npc moron containment pls
One job I had was doing applications for low income housing tax credits for an affordable housing developer. It’s a pretty good program and plays a valuable part of building affordable housing.
Other programs which I also did consulting for (same thing, preparing applications) were quite different (grant programs) and also built good projects.
The tax credit projects usually have rent limitations. There is an issue that the tax credit projects have in common here with the issue of rent control. The restrictions on affordability expire (usually after 30 years). At that time owners often essentially kick everyone out.
I can imagine a world where these types of programs are fine, although I’d really rather they just dis-incentivized building housing that isn’t affordable. Rent control and price controls more generally are where I get downright contemptuous. I think zoning is fundamentally evil as well obviously, but that I’m nowhere near as aggro about. Still pretty aggro though. I see zoning in the same light I see professional licenses and most intellectual property laws. They are carve outs for specific people that hurt everyone else, sometimes badly.
Since they only surveyed 50ish, it was literally one: Bengt Holstrom.
As I said, I’m not against density. I don’t think there is a universal right and wrong here and there are competing interests and the issue is who gets to decide. Perhaps denser housing is always better or perhaps preserving neighborhoods is more important sometimes. There’s value in each and who decides? What about when you look as something very specific like zikzak pointed out some historically and architecturally significant homes. Surely there’s some space for preserving some buildings? Ok, who decides? Should you in Atlanta have a say in what some neighborhood in San Francisco does with these homes? Should someone in London?
And this kind of thing (who decides) obviously doesn’t just come up in housing. Should a city be able to have any rules of its own?
Generally speaking when there are competing interests you go with the group that is larger and/or experiencing the most harm… unless you have a much better reason than ‘but mah architecture’ or ‘but I shouldn’t have to move every 5-10 years’.
CA needs a massive dose of reform on real estate and has conclusively proven it’s not remotely qualified to make zoning decisions.
This is super obvious if you pull up Zillow and look at any real estate within a hundred miles of downtown sf or Los Angeles. It’s not even a tiny bit subtle that it’s broken af.
Why even bother having nice urban environments at all? Just stack 'em up in concrete cubbies 500 stories high. lol aesthetics. And don’t even get me started on parks. Total waste of space.
It’s a little known historical fact that the first zoning laws were adopted in the US because late 19th and early 20th century cities were just too nice. People couldn’t handle that much urban paradise.
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The answer is council houses. Built and owned by local government and rented out at breakeven (or subsidised) rates to low income people. Not tenements but just regular houses
I think we need to bring back places like this:
Pretty clearly I don’t think zoning rules (much less all local rules) should be made by a hypothetical world government. There is, however, a difference between saying that voters in a particular political system are the decisionmakers and saying that those decisionmakers don’t need to consider the interests of outsiders.
Bona fide historical preservation is fine, although for some reason I can’t put my finger on, I have a vague sense that people sometimes use historical preservation as a bad-faith distraction, when they’re really just fans of NIMBYism generally.
Keep building those straw men. I’ve explicitly said that building codes are fine, and that the density should be determined by land values. I’m sure someone is just going to throw up the walled city in the middle of SF… except oh wait there are already homeless camps in SF that are visible from space.
By all means let’s just keep doing the status quo out there clearly everything is going great.
To be clear out of the 15-20 houses on my block (I haven’t actually counted them) at least five are occupied by middle class people who got priced out of CA and moved to greater Austin. It was be poor in CA or be middle class in Texas and they chose the latter. I suspect if it was up to him the neighbor whose entire garage is covered in CA stuff would have stayed in CA, but zikzak’s right to look at pretty architecture clearly takes precedence over him being able to live in the state at all.
Dude you live in LA. A city with some of the worst traffic in the country (and don’t tell me this isn’t true, I dispatch trucks into and out of Wilmington on a daily basis and get to watch them crawl at five miles an hour through the city), one of the worst homelessness problems in the country (which to be fair is largely driven by the weather being perfect and homeless people flocking there from all over the country, but there’s no danger of them finding housing for <1000 a month so the chances of the majority of them ever not being homeless are close to 0%), and rents on apartments that put them out of reach for any sane person making low six figures unless they are willing to live in an area that would be just for poor people anywhere else.
There’s a huge affordability crisis out there, and unless you’re a homeowner you’re one of the victims. If you actually are a homeowner I get why you’re freaking out about what I’m posting because you probably took out a massive loan to pay 4-5x what your house should have cost and now most of your net worth is tied to the NIMBY extremism in CA continuing.
I’m sorry, but you benefiting from something doesn’t make it right. when 90%+ of the population of the US is priced out of living anywhere near you it’s time to start building 20 story tall residential towers in your backyard if they don’t already exist.
The only reason I’m not going off on NYC is that NYC has been damn near maximally dense for a hundred plus years and is still massively expensive because it’s super desirable… although that’s going to be very hard to sustain long term if they don’t fix the damn subway (and the federal government should pay for most of it to be clear).
Well then we agree on everything.
Density and land values help determine one another, along with many, many other factors that you’re ignoring. In LA for example, along with most urban areas that primarily developed in the 20th century, the biggest factors in density were the rise of the automobile and suburbanization.
Are you in the Austin area? Because I lived there from 1993 to 2009 and had a front row seat to its journey from the sleepy college town it once was to the bustling metro it is now. That great transformation at play with all its competing factions was absolutely fascinating to me, so much that I eventually switched my college major to urban geography. It’s one of the most interesting things in the world to me, and that’s a big part of why I get so annoyed when the topic gets dumbed down to “Zoning bad! Moar Density!” Urban land use actually turns out to be a wee bit more complicated than that! Who knew?
Um, I live in western Massachusetts. We do have hella zoning and land use regulations tho. Where I am, the NIMBYism is off the charts and density is low, yet it remains very affordable. Meanwhile, the Boston area is far denser and outrageously expensive. It’s almost as if there are other factors besides zoning at play.
I got where I thought you lived from your post history.
What do you think is the solution to the affordability crisis in American housing?
Obviously there is way less demand for land in Western Mass than there is for land in Boston. I’m generally very anti zoning but I think it gets really ugly when you’re talking about land that a lot of people want to live on. In particular single family home zoning + car culture = really dysfunctional cities where everyone spends 30-60 minutes commuting with rent/mortgage payments that are literally 50% higher than what they should be.
Austin seems to have figured out how to handle this in as close to an optimal way as I’ve ever seen, and if there’s one key difference between Texas and the rest of the country wrt city planning it’s that there’s very little in the way of zoning going on.
I’m fine with saying ‘it’s more complicated than that’, but I’m not OK with pretending like NIMBY’ism isn’t a cancer… because I’ve experienced it being a cancer in my own life, and I’ve seen it not be a cancer in places that don’t have much of it.
As for rent control… yeah I’m an econ guy and I’m obviously 10000% against it.
If you want to call places like round rock and cedar park austin and say it’s doing well because of your experiences there, then that’s fine, but like austin itself is full of crummy single family homes selling for $300 - $700 a square foot. It can also easily take an hour to drive 5 miles during rush hour. I get that LA and SF are completely bonkers, but austin isn’t exactly sane
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That’s a fair criticism. It’s also fair to say that 5 mph during rush hour is standard in every metro in the country just about. That’s because cars are a bad form of transit at scale when everyone wants to use the road at the same time. Building more roads creates more demand than it fulfills basically.
Austin, at least in the city proper, has tons of zoning and land use restrictions. In many of the surrounding communities not so much, but holy crap at some of the ones in the city limits, like the capitol view corridors, for instance. In Austin you can’t block the view of a building that’s literally miles away.
Austin is also not very densely developed at all, and the entire metro area outside of the urban core is some of the most sprawling suburban sprawl that ever sprawled. Instead of zoning out there you get deed restrictions and HOA’s, which tie the land to unsustainable low density use much more permanently than any zoning law does.
I have no freakin’ idea, and anybody who claims they do is either lying or delusional. It’s a huge problem with a thousand different inputs, many of them a lot more important than zoning. There are some sensible land use changes that can, should and are being made in lots of places, which may help some. But even if somebody knew exactly what to do to solve it all and started tomorrow, it would still take a generation to fix. And that’s pretending like it’s even possible to make a highly desirable and limited resource cheap for everybody,. which it isn’t. If people want cheap housing they should move somewhere that has it. I’m sorry there isn’t a better answer.
So this is pretty funny and actually surprised me. Turns out the most expensive places for housing in the US already have the highest population densities (data source).
| Core based statistical area | Population-weighted density |
|---|---|
| New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area | 31,251 |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA Metro Area | 12,145 |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA Metro Area | 12,114 |
| Honolulu, HI Metro Area | 11,548 |
| Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI Metro Area | 8,613 |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metro Area | 8,418 |
| Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH Metro Area | 7,980 |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD Metro Area | 7,773 |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL Metro Area | 7,395 |
| San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA Metro Area | 6,921 |