust, and car honking sounds.
It's high quality public housing where classes mingle.
Two thirds of Vienna lives in public housing and the City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. [0]
It is, probably on a related note, also the city with the highest quality of live in the world for as long as I can remember. [1]
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-archit...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/23/vienna-name...
Vienna is constantly building new Social housing and new people get in all the time.
To your grandfather point: A third of people living there weren't even born in Austria, so it's not really a generational thing like you misrepresent it to be https://www.diepresse.com/69243/migration-gemeindebau-ein-dr... (in German, use Google translate)
Good things can happen if we let them.
Really?
Britain is a country noted for its class divides; and yet there are very few class enclaves in major British cities. Most people live in a mixed neighbourhood, with renters and owners all jumbled up, and with social housing mixed in. Sure, there are some pretty nasty social housing "estates" (groups of apartment blocks); but those estates are liberally sprinkled around - they occur in more prosperous neighbourhoods as well as cheaper places.
The USA used to claim it was a "classless society".
What do you mean by "taxing liquidity", i don't even understand. Negative interest on bank deposits? It's already effectively there for about a generation.
There is absolutely not.
If you densify the wealthiest areas instead, people will complain that you're "just building more luxury housing for the rich" and not fixing the pricing problem. You just can't win!
(The simple truth, of course, is that both are good things to do. Every little bit helps.)
You make it sound like putting up with density is a chore.
There are very few allowed to be built on quieter streets
Why doesn't Marc and his lovely wife just build a house far away from the plebs? They can't!
That's the case with a lot of the initiatives coming from wealthy people. Le'ts reduce carbon footprint but we still need private jets and multiple huge houses for ourselves. We need privacy but obviously we still need to mine our users' data for profit as much as possible. We need to do something about homelessness but certainly not close to where we are living. The free market is better than government as long as the government protects our IP so we can make profits.
Building more housing units would lower the price of housing units. The question is, within that, how should we approach it. I don’t think plopping randomly placed high-density buildings into low-density neighborhoods is optimal compared to planned development.
When cities ban apartments from entire neighbourhoods, they're banning people from living there. It ensures only the very wealthy can. This means people have to go somewhere else. This could mean longer commutes for the poor and worse living conditions.
There's nothing stopping someone who wants to have a SFH from buying a lot and building a SFH. The problem is when cities impose housing bans that limit people's ability to live in these communities.
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/12/21/atherton-battlin...
And of course: "Other speakers protested the aesthetic and safety impacts of the taller, and heavier, poles, saying they would also reduce property values."
The town also voted to close their own Caltrain station, because they clearly don't want the kind of riff-raff who use public transport there.
and of course the response to that is why things are going very slowly nowadays
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-stati...
Back in 1760, it made economic sense to have canals dug by hand because they were so much more efficient than transporting coal by horse and cart. It was incredibly expensive, but the thing that came before it was even moreso.
And in the 1830s, private investors could expect to make a profit building a railway because it as so much faster. And compared to hand-digging a canal, the costs weren't that bad! It was incredibly expensive, but the thing that came before it was even moreso.
There were a few successful attempts to stop the encroachment of the federal highway system into cities. I think the Bay Area was one of the first such victories.
I lived there, they hate pedestrians, hate new construction, hate public transport (never saw anybody at the Atherton Station, nobodoy getting on, nobody getting off, nothing, it's on for decoration), to diffuse NIMBY accusations. Nothing there, not one business, it's only utility is a discrete place to jump into the tracks.
Yeah Atherton is that place. Atherton is the spirit of NIMBY, the spirit of Landlord, the spirit of all those things.
Being fair to Andreessen and his family, they likely bought their house knowing that the property was zoned single-family residential, as was the entire neighborhood, and that it's relatively difficult to change land use policy. That is, until the Legislature of the State of California decided it knew better than every incorporated city, and wrote a housing density law that superseded local zoning regulations.
I've always been surprised that tech billionaires don't spend money influencing State Senate/Assembly races. Maybe that will change.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/14/1109345201/theres-a-massive-h...
May arguments stem around letting communities make their own decisions and abiding by the laws, as silly and antiquated and biased as they maybe, make their own decisions. I am heavily pro-building, but I don't want a jail built next door. There are nuances.
But we don't have a housing shortage in California, any longer.
You keep saying this, and yet home prices are still unaffordable for a median earner. What magical economic factor aside from demand greater than supply do you think is driving these high costs?
> I am heavily pro-building, but I don't want a jail built next door.
And no one I am aware of is seriously promoting changing zoning to allow something like that.
Even well off people have neighborhoods they can’t afford to move in to - that’s the way it works.
In other words: it'd be one thing if it were just Palo Alto that were unaffordable, but because it's a statewide problem, fairness demands that every city should chip in to the solution.
Housing is affordable; just not the housing you'd like. Food is inflating but starvation in the US is rare.
Considering California's housing costs are astronomical compared to the rest of the US, isn't its approach to restriction a sign of the model working? If not why is there so much market based demand driving up the prices?
And since many people can and do leave the state as a result of being priced out, where is the "statewide problem"?
This sounds more like an opinionated list of the way you wish things were. Also makes me curious how much you have vested in the state / community. As things are increasingly so, when in California, do as the ("Romans").
Call the right Marc(Benioff). He can house the majority of the SF homeless population in the open space in his tower... "Salesforce Giving Up 350K SF In Downtown S.F. In Latest Blow To City's Office Market" https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/office/salesforce-west-...
And this is not an anomaly, it's the norm. The $3M communities are just the leading edge, and every area with any economic opportunity will be there soon unless we do something to address this desperate shortage of houses.
Offices want large, flexible open-floor plans with the only plumbing being floor-wide mega-bathrooms. The two just aren’t compatible.
We all have electric heating and cooking, because there wasn't gas connections (which is annoying, but tolerable). We all have 14 to 16 foot ceilings (which is actually kind nice). The bathrooms were all somehow renovated and some plumbing rerouted. We have shared laundry downstairs (which sucks, but not as much as living in a tent city).
Someday there should be an actual HN article by an expert breaking down what's involved to renovate an office into apartments. It's clearly not impossible.
The issue with commercial offices is that the buildings have gotten larger and larger, but residential building depth will max out at around 45 feet, leaving a massive unusable interior.
CRE vacancies are unsurprising. You may not have noticed, but we just had a huge multi-year pandemic that moved huge amounts of work out of offices and into homes.
> The cost to convert offices to an average apartment building is about $100-$200/SF[4], although that cost could be significantly inflated now. If we assume $150/SF of hard and soft costs plus a 15% profit margin of $23/SF, a developer will need to seek offices available at $262/SF. Exhibit 1 below shows that the median New York office transaction price was $542/SF in 2021, with about 20% traded at $262/SF or lower.
> First, we looked at office rent per SF. The median apartment asking rent is $55/SF in NYC[5]. As Exhibit 2 shows, about 36% of NY office properties fall below or meet the median apartment rent per SF. A developer would likely seek offices with rents much lower than $55/SF because of the amortized cost of conversion, but again this is a rough exercise to broadly understand potential scale of the conversion trend. We also considered vacancy rate. Typically, developers would seek prospective office building conversions with above average vacancy, both because it’s easier to buy out or relocate fewer office tenants and high vacancy may reinforce that office space isn’t the highest and best use of a property. Of the 1,066 tracked NYC office properties, only 12% met our vacancy rate threshold of 30% or higher. When apply the two limits of $55/SF rent and 30% or higher vacancy rates, only 0.7% of Class A buildings and 6% of Class B/C buildings make the conversion reasonable.
> The size and shape of typical office buildings also limits potential conversions. Office buildings typically include deep floor plates and limited natural light for interior offices and storage rooms. However, natural light throughout is essential for dwellings, so apartment depths tend to max out around 40-50 ft. Much of the office building may be rendered unusable (or of very low value) with deep floor plates beyond 100-120 feet wide, after accounting for elevator and mechanical cores.
> An office building with a floor plate of less than 14,000 SF may be a good candidate for conversion, depending on the building shape. In the worst case the building is square (where both sides are equally as deep), the floor plate will be roughly 120 ft by 120 ft, resulting in just about the absolute maximum depth of 50 ft of apartment on one side and 50 ft on the other, with at least 20ft of elevator core and mechanical between. Of course, there may be other orientations of buildings (and creative solutions of designers and developers) that either allow or preclude profitable conversion, and that can even vary up and down a building’s stacking plan. But once again, this is a “rough justice” analysis. Without detailed information on all NYC offices’ floor size and shape up and down the buildings, we assume a convertible building to have an average square floor plate size of 14,000 SF. Layering in the 14,000 SF floor plate threshold on top of our vacancy rate and asking rents limits, only about 3%, or 35, of NYC office properties would be convertible via our (crude but reasonable) methodology.
35 converted office buildings is hardly a dent in housing demand for all of NYC.
https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/insights/cre-trends/office-t...
Commercial real estate in SF is in its worst straights yet.
Let's see how all these numbers average out after valuations continue to reset in both forms of real estate, tech, local construction, etc. Commercial owners are on course to paying people to sleep in buildings to look occupied.
The bottom-line is the sheer volume of commercial square footage, rapidly dropping residential values, tech layoffs, will eliminate the "shortage" story butting up against NIMBY'ism and Socialism faster than cases with high power attorneys and rich landowners will give up legal ground in California.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco....
Random Spot check on a single family home in highly impacted San Mateo. Surprise, list price is $2.08mm($2.2MM Zestimate) down $600k from March 2022 Zestimate of $2.7mm for a 22% drop from peak in less than half a year. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4241-Bettina-Ave-San-Mate...
If you have those two most recent months (June, July) that I left out of the 70 year picture please link to some data that includes them
Even before covid we were over we were over the average. This is national average btw. Not "a random sample" in SF that also proves my point because most people cant afford a ~2 million dollar home.
I feel like if you're index on 2 million dollar homes no wonder you don't think there is a housing crisis. You can afford anything you want
The story here is NIMBYism, California Real Estate, Tech, and the "housing shortage". Your data is honed in on the Nation Average and emphasizes the 2020 spike in prices that reflects an exceptional supply constraint in conjunction with a massive(exceptional) migration driver and breakout money printing(none of which speak to a localized housing shortage which would interface conflicts with NIMBYism in a material way). NIMBYism is primarily focused on affluent communities, so low income communities and national averages are fairly irrelevant in arguments pertaining to such(most communities can't lawyer up for long property battles). Most arguments conflating NIMBYism to other issues are calls for Government housing support.
Unfortunately most of the data I'm working on is derived from Zillow, which is specific to markets, lagging, and not open for export. Look at the Zillow charts of the average homes in most of the real NIMBY markets(San Mateo, San Francisco, Orange County, Marin, Etc) and you will see a fast dropping Zestimate that is well above the average transaction prices actually conducted in the last few weeks. All while supply is accumulating well outside averages. Debt bubbles pop fast. This one is the beneficiaries of government pumping debt with low interest rates into homes surrounding the growth companies that rode its wave. Tides out, so boats are hitting the shore.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...
> David says of those 40,000 units, about 32,000 of them fall into categories that would most likely be exempt from a vacancy tax.
> For example, properties that have been recently bought or sold and the new tenants haven't moved into yet, or ones where landlords are currently doing renovations or upgrades.
> "It will not move the needle on our affordability or displacement crisis in any meaningful way," he said.
> David says what the city really needs to do is build more housing.
> "In order to keep the cost of housing to just be increasing at the same rate as inflation, you need to be adding about two percent to our housing stock per year," he said.
> David says that comes out to about 5,000 new units a year.
> But for the past 30, we've only built an average of 1,800 annually, leaving us in a 100,000 unit deficit
The only vacancies that are a problem are all the vacant, unbuilt units above small, 1-2 story single family homes all throughout San Francisco. Those are the vacancies that are killing the city.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-09/homes-for...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-09/home-list...
- SF has least competitive rental market in state, report finds Occupancy rates and rents are up, but the city has less demand than elsewhere https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/
- Netflix puts Los Gatos campus up for sublease as growth slows https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/12/netflix-puts...
- ADP to close 63K sf office in Pleasanton https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/09/adp-to-close...
- Spec home developer slashes asking price on Woodside estate by 42% https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/08/spec-home-de... - SF home prices drop $370K from peak, per Compass report https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/11/sf-home-pric...
- Sand Hill Road reckons with its future Landlords of the iconic Silicon Valley office strip rethink strategies in remote-work era https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/09/sand-hill-ro...
- StubHub to close SF office as tech exodus continues Online ticket reseller to build up offices in LA and New York https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/08/stubhub-to-c...
- San Jose leads U.S. cities in falling home prices From April to June prices fell an average of $75K, or 5.1 percent https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/08/02/san-jose-lea...
Myth Busted.
Sincerely,
SF Chronical and Myself.
"S.F. population fell 6.3% to lowest level since 2010" https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6...
Some significant legal victories too: https://www.yimbylaw.org/the-general-plan-rules
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-hous...
It'd be going better if parking minimums and the social housing agency get through.
Sadly, most tech folks don't vote or have zero interest in local politics.
It's more that transient populations usually don't bother. If your plan is to move to an area for 4-6 years in order to bootstrap a career, earn some money, build a resume and reputation, and then move out to somewhere lower-cost, then you're not going to see the need to get involved in local politics or even vote.
At least the random couple with low income that lucked into a house 40 years ago is semi sympathetic. They don't travel the world and may not be able to move somewhere else as nice after selling (especially with prop 13 tax lock ins)
But Marc can live anywhere and travel anywhere.
I knew a guy who had to know the price of everything and calculated everything by its monetary value. Whether or not he ended up really wealthy I don't know, but he was already pretty well off when I knew him.
My take away was to just keep driving my small car, and not require such hustle to fill up a Range Rover. :D
Meanwhile money doesn't spoil, takes up almost no space even if you hold it as cash, it is also risk free, it can be traded and turned into almost anything. There is no downside to having money, there is no upside to not having money, not having money is a terrible thing actually. So anytime you earn money, you just keep it until you die and then you give it to your children.
The fact that money is actually meant to be a medium of exchange, not a status symbol was completely forgotten.
It's power and superiority. It's not that they care about a relatively insignificant amount of money they might lose on paper, it's that someone else might have caused that or might have gained from it. Doubly so if that someone else is a little person.
Maybe true in some cases, but I don't think this is generally true. I think the typical behavior is to focus on oneself and not think about the little peoples interest at all.
Regardless, Andreessen probably doesn't care about his property value all that much. But it's a lot more socially acceptable to say that than to say he doesn't want poor people too close to his neighborhood. (Or even just mere single- and double-digit millionaires.)
In practice, becoming wealthy is alost a social darwinist selection process where you need an extreme adaptation to your environment to end up at the top, anything less and you end up in the upper middle class at best. Once you have structured your entire life around becoming wealthy it is hard to quit.
This is problematic because human wants and needs aren't actually infinite. One workaholic can do the work of four people, making three out of four people redundant, but the workaholic would never give up the wealth he obtained this way, so three people end up unemployed instead of everyone working 10 hours a week. Because of this all or nothing mentality, everyone feels compelled to outdo the workaholic just to stay in their job, not because they actually need all of the money.
The absurd part though is that the workaholic blames others for not doing their share, while he himself insists on doing everything, in fact, he absolutely despises anyone taking his workload off his shoulders. Somehow charity i.e. doing others work for them turned into a one sided relationship where the recipient is now the sinner through no fault of his own. People start hating each other for no reason.
The restrictive part is that lots have to remain gigantic, but the setbacks from those lot lines are gigantic as well, and this is rigorously enforced, but within that build-able footprint the homeowner has nearly complete free reign. The result is a near complete isolation from having to see or contemplate neighbors, let alone "the poors", and yet it's within driving proximity of pretty much everything; that is, it enables the real-deal modern day version of the "country manor" of which the neighborhoods that comprise over half of American housing stock are merely cheap and shitty knockoffs.
The people that become billionaires are disproportionately people inclined to care about the value of their properties beyond the point where it makes any reasonable impact on their lifestyle.
Think about what an acre of land is worth in Manhattan , and what it would be worth if it were instead restricted to single family homes.
What's hilarious is that, in this context, "poor people" probably means millionaires.
Billionaires see each other as predator that will eat them and seize the assets given a chance. They see lower classes as worse, since logically they'll need more assets than billionaires.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/22/time-invest-af...
But strongly objected to a plan to build affordable housing in his own neighbourhood:
https://www.johnlocke.org/good-for-thee-not-for-me-robert-re...
Having lived in a few well known places, with different urban planning characteristics:
- Tokyo. Very praised for its successes, and there are quite a few: extremely liberal zoning (it seems), based around mass transit rather than cars (great!). Despite the small living space sizes for some, reportedly still very affordable, wide low/med/high density options for at various price-points spread all over. On the other hand, rarely worth having more than prefab buildings (earthquakes), masssssive sprawl, and legendarily horrendous commutes for those living in the suburbs. More than half the city is really quite ugly, grey and concrete.
- Berlin. Lots to like based on good previous planning decisions, and that war-time destruction and reunification somewhat provided opportunities to modernise. The city centre is mostly medium-density 5/6 storey apartment buildings. This seems to be a great sweet-spot that packs in a lot of people, but still leads to a strong community feeling in neighbourhoods. Even in the city centre, extremely green, and very accessible nature thanks to effective public transport. On the other hand, the last few decades of success may have had a lot to do with its historical anomalies, and now that it's normalising in lines with other similar cities, feels like these benefits have been drying up.
- London. Creaking under the legacy of its historical city centre. Planned under the assumption that of course everyone is living in multi-million Pound townhouses in Zone 1. Everyone else is SOL; the rest is low density suburbs with transit that forces most journeys to be via the centre, since there is no outer ring line (great in Berlin, not so great in Tokyo). Seems hardly any medium density: endless neighbourhoods of single family homes, or skyscrapers.
Anyway, none of this is new. It seems pretty clear that the political inability to fix these issues are a massive drain on economies already, and this will only get worse in the future with increasing urbanisation. Frankly, seems the only solution is building entire new cities. Asia has certainly benefited from this in the 20th century...
My thoughts
Most of Marc's investments went into crypto/fintech, social media and such. He dabbles in some hard, physical, even socially useful investment... but it's a 1/50 ratio.
The same is true of Peter Thiel. He talks an incredibly big game about atoms & bits or the power of entrepreneurship while doing the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz#Notable_in...
But in terms of actually making the world a better place, there are far bigger and better problems to solve.
The weirdness comes from the intersection of believing/espousing in the possibility and necessity of A, while also negating A. I'm not necessarily that annoyed by the straightforward hypocrisy. Everyone does that kind of thing. But once you start evangelising for A... either shut up about it or embody it. There's a difference between the minister moonlighting as a stripper, and a parishioner doing it.
Peter Thiel's a particularly onerous example. He's all talk about Bits & Atoms, objectivist ideals of productive billionaire industrialism. His post paypal investments are in: (1) fintech (2) paper trading (3) social media (4) data analytics for governments. He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all.
Hell, Peter Thiel is himself one of the clearest negations of the claim that billionaires and bankers perform the necessary and crucial function of capital allocation. None of Thiel's investments are in capital constrained businesses at all. There aren't really any investments one can point that lead to something happening which wouldn't have without him or his money. I suppose Palantir wouldn't exist, but I don't think that affects much.
What are you talking about?
Just from their website (https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/) Founders Fund invested in SpaceX, Anduril, Varda Space, DeepMind, Synthego, 8Sleep, Oculus and ScaleAI, every single of which are deep tech startups.
Hell, the only other VC that have kept pace with that level of 'Atoms' investing is Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital.
Also.. IDK that even the best are examples of investments living up to the ideals Thiel projects.
Oculus is/was interesting, sure. It's hardware, but still pretty far from factories ports and "atoms". It also flipped to FB and is now a foundation stone for the Meta project.
Besides, "friends with Elon" there's not much there there.
I'm not saying he's a bad investor or that these are bad companies, but it's all pretty standard fare. Potential for fire "moat" in emerging industry, and minimal need for hard capital investment by the primary growth phase. He's trying to get a piece of the next Zuck. That's all.
Waiting for the follow up "It's time to build in places where people allow it"
This probably sounds harsh, but if anyone doubts me, I urge you to actually read Andreessen's “It’s Time to Build”. It's shockingly naive. An entire essay written to convince us of "the need to build", without the awareness that the obstacle to building is not the lack of a SV visionary pointing out the obvious, but the tangle of policy and political incentives. Read Ezra Klein's rebuttal for a more comprehensive review of why Andreesen's essay misses the mark completely[1].
I do want to highlight one positive attribute about him though. He actually had the courage, and intellectual sensibility to write out his argument and publish it in a public forum for others to read. That's the first step towards getting your ideas challenged, and, in the back-and-forth of criticism, strengthening your ideas. As far as I know he didn't engage with the more robust criticism of his ideas (i.e. Ezra Klein) and so that second step is missing, but I at least admire that he took the first step. It's frustrating to me how much society idolizes wealthy "visionaries" who don't actively publish or debate their ideas, like Musk, or Thiel (with regards to his political activity), giving them the benefit of doubt that there's nuance and intentionality behind their actions without any evidence of such.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build...
Doesn't get any more SV than that.
Imagine I come to you and say you need to stop making positive changes in your life because others compare you to me and I don't like my 'value' being decreased by your improved lifestyle.
Also, can you move out of my neighbourhood? You're causing noise pollution and traffic.
Second rule of housing discussions, nobody agrees on what is the "right" housing and what is the "right" location
Specifically, in any given location, the people whose voices are considered agree that their location is not the right location.
In an age where people can hire shills to act for them, create fake companies, lobbying firms, etc. at least we still are able to rely on someone's inability to control their temper and expose themselves for who they really are. No more having to guess whether under the do-gooder curated front, you're being taken for a ride underneath. Now you can know.
Arrillaga established his career as a real estate developer starting in the 1960s, partnering with Richard Peery in acquiring California farmland which they converted into office space. Their partnership took off with the growth of the semiconductor industry and other high-tech businesses, such as Intel,[2] in what became known as Silicon Valley.[6] Arrillaga and Peery converted thousands of acres of farmland into office space in cities such as Mountain View, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to meet the industry's needs.[2] Over a period of 50 years, their partnership, Peery Arrillaga, built over 20 million square feet of commercial real estate, becoming one of Silicon Valley's biggest commercial landlords.[9][5][8] In 2006, he sold over five million square feet of his real estate holdings for roughly $1.1 billion to the real estate division of Deutsche Bank.[6][2] In 2020 Arrillaga ranked No. 339 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.[6] In October 2020, his net worth was $2.5 billion.[6]
The letter was signed first by Laura, who did not co-author the essay.
This outrage happens all of the time at HOA-run neighborhoods
Just the most detestable people.
This seems like the only legitimate form of NIMBYism to me. OK, you say that building housing here will disrupt your quality of life - then put your money where your mouth is. Andreesen no doubt could afford to do this as well, but obviously it is cheaper to lobby the government to stop it for you.
I don't understand why "enough housing" can't be in people's best interests. Removing voice in local decisions will not increase loyalty.
The result is that almost everything in wealthy suburbs is SFZ, because there's never concentrated objections to SFZ, but there's organically concentrated objections to multi-family zoning even if people don't actively work to coordinate it.
It won't fix itself, you can't advocate or educate your way out of it. It's a powerful default that just naturally works to keep the most valuable/useful real estate in the country reserved for sprawling houses for wealthy people. It's easy to say "no" and risky to say "yes", so everyone says "no" to new development.
Hence the current proposal du jour (which I buy into): stop letting municipalities cordon off all their lots for SFZ, at the state level, where nobody's specifix ox is getting gored by policy decisions, which can be made in the abstract and in advance.
I kind of don't give a shit about Atherton zoning. No zoning rule is going to make Atherton economically diverse. If Atherton wants to exempt itself from statewide multifamily zoning requirements, it could simply be taxed dearly for the privilege. The residents there can afford it.
Why?
Everyone on earth is a NIMBY when they believe they won't be sufficiently compensated for the negative externalities of a new development. Everyone on earth is also a YIMBY when it comes to developments with positive expected externalities.
This is not a moral problem, this is an economic incentive problem. We need to debug capitalism so that externalities both positive and negative are internalized, and everyone becomes IMBY-neutral.
This just happens to have the side-effects of removing deadweight loss, rewarding builders and penalizing squatters, encouraging development and discouraging speculation.
Prop 13 is a crime against economics and public finance.
Valuations are in a free fall, followed by the calls for filling shortages in the true NIMBY areas that define them. See the Job report release today for more Fed food for the next 0.75% raise. https://www.redfin.com/city/820/CA/Atherton/housing-market
Such views are usually conveyed over cigars, brandy, and prime rib, in private rooms (where smoking is not frowned at, even in CA) in very expensive restaurants.
In an age where people can hire shills to act for them, create fake companies, lobbying firms, etc. at least we still are able to rely on someone's inability to control their temper and expose themselves for who they really are. No more having to guess whether under the do-gooder curated front, you're being taken for a ride underneath. Now you can know.
But, this sounds like Marc Andreessen's wife is a NIMBY, and Marc Andreessen didn't sign this, or didn't feel like arguing against his wife in public.
All of the theoretical protections that zoning affords us are already granted to us via better mechanisms. For example, noise ordinances. Why ban motorcycle shops when you can ban noise above a specific threshold? When you combine nuisance laws and environmental laws and market incentives, you've already ruled out every possible boogyman coming to ruin your quaint bougie neighborhood. All of them except the poors living in apartments.
I've been taking my dirtbike and street bike to various repair shops for over a decade - I can't think of a single one that was even open on Sundays. Maybe the sales floor had Sunday hours, but the repair guys took the day off.
And 24/7 would be way more insane.
> More on why community input is bad.
This honestly strikes me as kind of insane. Community voice in community matters is bad? Local community decision-making should be removed from local governments?
- "we need to take community input into account" gets transformed to "a small handful of people acting in bad faith can stop any process"
- homeowners tend to have more access to these, but are not the only people affected by these decisions (you think the teachers or cops having to live 90 minutes away cuz they can't afford to rent in these areas are showing up here?)
- Home ownership in particular just generates a perverse incentive to try and profit off of your home. That might be great for homeowners, but there's a reason rentseeking is its own economic term.
I believe that the specific thing here is that community input on planning as it exists in the US is bad, for the same reason that deciding everything by referendum is bad. If you put every part of urban development up for line item veto, then you can't make much of a great plan!
I personally think that public comment and the like is ... fine and good. But I do think it should be possible for a city government to lay out requirements for building a thing, and for people who meet those requirements to be able to do the thing, no matter how much others whine. If there are issues, change the requirements for future projects!
Yes, pretty much every country that has sane housing policies and gets shit done, like Japan has elevated this to the national level with the power to break down obstructionism. Local decision making is notoriously corrupt. Be it the police, school boards, some union run rampart, the mob, homeowner associations or some business cartel, it's always local.
In fact if you want to pinpoint the central issue that paralyzes development in America it's the parochialism.
Thanks for the new word!
As a result, nothing ever happens, except in suburbs where not enough people care to stop you from building SFHs, so we get sprawl.
Other countries don't do this stuff. It's fine to not do it.
Also, neither Palo Alto nor Redwood City are particularly dense by urban standards.
This is a good example of why local government doesn't work beyond basic service provision such as garbage pickup. You get negative sum decision making that is locally good but globally bad.
That said, I think we just have to accept that affordable housing concerns are always hypocrisy-laden.
Home owners, have an interest in high prices. Home ownership overlaps significantly with active citizenry. Banks want higher prices. Mortgage solvency depends on it. Bank regulator regulators too, for the same reason. All that translates into entrenched political hypocrisy. You can't beat it by yelling at it.
FWIW, I'm personally not sure that increased density is the actual answer anyway... or what is. Are there any demonstrative examples with increased housing density making meaningful price impacts on an already expensive city. Do we even have examples of cities becoming significantly cheaper, that aren't a crisis?
In any case, I think we should call this kind of behaviour the "Andreessen Effect."
The truth is the materials and labor to build what most people consider “housing” is out of reach for a lot of people and these people don’t know it. There’s a reason that nearly all new multi-family development is “luxury” - it’s the only profitable way. Anything that’s “affordable” is government subsidized. Not to mention upkeep.
So we need to change what people think affordable housing is. It’s a lot closer to a trailer than it is to a fixed structure. I don’t know if a lot of people are willing to accept that.
This isn't barber shops and orange juice. Real estate is a far more structured market. Limited space. Price-pegged debt availability. Transport/infrastructure. Long term asset inflation trends. This creates a lot of ambiguity around the effect of supply on price... within realistic boundaries.
A simple supply and demand curve rarely models most urban real estate markets usefully.
Money makes good people become despicable.
In the case of Marc Andreessen, it made someone who was already bad, pretentious, arrogant, and full of himself, evil (and a hypocrite).
You mean other than that it’s a terrible usage of land in a region infamous for having extreme demand for housing?
America is a country of laws. If there is a desire to make policy changes, then it has to be done with the consent of the governed. The majority in Atherton does not and likely will not consent to such things, and Andreessen registering his discontent is just a citizen exercising his legitimate rights.
Yes, the fundamental political argument here is whether “setting up a town such that some small group gets to decide what kinds of buildings a property owner can build” should be a thing. There are clearly other premises that nearly everyone agrees cannot be enforced by a town (say, “a town set up for white people only”), so it’s not good enough to simply provide a premise and say “we’re a country of laws therefore the premise shall be enforced.”
The real culprit is not Andreessen complaining to his mayor, but the Bay Area and California politicians who have squandered the enormous revenues of the past 10 years and have literally nothing to show for their housing efforts.
There will never be 'sufficient housing' as there will always be demand to live there, until it's a a terrible place to live ... after which demand will drop and it will be 'cheap to live'.
There will always be 'high demand places to live' and the reality is no everyone can afford to live there, too bad, that's not how it works. There's plenty of wonderful places to live in the US.
The use of the term 'NIBYISM' is wrong, people have a right to control how their communities are developed.
If someone buys a home on a big acre because they really hate traffic, noise etc. then that's the whole point. Collectively, it's their choice - not ours.
The logic of 'Build Everything Until it's Manhattan' because you or I want to afford to live there is a bit absurd in a country with vast and open spaces, especially when 'Building Like Manhatten' often doesn't seem to solve the problem anyhow. NY, the 'densest' place, is one of the most expensive.
If people believe there's a housing expense problem in the area ... then:
How many Googlers does it take to 'Screw In A Lightbulb' and by that I mean 'Build a High Speed Commuting Train' ? - that connects Santa Rosa, to Pleasonton, to Morgan Hill and further? There's a lot of space. Connect it better. WTF are all the geniuses doing that CalTrain is so slow, doesn't loop around the Bay? SF Bay is not 'terrible' but it's nothing compared to good cities for transportation. That's something that needs to be invested in.
Get rid of the very bad idea of 'Everything Being in One Place'. Literally get some of these companies out of the Valley. Take 5 companies and set up shop in Portland, or Petaluma, or Sacramento - and spread it all out further across the US. Stop bringing everyone there, making everything there. Yes, there are some advantages, but there's also advantages in creating other centres.
All of that said: Andreesen's use of 'all caps' is a bit ridiculous, seriously, I don't ever write in 'all caps' it feels a bit childish. I can just see him huffing red, slamming his fists on the table. My god, is this what happens to us when we get a bit of money and turn 55?
I would object if someone tried to build low income housing next to my home. I think that what I find offensive about Andreeson is the apparent hypocrisy, eg “let’s spend mostly other peoples money for a cause I like but don’t let it affect me.”
I don’t really care how wealthy he is, douchebags come in all flavors.
Get a room full of engineers who “want a consistent style guide” to agree on the particulars of one and you’ll see this dynamic in action.
Style is inherently subjective so obviously there's going to be personal preferences, and consistency means enforcing one and only one version of preferences onto others.
That's not exactly the problem with more housing. It's not a question of style or character. People use those words when they talk about "the character of their neighborhood changing" or "these ugly concrete monstrosities", but really it's always the same thing:
1. I don't want my housing prices to go down. I want my house prices to only go up.
2. Lower priced housing will be populated by more poor people who are more likely to bring crime, and I don't want crime to increase in my area.
The thing is, they're not even wrong. They exaggerate, sure. But you can sympathize with both factors.
On 1: The American dream has been sold to everyone that housing is a guaranteed investment that should always go up. For many people it's the only retirement hope they have or any inheritance they hope to pass to their children.
On 2: Income IS inversely correlated with crime. Because our modern capitalist culture decided not to optimize for a social safety net, the only solution we've thought of so far is deep segregation (not racial, but economic)
So, in isolation, individuals making the classic "I want more Housing but Not In My Back Yard" argument is entirely logical. But in the aggregate, it only contributes to a vicious spiral.
And there is NO good reason for a billionaire to dare make that argument. He can afford a small dip to his housing value. Holy shit, leave some crumbs for the rest of us.
Of course, you can't get rid of concentrated poverty without spreading poor people into rich areas, so no progress has been made there.
See: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
Sometimes we seem to like the idea of democracy, sometimes we don't. That's the tension here.
Been to Japan? France? Pretty nice places.
Not saying it's great; Japanese wages are too low and their landlords are abusive (moving is expensive, you have to pay a lot of "key money", and they're free to discriminate against foreigners). But the housing crisis is an Anglo problem - it's bad in the US/UK/Canada/Australia.
Not sure about France specifically, I was just saying Paris is a nice city.
Countries like Japan have taken a profoundly different approach to urban development, and have more mixed-use zones (single-family, multi-family, high-rise, etc).
I love my home, but this is easily one of it’s biggest hypocrisies and the thing most strangling it.
What a joke. A system is what it does. Andreesen is a hypocrite.
You know what would be fucking incredible? If he had taken the opposite stance and put his money where his mouth is. Instead, he plays the coward, unwilling to embrace his own advice.
I agree that the post was right, but it discredits the author when they act so diametrically opposed to the words they write and, specifically, the action they call for.
Did he not mean those words in earnest? Is there some other play he is angling for? It begs everything to be questioned.
But he's not like the overwhelming majority of suburban homeowners; he owns mansions.
You'd actually think that a multibillionaire who owns a mansion would be less sensitive to fluctuations in home values, since their wealth is usually contained in other assets (unlike the average American homeowner, for whom their home is likely where the majority of their net worth is). If Andreessen were to accidentally light $200M of his own cash on fire, he'd come through it, lifestyle unscathed.
Where I live, property is expensive, and I live in a neighbourhood that seems to be dominated by investment property; many empty properties or short-let properties. There are no kids here, even though the neighbourhood would be fine for kids.
Anyway, that's apparently not the way the cookie crumbles; owning property so you can live in it seems to have become unfashionable. I hope the fashion changes, because I have no plans to sell.
the article advocates for bringing housing planning under state jurisdiction:
>The hypocrisy itself is galling, if informative. Andreessen might well support legislation upzoning neighborhoods across California. This macro-micro disconnect should push policy makers to grasp that they cannot reason with NIMBYs on a project-by-project basis. They have to eliminate NIMBYism’s veto power by moving decision-making to the state level.
>They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values
I get that mansions, like SFHs, are seen as investments. And I suppose this is just how they want to bring locals/voters/officials (who might not be as uber-rich?) on board while muffling the quiet part ("quality of life", i.e. mixing classes). But if it's even a remotely honest sentiment, how damn much is enough? He's a (multi-?)billionaire and still gives two shits about his house's appraisal? So shallow, but I guess in character for someone who just bought a $177M palace ("priciest home sale ever in CA") with the money of retail bagholders.
what goes down is the immediate price to rent out if new units become available in the vicinity.
what all these NIMBYs want is a reservation for themselves, where time (and gas prices and everything else) is frozen.
Why the words of rich people are important is beyond me. It's like you guys put these wealthy assholes on a pedestal and then act all shocked when they're looking to enrich themselves even more. Take money out of politics. It's that simple.
As a culture we value money more than many other things thus financial success is often considered a proxy for virtue, intelligence, or both.
I totally agree with this goal, but the core problem is deeper and won't be solved by banning political contributions and so on. Homeowners will still have a financial incentive to vote in NIMBYs, even though that's not directly "money in politics" (albeit it is so indirectly). We need to somehow take negative sum self-interest out of politics through systemic change. I have no idea how one would achieve that, though.
Currently lower supply means higher prices, which benefits existing owners, so they vote for that. Under a LVT, lower supply means higher taxes instead of higher prices.
You can resolve this issue through a 100% LVT. A 100% LVT would set land prices to zero. You would still need to pay for the building on top of the land.
A good way to transition to this system is by giving everyone land tax credits equal to the value of their land. This is beneficial for everyone right now because the Fed is raising rates, that will yield lower land prices, and thus by zeroing out the risk of lower housing prices as we move into this recession through a one-time credit, everyone is better off.
If you want to preserve those bubble prices, you want to quickly vote in a LVT.
That is one thing I really enjoyed about George Lucas v Marin County.
Lucas bought Grady Ranch to build an extension of the nearby Lucas film studio. Following the backlash he decided to develop the property (zoned as residential) as low-income housing, paying for it out of pocket (after 3 years getting the runaround from housing grants and regulatory boards).
Sadly a decade later the project is still blocked by Marin NIMBY.
At this point when I see that a company got Andreesen Horowitz money I think about it as one step above SoftBank money in terms of negative signals.
They invested 150M USD in a pay-to-earn crypto ponzi scheme and dressed it up as a democratization of whatever (as a good thing):
https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnReedStark/status/154029987929...
That’s an almost exact description of most crypto “projects” including the one referenced here, Axie Infinity.
For the most part pyramid schemes have some sort of productive enterprise in there somewhere. Like Avon actually does send people makeup, LuLaRoe or whatever did actually send people leggings that were at least somewhat popular and useful as clothing.
There's at least some actual business going on where a product or service is being delivered. Like at least some of the money going into the system is people who just want the leggings.
There are a small handful of crypto projects that sort of fit that description but not really. For the most part all of the money that's going into the schemes is coming from people who want more money returned to them. A lot of time there's some kind of sheen of a "product" to try to make it look less scammy but there's nobody who actually wants to just consume that product. Literally everyone is hoping that at the end of their engagement with the system they'll have more actual money than when they started.
That's the literal definition of a Ponzi scheme. There's no actual way for people to profit without getting the money from other people who themselves were hoping to profit.
When friends get on such a witch-hunt train, I suggest that they watch the film The Candidate (with Robert Redford). Why? Because - with rare dialogue exceptions - you could remake that film today and you probably wouldn't notice it's 50+ yrs old. 50 yrs is a long time for the needle not moving.
Andreessen might be a participant and a symptom but he's not among The Root Cause. He's not the tone deaf holding the 6 Jan hearings. He's not jetting to Taiwan. Etc. Let's not allow The Atlantic to distract us from The Root Problem.
1. It's a magical thinking witch hunt to suggest that local voters prevent housing from being built.
2. The Root Cause is the Jan 6 hearings and Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan.
Did I miss anything here?
Did you miss anything? Yes, apparently the pile of stink that's sitting right in front of you. The irony of you questioning me (i.e., stating the obvious) should not be overlooked.
“Usually when rich people rage against the possibility that someone less wealthy might become their neighbor, nobody bats an eye.”
I can understand writing an article about high profile peoples’ hypocrisy, but ascribing these kind of motives to their behavior?
We all need to push back against multinational corporations who would turn our local communities into the company towns of old, if given the chance.
SF still runs on a system (discretionary review) that basically means people like you get to show up with subjective complaints about anything anyone anywhere does. You'll find the only way to satisfy you and someone else with different taste is if nobody builds anything.
Far better to create new cities close to natural resources and stop 'old world' cities becoming swamped by overpopulation imo
In a way, the water crisis is the final wake up call that more housing is not the answer.
Can you imagine no middle ground between the richest zip code in the most prosperous country on Earth, and a dump?
In reality, water usage goes down as we build more housing, because people don't take much water at all. Landscapes take tons of water. Old appliances take tons of water. Take a house built in the 70s and replace it with 8 modern homes, and total water usage probably stays the same.
(It's used linear to the number of almond farms in the state.)
The letter was signed first by Laura.
The letter starts out, "I am writing". A spouse will usually use "we" when contemporaneously speaking for both themself and their partner.
> you don’t put your name on the letter unless you really agree with what’s on the letter. Now it maybe possible that Marc never co-signed this in which case he will speak out hopefully and explain his stance better.
Also possible his wife included his full name for the cachet without first asking, but upon finding out Marc decided this wasn't a hill he wanted to die on. He wouldn't have been the first spouse to make that choice.
The letter would evince the fundamental problem with NIMBYism even if Marc didn't willingly sign on--people who oppose projects are typically far more aggressive and outspoken than those accepting of new development, who tend to be more passive; and this dichotomy and one-sided paralysis manifesting between members of the same household only makes the contrast more stark.
It's far more important that people appreciate that dynamic, whether it existed in this case or not. There's absolutely nothing new about people being hypocritical, and righteous indignation about hypocrisy, however sweet, doesn't lead to people affirmatively advocating for development, or any other policy for that matter. People will relinquish veto power not as a consequence of others' hypocrisy, but when they realize and accept that they, themselves, are not up to the task of counteracting NIMBYs, and the only practical alternative is to make their own, personal sacrifice (i.e. relinquishing a not insubstantial measure of power and control) for the greater good.
And what if said developer was a former president building exclusively for his followers?
For your second point, I bet you know your managers or investors somewhat personally though. I bet there are some kind heuristic kinships.
The left underwent a transformation in the early 1900s, when they first wanted to ban alcohol sales because they viewed the situation as greedy alcohol producers exploiting vulnerable alcoholics. It was part of the activism behind the prohibition movement in the US, according to Smashing the Liquor Machine, and it was the policy of the Bolsheviks early on to ban vodka for the same reasons. The narrative was a social justice one.
Eventually they correctly realized that prohibition did more harm than good to vulnerable people, and the social justice stance nowadays (which I agree with) is to decriminalize.
Building affordable market housing is not parasitical. If developers are making abnormal profits, then sure, look at ways to regulate (or deregulate, if barriers are the reason for monopoly profits) and improve competition. But do not prevent building market rate housing. You can even build public housing in addition to market rate housing, if you want to. As long as you're not putting up barriers to construction.
Not only do urban uses generate more property taxes, the services they require cost much less per taxpayer to provide. We have an entire country of suburban sprawl. Those few places dense enough that their connective tissue is reasonably called a community, rather than a car sewer, are ruinously expensive because they are under extreme demand.
All types of built environments are essential to a country as diverse and dynamic as the United States. And the way we make built environments in this country is, you betcha, capitalism. This postwar obsession of ours with hyper-local veto power unreasonably arrests every village at the village stage. All our great cities were villages once, and they surely contained some stakeholders who opposed what happened next. Should we have never built a city? If it is right for New York to exist, why is it wrong for the next New York to emerge?
Serious question. I understand if you cannot afford a single unit, sure. But why would anyone actually want a multi-unit?
People are noisy, smell on occasion, etc. if a city is too crowded, find somewhere else. You’ll be better for moving where you can afford. Moving somewhere just to be in the “hot spot” or something is silly. Go move to a single family residential neighborhood and you’ll be far happier. You can have a garden, put a hole in the wall and expand a room, get a dog.
Beyond personally never wanting to live that he’ll again; I personally would never want a multi-unit home in my neighborhood. I don’t want the density of people. Don’t need the problems that entails, don’t need lower property value. It makes a worse quality of life, that’s why the value drops.
People who want these units want to live in a particular location, but don’t want to pay prices. And the location is more important to them. I get it. That location will be ruined by those homes; at least it will change the dynamics. That’s the unfortunate part.
There are definitely circumstances in life where a multiunit is great -- single people early in life trying to meet people and make friends, for example. But even outside of that:
Anyone can afford a single unit, it's just a matter of where. If you're the wealthiest of the wealthy, you can afford it basically anywhere. If you're extremely poor, it might be a shack in the middle of nowhere. Everyone else is trading off the variables of price, type of housing, and location.
They all did the same thing, move somewhere cheap. Live in a one bedroom, and work until they can buy a house.
My point is no one wants that one bedroom, except those well off who want to live in the city. Which by definition creating apartment complexes will destroy the aesthetic and overwhelm the city resources and utilities.
“Preference for me but not for thee.”
His neighborhood clearly doesn’t affect yours. Why is it so hard to leave it alone? I’m sure Marc doesn’t advocate for your neighborhood to change.
Again: Marc does not own his neighborhood. He owns his house. He can do whatever he wants with his house, but the moment you grant him control over the neighborhood, you grant him rights over everybody else's property.
Surely the solution is to build more places for people to be employed rather than overcrowding existing ones and forcing people to commute from far away. COVID showed us the office centric commuter world is not necessary. I understand some people must be onsite, but still, drastic commute reductions and spreading out of people is a good thing.
And no, the solution is to build more housing where people want to live, and let all the whiny nimby chucklefucks move to the places where nobody wants to live. That is, after all, what they want. If Marc Andreesen really hates people living near him, he can easily buy 100 acres in the Nevada desert where nobody would ever dare to build an apartment building.
Sorry, just because you want to live somewhere, doesn’t entitle you to enough units built there for you to afford it.
I’d love to live in Atherton. But I can’t afford it. I don’t try and get more units built there when the community clearly doesn’t want that, so I choose somewhere else.
Just because you live somewhere does not entitle you to control your neighbors property.
By that logic, the country owns the country, and the country should be able to force any part of the country to do what the broader country wants, and that is not considered force because, well, the country owns the country.
NIMBYs (the community and vast majority of single family homeowners) don’t want to see their neighborhoods overcrowded and changed completely by density, because they moved to such a neighborhood to get away from density. So they vote as a group to keep their neighborhoods nice low density places to live.
Meanwhile, YIMBY people in dense areas think they should have the final say over what SFR neighborhoods feel like and how they develop, even though they don’t even live there.
It’s never the other way around. No single family homeowner NIMBYs push back against another apartment building in an already dense area in the city nextdoor. Yet YIMBYs feel so strongly about controlling low density townships they don’t even live in that they advocate for state preemption. That preemption forces those places to change to adopt the YIMBY vision of walkability, density, public transport, and less cars, something few to none of the residents in that community want.
The closest thing neighborhoods have to votes on density are "town hall" style meetings where the crankiest asshole in the neighborhood shows up and pretends to speak for the entire neighborhood. And inevitably they're wrong, because there are always people that don't want to stay for whatever reason, and they rightfully want the highest price for their property, and that price is always going to be higher if they can sell to a developer which will build high density apartments in high demand locations.
Believe it or not, we actually do have a legal mechanism for entire neighborhoods to vote on density, and it actually has more power than zoning boards...it could prohibit density even where upzoning happens, because it can prohibit the density at the level of a deed covenant. They're called homeowners associations. They suck, and everybody hates them.
If Andreesen can't convince his neighborhood to form a homeowners association, and willingly introduce density-restricting covenants to their deeds, then you can be assured that density restrictions on zoning are actually minority rule...not some community decision.
If we want people to accept density, we need social norms and legal enforcement on the noise front, not pretending.
Open the balcony doors and the sounds of the river and Gabriel's Wharf will flood in. And that one time there was this crazy guy yelling. Doors closed, nothing.
I think US construction is just lower quality in comparison, which is a fair complaint. With only access to inferior manpower without the skill and techniques from the UK, you'll likely end up with the noisy apartment and then you're fucked. So I understand the concern.
I lived in an amazingly solid, all-concrete, incredibly sound-isolated complex for awhile. In the bay area, so it's nice to have fresh air and not live like you're in a bunker. And then the neighbor with the parrot moved in next door, and the neighbor with the kids who loved playing CoD late at night with a subwoofer moved in above.
In short, I will _never_ share walls again. Never. Enjoy the density.
Until people opened their windows. Which was the entire point of that post.
No amount of sound isolation is going to fix this problem.
- No garden maintenance / snow removal
- Dedicated maintenance staff / landlord pays for it
- Generally lower intrusion risk
- Smaller footprint than most single unit homes: not everyone desires to clean several thousand square feet
And the disadvantages of multi unit housing you listed have their analogues in single unit homes:
- Neighbours are still loud and smelly
- Putting a hole in your wall and fixing it is expensive unless you have the tools + experience to do so yourself. Not everyone enjoys this.
- Commuting becomes more onerous the farther out you live
For many people there is no living situation without it’s compromises. But for some, single-unit is ideal and for others multi-unit is ideal.
It's insanely hypocritical, and points to him saying one thing in public to gain the kudos of like-minded people while in private being something completely different.
Multi-unit housing is famously popular with extremely rich people as long as they're the ones living in it - a lot of them like NYC.
A lot of let them eat cake in this comment..Have you hear of "people who work at the restaurants you frequent"? They would tremendously benefit by living near where they work.