Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

theurbanist.org

115 pointsjseliger150 comments

I'm reminded of a recent housing development that was planned in the city where I live. They wanted to build a few hundred near zero-lot-line single family homes and townhouses. It was on land that was previously zoned industrial, so it required a pretty lengthy approval process.

The neighborhood next to it fought the proposed zoning changes. Too many houses near by, increasing traffic, too close to the creek, etc. Probably more likely they were worried about property valuations changing. Ultimately they got their way, and they never got past the planning stages for that neighborhood.

However, it didn't stop development on the property from continuing. Since it was already industrial, they went ahead and started building an ugly. massive, tilt wall warehouse on the property. It didn't need many reviews and got approvals very quickly.

So now instead of some nice houses, a park, and a few small retail spots to help increase the massively supply constrained housing stock in the area we're going to have a probably busy warehouse with large trucks coming and going constantly deep in the heart of what is otherwise a largely residential area. Nice going, NIMBYs. I bet that warehouse is going to help your property values quite a bit.

Low income housing is associated with more crime, but warehouses are not. The residents were probably satisfied with the result.

The houses planned in the example I gave started at $400k at the time of planning, with the nicest units going for probably close to $700k especially if you took all the builder options.

correlation != causation.

Also, the residents were probably interested in increased property values, just like all home owners are.

Who said anything about low-income housing?

There are some unspoken things you may have to pick up on here. When people start "worrying about property values" that is standard code for something next to them being built/used for lower income people than them.

They were probably worried their 1980s houses next door would look bad in comparison to the much newer and modern houses going up the next neighborhood over.

> The neighborhood next to it fought the proposed zoning changes. Too many houses near by, increasing traffic, too close to the creek, etc. Probably more likely they were worried about property valuations changing.

I see people assuming this a lot but I really think it's in bad faith.

There are plenty of reasons to oppose unbridled development that have nothing to do with property values. Some people like where they live and moved there because of what it was. The idea of an area becoming something totally different might understandably be problematic to them.

The traffic concerns especially resonate with me, as I currently live in a place that has few sidewalks and no effective public transit - previously "walkable" neighborhoods are no more as their density increased and they are flooded with cars.

Maybe as a society we can reasonably decide that such real concerns do not outweigh the benefits that may come if we increase density, but not everybody chooses where to live or what to advocate for based purely on financial concerns, and to dismiss those other concerns does a disservice to their points of view.

> Arguing against the project, Escala’s attorneys claimed that shadows from the new buildings would result in “cancers, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders and mental health [sic].”

In a world with an ironic sense of justice the court would accept their argument and extend it to then requiring Escala's demolition so that their neighbours would not be affected by shadows.

> shadows result in cancers

So all basement rental units are going to be banned, right? /s

Don't give SF NIMBYs any ideas.

SF government does already cancel housing developments over shadows.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-p...

Does any city have a well functioning design review process or are they all captured by incumbents to slow down development?

It is amazing how one person can have a view that developers have all the power and can never be stopped. Others have the view that NIMBY's have all the power and nothing can get developed.

Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not.

But that's exactly the point - not everything ends up with a high rise on it. Clearly, not enough of a percent of "everything" has a high rise, or there would be no housing shortage! You feel there are too many, but if there was no desire for high rises, no one would build them!

~3/4 of Seattle land doesn't really allow new housing:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/city-repor...

> Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not.

I'd like to know what definition you're using for "everything" here because the vast majority of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes and indeed that's mostly what gets built.

This is patently untrue. Cities like LA and SF should have high rises everywhere, but instead they have 1 story homes from 1955 selling for $2 million.

LA and SF seem trapped by their design. Sure they need way higher density, but that would require transit that handles density better than cars on a road. But in order to build high capacity transit they want people to prove that it would be fully utilized and that won't be true if you're servicing areas that are currently all single family homes.

So high density housing can't be build because there is no transit, and high capacity transit can't be built because there is no high density housing.

SF is trapped because there are well-organized community groups in the Western half of the city that will actively block density increase for the same sorts of reasons described here. You can get to higher density incrementally, but not if it’s always stopped at the beginning.

Yes and no. That's certainly a factor, but outside of work, people also tend to stay pretty close to their neighborhoods (I've been able to walk to my grocery store in the last 3 neighborhoods I've lived in). There's also been substantial work to build new mass transit, but housing hasn't increased substantially around the transit stops.

Edit: I'm referring to LA. My impression is SF is small enough that this isn't a big issue.

SF is small, hilly, and consists of many square miles of single family homes; with cars being the predominant way around town.

Less than 2000 feet from the geographical center of town, I live in a fully detached single family home with a huge backyard. My Walkscore of 35 equates to the nearest full line supermarket being a solid mile away, mostly flat, the nearest corner store is 0.8 miles away with 364 feet of elevation changes, too.

:30 minutes between runs of the bus means that all of my neighbors and I tend to drive everywhere. Trust me, this is not ideal.

At approximately 5x5 miles, SF is one of the smallest American cities while having among the worst housing crunch in the world.

SF doesn't need high speed metro. Cheap options like BRT, trams & separated bike/scooter lanes solve most of its variable demand. In SF, the transit vs housing conundrum is trivial. Build transit, and remove height restrictions in a 1000-ft radius in each stops location.

LA is harder to remedy. The city is so catastrophically designed, that any fix will bleed money before it ever stabilizes. At the same time, LA's housing isn't as expensive as SF. So, they could start with focusing on public transportation exclusively. (BRT + park-n-rides seem perfect for LA) and worrying about the zoning later.

I don't mean to nitpick, but why state it as 5x5, when it's far more popular for it to be denoted as 7x7, to the point that one of there local magazines is called 7x7.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7x7_(magazine)

What a coincidence! I had no idea there was an existing phrase for this. I merely eyeballed it from google maps.

I guess all people deal in the same tired cliches. I am not exception.

They don’t even need high rises—change the 1 story 800sq foot bungalow into a 2 story 4 plex and all the units can have more living space than the original and 4x more people can live somewhere—-but that is banned in most places even

Maybe we live in different corners of SF, but I see mostly 3 story buildings in my neighborhood. What's needed are lots more 5 and 10 story buildings.

Considering the land value and demand, neighborhoods like Sunset are extremely low density. SF seems to have a lot of duplexes, even closer in where a two or three level building has two living units in it.

Housing needs to move up one level. The single family homes turn into 4 plex, the small apartments turns into 4-6 story, 6 story turn into towers. It doesn't need to be everything but it needs to be allowed.

Developers can bribe individual politicians but NIMBYs hold all the power. NIMBYs control the votes. Developers don't.

> Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not.

Also this is just false.

That's a contradiction in terms, AFAICT. I was excited to find this in the post:

> Meanwhile, a bill moving forward in the legislature introduced by Representative Amy Walen (D-48, Bellevue) would ban design review for housing projects statewide.

I have this bookmarked to contact my reps and senator to join as co-sponsors.[1]

[1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023...

Two new apartment buildings recently went up where I live. Both have roughly the same number of units inside, and the units are of similar size. One is ugly, and the other blends nicely into the neighborhood, even incorporating some green space and planted trees. There's no reason why the ugly one couldn't have been nicer looking, other than that the developers didn't bother to make the place look more like the surrounding buildings, and nobody required them to do otherwise, even though it would have been a trivial extra cost.

Dogwhistle for NIMBYs though it may be, something akin to "neighborhood character" is a legitimate thing that residents benefit from (including and perhaps especially lower-income residents who would otherwise be priced out), and its loss is absolutely an externalized cost in terms of qualify of day-to-day life. Green spaces, shade trees, etc. are nontrivial in their importance to residents, and the importance of deliberately preserving or expanding those features actually increases as density increases, because otherwise they will be lost and possibly gone forever.

So I don't think it makes sense to be an absolutist about design review. But there do need to be some checks in place to prevent abuse by incumbent property owners. I don't know what those would look like, but I also know that a treeless street walled in with apartment buildings and no local shops or other amenities makes for a sad shitty neighborhood. Housing equity needs to be about the complete lifestyle, not just about making more physical square feet that humans can theoretically inhabit. Otherwise we're just repeating a denser version of the same development mistakes that gave us stroads and suburban sprawl.

Of course, "existing condo sues other condos" isn't quite the same thing. The loss of the view is legitimately an externality, but here I think it comes down to a question of whether the current owners are entitled to their view, or if it was always a temporary benefit that would exist only until other condos were built.

Can you name a functioning example of design review, though? My experience with them is specific to Seattle, and the program absolutely does not work as your comment hopes.

If anything, buildings in Seattle are uglier than their counterparts elsewhere.

Nah, it's all the same https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-develo...

Eh, https://news.theregistryps.com/in-114mm-transaction-holland-... is fairly garish, and somehow passed design review

I mean, I actually think that's pretty cool. I would pass that any day if I were on the review board, especially if that green space in front of it were part of the project plan.

Oh, that’s just a public park that was there before.

of course it would be ideal if everyone could be reasonable and not abuse these processes, but that's obviously not the case. So the decisions seems to come down to maybe having new ugly buildings vs having no new buildings. I think people that need somewhere to live would choose the new ugly building instead of overpaying for old buildings.

If these people wanted to protect their views, there is a way; Seattle allows neighbors to buy a lot’s unused development rights to preserve views.

They just want to do it without spending money.

Seems like using the power of the State to overrule local city preferences is pretty universal, regardless of where someone falls on the left/right scale.

I think a common feature of places I have seen with reasonable construction processes is that they do not have control of construction approval at the city level.

The Boston setup works great. The folks on the Boston Redevelopment Authority make a ton of money on the DL.

Oh did you mean work well for the general public?

Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud?

> Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud?

Though it was recently restructured, the BRA's long history of corruption is extremely well-documented and publicized. I'm not sure what would compel someone to leave a comment like this without taking two seconds to google it. Cynically slinging mud, maybe?

From my limited exposure to Cambridge, MA’s, it seems well balanced to me. As an abutter, I’ve gotten notices of a few different projects nearby and chosen to attend the meeting on each one (mostly to learn in case I wanted to go through the process for our property sometime; in each case, I went having submitted written comments in favor of whatever the neighbors were proposing to do, even in a case where I think what they chose is frankly pretty ugly).

In the course of attending those, I usually got to sit through 3-5 others each time. All of the discussions seemed quite reasonable and almost all were approved as proposed or with only minor changes. When an abutter is making obviously nonsense arguments, they get to say their piece and then the project is approved; when there are genuine concerns about the proposed variance, the design board seems to help the applicant reach a state that balances applicant’s desire to use their property and whatever the underlying reason for the rule they’re seeking relief from is.

In the case of Cambridge, MA, a reasonable stance is kind of required if the city is going to materially grow further. Without it, Cambridge would stagnate if progress was halted by quagmires of bickering. The only real thing of note is larger apartment buildings are largely put in the SE and NW ends of the city.

For those who've never been, Cambridge is one of the densest cities in the entire US -- ~122,400 people over 6.4 square miles of land -- even though it's predominantly three story tenements throughout, and still maintains a 1950s Americana "Main Street USA" running through the core of the city.

-- -----

Though a fair number of the Boston "suburban cities" (save Brookline) have been re-reviewing their zoning and review processes. They all know they're landlocked and out of room with regulations that prevented further building what was already there. It's been nice to see that become increasingly relaxed to allow things to get done.

A more ambitious culture that was any good at engineering megaprojects could just build skyscrapers on top of the Charles and instantly gain a bunch more land area. Might even be easier than building skyscrapers and then tunneling a freeway under them.

There’s plenty of land to be bought and redeveloped. We nowhere near the point where we have to ruin the enjoyment people get from the river and public parks on either side of it.

Design review in general is bad, if only because requiring individual approvals on projects is cumbersome to do for every single thing.

For example, projects compliant with zoning in New York can be built as-of-right and all review processes are administrative (e.g. fire code compliance)

Seattle has a particularly bad one. As far as I can tell it’s a general problem — our light rail expansion has been slowed down by the same tendency to wait until there’s near-unanimous consent.

Edit: I reminded myself elsewhere that SF is also pretty bad as this goes.

Despite the all complaining you'll see on the Urbanist, Seattle's process is pretty good for a big city -- which is probably why it's been one of the fastest growing prior to the Covid exodus from downtown. Seattle has recently had more cranes deployed than any other metro in the US, despite being a much smaller city -- not exactly the bane of the YIMBY.

Design review can slow things down, sure, but they eventually do get built. These buildings will be around for 100+ years, taking a year to get the design right for everyone isn't the end of the world.

And there are a bunch of easy things we could do to get more housing made, with fewer drawbacks like rushing out massive towers, like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods.

> like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods

This is such a middle of the road, easy, low-drawback compromise that I can't believe it's not happened already.

It's a perfectly reasonable proposal, unless you are living next to where a fourplex is being built, and you're worried about "those people" moving in nearby, where "those people" are either "poor" or "not white," depending on how much honest the NIMBY protestors are being.

There are empty lots around the corner from me, and I hope they build as much housing on them as possible.

> "those people" are either "poor" or "not white"

This argument actually does your argument a disservice. And I agree with your argument.

I've talked with plenty of NIMBYs in my neiborhood when an apartment building was going through approval. They aren't racists. And in fact they are often people of color. Their concerns aren't with poor people either. They tend to mention things like parking, traffic, density, character. Instead of immediately calling them racists, I think it's better to take them at their word and build and argument against it from there.

Their concerns aren't with poor people, but with "traffic" and "density" and "character," which... I mean... Okay. Existing houses clearly don't have cars, and were built to replace existing houses, not on empty lots, right?

"I don't mind people being poor, so long as they don't drive on the same roads I do, and there aren't too many of them, and they don't in any way change the status quo as it existed the moment I finished unpacking my moving boxes."

Call it whatever you want, but a focus on property values is always a push for higher economic brackets, never lower.

I hear what you're saying but there's a difference - if a seemingly subtle one - between "their motivations are racist/classist" and "their choices result in effectively racist/classist outcomes[, and they don't care]". Leading with the former puts peoples' backs up and terminates conversations IME.

Only ones ran by authoritarians who don't give two figs about community input. So, old Communist planned cities, modern China, Singapore, etc.

The end result is often much more livable than the endless suburban hellsprawl that we get here.

I'm a big fan of the work some cities have done in zoning "urban villages", and as a homeowner who's also aware of the need for more housing, these strike a pretty reasonable compromise in my mind.

Essentially, pick some areas that are in-demand, have reasonable transit amenities, and are underbuilt. Zone them to be able to build slightly more dense housing. Then as those villages grow more, expand the radius outward and allow more density in the core areas.

I think it's reasonable to not want a highrise next to your house, but a two-story apartment building is easier to digest. Likewise, if you buy a house in one of these urban villages, you're pricing in the reality that something big might be built right next to you.

The radius-outward approach lets buyers put their money where their mouth is: if they never want any increases in density near them, then they can pay to be far from these existing villages. If in the future different locations become desirable for density, the slow radial-out buildup of zoned villages lets homeowners adapt reasonably well.

Urban villages are a nice concept and they offer a doable, gradual way to upzone American cities along existing arterials. I've been a big fan of them on paper. The problem is often the implementation. Urban village zoning can place tough restrictions on market-rate development (they usually have carve-outs for BMR or affordable housing with fewer requirements) which discourage development. Urban villages aren't immune from NIMBY pressure either, especially if they're being built in an area that was previously only zoned for commercial or light industrial uses.

[1] talks about San Jose's urban villages which are often built in formerly light industrial zones and some of the issues with getting them off the ground. It's a shame because I feel like urban villages satisfy the need for upzoning in a way that doesn't completely jar the urban fabric of an area.

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/09/13/why-some-say-san-jose...

Why don't the people who care about their view simply build a taller tower?

This is no different than people in HOAs who try to block solar on the rooftops of their neighbors, or those blocking utility scale solar in their community on land they don’t own, out of aesthetics or their feelings. You can’t negotiate with them, you can only persevere (and hopefully you’re resourced to do so).

Washington addressed this by passing a law that solar panels cannot be prevented by a HOA.

They can put restrictions on the install:

https://artisanelectricinc.com/solar_and_homeowners_associat...

https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=64.38.055

During the South Lake building boom I recall seeing many “construct additional pylons” posters as a tongue in cheek advocacy for the condo buildings complaining about losing space needle views.

As an alternative there’s things like the protected views framework [1] which in London has enshrined which vantage points can see St Paul’s leading to some of the odder skyline architecture like the Walkie Talkie building.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view

In Seattle if you want to put your money where your mouth is, you can legally purchase a parcel’s unused “air rights” (the unused development capacity).

It’s most commonly used in single family areas, where homes buy them from other lots to preserve their views.

You can't. Most cities have very restrictive hight limitations for all the reasons you can read about in this article -- complaints about congestion, traffic, shadows, etc.

So, the title here is a bit misleading. It sounds like the particular lawsuits in question are all being flatly thrown out - the delays are normal parts of the design review process or self-imposed.

> He said Mayor Harrell and Councilmember Dan Strauss are awaiting those findings before introducing legislation that would reform the design review process, including exempting design review from affordable housing projects or projects that contribute to the MHA fund

If the point of the design review process is to prevent architectural oversights or zoning mistakes, then surely it wouldn't matter if the building project payed into the city council's pet fund?

They should either admit it's a dumb process that doesn't actually do anything and get rid of it for all projects, or stop having zoning laws all together if following the letter of the law is still going to put you into a 4-year backseat driving session anyway.

Delayed since 2016… doesn’t seem normal to take 8 years to break ground

Cases from seven years ago are finally being thrown out. That's the delay. They have been blocked for years.

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.

I think the idea is that the margins are better on luxury houses/apts/condos (less plumbing per sq ft, etc), so developers are incentivized to build at lower-density than is optimal for alleviating housing supply issues.

The concept of a "luxury apartment" is an oxymoron. It's a rhetorical tool used by NIMBYs. Those apartments that get labelled this way are barely sufficient to fit a family and cost less than the median house, yet the median house would never be labelled a "luxury house".

How does that not make sense? It's totally possible to have an apartment that's luxurious. Luxury doesn't mean "large" - look at luxury cars, or watches. Most other major luxury products are almost defined by how expensive they are and how they're not meant for families. Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with. A luxury apartment isn't trying to be a house, any more than a luxury house is trying to be a hotel.

That's not to say that most "luxury" apartments would actually qualify as "luxury" in the sense of most other luxury goods, but they are generally nicer than other apartments in the area, or at least newer.

> Luxury is defined by it being more expensive and presumably nicer to be in than the average thing it's competing with.

It's an intentional decision (one often done with malice where the objective is rhetorical persuasion) to run this comparison only with other apartments and not with general housing stock which is the real comparison that should be made. NIMBYs, in a stroke of genius, have managed to brand apartments that can barely fit a family as "luxury", yet the median house which costs more is just the "modest family home" that is being oppressed by the ghastly shadows imposed by said luxury apartments filled with, presumably, the rich elite, because who other than the rich elite could afford to live in "luxurious" dwellings? It is rhetorical trickery top to bottom with the objective of worsening the housing crisis and therefore adding to the suffering in the world.

That is ascribing a lot of collusion and malice to what seems to be a pretty simple situation. I lived in some "luxury" apartments, and they were, legitimately, nicer than the other ones I'd lived in, although not especially "luxurious". But they weren't called "luxury" by some local NIMBY group, it was literally in the name of the company I was writing checks to to pay my rent. It made them sound nicer and fancier than the less nice apartments across the street.

It's trickery, but the banal trickery of marketing a product that you want to sell at a higher price. I doubt they were off sitting in some room laughing about how miserable they were making the world when they named my apartment building. I'm not a family, I don't have one, I don't want a house, I want a nice apartment. Is catering to what I'm looking for "causing suffering in the world"?

I dunno. I lived in a "luxury apartment" for a bit. It had fancier appliances than the cheaper units I lived at. Quartz countertops. All the doors were inside with air conditioned hallways. Climate controlled storage was available on-site. A clubhouse with multiple billiard tables. Fancy pool area with multiple full outdoor kitchen setups. A golf simulator room. A private dog park. Free coffee in the clubhouse/lobby. A gym with nicer equipment than many places I've paid to have gym memberships. Dry cleaning drop off and pickup service on-site. Events put on by the building for poolside movie nights, poker nights in the clubhouse, etc. Other places had dog wash stations, car wash stations, and other amenities.

Luxury apartments can absolutely be luxurious.

Exactly. The fact that NIMBYs like to use "luxury apartments" as a rhetorical flourish doesn't mean they don't actually exist and people don't actually want to live in them.

For the most part developers focus on luxury because they are limited in how much they can build and there is enough pent up demand willing to pay. Also they have rules like minimum sq ft in cities and minimum acreage in suburbs.

This is kind of true, but misses an important point. Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed.

This is to say, if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either.

Generally speaking, you’d expect newer housing to be on the higher end no matter what, because people with less money would tend to buy/rent older housing, in the same way that all but the cheapest new cars are mostly bought by the more well off.

> if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either

San Francisco's problem is "a worker shortage, long waits for permits, restrictive zoning and high fees" [1]. Three out of four of those are direct results of planning rules. The first, related to the high cost of housing.

Issue permits quickly, loosen zoning and make fees low and predictable and you'll see affordable housing.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-is-one-of-the...

>Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed.

Sounds a lot like the reasoning behind farm subsidies, doesn't it?

I'm not sure this is exactly true though. There's plenty of (common) ways to build intentionally expensive housing, whether that's large minimum square footage or fancy shared amenities that up the cost of living there.

There's certainly demand for those things, and it's probably more profitable to saturate the most expensive "high rent" portions of the market first, but it's worth having incentives to also build smaller 1-bedroom places, or complexes without a pool, or without hardwood or stone floors.

The economics of this have been well observed in the car industry. Car makers prioritize luxury cars with higher margins when there is a restriction on how many cars they manufacture (due to supply or legal constraints), but if there is abundance, the lower end of the market is well served because there’s just more overall volume there.

I agree - I'm not trying to imply that no cheaper housing would ever be built if we made it easier to build, but that, as you say with cars, it's more likely to happen later as the restrictions let up. For a community or country, however, there's value in trying to serve people of all economic levels, and not simply serve the needs of the richest first. This is especially true when you're talking about building a city or neighborhood where there's a finite amount of land near a train station on highway.

If you wait for builders to "get around to" building cheaper houses, they'll be off in their own area instead of intermingled in the communities that they likely work and go to school in.

> one of the most active opponents to these new apartment projects is the association of condominium owners at Escala

Sounds like a good target for peaceful extrajudicial activism. (Protests. Preferably loud.)

Seattle notes:

Escala condos were the model for the protagonist's apartment in 50 Shades of Grey

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/fifty-shades-seattle-...

Also across the street from Lola's, where Bezos often has breakfast.

Related article. The build nothing country: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country

"We no longer have the luxury of giving our people a shadow subsidy by freezing their neighborhoods and cities in amber. Spiraling housing costs in any city with real economic opportunity, a floundering energy transition, and the inexorable migration of manufacturing to more development-friendly countries have become so severe that we must dispense with our collective illusion that America will always look like it looked in 1975. Slashing the thicket of red tape that prevent development, and subordinating local interests to the needs of the nation itself, are no longer idle dreams — they are immediate necessities. If we insist on continuing to be the Build-Nothing Country, our once-mighty middle class will sink into a genteel poverty, and someone else will build the future on the bones of our civilization."

And the top comment in this Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/11deckj/maybe_tr...

"Consider how much of our modelling is based on the assumption of voluntary transactions. We say that all have a right to life and liberty, but is that really true?

Every single space on planet Earth is owned by someone. In order to exist, one must occupy space. You can't exist outside the legal boundaries that those owners have every interest in upholding. As recently as a century ago, you could and two centuries ago it was actively encouraged. Any land you could occupy was yours to claim (risky as it may be).

But now... From the very moment of birth you must find a landlord who is willing to let you exist. If that landlord demands a lifetime of labor in exchange, what choice do you really have? If no landlord voluntarily chooses, despite incentives to the contrary, to charge much less, what are you but a slave? There isn't an easy solution, we all share this world and it is impossible to live truly independently...

But the solution is certainly not to demand a lifetime of toil at the whim of a handful of owning families in exchange for the right to exist. All the while creating profits that help them sustain their power over you."

I don't think this is true. The actual raw amount of land on plant earth is abundant, it's just that much of it is unattractive to modern humans due to not being hooked up to internet/electricity and not near interesting things like shopping or concerts.

I did a quick search and found many articles where states are encouraging people to homestead in unoccupied land as a form of development. (I will grant that this article was last updated 2014 and probably some things have changed, but it's hard for me to believe that it went from 100% to 0% over that time.)

https://www.cnbc.com/2010/11/16/7-Towns-Where-Land-is-Free.h...

I think it's actually really easy to go out into the middle of nowhere, have no master and claim some land, but this isn't really attractive as a way to live (actually homeless people do it downtown and even then it's kind of tolerated). People from 200 years ago didn't have a problem with it though...

> I think it's actually really easy to go out into the middle of nowhere, have no master and claim some land

Until you get arrested after someone saw you squatting/building/hunting/farming/whatever on some vacant field owned by some private entity or the BLM.

The solution to “landlord demands a lifetime of labor” is to fix the shortage. Permit more construction and landlords will have to compete for tenants. We could easily build a hell of a lot more housing than we have today: https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/1594939920166141952

Hell, there are cheap vacant houses out there right now, they just aren’t in the healthy labor markets where the working class need to live.

>Every single space on planet Earth is owned by someone.

I mean technically yes, but also not really. There are so many places in the US that are insanely cheap to live. You can buy a whole house in many small American cities and live the dream on a McDonalds wage, you could even pay it off early if you were frugal. I can find you plenty of houses in the US for sale right now for < $20,000. You can get multiple acres of space in West TX for < $2000. There is a lot of land available for people who want to build a life for themselves.

Your argument only applies to fancy coastal cities where there is a large pool of wealthy (most people working in CA are in the top 1-2% income of the world) people competing for the same space. This leads to obvious questions such as: does everyone have a right to live in the same space? Should property rights exist at all in places where many people want to live?

IMO, it's not slavery if people are trying to live in a place by choice.

We should, of course, do everything we can to build more housing and provide space for as many as we can.

The title might lead some to believe these planned buildings have affordable housing, I don't believe that's accurate. Instead they will pay the city for the right not to have any affordable units, hence the $39 million.

If I'm correct, it appears that all but three of the properties (listed in the table early on) are in Belltown.

Anyone else notice that? Damn, that's embarassing.

Irrespective of any economic or legal incentives or factors here, this comes down fundamentally to a lack of social trust in north america.

It doesn't happen the same way anywhere else in the world like it does in US&Canada.

People don't care about other people. "I got mine, ** yours."

It's a problem without an easy solution.

This rings so true. Simplistic but can explain most things that are wrong in the US. For an immigrant I see this pattern everywhere from Corporates, Housing, Immigration, Homelessness making friends. Selfishness is in the fabric of society here.

How can you build social trust when there is no commonality with your neighbor? Without some commonality of principles how can I trust that any social contract would be recognized or understood. How do people flourish in that environment?

How can there be "no commonality" when you're both human? Like oh no, these people have different arbitrary preferences to me and so we've got nothing in common?

And what is this "commonality" supposed to be?

Not everybody wants new tenements in their nice neighborhood.

Classy. At some point that 'nice neighborhood' was low-density farmland or widely spaced residential that no doubt didn't want to see new packed urban housing in their nice neighborhood. If you live in a city housing around you will steadily increase in density. You need to live with that, you own your property - you don't own everyone else's.

These lawsuits are an excellent refutation of your premise. I don’t want tenements anywhere near where I live. And I will work as hard as necessary to prevent their installation.

These are million dollar condos, you insensitive clod.

Only on the top floors. They’re Section 8 below that.

This is a tongue in cheek explanation for destruction of the urban middle class. Lowest class gets free rent, the rich buy the luxury condos, meanwhile middle class bread and butter workers flushed out of the city.

I have a condition that makes me unable to understand Internet sarcasm unless it is preceded by an upside-down exclamation mark.

Yes, only the top 90%.

Not everyone wants wealthy assholes either, but unfortunately they tend to be able to pay more lawyer fees.

You can choose to have affordable housing, or you can choose have a homeless encampment. The poor people don't just disappear.

Not everyone wants NIMBYs in their nice neighborhood, but we end up having to tolerate them. The way state-level political winds are going, it looks like you'll have to tolerate things you dislike, as well.

No I won’t. Lawsuits like this are the proof. I don’t want bus lines, walkable cities, or section 8 in my nice quiet community and neither does anybody else who lives here.

Democracy has spoken.

The lawsuits exist because democracy spoke and the NIMBYs didn't like what it had to say.

The builders are operating under the laws of the community. The NIMBYs are abusing the legal system in an attempt to subvert the will of the people.

Sorry, the nature of local, county, state, and federal jurisdictions won't tolerate some inevitable voter takeover even if most people in a state seem to vote for some socialist WEF policy or another. It's one of the differences between federalization and what other countries have. You can fool the voters but they're getting sharper and they're becoming conspiracy theorists too now, for good reason.

It seems you've been posting every two minutes for too long to have noticed how wrong you are. Calm down with the nonsense labels and conspiracy foolishness, maybe take a break from posting to touch nature.

The State of California recently revoked the rights of quite a few smaller jurisdictions to set their own zoning laws because they abdicated that right by refusing to set zoning laws that allowed for new development. So...

Voters at every level pretty consistently vote for more development, seeing clearly that development beats homeless encampments, and that a rising tide lifts all boats. The obstructionist lawsuits come from sub-jurisdictional groups like the residents of one particular building in this case. Federalism doesn't apply here any more than "socialism" does.

Appeals to imaginary international conspiracies aside, this is pretty simple: in many areas we have, and will continue to have, more people who need places to live than we have places for them to live. Either we build more places, or we deal with the consequences of failure. People abusing the legal system to stick their fingers in their ears until the problem moves a few blocks or a city or a state away are running out of time, because the tricks are seen clearly.

Every selfish NIMBY is saying much the same thing: any and all development that led to the point where I could move here and buy my place is well and good and the natural order of things, and every bit of construction that happens after I close on my property is horrible and evil and will irreparably damage the character of the neighborhood. Of course, anyone who has lived in the area just a few years more could say the same thing about the freshly-minted NIMBY, all the way back to those who lived here 500 years ago.

It's obvious nonsense.

California is a model for what other states want to avoid doing. And if you’re admitting that you wish to use bribed politicians to enact WEF policies where’s the conspiracy theory?

People don’t want to become California and will work to prevent their states from resembling it.

>California is a model for what other states want to avoid doing.

Ah yes, having the largest GDP in the country and one of the highest in the world is certainly something to avoid.

I wish for elected politicians to do what we elected them to do, which does not at all involve bribery or globalist conspiracies.

I'll grant that California is in some ways a negative model. For example, I hate that the NIMBY capture that has been a factor in driving prices up in California has started to show up in Texas.

Oh yeah, that's another bad assumption you made. I live in Texas, a place people often move to from California in part because it's growing rapidly, since NIMBYs haven't yet captured the legal system here. Of course, it's fun to see people who moved here within the last couple of years speak up at city council meetings against new development, because they're trying to "California my Texas" by bringing their NIMBY nonsense with them. They struggle to explain why the house that was built for them within the last three years is good, while the new houses are bad, of course.

And yet the Escala was built with 269 units anyway. Tear it down, I guess?

Or stop the YIMBY nonsense and let's build enough places to live for people who need to live somewhere.

Migration is about to stop completely very soon. We won't need new urban housing.

This is an important check to developer greed. You have to be able to maintain quality of life with new development.

This is a bad-faith argument. I have heard it throughout council hearings on housing in my city. NIMBYism itself is a prime example of greed and I don't see how it's any different.

> This is a bad-faith argument.

You can't just declare this, you have to say why.

> I have heard it throughout council hearings on housing in my city.

The fact that you hear it all the time might mean that a lot of people actually believe it.

Shouldn't Escala then be torn down for the very reasons they're arguing against the new construction?

Why do you have to be able to "maintain quality of life?" How do you define "quality of life?" For whom must this be maintained?

The quality of life for the people who currently have no place in the city to live is pretty bad, building 3000 more units will dramatically improve QoL for them, so a net gain regardless of the negative impact on the 269 existing tenants of Escala, right?

The federal government no longer allows "those solar panels are unsightly" to be considered for quality of life, so there's some progress. This shadow nonsense sounds like it's being rejected, too.

Bring on the developer greed, so long as they don't cut corners.

I am just curious why we are allowing foreigners to buy homes in the US when we have a housing crisis. Here in New England, Chinese/Russians came in and started buying homes in the past two decades. Not only that, we end up educating their children for free in our public schools. Why? They don’t even let our companies operate in their country.

Edit: they should not be able to invest in real estate in the US if US citizens are not afforded the same rights in their county. Reciprocity. It’s not asking for much.

You could just choose to not have a housing crisis, you know? It's not the foreigners fault that you insist on outlawing construction.

I’m against parking money in other countries that result in empty homes.

Home ownership should be only for people who are permanent residents (they can own up to 10 years or until they receive citizenship, to cut down on loophole abusers) or citizens.

Why should any country let mega rich people from other countries (let’s be honest if you have money in 3rd world country you’re most likely doing something sketchy.. otherwise you’d move here to work as a swe or something) who have no intention of living here.

Source: I’m a naturalized US citizen originally from 3rd world, grew up poor and I know income inequality there it’s far worse than what exists in US. I’m against dirt bag tier rich people from taking advantage of our system. We have plenty people doing that here already lol.

I would not say anything if they allowed US citizens to do the same in their country.

they don't pay taxes for the school systems?

I would simply avoid having a housing crisis by allowing people to build more housing. Seems pretty win-win to me.

Allowing the foreigner from a country with no reciprocal permission for us to build in their country works against this though. They're sucking capital out of their country which in the example used of Russia/China would build several more housing units and instead building fewer units in the US. Couple this with lack of reciprocity and what you did was a relative loss in housing potential.

We need to be forcing reciprocity to make sure we're actually maximizing available housing.

>I would simply avoid having a housing crisis by allowing people to build more housing. Seems pretty win-win to me.

The housing crisis is primarily driven by wealth inequality and poor financial decisions by the US government. Not building is a secondary problem.

I'm all for building more and denser housing, but if all the units are snatched by banks and wealthy investors, its not going to make the country more affordable.

You had me until you started complaining about educating children. Who cares where they come from? Feed 'em and learn 'em.

Public schools = public goods. That’s all goodwill built over decades in many communities. Why are we just giving that away for free to people with interests against the US? Nope.

Because with free education, you bend their interests toward that of the US.

Whats your alternative? Force immigrant children into an undereducated class? Lets see how that works for you in 2 generations.

Shouldn't they have free housing too? Shelter is even more important than education.

I'd argue it'd be best for the billions of world children if the USA housed, fed, and educated them all. Every blessed one of them. The ones with parents rich enough to buy homes in foreign countries aren't probably the most needy amongst them of our help, either.

In your goofy provocation, their housing is assumed. That's what you're caterwauling about, yea?

And yes, all people deserve shelter, education, and food.

In the thread we're under:

>You had me <referring about foreigners not being able to buy housing> until ... education ...

The 'provocation' was that their housing WASN'T even available to be bought, but that they should get an education. How do you consider it 'assumed' when the whole 'provocation' was the guy agreed they shouldn't be able to buy it?

Why are you so opposed to children being fed, sheltered, and educated? Im not even suggesting going out and American Exceptionalisming the fuck out of them, like you are trying to make this sound.

Children do not have national interests. I insist this is a matter of basic decency and I am frankly surprised that anyone would act like this is controversial.

Because we're better than them. We're a free market and that is that. We don't judge people by where they come from.

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