https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1824155610201432264
If apartment buildings are banned in 96% of residential land in California, with most of the 4% already built up with apartments, isn't that pretty similar to the commercial land use situation in Mammoth, CA?
Here in SF, a good example is the leading progressive mayoral candidate, Peskin. He's basically a housing subversive. He'll pay lip service to it, then sabotage YIMBY efforts. Earlier this year he sponsored an ordinance blocking higher density in parts of his district. The current mayor vetoed it [1] but he got the board to override the veto [2].
The barons originally sold suburban supply restrictions as anti-sprawl measures, co-opting the greener factions of the left. Then they sold density restrictions as anti-traffic measures.
No suburbs + no density = no new housing.
Luckily this unholy coalition has started to crumble a few years ago. A large majority of Democrats is now in favor of more housing.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/14/san-francisco-breed-peskin...
[2] https://sfist.com/2024/03/26/supervisors-override-breeds-vet...
To reach utopia - the fantasy goes - we must first travel through a dystopia in which the poor are enserfed by the housing barons, paying upwards of 70% of their income in rent. Unfortunately the dystopia never ends in practice.
Then there's the perplexing question of how real estate taxation got to this point. As the saying goes, a real estate family that pays any income tax at all needs to fire their tax advisor.
Companies on the other hand don’t get a vote. So if all grocery companies banded together and voted for a law to allow monopolies then it wouldn’t be the same thing as if all the humans voted for it. Companies do love to lobby though, but lobbying and voting are still two different things.
So if all the people in California banded together and voted to allow grocery chains to collaborate and split up areas to avoid competition, then I guess that would be mostly fine too.
It's a good deal for the people who live there, but a bad one for the population as a whole as all of the prime real estate is taken and they're pushed out to places that nobody previously wanted to live.
If I had a good or easy solution I would offer it, but this is just a fundamental problem with democracy. Maybe if there was a fairly hostile state zoning board that vetoed most of the laws that prevent new construction, but there is almost no way to prevent that sort of position from being captured by the local interests and it would be very hard to staff since the person would be under both intense pressure and hate from nearly all communities in the state. Can you imagine being the guy who, through veto of the anti-construction law, let some skyscraper be built that blocks the ocean view of a few millionaire mansions? You'd be lucky to get out of town alive.
That's a feature, not a bug. People who don't live in a community shouldn't be able to dictate how that community runs its affairs.
If you want to live in a world where the entire State, not your neighborhood, is deciding what you can build where and when, then keep refusing to make reasonable, regional compromises.
The local decisions on zoning are not made democratically, there's layers of representatives, and the representatives that get elected are some of the least reported-on and discussed elections in our society.
Land use decisions are made by small numbers of highly motivated people, that already have housing, and benefit financially from a shortage of housing. Just like the grocery stores here.
At the state level, regulation of land use is far more similar to poll results, and that regulation is reining in the abuses of local land use policy, forcing local decision makers to allow for more housing.
Some of these zoning restrictions (don't know specifically about CA but true elsewhere) were put into place 60 years ago, when a majority wanted it that way (often for very racists and class warfare reasons), and they made it a requirement to have a supermajority to change it, not simple majority.
Thus, a majority could want to change, but are unable to reach the 2/3rds or whatever supermajority threshold is required.
Don't all political questions in the US boil down to democracy issues?
Bullshit. Their money holds more value than any vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_story_building
Rebuilding these as new modern apartments would make everyone a lot safer in case of an earthquake.
Also, we don't outlaw ways of life based on safety. For example, larger cities are far safer when it comes to fire deaths, than small towns, but we're not about to outlaw communities < 2,500 (see Figure 5):
https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...
>Soft-story failure was responsible for nearly half of all homes that became uninhabitable in California's Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and was projected to cause severe damage and possible destruction of 160,000 homes in the event of a more significant earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area
There are special warnings about soft-story buildings for home buyers, apartment renters, etc. in California. There are not such warnings for high-rises.
I don't know much about Turkey's buildings, but if there were less than 5 stories then they were all low-rise too. And I doubt that they would meet California code if they collapsed in a 7.8 earthquake.
The reason buildings don’t collapse under shear (think side to side force like would be applied by strong wind or an earth quake) is in part because the interior walls offer shear strength. If you have too few interior walls, and you haven’t compensated via other mechanisms like stronger sheathing, then you risk catastrophic collapse. This is a risk in old construction where walls may have been removed or in cases where building weren’t constructed to appropriate standards. In Turkey, this was particularly bad because the use of concrete in floors and roofs results in more shear force.
The tl;dr is that this isn’t a low-rise vs. high-rise thing. It’s mostly an old vs. new thing.
The biggest damage was sustained by bridges and concrete road viaducts built in the 1950s and 1960s which were not built to modern standards.
If I'm ever inconsistent, I hope people point it out to me! This isn't "whataboutism" this is me changing the subject to a different area where I wish he'd be correct and use his considerable wonk-weight to correcting. Its not changing the subject to counter his point about grocery stores in Mammoth, California, it's more of a yes, and.
I'm also for improving the market forces in construction, and do devote some political effort to correcting exactly that problem.
That's not whataboutism, it's inconsistency, and it's worth pointing out.
>It's okay to be right one one thing and wrong on another.
but wouldn't you rather be right on both? "but I'm at least right on one" seems like a pretty low bar to aim for.
>It doesn't invalidate anything.
Did OP imply otherwise?
Beyond enforcement, the government has no real part in the former. Except perhaps not disallowing it. But we have rights to specific parts of usage excluded from land sales all the time - water rights being a particularly gnarly one.
Shouldn't he rail harder against the former than the latter? A contract is agreed to by two willing parties. The same can't be said for government regulation, especially for people who want to move into an area but are blocked by NIMBYs.
That doesn't matter at all, "two willing parties" doesn't make a contract legal. Neither of those willing parties are the ones harmed being harmed by the anti-competitive contracts.
But his having different priorities than us doesn't make him a hypocrite.
I understand whataboutism as bringing up something that is somewhat related in order to shift the focus away from the original topic.
...or it's to draw attention that the author might be selectively applying arguments whenever it suits him, and readers shouldn't take him at face value. Between the two articles, it looks like Stroller is against big corporations first and foremost, and musters whatever argument is handy to back that thesis. In the case of house builders, he's explicitly says land use regulations aren't a significant factor ("just pointing at over-regulation in and of itself isn’t a satisfying explanation"), but in the case of supermarkets he turns around and says it is. He doesn't try very hard to explain why it's justified in one case and not the other. The first article is basically "I don't find it convincing [no refutation given], here's my alternate hypothesis". I feel like all of this is worth pointing out, even if it isn't exactly a straight up debunking of the two articles.
Umm... what? Those are two quite different statements. You can't conflate them that way and be arguing in good faith. You have either misunderstood his stance or are deliberately misrepresenting it.
>I took on the YIMBY’s here and pointed out that the problem of housing prices and construction is about consolidation of homebuilders, not an upsurge in annoying people who want to maintain neighborhood character.
I'm sure you can come up with a contrived worldview that proclaims those two statements, but doesn't believe "land use regulations aren't a significant factor", but it's pretty clear that's his view, even if he doesn't say those literal words.
This doesn't mean that land use regulations (and permiting processes and the other NIMBY tools) don't have an impact, but it does mean that we cant look at that impact to expain the increase.
Believing there is only one cause is simplistic and naive and believing in multiple causes is not "contrived".
As I said elsewhere, I think NIMBY land use restrictions are an obvious tool to use by any would be oligopolist or monopolist who wanted to restrict the growth of our housing supply.
The actual article linked in the tweet does a pretty good job of layong out an argument for the importance of the consolidation among homebuilders (and notably spends no time arguing that land use regulations have no impact.) Instead of engaging with any of those argument you've opted for a shallow dismissal based on trying to tie them to a position that you are only assuming they hold. That is not how you have a good faith discussion.
>This doesn't mean that land use regulations (and permiting processes and the other NIMBY tools) don't have an impact, but it does mean that we cant look at that impact to expain the increase.
Stroller isn't just adding his theory (corporate consolidation) into the list of factors, he's explicitly denies that NIMBYs are a factor.
>the problem of housing prices and construction is about consolidation of homebuilders, not an upsurge in annoying people who want to maintain neighborhood character.
Your parent didn't say "those two cases are different," but rather "it's OK to be right about one thing and wrong on another." That someone has a blind spot for matters that affect him directly doesn't mean he's wrong about the matter that doesn't affect him directly (though of course it also doesn't mean he's right).
Except, that isn't true. Arguing that the YIMBY explanation of our housing supply problems is incomplete doesn't make you a NIMBY. Your uniformed commentary also adds nothing to the discussion. Next time please take the time of read the opinions of someone before arguing on the internet about what they are.
if the residents of one town were deciding that no housing could be built in another town, that would be closer to the commercial land use case made here
I can't build a fourplex on my lot, despite having the room for it, because people living elsewhere deemed it so. Instead it's a SFH with most of the lot wasted as setbacks, and is worth more than it should because of it.
(Not saying that NIMBY-ism is good or right, just that the situation is different.)