Marc Andreessen slams new multi-family affordable housing
fortune.com
fortune.com
The hypocrisy is delicious, and so typical of many ostensibly progressive tech magnates in California (and elsewhere). NIMBYsm at its peak.
What’s wrong with letting a nice town stay nice? We don’t need to turn everything to shit just to satiate socialist schadenfreude.
Build it somewhere else
It's pretty transparent discrimination, tbh.
You don't have to design around the car...
But there's no reason not to take the things that work well in them and bring them elsewhere. Traffic separated bike lanes and Dutch style intersections are common sense improvements that we can build that improve access without requiring a car.
It's an inefficient use of space, it socially isolates us, and it has devastating ecological consequences.
I'll wait, take your time.
"That land is in use already."
"Lololol strawman! No u!"
Alright, sure.
Mandating one 18-hole golf course for every 2K people in municipalities would also create positive offsets to impervious surface and add to the benefit.
Even if that means billionaires might lose some of their home value.
Usually if the solution seems that simple, and you think everyone else is an idiot for not realizing it, then they are not the ones being idiots. It's a pattern we should all consider when we "don't understand" a widely understood concept.
Okay... _where_?
Thats the whole point of why NIMBY is reviled. Not In My Back Yard.
Wouldn't that indicate there's at least some YIMBY attitude in this location?
It's probably safe to assume the people who need affordable housing want it.
I own and live in an 80-year old single family house. My neighborhood -- one of the more desirable ones in my city -- has had a massive ongoing build out of 3-5 story apartment buildings in the past 10 years. They don't bother me in the least. It's either that or people can't afford to live here, which seems bad.
AB 686 also makes changes to Housing Element Law to incorporate requirements to AFFH as part of the housing element and general plan to include an analysis of fair housing outreach and capacity, integration and segregation, access to opportunity, disparate housing needs, and current fair housing practices.
Reminds me of a Ben Shapiro quote:
Let's say for the sake of argument that all of the water levels around the world rise by, let's say, five feet over the next 100 years. Say 10 feet over the next 100 years. And it puts all of the low-lying areas on the coast underwater. Let's say all of that happens. You think people aren't just going to sell their homes and move?
"Want to buy my land?"
"Sure, why are you selling?"
"It'll be literally devoured by the seas soon and totally worthless."
"That sounds like a great investment. Sold!"
How do you sell a multi-million dollar home in a remote location with no access to water?
If people want houses to be treated as investments, then they should be punished as such when their bet goes sideways.
Lose money imvested in stock/crypto/whatever? Too bad so sad.
House value even so much as commits the sin of not appreciating because of whatever reason? Stop the presses and think of the children!
I don't think ordinary folks should lose their shirts off their backs if they lose their homes. Sure, I have zero sympathy for the investors who are manipulating markets, but the every day worker? Nah.
> Build it somewhere else
If everybody says "build it somewhere else" where are you supposed to build?
My land, I decide what gets built there.
Don't like it? Buy it off of me for the price I state.
Your net worth is $1.7 billion, you can fuck off with your concern about that one home of yours experiencing a dip in value.
I realize this comment isn't in the typical spirit of an HN comment, but that's just gross.
Slightly less glib -- I think it's more about allowing the precedent. Not so much about breathing the same air as the poors, but more about letting the poors think they should have any such opportunity to share their air.
That's why after realizing her sudden immense wealth, even Patrisse Cullors purchased her homes in Inglewood and a spacious ranch in Conyers, GA, instead of say Compton or Oakland.
The residents can have whatever kind of municipality they want. If they want to keep it quiet and not be Manhatten, it's their prerogative.
Now - blocking the electrification of Caltrain - that - is actual NIMBYISM, because they're blocking needed infrastructure changes that don't likely hugely affect them.
Those kinds of actions make it impossible to have High Speed Trains etc. etc..
But otherwise, there's plenty of land, people can go elsewhere, and tell Google they need to open an office in Morgan Hill because nobody can get to GHQ without spending 1/2 their salary just to survive.
What happens in Atherton is, indeed, the business of Atherton residents. But if you have a net worth of $1.3 billion, and you walk around publicly telling every other municipality what they need to do, only to turn around and publicly refuse to do that in your municipality under the auspices of, "My gigantic pile of 'fuck you' money will still be a gigantic pile of 'fuck you' money just ever-so-slightly-smaller, so much so that I won't even notice the difference," then... yep. We're all going to roll our eyes and tell you to fuck off.
Now, you don't have to fuck off. That's your prerogative (after all, you've got all of that "fuck you" money!). But we'll still tell you to.
Plain and simple.
'It's Time To Build' is not about 'building buildings', for gosh sake's, it's about building companies, innovating, organizing ourselves better and 'doing stuff'. Not 'building homes' in Los Angeles.
You can 'fuck off' with your 'fucking off' language, this isn't the place for uninformed mob rage.
People have their quiet neighbourhoods and want to keep them that, it's not really any of your business. There's plenty of room for you to express yourself and even get angry with other by telling them to 'f-off' just not in Atherton apparently.
>Andreessen isn't telling other communities what to do.
"It's Time to Build" is literally Andreessen telling us what he thinks that we - the United States as a broader community - need to be doing as we move towards the future.
>'It's Time To Build' is not about 'building buildings', for gosh sake's, it's about building companies, innovating, organizing ourselves better and 'doing stuff'. Not 'building homes' in Los Angeles.
It's about all of that and building homes. As a matter of fact, it's actually a pretty well-rounded piece. An excerpt:
>You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential — which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future.
I'm struggling to square away how lamenting our inability to "build nearly enough housing" is "not about 'building buildings'".
>You can 'fuck off' with your 'fucking off' language, this isn't the place for uninformed mob rage.
Again at the risk of not having a typically-constructive HN conversation, there are 61 up votes for my comment and yours was decently downvoted. It's safe to say that more people disagree with you here, or - and I think this is more likely - that they at least understand my point better than you do. You see...
>People have their quiet neighbourhoods and want to keep them that, it's not really any of your business.
... I have never actually said that it is my business. In my first post, I only told a gigantically wealthy person off for whining in caps lock about losing an amount of money that will have next-to-no impact to their massive net worth. You then responded to me telling me that I don't get to tell Atherton residents how to determine what happens in their municipality.
I responded, clarified that I know that, and further clarified that I was only telling a gigantically wealthy person off for the same reason I mentioned just above and in every previous post of mine in this chain. Yet you are again telling me that "it's not really any of [my] business" what Atherton residents want. Stop putting words in my mouth!
Again - let them do what they want with their community. But Marc Andreessen absolutely can still fuck off for that comment.
And it's false in any case according to some of the research I've seen. It's housing. For people. Not a sewage facility.
Solution is to just not give local towns such strict control. Otherwise there is truly no incentive to allow building like this
You most likely will never get to that point if you aren't greedy and always look for your personal advantage.
Do you feel the same way about people that want to prevent chain stores or Walmarts from opening in their neighborhoods? It's something like that...
Oh the Urbanity! recently did a (7m) video on this, 'The Problem of “Neighborhood Character”':
You are right! It looks like he might not give a crap about the actual financial "hit" from depreciation of his house as much as he worries that if the prices do go down, Atherton will become more affordable, and that to him is probably a massive problem.
But let’s try actual, if low quality, numbers:
Houses near Atherton, in Menlo Park, seem to sell for around $500k-$1M per 1000 sq ft of lot size. That’s $500 - $1000 per sq ft lot.
Houses in Atherton, supposed home of very expensive homes, seem to sell for around $10M per acre of lot. (Yes, Atherton is so fancy that it uses different units in Zillow!). That’s about $230 per sq ft of land.
In other words, Menlo Park (not exactly a paragon of high density and unrestricted land use) has 2x-4x the land value per unit area of Atherton.
So those NIMBYs who actually want to extract dollar value from their property should support less restrictive land use!
edit: of course this is the value of random houses plus their lots. I expect the effect would be more pronounced if the houses were removed — those Atherton houses tend to be quite fancy.
The whole point of Atherton is privacy- the property owners don't want other living human beings within earshot.
In any case, this may be what Andreesen is thinking, but it’s not what he wrote.
It should be noted that the zoning rules in Atherton require a minimum lot size of 1 Acre per home. Thinking of it in terms of square feet lets you compare it to nearby towns somewhat, but misses that building say two houses per acre (1/2 acre lots) is illegal there.
(Under SB9, one can likely split a 1 acre lot once. I imagine that Atherton would try to block such a split.)
He lives in a quiet neighbourhood and he likely moved there for that reason.
The community wants to keep it that way.
It's (almost) entirely none of your/my/our business otherwise.
The anti-NIMBYism issue is an irrational hysteria ... pushing everyone to think that the moment an area becomes popular, it must be turned into New York or Hong Kong.
And FYI are those places affordable?
There's tons of land in the US, it's time for stupid cities to organize themselves and not have antiquated/disjoint transport systems i.e. Caltrain/Bart.
If the 'Valley' were 'intelligent' they'd have a train from Santa Rosa to Morgan Hill in 1 hour.
What is 'very hypocritical' is that in Atherton they apparently refused the infrastructure changes necessary to electrify the CalTrain.
Now that - is terrible.
I'd imagine this would mean a modicum of change / trouble, for quite an important common/civic benefit.
Andreesen should be pushing for that electrification change, and probably other forms of change, and finally not be ALL CAPS in emails like a giant turkey. I mean, it evokes images of an angry giant bald man smashing his fists on the table. I mean, Marc, chill. Just make your point ...
how about cars
Where I live, it’s so expensive to live anywhere near our major cities that I’m left wondering how the NIMBY classes who live there expect to get their morning coffees or their houses repaired when they’ve finished pricing any young people and trades out of a 50 mile radius from them…
Thankfully, Washington seems to be moving to do away with single family only zoning.
Cancelled event, but desired event: https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2019/09/13/trump-wont-be-co...
I understand this is the argument is being made. This just seems to me like this is an opinion stated as if it were a fact, and not a tautological truth of property valuation.
You're probably correct except in the case of the most expensive and exclusive neighborhoods in the country. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/managing-wealth/062416...
if people wanted to live by multifamily housing they would live in the city. people move to suburbs to escape dense housing.
It's why there are almost never (in the USA) bus lines to the fanciest malls or other shopping areas - if you can't even afford a car to get there, you're not wanted there.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/15/tech/adam-neumann-flow/index....
Here's the page about the project, with a broken link to public comments: https://www.ci.atherton.ca.us/627/Housing-Element-Update
It also broke the link from the Atlantic's story. Hopefully someone can get their attention to update it to point to an archived version.
That way, people who "don't want to see their community change" would be free to buy up land and pay the opportunity cost of not developing it. Society could use that revenue to either invest in the welfare state, or offset taxes for the rest of us.
There are plenty of lower-cost units available, and subsidizing rent/purchase of these would allow a small benefit to be realized by a large number of qualified people, rather than a huge benefit to a small amount of lucky people who win the lottery that is used to allocate the small number of inits that exist.
This is true if the housing supply is inelastic. But the long-run supply of housing services is very elastic[^1].
Also spending money to build housing is inflationary.
[^1]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R284...
It might be that their position on new housing in their region is an egregious one, i haven't really thought about it, but the hypocrisy around it is, I think, par for the course.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
Could this be having a destabilizing effect on a number of things in America including real eastate?