I hate to always be siding with NIMBYs but it's not always about wealthy people's wealth. Can't it also be about families simply not wanting to be stacked and packed into dense urban sardine can housing? As amazing as it sounds, some people like suburban life and not everyone wants their neighborhood to transform into a big city.
If you don’t want to live in the big city, go live in the suburbs. If you move somewhere and don’t want it to change, then buy the necessary rights from surrounding property owners.
What NIMBY’s do is to use government coercion to prevent property developers from doing what they want with their property. Now, I’m not one of those “no government men,” and I think government coercion and impairment of property rights is appropriate to protect civil rights or the environment, etc. But homeowner’s aesthetic preferences? Give me a break! It’s an illegitimate use of the government’s monopoly on violence.
Most repliers are missing the point. I'm not arguing for turning the city into suburbs. Nobody is arguing for this, I'm arguing against turning the suburbs into a city, which is what most of these development fights are about.
Say I like suburbs. I move into a suburb. I expect a suburban life when I do that. My neighbors expect a suburban life. Now developers want to roll in and stack apartment buildings all over the place. If we argue against this, we're apparently terrible NIMBYs, opponents of affordable housing and stooges of the wealthy landed elite.
I'll turn the argument around. If you want to pack yourselves into cities, go move into cities. Go build more dense apartments in the cities. Why are the aesthetic preferences of suburban dwellers invalid and the aesthetic preferences of city dwellers valid?
The aesthetic of suburbia is exclusion. That's what makes it less valid. It's reaping the benefits of access to the city while minimizing the number of others who can do the same. There's nothing wrong with liking solitude, but there's everything wrong with insisting that we preserve your solitude on the most central/best connected land, no matter the cost to everyone else.
SF's unoccupied blocks are pretty much built out by now. Everywhere with preexisting residents is the same: I came here because I liked the neighborhood as it is, it can never be allowed to change.
Cities aren't plopped down out of the sky fully formed. They're living organisms, built by expanding iteratively and incrementally. The city that's already been built is full. For more people to live in city, we need to make more of it. Aside from a fire or earthquake providing a clean slate, intensifying the suburbs with the best access is essentially the only way that happens.
This would be fine, except that economic growth is increasingly accruing to a handful of cities whose zoning is a big Keep Out sign.
We aren't prioritizing the "aesthetic preference" of the suburbs over the city. We're prioritizing the rights of those who own the real estate in question over those who don't, but live nearby.
If we argue against this, we're apparently terrible NIMBYs, opponents of affordable housing and stooges of the wealthy landed elite.
Yes, exactly. You are putting your aesthetic preferences above the property rights of landowners to do what they want with their own property as well as the ability of other people to find affordable housing. You're also (in most cases) using the power of the state to push up the value of your home and put money in your pocket.
This isn't really up for debate. That is literally what you are doing (in this theoretical scenario).
Now, maybe doing that is good. Maybe that is ok. Maybe those values are fine. But you have to confront the reality here.
Why are the aesthetic preferences of suburban dwellers invalid and the aesthetic preferences of city dwellers valid?
The aesthetic preferences of no one are valid. If someone wants to buy a plot of land in the middle of NYC and build a single family home on it they are free to do so as long as they have the cash.
Property rights have limits. You can't open a stinky pig farm or a loud car repair shop on your property. One of the purposes of local government is for local people to band together to set the ground rules for what's allowed in their local community. Within limits of course--people shouldn't be able to exclude based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
There are lots of communities. If you don't like the rules of one of them, try one of the many others. How is it that residents agreeing they don't want something around is a bad use of the "power of the state," yet coming in and forcing the locals to accept something they don't want around is an acceptable use of the power of the state?
> Within limits of course--people shouldn't be able to exclude based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
California statistics indicates that artificially constraining housing supply has created housing costs that in effect limits access to the rare opportunities found here to blacks and latinos as well as the poor.
It makes it almost impossible to grow up with lower middle class parents or work in a low-pay low-skilled position, and mingling with the tech crowd to work your way up.
* A snapshot of more recent U.S. Census migration numbers shows that nearly three-quarters of those who have left California for other states since 2007 earn less than $50k a year.
* San Francisco's African American population has declined from 13.4% of the population in 1970 to 6.1%
* 41 percent of San Franciscans spend 30 to 50 percent on rent, despite a lot of rent control for longer-tenure residents and a population average income being $104k as well as median $77k
I understand that this might not be the intended consequence for all people fighting for the current zoning rules, but due to its effects on blacks and latinos as well as the poor I find the effects immoral.
Anyone supporting these policies knowing this has the right to do so, but not while at the same time claiming they fight for diversity and the dispossessed.
We aren't talking about a stinky pig farm or a loud car repair shop. We are talking about a building that is slightly taller than the ones already there.
How is stopping someone from making their own house one story taller an acceptable use of the power of the state?
The government isn't forcing locals to accept anything. If no local landowners want to build denser housing no one is forcing them to do it. You've mischaracterized what is going on here.
The default mode of government should be to get out of the way unless there is a super compelling interest to do otherwise. I don't believe that the desire of people to live in unchanging suburbs is all that compelling. We living in a country with a growing and urbanizing population. These changes might make some people sad. Tough.
In the SFBA, the land use issues with suburbs are that most of them are building far more office space than housing and thus the jobs-housing balance is out of whack. A suburb like cupertino, that’s builds office space for 12k workers (the Apple campus), and then received payroll taxes for those 12k workers, needs to accept that they also must build living quarters for and provide social services to those 12k workers, as opposed to the status quo, where they floist the responsibility and costs onto neighboring communities while hoarding the benefits (taxes from large commercial spaces).
> I'll turn the argument around. If you want to pack yourselves into cities, go move into cities.
The similar situation would be: you want to live in a dense urban neighborhood, but instead of moving to the city, you get a law passed that requires any new buildings in your suburban neighborhood to be a mid-rise condo. It's not a question of whose aesthetic preferences are more valid, but whether it's legitimate to invoke aesthetic preferences to limit peoples' property rights.
Have you ever been to Los Angeles (the actual city in question)? It is a city of suburbs. Excepting the metaphorical postage stamp of downtown and some highrise development along a few corridors, Los Angeles is basically 4 million people packed into a little less than 500 square miles of nothing but single-family home "suburban" development. Nobody living in Los Angeles believes that they live in a suburb, they believe that they live in a low-density city.
Hmm, where do cities come from? Did all the big cities stand right where they are now when the humans first came to the planet?
Cities grow when people go there and settle down. When cities grow, the suburbs turn into parts of the cities and new suburbs come into being. That is called progress.
If you really love suburbs, like GP says, move into a new suburb. Do not try to hinder progress.
Sustaining that charmed suburban life in booming metros requires making everyone else mega-commute or stay underemployed in more stagnant areas. People who have already “made it” are not the only ones whose well-being matters. A mid-rise next door is not going to hurt you anything like a 2-hour commute or turning down a dream job hurts someone else.
> High density creates the critical mass to support better, faster, and more frequent transit.
High density that, as some have suggested in this thread, displaces parking access to the transit, prevents people not in the new high-density development who previously used the mass transit from accessing it; it might (or might not) induce, with the long lead time that major capital improvements have, projects which provide new infrastructure and access to replace what is lost, but that's likely a decade or longer delay after the negative impact to, maybe, get back to status quo ante for those adversely affected.
Of course, that optimisticallty, assumes that there isn't an active political move to prevent transit access to those not in high-density developments, an agenda which some in this thread supporting the new bill have endorsed.
In our society where we generally use pricing to distribute limited goods, your desire to drive to and park at a train station, at no or low cost, is irrelevant next to the market price of that land when that price is about 6-10 million dollars per acre.
What you're asking for is a massive external regulatory subsidy in order to prevent the market from functioning, just because you like your car.
As a former BART station parking user: it’s not about liking your car, but your time. When you get used to a 10 minute drive, no one wants to switch to a 30 minute walk or 40 minute bus ride.
Point still stands, if you paid for the true cost of parking no one would bat an eye, but the current regime subsidized car use to an insane extent through inefficient land use policies. A true “market rate” bart parking spot would likely be many multiples above the current price when all costs, alternative uses, and competition are factored in.
AFAIK the private lot at West Oakland is still under $15. Well worth it. But yeah, the $3 BART charges is comically low. If it’s full by 7am, it’s too cheap!
You need to widen the universe of competition when you price parking. The universe of competition for an empty parking space is not just "everyone who would want to park here for a day" it is also "all alternative land uses to parking, including housing". A more profitable, and thus more efficient, use of the land would convert likely 99% of all BART parking land to apartments, retail and office space.
Communities whose voters highly value parking should feel free to acquire sites and provide it at public expense. I’m very glad that Berkeley does downtown, for example.
When you choose to move somewhere, you're not just moving into an isolated square on the map. You're moving into a lifestyle and a neighborhood with attributes you desire. Those desirable attributes can include "no mid-rise apartments next door".
Apartments springing up next door hurt, if one of the primary reasons you move somewhere is that there are no apartments next door.
Sure, and now we’re asking the state to consider whether maintaining what you like about your neighborhood is sufficient justification to write public policy that denies opportunity to others.
The government's job is to balance the will of the people with the rights of minorities.
If 51% of people voted to outlaw single family houses would that be acceptable? Of course not. People should be able to build the type of housing that they want to on their own property.
Until very recently laws against gay marriage were Constitutional. Was the government doing it's job well when it passed these laws?
No, it was not. There are underlying principles of good government that should constrain citizens and politicians further than what is strictly defined in the constitution.
That is the case being made here: NIMBY zoning laws, while constitutional, are not ethically or philosophically sound so we shouldn't have them.
And the will of the people of California appears to include affording its cities, and not to include an unlimited tolerance for single family neighborhoods dumping externalities on everyone else.
I understand what you are saying, you buy into a location because you like that location. People do a lot of research before they move. Then it start changing right before your eyes.
But part of living in a city and society is that things change. One of the things that needs to change is higher density housing, located around travel hubs.
Moving to the suburbs is not enough. These fights are often about developers wanting to roll into existing suburban areas and stacking dense housing in them.
Why? Moving is expensive, stressful, and potentially fraught with risks as any major change in life can be. You do that, all while knowing with certainty that of the 7+ billion on Earth, few would move to accommodate you.
So why? Out of the unrequited goodness of your heart?
Because a higher level of government recognizes that maintaining your neighbors’ lots exactly as they are in perpetuity is destructive to society as a whole.
Right, and it’s an adversarial process between that higher level of government, and local interests. What you’re suggesting is akin to asking people to forgoe the use of an attorney during criminal proceedings. The idea is that competing interests can find compromise where necessary, or at least that the adversarial nature of the process is preferable to alternatives.
Having apartment buildings along transit corridors in your neighborhood is really nothing like being convicted of a crime. The right to due process protects you from imprisonment, not neighborhood change.
That's the stupidest straw man I've heard in a while. The argument was not, "why should we allow it? I don't want to live in that kind of housing!" The argument is that that kind of housing affects the housing around it by increasing noise, traffic, blocking out the sky, etc., and has its own set of problems (increased likelihood of spreading disease when people live more closely together, for example). We can argue the merits of any given argument, but you've just made up an argument to argue against and it's completely false.
Read OP again: "Can't it also be about families simply not wanting to be stacked and packed into dense urban sardine can housing?"
Who is doing the "stacking and packing" in that sentence? Who is forcing anyone to live in an apartment building? OP seems to believe that anyone living in an apartment was taken and put there.
Does OP find it so literally impossible to imagine that anyone might not share his over-the-top, grandiose disgust for apartments?
Nope, but if enough people do share it, they should be able to elect a local government that will help to keep them out.
Just like if the people in a neighborhood find pig farms to be stinky, they should be allowed to, through zoning, keep a property owner from building a pig farm next door.
It is not that simple. When a city builds offices without providing housing they are effectively forcing housing as well as infrastructure onto neighboring cities, while keeping the revenue from the office buildings. In my opinion this demonstrates that cities are too fine grained of a decision level for all regulation of housing supply.
