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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Wow that's great news!

The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers.

Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.

It is insane.

I honestly hope there is a property-rights case that abolishes all of this. If I own the property, then it's mine. If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.

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> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.

The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.

People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.

Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

Where this breaks down is cities that do not even have space for their own offspring. Again sticking with my own city of Berkeley, demographic processes, birth rate combined with increasing longevity, means that Berkeley has been exporting young people for 50 years, causing housing crises in those places, too. In what way is that equitable to either the offspring in question or the people who already lived in the other places?

All developed countries have negative demographic growth, if people want to get into very few places this does not make it right. At the opposite end you find the example of hundreds of villages in Italy that are deserted (and many more in less famous countries), do you say they are also exporting population?

Again this is where we are getting into what it means to own something. Do I own the property or not? If my neighbors want to get together and buy my house from me because they want to do something with it, then they are by all means allowed to do so.

Nobody in the US, and indeed most of the world, "owns" their property. Try not paying your property taxes, and see where that gets you. You lease the right to usus, mostly fructus, and to some extent abusus from the state.

False, much of Alaska has no property tax.

Fair enough. I have looked into this before and that exception has not come up before. Let's say roughly 99.7%+ of people, then.

Where does title revert if you die intestate and with no next of kin?

It goes to probate like any other property.

I feel that this is a misleading. Property taxes are not leases on property but simply a disincentive to hoarding unused land.

Maybe in theory, but functionally it is the same. You don't pay your property taxes, you get a lien, and can eventually, in extreme circumstances, be foreclosed on.

I do not understand your point, really. Obviously, from a legal standpoint, ownership exists. But you say, no, no, no, that's not _reaaaal_ ownership, since I have to pay property taxes.

When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.

That's okay, it requires some knowledge of rather niche economic philosophies. I'd suggest reading into some philosophy of property, labor, and ownership. Specifically in the right-libertarian and left-anarchist traditions. Start with John Locke and Adam Smith, then move into thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, George (Henry, of Georgism fame), Nozick, Rothbard, and writers on similar topics.

LVT is a disincentive to hoarding land. Property taxes are incentive to tear buildings on used land down.

This is a great example of how framing makes a big difference.

If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).

Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.

Even if you consider property tax that is legally false.

I'm not sure if you even understood what you're replying to, since this is pointlessly contrarian.

"legally" is an acknowledgement that the ownership is conditional on someone else who has authority about the ownership (ie the practical owner).

This is a reasonable point of view, in theory.

Even then that would mean that the state would have a voice, not the neighbors.

No, you don't own the property. Under what coherent system of thought could you possibly own something that was there before humans existed and will be there after humans are gone, and which you did nothing to create or maintain? Property ownership is a societal construct that we agree to use to improve our lives together. If it's not serving our needs we can change it.

Sure, the name of the social construct is ownership. Therefore, you own it. Because of the social construct.

I don't know how it works where you live but I spend an insane amount of my time maintaining my property.

You maintain the property to make it suitable for your needs. But if you didn't "maintain" it, nothing would actually happen to it. It would still be completely usable in 1 million years.

Sure, I don't expect to still own it in one million years.

That is no different from ownership of anything else, including one’s own body. The government has an interest in property and may tax it, but how is that different from auto registration, income tax, or any other tax liability? Someone can be imprisoned for daily to pay income tax, but the government doesn’t own their job or work.

You will own nothing and be happy /s

>Do I own the property or not?

Yes, for the duration that you (and your crew) can defend it.

> I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"

Same thing with building codes. Make them more onerous to increase construction costs. Then lol all the way to the bank when you grandfather your own house in, increasing your own property value as it is now impossible to build a house as economically as your own. Sprinkle in some "think of the safety of the children" for good measure, no matter the fact your own house is justified as safe enough to stand.

In-group/out-group aren't great terms to use to make that point.

I and many others who don't live in the Bay Area see ourselves as an in-group relative our out-group -- the people who have to live there.

To be clear, my comment was more a reaction to what I perceived as the idea that any zoning of residential areas by the community that lives there is unacceptable and that you should be able to do literally anything that's not actively endangering your neighbors. That would result in most neighborhoods being much less pleasant due to a few owners deciding to do things against the interests of the many.

I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.

San Francisco is 2/3rds renters, all of whom can vote. You shouldn't pretend that they have no say in how their city is run.

If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.

Everyone can vote? American Samoans, green card holders, various non-citizen immigrants? I thought SF was unusually immigrant rich.

There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.

These renters mostly live in rent-controlled apartments, so they don't have the same interests as people who might want to move there.

> don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country

Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.

I mean… there's a balance, right? People should be able to mostly do what they want with their own property. At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods. Each of those has a bad outcome if taken to the extreme.

Sure, but we should apply 'strict scrutiny' to that. Strict scrutiny is a legal term meaning in general that isn't a right the community should have, but we will make exceptions for really bad things only. (you have free speech, but you can't just yell fire in a crowded area. There are things you cannot do on your land, but they should be very limited.

> At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods.

That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?

Devil’s advocate: they did. 50+ years ago they moved to a sleepy suburban town that through no fault of their own became a center of a worldwide tech revolution. Things change, sometimes dramatically. A place in the country you move to today can also transform 50 years in the future if you’re unlucky.

There's no right to be free from change. You may need to keep moving around if you're after a specific ethos or aesthetic on the land you don't own. Your early arrival shouldn't have permanent supremacy over your neighbors plot of land. Don't want a building there? Buy the land. Can't afford it? Prepare some welcome gifts for your new neighbors.

Not sure if I'd consider an unprecedented explosion in property-based generational wealth unlucky...

> they did

They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.

That was the deal at the time they bought it, and priced in.

That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my home was any arrangement with the city constraining future construction nearby. That's done with my vote (so without much effect) and any political action I can spur.

Devil's devil's advocate: The world is not static. No one can reasonably expect nothing to change over the course of half a century. The only constant is change itself, and you have to deal with changing situations. Maybe it made sense as farmland 50 years ago, but if it makes sense as apartment blocks now, by God put apartment blocks on it then. The collective value to all those new tenants massively outweighs the downside to the single existing landowner (who stands to make a huge payday anyway!).

And at the cost of the character of their neighborhood changing, their property valuation rose to the point that they can now live almost wherever they would like to. Countless people have to see their neighborhood change without the financial windfall they got.

>If the people decide together to change it though, they can.

And they did. The decision by the people was to "nuke" current zoning regulations.

This is America, land of the free, home of the property rights. It's a weird imposition to say that I can't build exactly what I want on my property (assuming it's safe). It's a totally fair thing to say that if you want full control over what can be built adjacent to your house buy a ranch in Montana.

Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.

It's a good thing.

What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?

All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

> What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?

Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.

> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.

For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.

> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.

I think many people would consider Tokyo an overbuilt hellscape and never want to live there. I much prefer Santa Monica.

Obviously not the 14M people who live in Tokyo. Those buildings aren't empty! Population of Santa Monica is 91,000, which is what the population of Tokyo would be if nobody wanted to live there :)

If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.

This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.

Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.

If you don't own stock in a company, you don't vote in its governance decisions.

If you don't own a car, you don't determine when to wash it.

If you don't own a property, you totally still get to determine what to do with it by being a whiny neighbor. Why is this OK?

I'm very-much onboard with the "put up or shut up" model of zoning. If you want the place to be empty, you should own it and keep it empty.

Exactly. These people dont want to actually pay the costs to keep things as they are because really it's about property prices.

>All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.

An important caveat here is that these small groups are only "nuked from orbit" for the time period that they're out of compliance with a law that has existed for 50 years.

I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.

Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

> Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.

>People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason.

This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.

So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.

None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.

Is this a question of jurisdiction? I mean the people living together in a slightly larger area get to decide together what they want the collective area to be like as well right? Surely local politics can be overruled when the policies start having a material effect on individuals outside of the local jurisdiction.

Which sounds well and good until you learn that the zoning laws we have are mostly a result of attempting to keep neighborhoods white.

So you can live in the actual countryside, or the population center curated to be like countryside. So many choices!

What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.

For what it's worth, most zoning is created by property owners, too. Gotta preserve their investment at the expense of our nation's growth.

As a property owner, I've always found this to be remarkably short sighted.

If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.

edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.

Some people just want to live in a small suburb

Except when that small suburb is in a not-small town (Eg: many parts of SF, Berkeley Sunnyvale, etc.)

Well some other people have decided that that's not allowed.

I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue.

edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.

If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed...

Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.

I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.

How does that square with their place in the timeline Strong Towns documents?

They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.

These are towns that were founded in the 1800s at the latest and some in the 1600s...

Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development?

From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.

"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."

I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.

Looking at satellite images I would guess they would not do well financially with the infrastructure costs.

But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.

Speaking as an Arlington resident, I would not describe it as "car centric", although cars are accommodated far more than I would like. It's still a classical streetcar suburb. The majority of Arlington's housing stock is from multifamily buildings within a couple of minutes walk to high frequency bus service (~5 minute wait).

Rich suburbs do fine. Many suburbs of Boston have high income earners and high property values resulting in sane levels of property tax that actually fund those regions adequately. Most of the suburbs Strong Towns criticizes have $250k homes with household incomes between 40-50k and it’s impossible to tax those residents enough to pay for their infrastructure.

Can you name some of these communities?

Sure: Arlington, Belmont, Lincoln, Newton, Waltham, Watertown, Wellesley.

Arlington and Watertown are higher density than Lowellor Quincy. Newton and Waltham are not far behind. You're relying on intuition rather than data and it's showing.

I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.

http://www.usa.com/rank/massachusetts-state--population-dens...

https://www.towncharts.com/Massachusetts/Top-25-Cities-in-Ma...

Strong Towns are picking the outliers that are not doing well and trying to extrapolate to all suburbs. I quit reading them a few years ago when I realized the place they using as an example was a rural town an hour drive from anyplace that could be considered a city - yet somehow this was supposed to show why suburbs were insolvent.

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.

Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.

Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.

I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.

Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).

Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.

> If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs.

If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?

Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)

Doesn't that go against the Strong Towns narrative that the 'burbs are a net drain on cities?

Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.

The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor.

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.

Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.

I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live).

Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.

The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious.

If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.

At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well.

The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.

A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.

As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.

> unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean

These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.

You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.

How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.

I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.

I understand, and if this policy ends up affecting you, I'm sorry.

Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable.

The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population.

PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.

I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.

It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels.

NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.

High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first.

I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.

I don’t know what you consider unbiased but for stuff like energy use the numbers are very evident. https://financeguru.com/news/new-york-energy-rates-consumpti...

“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”

It’s consistent across different countries, here’s UK’s data: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49639003

First you said environmental impact, not electricity usage which is very different.

Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.

It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.

Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?

Edit: Feel free to do whatever research or literature review you want I don’t feel like trying to convince you.

Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.

The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.

Even a look at current population densities destroys this argument as cities like San Francisco need far more density from this sort of inner ring. Keep in mind the actual core in this model is only 25 square miles so even if the core of San Francisco has 20 times the density of the suburbs it fits only 500,000 people. Your 5-15 mile ring fits only 600,000 people so you’ve gone 15 miles out from the centre of San Francisco and you’ve only fit 1,100,000 or so people of the 1.8 million that live in SF proper to say nothing of any of the people living in nearby cities or suburbs you’ve also hit.

San Francisco is extremely space constrained due to the Ocean, Bay, and Parks.

If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.

The thing that you and many prior comments mention is proximity, city size, density, and living in a specific place.

The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.

It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.

Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.

Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!

It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.

> we have no big city we parasite off of

> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL

So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?

> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's

As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA.

61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1]

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...

How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.

If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.

That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.

Yeah, my city totally surrounds several sub-50k "towns", plus has several others glommed on to the side of it that you'd be forgiven for not realizing are separate from the city, and it's not even an extreme case (see St. Louis for that)

A sibling comment of yours mentions Leander; there's only one train in Austin, and it goes from downtown to Leander. So you could even get there without a car. Good luck once you get there, though.

So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'

This is an incredibly misleading statistic. When you describe "a town of less than 50,000 people," what comes to mind most easily is some sort of rural town. But at your link, I recognize several of the places on that "fastest-growing" list. Leander is a suburb of Austin, Little Elm and Forney are both suburbs of Dallas, as are (scrolling down) Frisco and Farmers Branch, while Boerne is a suburb of San Antonio, and Georgetown is a suburb of Austin again.

Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.

That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.

Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit.

But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.

I live in what you would probably call a sprawl hellscape, and I love it.

Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs.

But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.

And many more would like to be able to afford a place to live

Value can be non-monetary, particularly for owner-occupied non-investment property.

A little game theory may come to play though. If the whole city booms and just my neighborhood stays single-family large lot, my price/sqft may increase drastically, and I may get better return on any improvements I do to my property based on my investment profile.

If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.

So its not necessarily illogical.

No, it's almost entirely short-sighted, at least in terms of economics.

First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.

Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.

You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.

> I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell

Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.

I never meant that anyone was forced to sell, legally. Only that the economics forced them to sell at a different schedule or terms than they would have preferred.

It's the variance.

If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment

It can be when you can artificially induce a housing shortage.

E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.

Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.

As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.

> zoning is created by property owners

Supported. Individual property owners rarely have external zoning power.

Um, sure. If you take away the property-owner lobby, the vast majority of truly bad zoning wouldn't exist. I'm comfortable ascribing causality directly to the force which, if removed, would eliminate the effect.

This is a great example of a financial misunderstanding. Land use restrictions reduce land value. Seriously, compare property prices per unit lot area in fancy, restricted communities (e.g. Atherton) to neighboring lots in less restricted, less fancy areas (e.g. Menlo Park or Fair Oaks, hah). Land in Atherton is worth less. Which makes sense — you can’t do as much with it.

At best, single family zoning preserves the value of a (depreciating!) house to a limited extent.

100%. It's NIMBYs who drive the creation of these laws, actively block multi-family housing, prevent development of new roads and resources, etc...

Now with large corporate ownership in residential real estate the problem has gotten worse as houses are investments not places for people to live.

Zoning is also used to preserve the character of a neighborhood. Unfortunately, that typically includes racial character. The US has a long history of zoning as a proxy for redlining and racism [0].

0. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...

Character is the worst part of any area. They are preserving old buildings that cannot be made energy efficient without a large investment, while making that investment illegal as well. All in name of preserving a building just because it is 'old'.

Sure there are a few buildings that are historic and should be preserved, but the vast majority are only old, and have no other historic value.

This position would be a lot more popular if 99% of new development wasn't hideous beyond words and an affront to human dignity.

People want to preserve old stuff because (and only when) it's beautiful, but there's no reason we couldn't and shouldn't be building beautiful stuff today!

> If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.

I don't like that we have to have laws like this in society anymore than you do. But you're kind of ignoring Chesterton's fence here.

I've lived next to places like you're describing, and I don't mean trash heaps like you see in rural parts of America, though I've lived next to them, too. I mean collectors who simply fall behind on preventative maintenance for mundane reasons. So I don't care until I'm forced to... Which is typically when the rats show up.

This argument is a strawman though. Reasonable restrictions are fine, but in practice you get neighbors arguing about what kind of tile you’re allowed to put on your porch roof. If you ever listen in on local city planning/design meetings it’s pretty illuminating.

> you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously

Actually we have oil derricks in the middle of residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

As far as I know, pumping crude doesn't produce the same pollution and nearby collateral damage that processing chemicals does.

Source: Grew up in Texas surrounded by mostly harmless pump jacks and then moved to Louisiana in Cancer Alley.

We have some refineries right up against homes in Wilmington and the bad parts of Long Beach.

In either case, the fact that zoning laws aren't stopping this but are taken as seriously as laws of physics when it comes to apartments shows that they're mostly a scam

Until there's an oil spill, fracking discharge, earthquake (from fracking), or refinery explosion like in Houston.

Houston has both petrochem refining and chemical plants with people living in "sacrifice zones".

Just the wells themselves are prone to leaking lots of toxic gases, and a lot of the modern extraction procedures have additional risks too.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-05/deserte...

Modern epidemiology also enables really accurate tracking of the increase in asthma and other health problems near wells:

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2021-06-02/urban...

Yeap. "Gasland" is a good documentary

"If I own the property, then it's mine."

I'm assuming you are U.S. citizen and not super familiar with the common law; apologies up front if that isn't the case.

Property law principles in the common law are vastly more complicated than this. There are all sorts of ways that your right to use real estate as you wish can be affected by past practices, hazy conventions, etc. Check out "easements", "mineral rights", "air rights", "adverse possession", and the sometimes elaborate processes of establishing title and specific property interests in particular jurisdictions.

And many of those limitations are logically prior to U.S. specific legislation around zoning, restrictive covenants, etc.

Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.

In my experience, the city regulations around what you’ve listed are always sensible. It’s the HOA regulations that tend to be kooky and capricious.

Pretty much any city that was rich in at any point in the latter half of the 20th century has a ton of regulations that boil down to "if you couldn't get away with it in a gated community you can't get away with it here." No one regulation is onerous on its face but the sum total of them are damn near impossible to comply with unless being a high class homeowner is your hobby so this just results in discretionary enforcement which is complaint driven. And of course because the .gov doesn't want their snitches getting stitches they won't tell you who complained so you can't even go attempt to work things out with your neighbors. Karen complains about your shed and you're getting fined $50/day until you tear the thing down not knowing that she'd have been fine if you just painted it.

Your experience sounds outdated. It was like that 10 years ago, even 5 years ago in many cities, but in the last few years so many cities have gotten into HOA territory. Even small cities in places you wouldn't expect.

That kind of timeline is extreme and definitely doesn't pass the smell test. Sounds like a whitewashed variation of "big gubmint takin over as nanny state" reactionary predilections.

Goodbye "high-rises can't be built in SF because they cast an unsightly shadow". But also hope it doesn't mean California gets to regulate San Jose's "green belt".

isn't building high-rises in SF precarious because the ground is soft, with inadequate bedrock? are there also concerns about aesthetics, if i understand?

From what I understand it's about the same as building in Tokyo. With modern technology and proper materials you can build a safe building. But the residential tower currently sinking into the ground indicates that either that isn't actually true or the rules aren't being enforced.

Yeah, that one was a case of taking shortcuts. The bedrock was 200"[1] down but the studies they used said that wasn't necessary. So NOW they are taking steps to introduce new pilons that go all the way down to bedrock and will be braced to the current, faultily installed ones.

[1] Not sure the exact depth, but whatever, they went like half way down to save on money.

I think it's more likely that corners were cut with the Millennium Tower, or the engineers made an error of some kind.

None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock. None of the towers in LA have supports connected to the bedrock. Heck, the Burj Khalifa isn't connected to bedrock. They all use friction piles, and these can work fine if they're done properly.

> None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock

Absolutely not true.

Salesforce Tower, Park Tower and 181 Fremont all being examples of tall buildings in the immediate vicinity that do go to bedrock.

Whether or not friction piles are a good idea is another matter.

friction piles? (trying to look that up)

The top page of Google search results for "friction pile" are all bang on.

thank you

I stand corrected! I got my information from a soil scientist who was explaining that the bedrock wasn't anywhere close to the surface in SF and LA and misunderstood that to mean that none of the towers went all the way down. I stand by my claim that the Burj Khalifa isn't on bedrock, however.

I would expect there to be a viable range of building heights (and building techniques) on the spectrum of single storey house to highrise.

In one notable case, it was decided to not bore all the way down to bedrock, resulting is a sinking building and many lawsuits. More commonly, someone complains that a planned building will cast a shadow, and after spending millions the builders are not allowed to proceed.

The Millenium tower:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/10/san-francisc...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8105988/

Here is someone who goes into detail about the Millennium Tower debacle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph9O9yJoeZY

In short, shortcuts, or more charitably, miscalculations. They really thought they had enough margin to work with but obviously that wasn’t the case.

If that were true, there wouldn't be any building in the New Orleans area more than a couple stories high. Everything south of the lake is built on an alluvial delta.

> you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously

Lots of people disagree with this! There are tons of chemical processing facilities that pop up near my neighborhood, particularly rail car cleaning.

Can smell a different chemical every day depending on what they’re spraying out of the rail cars.

La Porte, TX

Pasadena, TX

Lake Jackson, TX

There are both new subdivisions and new processing facilities going up all the time. ProPublica ran some big articles on it, absolutely skyrocketing cancer rates around here.

Yeah, no kidding, no residential zoning at all? Hard to believe it's CA, but good for them! This will vastly improve the housing situation, if CA has sense enough to keep it this way.

Isn't this misleading? It's not "no zoning" it's specifically required to be low-income or whatever housing. Right?

Mandating one zone is like mandating zero zones in the "fish asks, 'what's water?'" way.

Yeah man I was shocked here in Texas on how much crap I had to go through with the city to build a small workshop in my backyard. It was absolutely ridiculous since it was a permanent structure (stone and wood with concrete foundation). Good for California and I hope other states follow suit. Austin has two failed attempts to set up rezoning in the past 15 years or so, millions of dollars spent on the plans that ultimately failed.

The idea that property rights are totally inviolable doesn't really hold water when you think about it a little more. Stuff like electricity, running water, trash and recycling, roads, parks, schools, public safety, the technology behind your fridge/oven/heating/AC etc. only exist because of decades or even hundreds of years of robust public investment. Without any of that, you wouldn't even have a house!

What is the relation between property rights and services? Paying for consumption versus having property rights is orthogonal.

The relationship is that private property only exists because of a system that enforces it and provides many of the services that lend it value. Whatever you think of this system, the two are deeply intertwined.

And, crucially, the relevant services all have easements that supercede your desires to do whatever you want on your property. You don't have the right to NOT have a powerline going down the street on your property, or a city sewer line, or a sidewalk, etc.

So the next logical step would be that property tax to be extended over all your property, not just real estate. We already pay property tax on cars in Europe, but not yet on bank accounts, clothes on our back, collection of family photos, etc. Probably with you guys, it's already on the way.

Cars are registered property, just like houses. Clothes and family photos are not. How would you tax them without registering titles for them?

I don't want to tax any property, if that is not already obvious. It is already paid and taxed once.

I agree that the distinction between property and other forms of wealth doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of taxation and mostly exists for historical reasons. Especially because the wealthier the individual, the smaller the percentage of their wealth that is derived from property. Small amounts of wealth like clothes and family photos probably shouldn't be taxable in the same way that small amounts of income aren't.

>(you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously)

You can get darn close in some places. I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine. I live in a neighborhood surrounded by biotech labs, which tend not to blow up, though we do joke a bit about being zombie-apocalypse-ground-zero (also, every available developable lot gets sucked up by a new lab project). And of course, in some rural areas, the proximity of farms waste lagoons and low-income neighborhoods is a serious issue.

I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine.