Example: a .1% increase in shadow over Dolores Park in SF almost stopped a new 19 unit development - https://twitter.com/sam_d_1995/status/1415839145386196993/ph...
It was approved years later after adjustments - https://sfyimby.com/2022/04/supervisors-approve-shortened-pl...
Granted...this particular situation was unique as the development was market-rate units, not low-income, in a communal living layout. There were other concerns on part of neighbors (some real, some silly, and others just simply obstructive). This, along with CEQA in California have been constantly used by existing members of a town/city/neighborhood/etc to reduce additional development of any kind, not just low-income.
This is at a point where NIMBY isn't even the only acronym anymore, BANANAs is the new one the kids use these days - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Some more links - - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-fr... - ugh i know, the Atlantic, but its good - https://missionlocal.org/2021/07/developments-in-development... - https://www.ocregister.com/2022/03/16/berkeley-case-proves-c...
NIABY: Opposition to certain developments as inappropriate anywhere in the world is characterised by the acronym NIABY ("Not In Anyone's Backyard"). The building of nuclear power plants, for example, is often subject to NIABY concerns.
NAMBI: ("Not Against My Business or Industry") is used as a label for any business concern that expresses umbrage with actions or policy that threaten that business, whereby they are believed to be complaining about the principle of the action or policy only for their interests alone and not for all similar business concerns who would equally suffer from the actions or policies.
BANANA: is an acronym for "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything" (or "Anyone").The term is most often used to criticize the ongoing opposition of certain advocacy groups to land development. The apparent opposition of some activists to every instance of proposed development suggests that they seek a complete absence of new growth.
NOPE: (Not On Planet Earth)To leave an uncomfortable situation, usually quickly.
LULU: Locally Unwanted/Undesirable Land Use planning.
NOTE: Not Over There Either (meaning is same NIMBY)
thanks for digging
Higher density housing is a massive component of building lower carbon footprint cities, as well as making our cities more financially resilient. It's also something that can increase equity a lot by giving people with lower incomes access to nicer areas and schools.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/we-cant-beat-the-climate-...
I lived in one throughout my entire childhood. Around half of people were OK, the other half just generally dickheads.
That has 0 to do with racism. Many UK towns have trivial populations of non-"White British".
The problem is mostly that over time (years or generations) poverty gradually turns people into a shell of what a well adjusted human could otherwise be.
And then what, you expect rich people to move in? They won't. Poor people are going to move in. And the rich people who made that area nice in the first place are going to flee, because it will turn into a not-nice area.
By contrast if your suburb is nice and quiet despite being right next to a city because decades of policy have locked it in place and it’s pricing people out… too bad? Other people need housing too and outward from an already dense city is where it makes the most sense to build them.
Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like you know what's best for everyone else. If I wanted to live like you, I'd live where you do. And no matter how much you want my area to change (because you clearly can't stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with) it's not going to.
So the side advocating for upzoning (allowing people to build what they want on their own properties) is "acting like they know what's best for everyone else" while you, advocating for strict limits on what others can do on their own properties according to your desires, aren't?
I guess we can make this consistent if you admit you're doing something you know isn't best for everyone else, and aren't even trying to. Which would be fine if you weren't using the state to support your aims.
If we don't do that, and both sides are trying to do what they think is best for everyone, this is a difference in degree not kind. There obviously need to be limits on any zoning.
> because you clearly can't stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with
You are in support of using the coercive power of government to restrict your neighbors from living in ways you disagree with, if those ways include building more housing!
https://twitter.com/issiromem/status/1557816668604141568
What your friend has observed is what happens when you keep it bottled up for years and years.
Instead of gradually moving to 4-plexes and 3 story apartments and narrow townhomes, when all that demand finally gets unleashed, it's a larger change.
Change can be disturbing, so we should aim for more frequent gradual changes than 'quantum leap' type stuff. That said, at least your friend has options in that their land is probably worth a ton of money now and they do have the possibility to get out and go somewhere more to their liking.
Tons of people in high cost cities like Seattle have no home at all due to housing costs.
It’s more important to me that people have places to live than that existing homeowners everywhere can have a neighborhood that never changes. The two are incompatible. It would be preferable for that change to be gradual, but given the current state of things I don’t see how that’s possible.
We do it on a national scale in most countries (visa policy). That's far harsher.
What differs between it being concentrated or spread out? I see you're making the argument that it should be spread out, but I don't see any explaination of the benefits.
Edit: why disagree? This is an honest question.
Low-income, high-density housing attracts problems. It has literally nothing to do with race. You could guarantee that the high-rise apartment building you want to construct down the street from me would be 100% filled with people who look like me, and I'd still oppose it.
Keep your YIMBY nonsense IYBY.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
If that makes you feel uncomfortable, so be it.
Americans spend zillions of dollars every year visiting Europe, which is full of high density housing. And come home raving about how much they love it. It does not 'cause problems'.
That correlation may be because of historic and current structural racism, lack of access to mental health services and a social safety net, or a myriad of other socio-economic issues, but it doesn't change the fact that it exists.
Insinuating that anyone who brings up those issues is racist isn't helpful.
It would be more productive to say "Yes, I understand why neighborhoods might be resistant to denser, low-income tolerant development, and here are some ways we could incorporate that fact into a productive plan..." E.g. building more mixed-income developments.
Like with most policies, the details are much more nuanced.
Check out the history of the Gropiusstadt in Berlin:
Every time I’ve seen this type of argument brought up, it’s fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built here because it does end up working. We’re really not so unique.
And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID when voting, I’d get an endless stream of replies about why that’s fundamentally impossible in the US (and racist, naturally). And that’s a FAR easier problem to solve than pie-in-the-sky “make everything more dense and have high speed rail everywhere and European-style public transit in every city” daydreams that are so popular.
Maybe some things really aren’t that easy to do in the US.
Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches, community recreation centers, and schools.
The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress turnout under the guise of "election security".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
I think it would be good to do away with these simplistic this or that doesn't work here because... The US society was remodelled quite dramatically to be very car centred over a very short time and now people say that it can't be any other way because of the geography? The US was literally different 70-80 years ago.
Look up the US Census definition of "urban." In the town where I live, three houses around me are on 100 acres collectively--not to mention even more adjacent conservation land and that's classified as urban because it's near a smaller old mill town and only about 50 miles from a major city.
>Adopting 500 persons per square mile (PPSM) as the minimum density criterion for recognizing some types of urban territory.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/24/2022-06...
Which basically means anything "town-like" or higher is "urban".
So most Americans live in urban areas even if they are in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.
Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your expectations.
Which doesn’t mean that the same infrastructure you’d see in a dense European city would make sense in your town, mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren’t as incomparable as some people seem to think.
About an hour drive from a major city.
Though not that different really from small English countryside towns I've walked through.
It seemed bizarre that even "one strip mall" towns didn't have certain categories of business. Down in the south, you can't measure a mile without hitting two serviceable Tex-Mex restaurants.
Up north? The nearest Tex-Mex is often 30 minutes away, and the nearest pizza place (which often isn't great) is 20 minutes.
The amount of violent criminality? Look at any major light rail network in America and they are nowhere near as safe as the European equivalents.
Look to Vienna’s social housing program for an example of this done very well. That doesn’t look like it attracts problems, now does it?
The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure, investors won't want to build a 30 stories building.
But they might want to build a 3-4 units building, something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY densification is impossible.
You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see giant cement buildings. But you do see livable neighbourhood with buildings that are just slightly higher than the norm and can house multiple families.
Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people infect with your ideas turns to hell.
If you’re talking new suburbs of existing cities, well, that’s basically the only expansion we’ve done in many places. Some problems with that:
- It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right now).
- If the implication is that you’re building outward because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to live in (which will happen if they don’t densify at all and the population grows), then you’re basically forcing most kids to move far away from their parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won’t want to live near their family but many do, and being able to maintain those close family ties feels important.
How exactly is it best for the well-off? I'm curious what pros and cons it would have for them.
Restaurants are shutting down for want of workers. Because they can't afford it.
Low income workers provide valuable services in our communities. Telling them they can't live where they work creates all kinds of problems, both social and environmental - they often drive in to do those jobs, creating more pollution and traffic.
It's much easier to hire and retain staff for your business when your pool of potential employees isn't a 30+ minute bus ride away.
For the well-off residents, it means better and more consistent service at their neighborhood grocery, coffee shop, restaurant, pharmacy, etc.
Historically, the decline of most late-stage empires was triggered by spiraling economic bifurcation.
Sometimes, it's better to be less wealthy but on top of an ordered country vs more wealthy and without the rule of law as society breaks down.
Zoning laws ultimately restrict your property rights as you lose the right to do what you wish with your property. They ought to be abolished to protect property rights.
Most societies did just fine without zoning laws for the entirety of human history.
Note, that I don't approach this from the YIMBY or woke side of things. Rather, as a pretty staunch free market advocate, it is painfully obvious to me that we should not restrict people's rights to do with their property as they see fit.
As an example, I was recently going to buy land to develop into a business. However, zoning laws in this area of the county (in the middle of nowhere mind you) meant I would have to jump through endless permit and red tape. Any so-called supporter of property rights should be livid that this goes on in this country. Buying the land should be enough to give me rights to do what I wish with it. Environmental laws should deal with actual human health hazards, not how much shadow I'm spilling onto a neighboring property or how much view I'm blocking.
A lot of the issues with zoning is people attempting to own that which they don't. You don't own your neighbor's property.
The value of my house would be decimated if there were a pawn shop next door to it. I wouldn't have bought my house if that were even a remote possibility.
A totally free-market approach allows one party to reduce the use or value of another party's property. E.g. in the above, the high-rise blocks the sunlight, which will could kill any plants on the property and preclude a backyard. That combined with the lack of sunlight could dramatically diminish the value of the property. Meanwhile, the highrise increases in value because they got X extra floors that get sun.
There is absolutely utility in the sun; in the most obvious form, it can be used with solar panels to generate electricity which can be sold for cash. My neighbor shouldn't be able to build a solar array that blocks all the light that would hit my property.
Zoning laws, to me, are just a shortcut to avoid having to enumerate and manage those rights individually, per property. There's a lot of things that can contribute to the value of a property, and it would be a mess to manage them individually.
Um.. the qualifier is very broad. I would posit that the owner of the house ( and therefore part of a given community ) is in a very good position to judge whether or not a given project is, or is not, beneficial to that community. There is nothing to be quiet about. Neighborhoods that house predominantly black population tend to have houses with lower dollar value. As a result, chances to transform the owner's local habitat to one that that does not benefit the owner is highly irrational, regardless of current political winds.
<< It's also something that can increase equity a lot by giving people with lower incomes access to nicer areas and schools.
They are not nicer as a matter of fact. Part of that niceness is being funded with higher prices ( and taxes ). You take that away by adding some things NIMBYs are fighting about and the result is a neighborhood whites will flee. And cries of racism will continue.
edit: clarified value in first paragraph
Could have just ended the sentence there.
If it was up to me, I would already have moved somewhere with lower taxes, but "kids, school and so on" currently takes priority over my selfish needs.
<<They like city amenities though.
Yes. I pay for them. I better like them. Otherwise, I will be the one complaining during next board meeting.
In my middle- to upper-middle-class mill town there's a proposal to turn a disused historic mill building into luxury apartments and residents are fighting hard against it. The main stated reason is traffic, although it's unclear to me if having a bunch of apartments will generate noticeably more rush-hour traffic than when the mill was operational. I think some folks are also put off by the term "luxury apartment" too, as this area is becoming less affordable than it once was. So they counter-productively fight against increasing the housing supply, which would actually create downward pressure on rent, even for non-luxury places, as folks in more modest apartments might be tempted to move to these fancy new places, creating vacancies for others.
I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they fight it - they want their town/neighborhood/whatever to be just the way it was in the "good ol' days", which just isn't realistic. The mill jobs aren't coming back, but we do have white collar workers willing to pay for attractive places to live. Why not re-use the damn mill building?
"Luxury" apartments are, 9 times out of 10, just brand new apartments that happen to be in an expensive location.
It's kind of like cars - a brand new Toyota Corolla is not the cheapest car out there. A 20 year old used one is going to be a lot more affordable. But you don't get old ones unless you build and sell the new ones to people who have the money to buy new cars. If there are not enough new cars, those people will drive up the price of the used cars.
Indeed, this is exactly what happened during the pandemic.
As someone who lives in a former mill town myself, feel free to write if you're curious about organizing in favor of housing. It's a lot of fun!
This is it, hilariously. Locally the railroad started building a rail yard, and everyone got up in arms and the city and county was howling and a meeting was called and the rail company politely explained that they're regulated federally and are building a nice berm around the rail yard, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.
And everyone stopped complaining, the yard got built, and nobody cares.
We need more of the straight bribery that used to happen around nuke plants - if the plant is approved, everyone gets $1k off their property taxes for X years or whatever.
if density == low:
return "This won't solve the problem"
if income == low:
return "This ruins the neighbourhood character"
if density == mid and income == high:
return "This is gentrification and soulless coffee shops!"
if density == high and income == high:
return "This is for Arab/Chinese/local-xenophobe-target-du-jour investors only"
return "This ruins the neighbourhood character"
Person moves to SF and puts down life savings as down-payment on 1:4 leveraged home...not a surprise they want to ensure they arent wiped out. A 20% decrease in value wipes out the life savings. The whole system is designed to perpetuate itsself.
Are there, other than "I don't want to live near the poors" and "I don't want to see people who have problems"? That's not a good reason.
A good neighbor who has fallen on hard times will have plenty of sympathy.
What are these reasons? What makes them "good"?