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Comment by orange_county | Hacker News Reader

The fact that we need tech companies to build housing on behalf of the city is a huge policy failure.

The city should have just rezoned many parts of the city a long time ago for mixed used. But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. It’s only because of new RHNA mandates that they are required to zone for new housing. This is going to be a win for NIMBYs.

I hope the cities involved will rezone other areas especially in single family neighborhoods such that we can get more housing when interest rates drop. There is a lot of demand still for housing and there are policy tools that can be leveraged to encourage more housing to be built.

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> But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing.

Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

>If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.

covid restriction refugees

A lot of people left big cities and states with heavy handed covid restrictions. Many came to the state where I reside and others.

Have you had children, or do you plan to have children?

>Have you had children, or do you plan to have children?

Yes, I'm sure there's a gotcha in there, so go ahead.

Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.

>Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them.

That's not accurate. The birth/death rate is up-side down (more people die than are born), so they can live in a previously occupied house like I do. Also, people who retire often move to a lower cost of living city. I'm not against gradual, planned growth, but BUILD BUILD BUILD, like people in the Bay Area seem to want isn't what I would want either. It's happening in my city too and it sucks.

>Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town.

I suspect they'll live where they want to and/or find work. I don't really have much say in that once they're adults.

>If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.

There's a big difference between gradual, natural, planned expansion and rapid, explosive expansion. I want the former, not the latter. I suspect the main reason of the overpopulation of the Bay Area is directly related to the tech companies that reside there. Maybe they should spread out their workforce some more.

Can you provide any examples where rapid growth has occurred in the Bay Area in the last 20 years?

>Can you provide any examples where rapid growth has occurred in the Bay Area in the last 20 years?

Sorry I meant what the people outside the Bay Area want. It hasn't, but that seems to be because the residents are blocking it.

For me, it seems people who don't live in the Bay Area want the people in the Bay Area to build "affordable housing," which really means "subsidized housing," which is subsidized by the residents that live there. I mean call me crazy but the people who live there don't want more building and they certainly aren't going to pay higher taxes to subsidize housing for more residents that they don't want in the first place.

Since zoning and all that is controlled by the mayor and city council, the only people the mayor and city council are beholden to is the residents, not people who want to be residents. I don't think affordable housing has a snowball's chance in hell of happening there.

They could come to my city, they're building like crazy here, road capacity be damned. It's been bumper to bumper during rush hour like never before. They're building a 1.5x0.5 mile strip of packed condos on a 2 lane road right by my kid's school. Those condos are right across the street from an even larger tract of apartments. That will be fun.

If the town population doesn't grow (100 deaths each year, 100 births, equal immigration and emigration) then new houses aren't needed. Sure you have kids needing a new home, but then your parents die, freeing up an old home

The reason we need more housing is

1) Concentration of living in certain areas more than in the past

2) Smaller households (more common to have a family unit of 2 parents and 3 kids being divorced, with both parents wanting a house large enough to keep the kids on alternating weekends)

3) Increasing population (both from longer lives, more births, and net immigration)

> covid restriction refugees

Is there any data that suggests such a loaded term is appropriate? It seems more likely that people were taking advantage of the new economic benefits of remote work.

On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?

Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them.

Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area.

One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc.

Then you have people just trying to get a cut.. https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e22500...

This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert"

Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too"

Sick!

Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.

I don't know why you lump NIMBY with Boomer. I think 99% of people don't want new constructions next to their properties.

What is your assessment outside of the unfortunate Boomer mis-reference?

Your argument had some juice up until the "boomer" slur. Are we still doing that?

K, that was admittedly excessive. My life experience up to now (btw definitely Boomers+Xers who display identical entitlement and offensive conduct) What say now?

Why do folks downvote mea culpas. Seems incredibly obtuse

I regret the use of "you/you" pronouns, at no point was I referring to you. Was more of a rhetorical fluorish gone amok

* MUH investment

> Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them. Some of the same people will protest any developments near them

Cross referencing this must be tricky

Right?

If I'm role-playing as a boomer, I just cant understand how I dropped out in grade 10, got the good job at a local factory over a handshake and an all-expenses paid 3-martini lunch the moment I expressed interest in applying, and got a full pension plus zero or close to zero education costs and I have like 3 cars between me, wife, daughter, vacation at least 1x/year, and protested every subsequent development after I bought my house outright for $50k, and now my daughter needs to leave (she's 18, we HAVE to kick them out at that point?!) and she has nowhere to buy that doesn't rely upon me since she has no money and I fomented this monster?

Why me, Lord?

Edit: and even if I purchase nearby properties for fun and profit, she definitely can'tafford what I demand to be paid for rent in exchange for transferring partial use of the property that I aquired purely because I was stupidly financially empowered to have all these opportunities cuz my dad fucked my mom at the right historical timeframe to make sure that the content of mybirthdate took precedence over the content of my character or intentions or worthiness

Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits. And then the fights amongst city council - ugly at times in social media (Nextdoor). Nextdoor may be ugly itself but sometimes it exposes the fault lines very clearly since you see the same people parroting the lines over and over, after some time you just understand their tilt without anyone having to tell you so.

And this is not just Cupertino. I read stories from Saratoga, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. Wherever you get big money, some people get corrupted, and they don't work in the interest of the society. I mention San Jose but that is an example of city so big that neighborhood complaints can be killed quite easily since mobilizing the entire city to fight in behalf of one corner is not easy, so that's where the cities end up winning - they can do whatever without worrying "much" about the residents. But smaller cities can fight back and IMO they should until they get delivered what was promised.

Why is it the responsibility of a developer to provide public benefits? That's the responsibility of the city. The developers should just be building the actual housing, which the cities by and large do not allow at all.

The benefits are essentially bribes to the citizens and planning departments.

It would be irritating if someone bribed you to be able to do something, then once they did it the check bounced!

Indeed. It's especially irritating that such bribes are necessary to get approval to build anything in the first place.

On one hand? Yes.

On the other - real estate/physical locations are the one thing that fundamentally is limited and where distance and control really, really matter for a specific outcome or circumstance to exist.

Rural Idaho, little/no competition, no need for heavy rules to avoid it turning into complete anarchy.

Manhattan? Completely different story.

And there is only one manhattan (and only one of any given spot in rural Idaho, too, but a lot of any given spots).

The way these things tend to work in the cities is heavy rules, and then you have to apply for exceptions. Often, the rules are ‘no, you can’t build without an exception’.

So then, it’s all about making a good case you need an exception. The ‘benefits to the community’ is the ‘bribe’ as to why your good case should get the exception.

It’s hard to see what the alternative is, frankly, when you look at the on the ground reality - there is rarely a rule anyone could write that wouldn’t cause massive problems if applied naively in these dense environments.

And if the people living somewhere want to reduce/avoid certain types of problems, what else are they going to do?

And someone can say ‘fuck ‘em, they don’t get to say no’ - but most people saying that will very much change their tune when they’re on the other end of the bargain.

Manhattan got the way it is today precisely because it DIDN'T use to have all of these restrictive rules prohibiting development. Indeed if those rules had been around a century or more ago, it wouldn't be the #1 city in the country. Chicago would be.

You've got it precisely backwards. The excessive rules are harmful, period, and are significantly hurting housing affordability. The lack of them is what made this city great back in the day (and it's still coasting on that inertia, though only growing more and more unaffordable over time).

The most recent dumb rule that was tacked on recently essentially made it impossible to build new hotels* (see https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-... ). Not a single hotel has been granted permission since that law passed several years back. Now add on top the AirBnb ban and we're making it significantly more expensive to visit NYC, which is hurting our tourism industry. All for completely dumb reasons. Build more hotels, build more housing, let the city thrive.

* This law was passed not because it's a good idea, but because of captured interests, namely, the existing hotel operators who didn't want further competition. It's anti-competitive, not "a good law that you need in a dense city" as you are characterizing things.

None of what you’re saying changes anything or conflicts with what I’m saying, near as I can tell?

Of course the rules are there to maintain the status quo?

Do you think they don’t know that?

The rules won’t change until long after it’s started to be unsustainable either. That’s normal.

The only people who are going to pre-emptively change the rules to make things better are the folks who are competing to be the next ‘big thing’, not the already big thing.

The already big thing is trying to not lose what they already somehow got. They’re going to be fundamentally conservative unless they’re very risk tolerant, which is rare.

New Jersey is much more friendly zoning and taxation wise than New York, for example.

I think the reference here, is to a certain amount of park land, trails, etc in a large project, and some low income housing.

Right, none of that is the responsibility of the developers to provide. That's for the city to provide.

What's going on, however, is that California has hamstrung its ability to charge its existing citizens the costs of the services they are incurring thanks to Proposition 13, hence why expensive taxes, fees, and required public improvements are levied on new development. The wealthy older people who already own property (and aren't paying much for it) are being subsidized by the younger generation, and are paying out more than their fair share.

> Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits.

I live in the state capitol of Washington. I could not agree more. What is even more galling is how open it is. Because I've done a lot with public services here, I have a lot of people on my FB feed who are involved in city politics, and several of them are close personal friends with many of the larger developers in the city. Not just socializing and meet and greets, but "We're going on vacation to Vegas together" and such. And then people wonder why our city is so "developer-friendly".

The people who live there and vote clearly don’t want it, or they’d change the zoning?

I think what you’re saying is ‘people in general want to be able to live there but currently can’t afford to do so, and those jerks who live there won’t budge on making it happen’.

Which, okay?

You’ve completely skirted the question with most of this comment

> Whose goals are considered "democracy" here

The people who actually live in the area where decisions are made. People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

You're missing the point. The people in the area often do support building new housing, they just don't want it where they are. This is a fundamental paradox, as it has to be built _somewhere_, but seemingly none of the people who agree there is a problem want to disadvantage themselves to fix the problem.

Anyways, can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"? Seems like a hysterical reading of the situation.

> Can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"?

Yes, please do say this.

If anything in the system is tyranny-adjacent, it's zoning. Not to say I am against zoning holistically, but zoning is others telling you what you can and cannot do with your property. To characterize a liberalization of zoning as tyrannical is a great inversion.

He's not missing the point - everyone else is.

There's only so much highly desirable real estate. There are only so many beachfront properties. There's a shitload of millionaires out there. There's an assload of multi-millionaires out there. There's quite a few billionaires out there now.

If you make $100,000, you're not living on a beachfront house in Miami. You're not going to live in Downtown San Francisco in a nice home.

That's life. Life's not fair.

Too bad.

Poor people are going to have to reconcile that they can't afford to live in the cities. They're going to have to be content with the suburbs, because the affluent people want to live in the cities, and they don't want people around them that are going to bring down their property values, period.

Those affluent people, especially in places like NYC / SF / LA don't have the goddamn moral courage to just say, "I don't want a buncha poors around me, doing poor people shit, that's going to reduce the value of $4,500,000 home. This isn't just my house, it's an investment, and I cannot and will not allow you to tank my investment just because you want to live where I live."

Now that's the truth.

People should accept it, because you're not gonna change it; you're not gonna change it because it's human nature and you aren't going to change human nature without a lot of pain and suffering.

There's entirely too many people in Big Tech that don't want to accept this. "If we just XXXXX, we can fix XXXXX!"

No you can't. Evolution fixes these issues, not your money, not your regulations. We have to evolve into better angels - there are no shortcuts.

Can we just stop with the nonsense about "people wanting to live where the rich people live" as if a good majority of the people who are fighting for affordable housing aren't people who _already_ live there and are fighting against being priced out of where they grew up?

Your only response is an absurd defeatist appeal to human nature and trite clichés like "life isn't fair", ignoring that legislation is very capable of addressing this particular issue. That is currently the plan, and the plan is being executed by the state of California. If you think individual rich homeowners are more powerful than the state, then I think it might be you who is out of touch with the state of reality.

Wonderful, but if you make $100,000 you can't afford a nice house in the suburbs of SF either.

So in this version of NYC / SF / LA, where do the service workers live? Who tends bar? who runs security at the door? who's sitting at the reception desk? Who cooks the food? Who delivers the food? who teaches the kids? who cleans the toilets? Who roasts the coffee? who delivers the Amazon packages?

Those people (clearly you are not one of them) need to live somewhere. They don't need to live in a luxury condo in downtown, but they do need to live somewhere, and if they all need to live in Yonkers / Fresno / Riverside to afford rent, they're not going to commute into your city of aristocrats.

we're seeing this in sf, with restaurants unable to hire, so self-sevice kisoks aren't a choice for the restaurant to use, they're sometimes the only option available. which is neat if you have a technology fetish, but sometimes we want a human person to talk to who understands something that hasn't been programmed into the computer.

Seems like the government and residents blocking use of land that neither of them owns it more tyrannical than building a new housing development.

> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?

Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?

Fortunately we don't just have cities: we also have counties, and states.

Every city needs teachers, firefighters, service industry workers, etc., and if they're not providing a place form them to live that they can afford with their current incomes, then they're not a real living, breathing city: they're Disneyland.

The state is well within her rights force cities to build housing for the people that are required to keep that city running, rather than externalizing their problems and forcing these folks to overflow into neighboring cities and endure inhumane commutes.

The ones that were here first.

One way that I've seen this explained (not that I necessarily agree with it or care to defend it) is that the city somehow has an obligation to _future_ residents. Or put another way, to a minimum level of sustainability as a going concern.

Another commenter framed this as ensuring that essential service workers can afford to live in the area.

The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.

>The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.

That's not democracy though. Can you give an example of where the minority overrode the tyranny of the majority in a democratic society? The major changes in the US regarding tyranny (civil rights act, 13th, 14th, 15th amendment) were due to the majority forcing change and overriding the tyranny of the minority.

The residents who own property exert a far greater say on policy than those who don't, which is more a plutocracy than a democracy.

No problem about that. But they should never complain about homelessness and congestion after voting against the solutions.

In this case the democratic model doesn’t really work because the people who need the development to happen are people who will need a house in about 20 years. Most of those people are too young to vote, so are not represented by the democratic process.

If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.

I don't believe in giving power to local governments to do that.

there's a power imbalance between the homeowners and the renters. i'd be curious to see the makeup in the bay area of city council members who own vs rent. also there's discretionary zoning in the bay area which is a large driver of the problem imo.

the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.

It’s because the renters usually don’t actually care to the extent of voting. They’re not invested because they literally aren’t invested.

And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do.

i'm a renter and i vote like hell. so do my friends, who are also renters.

a homeowner can sell their house if they don't like something. it's more of a PITA but this is simply a false statement: "And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do. "

not to mention, as a renter in a tight renter market, it's very hard to up and leave and find some place in a similar budget.

If you look at the stats, you’re very much outliers.

And if you’ve ever owned before (I have) and also rented (I have), the difference in ability to move and sensitivity to market conditions is dramatically in renters favor the vast majority of the time.

No renter is going to be looking at losing hundreds of grand trying to move in a downturn, for instance. Or like in ‘08, being stuck for years in frozen real estate markets or losing hundreds of grand or more.

No renter is ever going to get hundreds of grand in cash money on sale either, if things go well.

Just the paperwork involved in selling (let alone the other logistics) takes longer and is more involved than renting a new place, even in the tightest markets!

Ownership has its privileges and its costs.

yeah i'm aware of all that. i'm in the process of moving and have thought on a few occasions that i'm glad i also don't have to worry about selling a house. i wasn't saying that it's not hard to move for an owner, was directly responding to your statement: "which is something the owners can’t do."

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a real estate slump. People forget.

I expect over the next year or two you’ll see what I mean. If you thought ‘thank god I wasn’t owning’ before, wait until the bankruptcies start and the market is forced to ‘move’ again.

Orders of magnitude more pain than most people even think possible until they’ve lived through it.

homeowners (some of whom are corporations, or use their home as a rental business and not a domicile) vs (renters and homeless). Even if homeless people don't directly get to move into new housing, it still benefits them. I think if the homeless were mobilized to vote, they could work with renters and become the majority.

Being elected in a democratic way doesn't necessarily make something moral.

Nobody wants to pay taxes as well, but unfortunately we need a government to solve coordination issues, where not all parties can be satisfied.

When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?

Homeowners are more politically active than renters.

It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.

The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

> The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state

So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?

Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.

No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process.

Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)

And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway.

Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.

Because the nation-state is constantly using the democratic process to decide which powers should be delegated to which part of the hierarchy.

This thread is about that abstract process, and indeed whether "housing crisis" is enough justification to start overriding local autonomy.

For example, in California the state government recently restricted the power of local governments to regulate ADU construction. This was a case of state democracy overriding local decisions because of their negative externalities when taken in aggregate.

Basically the whole point of a government hierarchy is to resolve the multi-agent coordination problems that routinely occur. The government is the equivalent of the mob boss in the prisoner's dilemma, and without it we will devolve into a tragedy of the commons.

I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority?

I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it.

That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.

Because "residents" is a group defined by perspective. If the residents in a city don't want something, but the residents of a neighborhood do, which has authority? What about residents of a city compared to a state?

How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there?

What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.

But it's not all residents, or even most residents. It's _some_ residents who are overrepresented in city governance. Many, many people in the Bay Area want more homes built.

If they actually voted, it wouldn’t be an issue - assuming their votes aligned with what they’re saying they want interest wise.

For some reason, it rarely seems to though.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Most of the actually important housing policy isn't decided by direct vote, it's handled by an unelected committee which uses in-person feedback provided during open sessions to make decisions. A quick review of The Discourse turns up plenty of evidence that these types of arrangements often result in uneven participation in local planning decisions across demographics. If we want house policy to be "democratic" we need to consider how to plausibly canvas the local community and balance their interests against the well-being of the wider region.

If there was a large portion of the electorate that organized and wanted more housing, all those other changes would happen, as the controlling elected officials would be replaced.

I’ve seen it. Rent control too. It’s rare though, as the segment of the population who does has historically poor turnover and is chronically confused and disorganized.

Pro ‘keep it the same’ groups (and pro landlord groups) tend to be composed of retired professionals with decades of experience generating (and wading) through red tape, and have no issues rallying the most consistent voting block in any area - retirees who don’t want their largest assets and (literal) roof over their heads screwed with.

What you’re talking about is that the governing structure gets setup to diffuse blame and obfuscate responsibility so activists don’t have any obvious individuals they can easily attack. That’s by design, but not the ‘problem’.

Not the same thing.

I don't find your "if people wanted it, it would happen" argument very convincing, nor do I understand how the situations you describe in your second and third paragraphs are (a) different from each other and (b) different from what I'm arguing is undemocratic. As far as I can tell it seems that we agree that different interest groups have different capabilities for manifesting their political preferences in local government. Is there an actual difference between our viewpoints? Like are you arguing that people don't actually want more housing? Or are we just quibbling over semantics?

I’m arguing that the voting blocs who actually show up consistently don’t want more housing, yes. At least anywhere near where they live.

Because when you get down to the details, more housing would;

a) cost many of them a lot of money (they get income from renting out, and higher rents == more money) or hurt the value of their assets (more stock == less value for the house(s) they own).

b) lead to significant quality of live impacts they don’t want. More traffic, busier stores, more noise, crowded parks, more crime, more expensive cost of living, etc.

The gov’t structures follow that and produce the outcomes they want, and insulate them from blowback. Or the people in charge get replaced until someone does do that. The gov’t structure is the symptom, not the cause.

Grandma doesn’t like looking like the bad guy. Grandma wants to be comfortable. Grandma’s kids long ago moved out and live somewhere else, so fuck all the younger folks making noise and keeping her up at night. They should go live somewhere else and be someone else’s problem.

At least until the demographics have shifted enough that another group is able to tell the retirees to shut up and sit down. Which always happens eventually.

It’s pretty obvious frankly if you watch how things play out.

Ok I think we fully agree on pretty much every point. Cheers!

Because we live in a country and state, not just a city.

And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want.

E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents.

The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city).

Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them.

So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.

Think long and hard before you start taking that line - unless you want Trump or Biden or whoever next is in line (or Congress) being able to define your local zoning laws.

Nothing good is going to come from that the vast majority of the time.

Local zoning should be local so costs/side effects/benefits are associated with decisions as closely as possible.

Otherwise, it would be trivial to penalize to the point of almost destroying entire states or regions because they were on the wrong side of some ideological line on another topic. Which would then be paid back 4 or 8 years later, of course.

I'm not taking any line, I'm describing the basic principles of representative democracy.

The US is a little bit of an outlier in having a federal system so there are some limits to what Congress can do, but there aren't to what a state can do, and some of our states (like CA and NY) are the size of countries themselves.

I'm not saying the majority of zoning decisions should be taken at the state/country level -- that would be ludicrous simply from an organizational standpoint.

I'm simply describing that states are perfectly free to override local decisions whenever necessary, with full democratic legitimacy. How do you think the interstate highway system got built?

The US is a constitutional republic - currently, the federal gov’t could not do it.

However, almost every state already sets aside the level of control municipalities have explicitly.

Here is Texas’s

[https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/SOTWDocs/LG/htm/LG.211.ht...]

The US is one of a kind, as is every country I’ve run across.

Typically, zoning rules are the way they are (everywhere, and they are almost everywhere) because the benefits of them outweigh the perceived costs for the folks in power over that locality.

Changing them is not taken lightly because a lot of money is at stake and disruption is high.

Lots of people complain of course. But money talks, and bullshit walks.

I’m curious when things will switch from talk to actual change. Next 5ish-10ish years maybe as the boomers start aging out?

How do you think the interstate highway system got built?

> How do you think the interstate highway system got built?

The federal government appropriated a ton of land whether local people liked it or not.

Obviously the government didn't want to provoke massive unrest so it did some negotiating, but at the end of the day it did take whatever land it wanted, regardless of local opinion.

Also, regarding states ceding control of zoning to localities -- of course. That's just practical. But what the state gives, the state can take too. I'm talking about basic democratic principles, not what happens to be current law.

Nope - and it isn’t clear the federal gov’t even could. There would be hell to pay if they tried. The constitution allows some wiggle room, but ‘eminent domaining’ large swaths of state land is definitely not one of them! It might even cause a civil war, frankly.

you might find this interesting [https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1996/federal-ai...]

There was widespread national (bipartisan) support for it, a clear national military/security need, and it took the political capital of a very popular and trusted president to make it happen - and continuing support by his predecessors. Over 20+ years.

The federal gov’t basically proposed the overall plan, helped co-ordinate between states, and funded about half of it with the states using a cost share program (eventually increasing to 90% in some cases). The states did the actual building (and continue to do the maintenance too!) and things like right of ways, specific plans, eminent domain were handled by them.

No federal forced appropriation I’m aware of. Just co-operation and money.

I appreciate the details, and I'm not an expert on the history of the interstate.

But for the purposes of my argument, it's irrelevant whether the states did the eminent domain or the federal government. My point is this whole thread is that a higher power did, and localities couldn't do whatever they wanted. Your town couldn't veto the interstate passing through it.

And when the federal government is doing the planning and incentivizing with federal funds, the question of whether the eminent domain was "really" done by the federal government or the states is somewhat academic.

Again, my original point still stands completely: as a general democratic principle, when a higher level of government makes policy that conflicts with lower levels, the higher level wins. The US federal system happens to have more limits around this than most other democracies, but it's still a general principle.

The only reason the cities can do what they do now is because they are expressly granted the scope to do so by the same states.

The interstate detailed plans (which towns, for instance) was drafted by the states. If a state wanted to move around a town, they could (and did!). They had to roughly follow the federal plan and connect at specific points to get their share of the money, but there are tons of state level highways that have no Fed involvement - and places the states said ‘nope’ to the Fed money and did what they wanted.

It isn’t irrelevant if the states or the fed did the eminent domain - it’s a critical distinction. That it was the states is because the states are the ones who control their land and it’s usage - there is no (actual) higher power for zoning that isn’t already okay with it as-is!

That’s my point.

Now, the states can be convinced to change the rules of course (per state), but that is an entirely different situation no?

The supposed saviors have been the ones in charge the entire time!

Ok, gotcha. So then it is perfectly fine for a state to overrule the local town zoning regulations, and give back housing freedom to the individual who owns the property.

Problem solved. A state can democratically ignore the local zoning requirements of the town, and force them to allow more housing.

They’ve not only always been able to do that, they explicitly had to go out of their way to make it any other way.

That it is delegated to the local towns is because that’s what they (as in the state and the towns) wanted.

And it’s likely to stay that way unless extreme effort is put into changing it, because otherwise the local folks will usually get very angry, as you’re taking away their self determination and ability to control their immediate surroundings. And everywhere is local somewhere.

So why don’t you ask the state legislatures? They’re the ones who have always been in control here on this topic.

> So why don’t you ask the state legislatures?

That's what people are doing.

California is a great recent example.

Fairly recently there were massive legal changes that are forcing local towns and cities to add significantly more housing.

(Obviously the housing situation has been bad for a long while in California, but I am talking about the recent changes which have been huge)

Those laws are going to come into effect, and forcibly over rule local zonings and housing laws.

Yeah, that's not how it works, at least in the US. You're 180 degrees out of phase with the intent of federalism.

There are other countries that work the way you suggest, but people prefer to migrate out of them rather than into them.

What are you talking about? Sure you can focus on the state level if you want instead of country-level, but there's still plenty of room for federal policy that supersedes state/local policy.

So it very much is how it works, but there are technical questions about how much and in which areas.

As for migration, I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Most countries don't have a federal structure to begin with, including most democracies.

> So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.

Why stop there? Why not: So the moral authority comes from universe-level democracy, and planet-level, being able to rightly supersede national, provencial and local level.

There isn't any reason to stop there, except that we simply haven't gone beyond it yet, except for the EU to some degree.

Absolutely nothing stops a planet-level democracy, except that you've got to get all of the existing countries to democratically choose to join it first. Which is a gigantic historical undertaking that might happen someday, or might never happen at all.

But if you're asking why stop there now, in 2023, it's because a planetary democratic body simply doesn't exist. While countries do.

Ok, what is it about larger aggregations make them have more moral authority than smaller aggregations?

Well, the simple fact that if they don't, they literally have no reason to exist. It's not so much a moral question, so much as that this was the decided policy when the smaller units chose to join together into a larger one. It's moral because that's the decision the people made when they joined together.

There are various names for the concept over higher-over-lower power in a democracy -- supremacy, preemption, paramountcy.

If smaller units want to accomplish things together that can't override their individual sovereignty, then they sign treaties, form alliances, and groups -- like NATO or NAFTA and so forth. The thing that distinguishes a grouping that makes an actual state is precisely the fact that it can strike down the laws of lower organizational units when they conflict.

Now, nobody's claiming this power is unlimited -- that would be fascism. There are still rights that exist precisely to limit state-level power. But the general principle of supremacy/preemption/paramountcy still exists.

>>> So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.

>> Ok, what is it about larger aggregations make them have more moral authority than smaller aggregations?

> Well, the simple fact that if they don't, they literally have no reason to exist.

This is circular reasoning. You made an assertion. Either defend it or declaim it. What is the specific moral authority that you claim larger aggregations have over smaller ones?

1. Many people would have no problem with not stopping there. 2. If we do want lines, we can say people decide on local matters. Which is the primary argument for why this kind of NIMBYism should not be allowed -- it is negatively impacting the surrounding area, and this deserves to be controlled by the larger group (city, state, etc). Beyond the state, and certainly the country level, it is fairly easy to argue for a line at that point under this logic, as the impact is far less direct.

I mean, yeah, that's the only way to tackle global issues like climate change.

One role of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is to balance competing desires. Eg everyone wants good roads, but no one wants higher taxes. If you allow people to directly vote on each, people vote for higher costs and less revenue. So instead, we elect representatives to take a mix of popular (give us things) and unpopular (take things from us to pay for those things) positions at the same time.

Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires.

That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.

> Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).

The federal government has priority when the relevant power has been granted to it by the states. See the Tenth Amendment, which is unfortunately read/followed only slightly more frequently than the Third.

FWIW, that's not correct. The tenth amendment is a limitation on unenumerated powers. It says nothing about precedence of conflicting powers where those are enumerated. That's what the Supremacy clause is about, and it's abundantly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

Not that it really matters here, since the relevant conflict is between state and municipal law. But the 10th amendment tends to be pretty badly misunderstood by internet libertarians, so it was an interesting digression.

I agree with everything you wrote except your first sentence. What of what I wrote was incorrect in the context of the unbounded claim that “feds win”, particularly on a thread dealing with real estate zoning issues?

"democracy" can mean a range of things, and, in addition, it's not really clear who the relevant group of people are whose collective will we should care about.

For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority"

"Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.

Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do.

Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!

The us is in desperate shape with the housing policies that we have leading to a tremendous lack of housing availability in many large cities in the west where it's harder to spread out. California but also Seattle is another city. There's a shortage of housing, the housing that exists gets more expensive because there's more competition to get in, people are pushed farther out, the high prices push many to eventually living in cars, there's no place for low income people to go. This contrasts with Chicago where there's apparently a lot of low income housing.

This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.

Democracy is a terrible model for many things, and civil development is one of them.

High-income, low-density suburban areas are actually economically sustained and subsidized by low-income, high-density downtown areas. This is why residents of such areas should not be the sole voice of democracy here.

Source: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy

Interesting video, but it's all from the pov of the city's tax revenue and nothing else. Taking the first example, if they don't build the new food complex and keep the old one, less people will want to live in that city, and eventually the tax revenue will go down. Plenty of ghost towns around me that prove that point, you have to stay modern or you go under. As far as the suburb part, if those high income areas spend all their money downtown, then tax revenue downtown goes up but the source of money is still the suburbs. You have two sources of tax revenue in downtown (business + residents), but only one in the suburbs. So naturally tax revenue is lower in suburbs, but without them the downtown businesses wouldn't survive at all. It's a relationship, and it's odd they don't address this point. Also in the southwest there are plenty of suburb-only cities that grow rapidly without a downtown district playing major part.

The people on the zoning board are homeowners in the city! Of course they are going to zone things so that their neighborhood never changes. This is how it works in 99% of cities in the US and it’s terrible.

It's weird b/c in most parts of our day to day lives we have no say. We live in a democracy but for the most part none of us can vote on anything meaningful but in this one particular area everyday citizens have a ton of power and they're voting to protect their owns means. I don't know man I look at the decisions made by politicians and they piss me off but when everyday citizens get a chance to make policy if you will they do shitty stuff like this blocking affordable housing. If I come across as bitter it's b/c I am. My town tried to build affordable apartments and NIMBYs blocked it.

I'm a homeowner and I want more housing built. But I also want improvements to transit and for both bike & car commuting. It's great that a lot of the current crop of apartments are being built along Caltrain & light rail corridors, but those still mostly only keep people who work along those corridors off the roads, creating more congestion for everyone. 87, 880, 101, 85, and 280 (until you get past Cupertino) are all already basically parking lots during rush hours, and it's because people can't live near where they work. This was the entire point of companies like Google & Meta including residential development in their broader campus development plans in Menlo Park, Mountain View, and San Jose ... and if it doesn't happen, then which municipalities are going to pick up the slack to incentivize developers to build near those campuses?

If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.

zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.

Maybe it would be best for Google to just go build them somewhere else.

There's no actual rule that says we have to stack every human being in the country in Silicon Valley. Software engineering in particular is a business that lends itself being done from anywhere.

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