> 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?
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?
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...
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.
Cross referencing this must be tricky
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
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.
It would be irritating if someone bribed you to be able to do something, then once they did it the check bounced!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Another commenter framed this as ensuring that essential service workers can afford to live in the area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 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!
Problem solved. A state can democratically ignore the local zoning requirements of the town, and force them to allow more housing.
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.
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.
There are other countries that work the way you suggest, but people prefer to migrate out of them rather than into them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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?
Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.
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?
Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
For some reason, it rarely seems to though.
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.
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.
This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.
When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?
It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.
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).
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.
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 developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
?
Yes, I'm sure there's a gotcha in there, so go ahead.
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.
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.
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)
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.