Good morning — and now for something different. I’ve started writing a little bit with the TriangleBlogBlog which is a hyper local (2 town) politics, policy, pickleball and park old school group blog much like Balloon-Juice. I’ve been leaning into what I originally went to graduate school for — urban economic development — and I’ll be crossposting some of my material between the two places:
Crossposted at TriangleBlogBlog
I moved to Chapel Hill in 2017 from Pittsburgh after receiving a great new job offer. My family and I rented for two years and then we bought a house.
We chose to live in Chapel Hill because of the amenities. The schools are great for our kids, the library is amazing, the park system is wonderful for my morning walks, and there is enough of a downtown between Chapel Hill and Carrboro to have a couple of favorite restaurants depending on what strikes our mood — be it a good burger and fries at Buns, a really nice dinner at Tandem or beers with buddies at Steel String. It does not hurt that there is great soccer to see during the fall.
This amenity package is desirable. It is also expensive.
The rent on our first condo here was almost three times what we paid for our mortgage and carrying costs in suburban Pittsburgh for about the same square footage in a town whose primary source of historical employment – a coke works for the declining steel industry – had closed two decades ago.
The Pittsburgh region is a great spot to live and raise a family but over my lifetime the city itself has shrunk by half, and the entire metro region has slowly lost population over 40 years. Housing is cheap in Pittsburgh because demand is weak and there are few outsiders coming into the region.
We’re part of a regional economy
That is not the case in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan cluster. We’re growing. And we are likely to continue to grow. This region has a good combination of highly educated populations, intense agglomeration economies of scale in a few key industries, available land, decent infrastructure, good weather, and better barbecue. This is an attractive endowment of factors for growth. And this growth is going to happen no matter what we do in Chapel Hill.
We are part of a regional economy. People who have jobs and a reason to be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan cluster have lots of options. This is especially true for people who don’t have strong ties to the region and can seek out a particular amenity and price intersection instead of trying to balance the amenities that they want with the type of house that they want while looking to stay within a ten to fifteen minute trip to the grandparents.
People can look for single family suburbia in Cary, or they can be hip and with-it in downtown Durham or Raleigh, or they can trade far fewer amenities for more land and bigger houses at a lower price point in western Chatham County or unincorporated portions of Orange and Alamance County. Or people can buy high services, great schools, higher taxes in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
As thousands of new households emigrate into the Triangle, they have to live somewhere. As long as the Chapel Hill amenity package is pretty attractive to a decent number of folks and there is a limited supply of housing, people will bid up both rents and sales prices. Higher sales prices are transfers to incumbent owners who are selling. Higher rents are accumulations for the owners of capital. Higher rents also flow through the entire market. If a new set of apartments have higher rents, soon other apartment buildings will increase their rents. This will displace households that were just able to make things work under their old, lower rents, but now can’t.
Chapel Hill is an amazing place to live. I love it here. But we are part of a large, and growing region. Pretending that we are not merely by not increasing our housing stock of all types of housing just means that we are pricing out our current neighbors and never meeting our future neighbors who want to live in Chapel Hill and enjoy our amenity package but can afford neither the rent nor the mortgage.
We need local solutions to the good challenges of living in an economically vibrant area. And a key part of that local solution is building more housing.
Jerry
The Triangle has become one giant swath of suburbia from Wake Forest to Fuquay-Varina and Zebulon to Carrboro. And yes, I am including Raleigh and Durham into that. We’re like the metro Detroit area without the Detroit. Hey, I’m not knocking it since I threw down roots here, but it’s funny to me when folks call certain towns in the area as “suburban.” We’re all suburban around here now.
As far as housing is concerned, though, whoah what a nightmare it’s becoming. My renter friends, to a person, have been crying about their rent going up by hundreds of dollars every year. We want to sell our current house in central Cary to move into the Green Hope HS district (daughter’s friends all live in that district) but there is hardly any inventory and what does exist is either way above our budget or needs so much work that it will put it above our budget.
WereBear
More housing also means new and retro-fitted housing, which is good for climate change issues in that they are more energy efficient.
gene108
When I was in high school, in Raleigh, a little over 30 years ago that was Garner, and Apex to a lesser extent.
Starfish
@WereBear: New houses are bigger than the old ones so they are using more energy in heating and cooling. New houses likely have fancy gas stoves which are not good for the environment.
eversor
It’s not just housing it’s what housing. In the areas of Arlington VA I live in we are building housing but it’s making things worse. Most of the apartment/condo buildings are on leased land. When the lease expires is where things get interesting. If the place is affordable it is immediately torn down and some new monstrosity is put in. This means that a place which had studios for 1.5k and one bedrooms for 2k is replaced by some luxury item which if it even has studios they are now over 2k, one bedrooms are over 3k and often it’s got much larger apartments as well which are going to go over 5k a month. The buildings that have condo’s you can buy at around 400k are in the same boat. All the new stuff asks well over 600k for a unit and easily goes up into the millions.
Housing that sells in the millions stays. Anything cheaper is bought out and the actual houses and townhouses are demolisted and up comes more buildings full of million dollar condo units.
The trick here is that these units are not for living in really. They are for investing in. So most are gobbled up by wealthy investors and various LLCs in bulk and then rented out or simply sat on as an investment. The most common types who buy are unit are consultants in the six figure range who live here for a bit and then move out and rent it, or international students from the ME and Asia who go to places like Georgetown where their parents buy them a condo to live in and then they move out and rent it after school.
We currently have vastly more housing than we did. It’s also a lot more expensive and most of the units are empty. It’s one of the richest counties in the nation but it’s top loaded. We have a lot of 1% here.
There isn’t a good solution. I got a good deal in rent at a bit under 2k a month for a large 1br. But there are catches. There is a large double lanes on either side “highway” right here that I have to cross on my walk to the metro (which isn’t a bad walk it’s 20 mins for most people but 15 for me because tall). On the other side it’s homes all around 700k- a few million. On our side it’s seedy bars, shady used car dealers and more. While there are nice places on our side our area is decidedly not.
Our building is also very old. Which means stuff is mostly broken, they won’t fix it, things are loud, and there are other issues but that’s fine. The other catch, and this has gotten worse, is that since we don’t have a security guard system it’s not uncommon for homeless people to steal close out of the laundry area, steal packages, and sleep in the stairwells. We are about a decade out or so from the land lease running out here at which point it will be bulldozed and some massive monster put in that we also can’t afford.
We need housing that works for the people who are there. Not monsters for investors. We don’t build livable units. We are looking at moving to an older building at the warf in DC that isn’t on a lease but isn’t in the nice area because we can buy a nice unit in the sub 500k range. Also if I get my new job there!
Betsy
Under awful sociopath mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin and her awful City Council, just 116 affordable rental housing units were created last year in Raleigh, a city of a half-million people which is the second-fastest growing large metro in the country.
Source: Raleigh annual affordable housing report
Raven
Athens is in a similar boat except we have a high poverty rate to go along with the housing shortage.
WereBear
@Starfish: They don’t have to be, either.
Betsy
@WereBear: They’re generally not though, because they’re made mostly of plastic and they are so poorly constructed with such crap material that they fall apart before a 30-year mortgage is even paid off.
Most houses built today are essentially disposable, with at most a one-generation lifespan.
When you count the embodied carbon in any existing building, it’s nearly always a net gain versus a new building.
As the saying goes, “The greenest building is the one that’s already built.”
bbleh
… a key part of that local solution is building more housing.
Alas, when we have a Fed that seems to think the solution to supply-side inflation is to deter investment in, y’know, the supply side by raising interest rates, and insofar as that also directly affects the demand side by restricting purchases of big-ticket items like, y’know, housing, then I fear that solution may be a while materializing.
Anonymous At Work
It’s more about zoning than anything else. I started reading Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias waaaaaaaaaay back when (cough 2006) for their writings on these topics. Essentially, it is a regional good but artificially constrained and the incentives are in high-end and single-family housing rather than density or affordability.
BUT until you fix the Senate’s malapportionment problems and convince seniors living in Pig Knuckle Junction, Missouri to fix the tax incentives either to favor renters and rental construction or to stop favoring single-family housing, there’s not a ton of fixes outside of attending local Zoning Board meetings and being an annoyance.
KBS
I’m excited to hear that you’ll be blogging about these issues! I understand more about housing & economic development than health insurance by a long shot, and I hope I can get new perspective from your posts.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
One thing that has always puzzled me as an economist is why places like Pittsburg, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland etc. go into perpetual decline and then just stay stuck there…one would think cheap housing would attract new employers (I can pay my employees like 20% less and they can still afford nicer housing in Cleveland than in Chapel Hill). I mean Pittsburg on paper could have everything to offer that Chapel Hill does. It’s got universities, plenty of scenery surrounding it, hip urban neighborhoods, suburbs and exurbs for people that want them. I’m assuming it has good parks. Maybe the schools aren’t so great but I’m sure they’re fine or better than fine in parts of the metro area, and that would improve with better local economics IMO.
bbleh
@Anonymous At Work: It ain’t just the Senate. As you point out, local zoning boards are just as much (or more) part of the problem, and their behavior is heavily affected by NIMBY landowners who don’t WANT higher-density housing or more public transit or smaller more affordable housing because they don’t want Those People (among whom are young people generally) and all the traffic and noise and crime They bring with them, in their nice quiet neighborhoods (even as they are very happy with transit facilities that serve multi-acre garages because it’s so convenient), and they certainly don’t want small-scale mixed-use “village”-style development because that might require [shudder] doing some actual walking.
(There’s also the problem of builders who like the margins provided by widely-spaced McMansions without all the bother of developing infrastructure, but they’ll likely respond to changes in demand.)
I’m afraid it’s gonna take replacement of a whole generation of older, car-addicted white-flight-era suburbanites, first locally and then more generally, before we really see much change in housing development.
Motivated Seller
Urban Planners rule! Except for Robert Moses. He was kind of a jerk.
bbleh
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: It does eventually turn around. Case in point: Philadelphia.
Anonymous At Work
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: It’s about cycles. Places decline because of lack of jobs. Housing declines, lowering the tax base, reducing amenities, etc.
Cheap housing doesn’t bring in the jobs by itself and restoring declining housing to be new cheap housing takes money.
Finally, there are “external economies of scale”, basically industries like to clump together for valid economic reasons that adds serious costs to moving into a declined urban environment, above and beyond the costs of building the industrial facility, repairing infrastructure, etc.
It’s a hard cycle to break.
David Anderson
Yeah, we have a temporal misapportionment as well as spatial malapportionment problems — the future does not vote while the past does.
Anonymous At Work
@bbleh: I do agree except I think that money talks louder than NIMBYs (which *is* saying something). Getting the incentives behind densification might result in a NIMBY-Developer War but I’d favor the developers by a mile. They’ll fight dirty to get exclusions, economic development zones, etc. “Heck, you don’t want apartments built here? Guess we’ll go with homeless shelter and methadone clinic.”
Sayne
Not just more housing. Denser, more walkable in-fill housing that is built for the person not for the automobile.
I recommend everyone watch the full Strong Towns Playlist on Not Just Bikes. Suburban development is not just bad for the environment, it’s horrible for municipal budgets and is basically a ponzi scheme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
TheTruffle
I would love to visit NC one day, and I’ve heard amazing things about the Research Triangle area.
That said, I’ve also heard Pittsburgh has transitioned from steel to other industries. I’ve heard good things about it too.
apostropher
I grew up in NC and have lived in Durham or Chapel Hill since 1980 or so. The growth and outside investment pouring in, especially over the past 10 years or so, is just staggering if you’ve been here for a few decades. As big a problem as affordable housing has become, it’s very much exacerbated by the lack of robust public transportation infrastructure. It’s pretty challenging to get by without a car here, and there are only so many lanes you can add to I-40.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@TheTruffle: I’ve never been to the research triangle area but Asheville is great. Some people I know who’ve lived in the triangle loved it. Others not so much – they feel like it’s in the worst part of the State geographically. Too far to get to the coast easily, and too far from the mountains and the summers can be brutally hot and humid. Asheville is right in the mountains and is a fun little city.
Betsy
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Federal grants and aid to states subsidize all the new suburban crap, like trillions of dollars for new highway construction to serve suburban subdcisions and strip malls. There’s almost no federal money for aid to existing areas and maintenance. It’s a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
This doesn’t explain ALL of the subsidies and biases in favor of greenfield and Sun Belt development and away from those older cities you described, but it’s definitely a huge thumb on the scales.
Cacti
The triangle is a nice area. After a childhood in the bible belt though, I could never live there again or raise my kids there.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@eversor: I live in the DC area too. Can’t figure out why all these people are buying up housing and sitting on it…not renting it out. How does an investor make money out of buying an apartment building and leaving it vacant? I can see writing off the cost as a loss but why take losses like that?
Seems like there’s a legal solution to that problem…like a limit on the tax write-offs you can get on rental properties.
indycat32
I live in Indianapolis and there are four new developments going up with 5 miles of me (east side). Prices start around $200,000.
Betsy
@bbleh: But it’s also just really hard to retrofit gangling, sprawling suburbs into anything more energy-efficient and people-serving. Even if you COULD reform the zoning, how do you go about transforming as-built half-acre lots into three or four houses per lot? The shitty McMansion is already sitting in the middle of the lot with a gigantic driveway, the streets are designed as sprawling loops and tangles that aren’t easily served by any kind of public transit, it’s just a complete wasteland of car dependency and riding mowers, and can’t be fixed for the most part.
Suburban sprawl is 90% of our country’s built environment, is *mostly* un-retrofittable, and is “The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” as one analyst is fond of putting it.
Obvious Russian Troll
I made a number of small visits to the RTP area in 2018 and 2019. While I did like what I saw of the area, it was horrifically unfriendly to pedestrians. I made the mistake of not renting a car for my first trip under the mistaken impression that I could walk to where my class was being held. I did end up doing it a couple of times on the weekend, but I had to cross a major road and dear lord during the week it was not safe. It didn’t help that a guy on a motor cycle was killed right in front of the hotel the second day I was there.
Between that and North Carolina summers, I couldn’t live there.
Cacti
@Betsy: The architecture you described is pretty much everything residential built in the southwest for the last 30 years.
And they’re all about to be righteously fucked as the Colorado River continues to wither away from climate change.
Endless development in a desert. What could possibly go wrong. But the good thing is, they’re reconsidering…wait, no, they keep building ugly subdivisions and golf courses.
Ohio Mom
Oh, one of my favorite hobby horses!
Here in Cincinnati there are gazillions of “luxury apartment” rental buildings going up in just about every neighborhood on my side of town (the West side of town is perceived as undesiresble). I can count five within a two mile radius of my subdivision alone, (not counting the blocks of attached “luxury” townhomes). They are all the same: they are long, featureless rectangles, four or five stories tall, often with retail space on the first floor (did anybody notice that retail is struggling?), surrounded by parking (that is, no common outside area, and traversing a parking lot to get off the property does not feel walkable); what makes them luxury I suppose are the balconies, granite kitchen countertops, party rooms and “fitness centers” (which are just like chain hotel gyms, a couple of machines in a small, poorly ventilated, carpeted and mirrored room).
And the rental rates! They are advertised as market rate, which is calculated thusly: take the area’s median household income, divide into thirds, divide by 12. That comes out to somewhere between $1300 and $1500 a month. My mortgage is less than that.
What I want to know is, who decided that the ratio was not spending a quarter of your income on housing, let’s raise It to a third?
Now basing rents on the median income means that half of households don’t make enough money to afford these “luxury” apartments; the other half that can afford these rents has other options, including buying a house for a smaller monthly payment.
Meanwhile, the region has a documented shortage of tens of thousands of affordable rental units.
Okay, that’s enough for now.
bk
Chapel Hill alum here, and I have always wanted to retire there.
Ohio Mom
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I can tell you one wrong turn Buffalo made back in the early 70s (though the plans must have been in the works earlier).
The state University was outgrowing its campus. In particular, more dorms were needed. Instead of building them downtown or in another area in the city, where all those students could fill the streets, making things lively, and be patrons of bars, restaurants and other businesses, they built the complex out in exurbia.
I can only guess that putting the students in the equivalent of Siberia was a reaction to the college protests of 1960s. The city fathers were afraid of the havoc students could wreck so they were isolated far from everything. Which meant that “everything” did not have the numbers of people it needed to remain vital.
Kelly
In 2019 Oregon mandated towns over 10,000 population allow duplexes in single family zones. That covers a bit over half our population and all the places that are growing. There are also provisions to encourage 3-plex and 4-plex construction but I don’t know the details.
It’s a start. It’ll take a while to matter.
AM in NC
Yep, housing is a problem here. Teachers in my kids’ schools (Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district) can’t afford to live here unless they are married to someone earning more money than they make.
We are finally getting more dense development as opposed to single-family homes, but so many of the condos start at half a million dollars and go up from there. So not really affordable for the average person. And rents follow along.
The population growth in this area is really something to see, and our fucking GOP-Gerrymandered General Assembly passes awesome laws like “town councils may not implement impact/developers’ fees to force large development companies to help offset the costs of the growth (schools, roads, water/sewer, etc) that they profit from”. Local control, my ass. It is ALL about punishing the libs.
Low Key Swagger
I was hoping that in depressed housing markets, work from home opportunities would mean that certain professions can move wherever they like, and they might move to these markets to take advantage of lower cost of living. My daughter is a case in point. She wants to buy a home, can work from anywhere, and has the credit. The problem? At 27, she wants to live in an area with decent weather and things to do for younger people. Also, too, interest rates are now a factor.
Another Scott
A strong regional economy starts with education. One needs a critical mass of strong research universities for sustained growth. Dayton OH was a thriving city for decades, but when NCR and GM and Frigidaire and Chrysler and Delco and … started having problems and downsizing and moving out, the city didn’t have new industries to fall back on (even with WPAFB, UD, Wright State nearby). Pittsburgh is much, much better off with CMU than it would have been otherwise.
But it also needs state or VC support for new company incubators to encourage new researchers and instructors to come, and for graduates to want to stay around. The Research Triangle area has that, as does Silicon Valley (and apparently NY State).
Of course, to have strong education requires money and that means state support. The support has to come first, and it has to be sustained.
So, it starts with money. Then education. Then company incubators, because the economy is always changing and regional economies have to be flexible.
Old housing stock can be a benefit (refurbishing giant old homes to be duplexes/multiplexes) and maintain the town’s character; or a curse (lots of tear-downs and empty lots until a critical mass of new construction happens). Just letting property developers run wild is a recipe for disaster (red-lining, increased sprawl, etc., etc.). Higher density is needed for lots of good reasons, but it’s not going to happen quickly (without huge increases in energy prices or something).
Looking forward to more of your thoughts on this huge topic. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Spanky
Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh …
sab
Retrofitting with decently designed windows helps a lot on energy usage. What we are saving on our house would run a whole other house (with the same new windows)`for the same amount of energy for both. It is not all a zero sum game.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Cacti: Reason number 999 that I talked my husband out of staying in SoCal or taking jobs in Nevada. The Colorado has been on the decline for years and I get the feeling the “drought” in the South West is the new normal for who knows how many years/decades.
Spanky
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: And it might be prudent for eastern states to nurture their remaining farmland. The Imperial Valley is not going to feed the US forever, and transcontinental transportation is going to get pricey.
gene108
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Rubles won’t launder themselves.
BellyCat
Respectfully, you might want to update your take on Pittsburgh, within the city limits.
ETA: East End in particular.
Mike E
Good ‘ol spRawleigh (now as populous as Pittsburgh) and sCary (pop. went from 12k to 125k in the 25 years I’ve lived here) are desirable places that attract more than enough people who will smother these areas to death… dunno about the psychopathology of our local leadership but let’s just say that sustainability was brought up/shot down so many times I’ve lost count. Now that hedge/vulture funds have snapped up the available housing I seriously doubt I can affordably retire here (or find decent employment in the meantime). Nor do I want to live in Clayton/Johnston County, or Rocky Mount for that matter. I’m sure the natives see me as another carpetbagger even though I’ve lived in NC since 1988, heh. So it goes.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s sad that the yimby, Reaganomic, trickle down “build build build” mantra with all it’s very racist outcomes has made it into mainstream “progressive” dialogue.
Follow any actual housing justice people in CA and you’ll see what yimbys and buildbuildbuild is actually about.
sab
USA is going to have water wars in coming decades, and my Midwest will deserve it because we breached Canadian water treaties for local gains, leaving us wide open for California taking Great Lakes water.
artem1s
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Those places started in decline with White Flight and then got hit again when the Fortune 50/100/500 companies fled south to anti-union cities like Atlanta and, you guessed it, The Triangle. Most of them got huge incentives to move too.
artem1s
@sab:
Can you cite? I’m not aware of any breach of the Great Lakes Consortium agreement. Which state?
Geo Wilcox
@sab: Even just caulking the windows helps tremendously. We had the crappiest windows put in our house without or knowledge. We had them replaced 5 years later and the difference was nothing short of amazing. No more lady bug and stink bug invasions, lower heating and cooling costs, and they are so much easier to take care of. That installer told us the builder did NOT caulk the windows. UGH.
sab
@artem1s: Ohio. I will need to look up the cite, but Tim Grendell got something through allowing him and Nestle to export bottled water about 15 years ago. I squwauked a lot in my immediate family, and even the environmentalis in my family thought I was nuts, but here we are. That treaty with Canada protected us, but we decided treaties don’t matter.
Ohio Mom
@Spanky: Retrofitting downtown office buildings to be condos and hotels is big in Cincinnati too. But you can’t live in a hotel room and the condos are pricey.
Downtown just got a Kroger’s supermarket but it doesn’t have very many of the other amenities my neighborhood has, like a dry cleaners, hardware store, doctor and dentist offices, gas stations and car repair shops, the list goes on. You know, the places on your Saturday errands list.
Downtown is mostly bars and restaurants and entertainment like the stadiums and arts centers.
I’ve always said there isn’t enough gentry for every neighborhood looking for them.
Ohio Mom
@artem1s: I will point out that there are gobs and gobs of money in the Detroit area — in the suburbs where the car executives live. I’m not sure there is a similar level of money surrounding the other rust belt cities you list.
raven
@Ohio Mom: We have Normal Hardware! I‘ve take the doggie (previously the doggies) there every Saturday morning for 15 years
Let’s go crash that party downIn Normaltown tonightThen we’ll go skinny-dippin’In the moonlightWe’re wild girls walkin’ down the streetWild girls and boys going out for a big timeAnyway we canWe’re gonna find somethingWe’ll dance in the garden in torn sheets in the rain
coin operated
@sab:
Yup…and the first shots (metaphorically speaking, I hope) will be fired along the Colorado River basin. Unless we get a decade of record snowpack in the Colorado Rockies, everyone south of Lake Powell (Southern Nevada, Northern Arizona and the SE Cali agriculture areas) are in for a rude awakening fairly soon.
Roger Moore
I think this is one area where California is finally moving in the right direction. The state looks at regional housing shortages and assigns a number of increased housing that has to be produced; then it’s up to the region to figure out where the housing gets built. After that, the cities have to produce a plan to have the housing built, which the state can veto if they decide it’s unrealistic.
There are even strong incentives for the cities to get their housing assessments done on time, which has just hit Santa Monica hard. While a city is without an approved plan, builders can bypass normal zoning rules and get automatic approval for projects that meet basic building codes as long as they include enough affordable housing. The city can’t revoke their approval later because it violates the newly approved plan. A few builders took advantage of the lapse in Santa Monica’s housing plan to get approval for about 5,000 new units, a large fraction of what the city was supposed to add, many of which would never have been approved otherwise. It’s a big stick.
JML
Housing is such a complex topic and so hard to maneuver in. figuring out the parking and transportation aspects is the hugest of messes in most of the midwest, where we are addicted to not only our cars but having more than one of them. bus transit is not liked, except as a commuter option (and even then…eh) and now we have the post-pandemic WFH world that’s throwing our downtowns into decline. People are not fretting about suburban sprawl any longer if they don’t have to drive in it as much or as far…
Roger Moore
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
A big part of it is that local governments depend on property tax for revenue. That means a decline in local property prices starves the city government of the revenue it needs for basic services, which tends to drive people away. That drives down prices even further and leads to a vicious circle. Businesses depend on good government services at least as much as they depend on low costs, so they tend to steer clear of those declining cities.
This is one more reason I think forcing cities to depend on local revenues for funding is such a terrible idea. If revenue were centralized and then doled out to ensure a basic level of service everywhere, a declining city would become everyone’s problem, and the state would have a strong incentive to fix it. Instead, rural and suburban folks are fine watching the city collapse. It doesn’t help that a lot of the rural and suburban people are where they are because of White Flight and are perfectly happy to watch the city collapse and hurt Those People who live there.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
I think the underlying issue is that greenfield development looks cheaper in the short term, especially because it’s heavily subsidized. Building more stuff in an already developed area is expensive because you have to remove something that was already there and hard because you have to deal with NIMBYs. Building somewhere that hasn’t been developed already looks cheap and fast, because you don’t have to worry about that stuff. It doesn’t help that there are big subsidies for building the new infrastructure needed to support that greenfield development. Part of what is needed is to change the subsidy structure, either to simply eliminate subsidies for greenfield development or to change it to subsidize infill instead.
raven
@Roger Moore: Savage Inequalities
Renie
FYI –
U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, Senior Justice Department Officials to Hold Press Conference on Significant National Security Matter
Start time: 1:30 p.m. ET
eversor
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
A lot of them are foreign investors. The top US markets are a good place to stash cash and get it out of your own countries system. So it’s from places like China or Saudi or Russia. They are also sold and traded among investors which drives the prices up. It’s just condo flipping.
Hell we have entire office skyscrapers empty in downtown Rosslyn for the same reason. Nobody could afford the lease, this is pre pandemic. There’s the fun story of the Nestle Tower in Rosslyn. That fucker was completed in 2013. Nobody was in it, completely empty, until Nestle leased it in 2017! Four years of just sitting on an empty building because “muh property values!!!!”
It’s nuts. They tore down my old building and now a condo would cost me 1.5 million for the new insanity that is up. A buddy lives there and he says there’s like nobody there! Then people also wonder “why is the area all of a sudden full of aggressive homeless people” ? I can tell you why! Nobody can fucking afford a home! People don’t choose to live under the bridge among piles of shit they just can’t afford a home because you assholes build nothing but luxury units.
There are tent cities in Georgetown and on the way I take to the DOJ. Those are all pretty recent and they are growing. Everyone hates it, hell I hate it the situation sucks. But nobody wants to admit “maybe we should build housing people can afford” because that would cut into profits! I’ve got a VA loan though so I’m looking at an older building in the Pentagon City area about a 20 walk from the METRO or The Warf area.
Baud
@Renie:
That’s now!
raven
@eversor: Hooverville’s!
Mike in NC
Developers are clearing vast tracts of land all around us. Read that they plan on building around 6000 new homes in this part of the county over the next 5-7 years. The foreman of the roofing crew we spoke to last week was skeptical of that happening. We shall see.
Roger Moore
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Count me as skeptical of a lot of the “housing justice” people. They have their own biases, primarily that they care mostly about protecting the people who are already there and don’t seem to give a damn about ensuring there will be housing for anyone else. I agree we need to do something to protect vulnerable people from losing their housing, but that is far from the only problem. There’s a huge housing shortage, which is why prices are so far out of control, and the prices will continue to get worse if we don’t keep up with demand. We need to build a lot of new housing and do something to make sure it is actually used as housing rather than hotel surrogates or investments for the ultra-rich.
Dorothy A. Winsor
In the meantime, here’s news to tide you over.
Clarence Thomas freezes order for Lindsey Graham to testify before Georgia grand jury investigating 2020 election
Renie
@Baud: They always start late. Still waiting
Almost Retired
@Ohio Mom: This sounds like Los Angeles. With the exception of Bunker Hill, downtown urban renewal in the 1960’s didn’t take the form of razing the historic core. The financial sector just picked itself up and moved a few blocks west, leaving the historic buildings on Broadway, Spring and Main mostly intact. The area was largely underutilized (except for a thriving Latino shopping district on Broadway) until adaptive reuse was authorized 20 years ago. And now these old buildings are being repurposed for hotels, lofts, businesses, etc., although as in Cincinnati, there are more gentrified housing units than gentrifiers. btw, central Cincinnati is absolutely wonderful. I stayed in an AirBnB on Liberty Hill and walked everywhere. Sketchy neighborhoods here and there to be sure, but the “bones” – as they say – of the City are fabulous.
eversor
@raven:
It’s bad. By the month you can see them grow and then new ones crop up in other places. “Oh, there’s a new camp in the middle of GW university, imagine that” or oh “they took over this area of grass in the middle of 395? how does someone not get runover getting downtown”.
You have the usual types you can tell are homeless, then you have the flat out mentally ill, but there are also a lot of them that have day jobs and do not look homeless. We did have one of them that got the title the ass biter cause well of the obvious hobby of his. But that stuff has always been around. The “this person totally has a real job and is living in a tent city cause reasons” is a new sort of “what in the fucking hell is going on”. I know guys in their 40’s all making 60k a year cramming four per a studio here now to save money. Something is very very very wrong and it’s going to blow if it’s not fixed.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Looks like things are getting started. ie someone came out and put something on the podiu
China!
Geminid
@Mike in NC: North Carolina has a lot of flat, buildable land. I think that is an attraction for industry both manufacturing and tech. And the companies have at least the prospect of land for their employees to live on that’s cheaper than in the northeast or in the Pacific states, as well as decent rainfall. Texas is similarly advantaged, although there is not as much rainfall.
The North Carolina Piedmont is spacious and also has nice weather.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Why did they put china on the podium?
Omnes Omnibus
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That does not necessarily mean anything.
Mike E
@Baud: Because they’re expecting company?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Omnes Omnibus: What doesn’t?
Garland says they filed a bunch of cases against agents acting on behalf of China.
Hm. I must have been a little to cryptic before.
Roger Moore
@Almost Retired:
In LA, part of this is because there’s so much new construction happening in the downtown area that there’s some competition. And, of course, the prices for all of it are high enough to keep a lot of people outside looking in. My hope is that if enough overpriced housing stock builds up, some of the builders will eventually decide it’s more sensible to sell or rent it for less than they hoped rather than sit on it and wait for people to accept their prices.
This is an area where rising interest rates may force their hand. With interest rates as low as they were through most of the 2010s, builders could afford to sit on properties for a long time hoping to sell them for more. Higher interest rates will make that untenable for any builder who had to borrow most of the money to finance the construction.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The indictment was issued and sealed in 2019, so this is an old investigation
ETA: Also shows how slowly investigations can happen even in non-political cases.
ETA2: Never mind. The 2019 indictment was for the company, not these individuals.
oatler
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s the good china.
eversor
@Roger Moore:
That’s not what’s going to happen. What will happen is foreign investors, wealth funds, venture capital funds, and asset management funds will swoop in and buy it all up just keeping prices inflated. Bain Capital of all people released a report on this at the start of COVID that this was all a boon for them to get everything and then raise rents. The rents are now set by a computer program that everyone uses and just keeps jacking up rates.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: Yeah, California is finally doing the right thing, after decades of shooting itself in the dick re: housing.
I’m really looking forward to the entire Bay Area having the Builder’s Remedy applied to them, the whiny babies. Apartment towers in Atherton–bring it!
Martin
Anyone really interested in this should read this book: The Rise and Decline of Nations.
This is the author that really formalized the term ‘collective action problem’ and focuses on how narrow interests coordinate to block broader social good. How established homeowners block new development believing they are protecting existing asset values, even though the growth could (and usually does) enrich everyone including the people opposing it. Safe to say this is the dominant political philosophy in the US, as David X Machina famously stated:
The notion of shared prosperity has been utterly choked out by white christian nationalism and its related zero-sum policy and culture thinking. When they yell about a taco truck on every corner, people should hear ‘a new job on every corner’ and welcome it. It’s also why I tend to be opposed to things like nuclear power. My objection to it isn’t that it’s dangerous (the US Navy has proven it can be extremely safe) but that it contains too many attack surfaces to cause it to fail – opposition groups will spring like weeds to make sure it never gets built, wasting precious time to address climate change as we tie up efforts and capital on a project that will be mired in the courts. This is basically why the US can’t build anything of scale – it only takes a dozen people with enough spare time to constantly object in zoning meetings to block a national scale bit of infrastructure. This is why solar has succeeded – it’s dominated by small scale deployment – and goes up too fast for people to fight against it. Not that once it’s built, nobody gives a shit. It’s all performative NIMBYism. All of it.
Speaking of which, despite the constant whining by Republicans about how horrible California is, we’ve probably just passed Germany in GDP, making us the 4th largest economy. Now, that’s equal parts growth in the state, but also energy crisis in Germany hurting growth. I attribute a lot of that to the state just checking out of the national political bullshit and getting on with things. While y’all were fighting over coal and oil and whatnot, we built solar and EVs and grew into the inevitable new markets that would result and now lead them.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@eversor: I have seen more tent cities around since I started going back into the office (I live in Takoma Park and thankfully bought a house here at the bottom of the market). There’s one near work (Navy Yard) under the highway on 3rd Street SE, which is crazy because the Navy Yard…they’ve built a gagillion new large apartment buildings right there and I don’t think ANY of them are more than half full. And they’re still building them! I just don’t see how it pays to own a building that’s half or more vacant.
If you want something reasonably affordable…well I don’t know what affordable is to you but look for condos in Cleveland Park of all places. My wife has a fairly spacious 1 BR (I think 900 sq ft) for sale in Cleveland Park, right on Connecticut just a block or so north of the metro on the East side on a spur of Rock Creek Park. The realtor says she might be able to get $320K for it. The condo market in NW seems to be soft because of all the new buildings going up elsewhere and the fact that the condo buildings in NW are older and hence not “luxury”. But the buildings are nice and have character and were built to last. Plus you can run every errand within a 4 block radius so no need to ever get in a car.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Unfortunately there are still tons of cities that are fighting it (Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, etc. down here) and its infecting local politics threatening democrats that are trying to comply with the law with anti-growth messages and accusations of working for developers. I worry it will dramatically shift local politics rightward in the very places that are working to get it done. In my city we’ve built almost nothing but 5 over 1 mixed use housing for the last 5-10 years. It’s exactly what we needed to do, but the city is now struggling to get transportation in alignment with that kind of density.
Served
@Martin: This article caused quite a stir recently, but it presents a pretty compelling case imo: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/environmentalists-nimby-permitting-reform-nepa/671775/
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Roger Moore: Yeah I can see how that’s a problem. Of the cities I mentioned I’m most familiar with Cleveland because I have an Aunt and Uncle who still live there and three cousins I was close to who grew up there. I’m from Grand Rapids, MI and now live in the DC area so the aunt and uncle are a great midway stopping point on the way home, plus they host Christmas and summer get togethers fairly regularly. They live in Shaker Heights which is still nice but I mean, Shaker Square isn’t quite so upscale as it seemed when I was a kid anymore. And Cleveland looks pretty grim for long stretches and the roads are absolutely awful. I imagine all the other public services are just as bad. I did look into buying a house there during the pandemic. I could get a legit mansion there for maybe half, maybe even less than that, what my 3 BR cape cod in Takoma Park would sell for.
Martin
I know this is a topic I talk about entirely too much, but I’m not crazy about the issue of car over dependency.
Today the CEO of Rivian (EV maker here in CA) said that the future of urban transport and deliveries is bikes and the constraints on the battery supply chain will force that issue. They’re expanding into the bike market. Part of that probably has to do with the realization that the same battery stack that powers one of their $70K trucks can power nearly a million dollars worth of bikes, and if you are battery constrained, one of these markets is much more lucrative than the other.
This is a pretty big deal, having a US automotive big make this admission (many of the European automakers already have opened bike divisions).
Major Major Major Major
@Served: I’m really glad people are getting serious about the regulatory paralysis (for lack of a better term) that prevents us from building basically anything. Ban combustion-only cars in California? Sure! Make it possible to build the infrastructure for green energy that will mean electric cars actually reduce emissions? Hell no, not in my back yard (or anybody’s)! High speed rail connecting SF to LA? Don’t make me laugh.
To say nothing of the major environmental benefits of density.
ETA before anybody chimes in about the dangers of deregulation or whatever, other countries manage this just fine.
Betsy
@sab: The main problem with replacement windows is that they have a short lifespan, and have to be replaced with new ones (also made out of plastic and composites) in 15-20 years typically.
They’re (sadly) disposable. That’s why they’re called “replacement windows.”
It’s more expensive up front, but cheaper in the long run and much better for the carbon footprint, and conservation of resources, to repair and insulate existing wood windows which have already lasted for many decades.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@sab: I thought Nestle was bottling water somewhere in Michigan but could only take groundwater…whether that’s a violation of the compact I don’t know. Getting Great Lakes water over the Rocky Mountains to the Southwest is cost prohibitive so if they piped Great Lakes water to AZ people wouldn’t be able to afford to buy it. Desalination is a lot cheaper from what I’ve read, although that doesn’t help AZ or NM or Western CO much but it is a solution of sorts for CA.
Fair Economist
@eversor:
Oh, there’s a very good and easy solution. Build a lot of units like that and cackle as those investors go bankrupt. Actually, only a moderate amount of new construction is enough to make them run for the hills.
Another Scott
@Martin: +1
It’s Davis X. Machina, of course. ;-)
Looks like he’s on the Twitter machine – https://twitter.com/davis_x_machina
Cheers,
Scott.
Betsy
@Martin: That is amazing!
And it’s impossible to talk about this topic too much; it’s exactly where the center of sustainability focus ought to be – so please don’t apologize!
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Betsy: Now you tell me. We had Marvin replacement windows put in our house in 2013. Before that we had old fashioned wood frame ones with storm windows. The replacements were not cheap.
Martin
@Served: Yeah, there’s growing recognition of the problem. The issue is how to remedy it. One of the downsides of Californias path to the present is that environmental law is one of the better ways to block projects – a place where you can sue a developer almost indefinitely. This was pretty famously put to use here in my area with the Trestles toll road which was sued out of existence over the course of two decades. A friend of mine worked on that project at the start of his civil engineering career, and was working on it again when he retired. Now, it was a project that deserved to not be built, but it still illustrates the point.
The main reason why CA high speed rail costs are so high is that every farm, every right of way, every road realignment, every utility realignment gets their own day in court, and appeals, and so on – and in the case of a 400 mile long train with limited ability to be relocated in the most populous state, that’s *thousands* of lawsuits. And in a way that’s good (it’s good that Trestles got blocked), but it also needs to be efficient and consolidated, and boy, that’s not how the US legal system works anywhere.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
One place where I differ from you is that I take the NIMBYs at their word when they say their primary objection is to lifestyle issues rather than monetary. They are primarily people who own their houses and are happy with the community they live in. What they really want is to preserve their community exactly as it was when they moved in.
To the extent they complain about declining property values, I think it’s the use value they’re really worried about. Allowing multi-unit development on a single property should raise the sale price. They absolutely don’t want that, though, because they care more about being able to continue enjoying life as it is rather than having more theoretical value in their home.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore:
This annoys me so much. (The very real sentiment, not you.) You own property? Great! Do you also own all the other property in town? Oh, you don’t? Curious how much control you want to have over how it’s used.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore: Sac is adding thousands of rental units downtown and midtown, where it will eventually have an impact on rents regionwide but it’s impossible to guess when currently overpriced units will have to ease back their rates. Like the famous NY mayoral candidate said, “The rents are too damn high.’
It’s tempting to believe the LGM mantra of rapturing the NIMBYs to solve housing, but that requires ignoring how housing gets built and how difficult and time-consuming it is.
HUD used to have a significant role but Republicans took care of that.
Fair Economist
@Martin:
Hunh, since car and oil company manipulation of markets and zoning laws is a big reason we’re in this situation, car companies going into reverse could change things in a hurry. Especially given that bike infrastructure is vastly cheaper than car infrastructure.
That said, my impression is that the battery limitation is a medium term thing – perhaps 5 to 10 years. The real bottleneck right now is lithium production; there’s plenty of lithium on the planet, it’s just going to take time to get it into production. The Salton Sea is estimated to be able to produce about 6 times as much lithium as the entire planet does right now; that’s enough to make every new car on the planet a BEV.
Another Scott
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: We’ve got Andersen 400 series (vinyl clad wood) replacement double-hung windows in January 2006. I expect them to last a lot more than 15-20 years here in NoVA – they’re still fine and work like new. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thomas doing a temp stay. One shouldn’t read into it.
Suzanne
@WereBear:
It is almost always favorable from a carbon perspective to reuse and improve building stock rather than replace it. It is almost always favorable from a financial perspective to replace building stock rather than improve it (if the work is significant) or adapt it for reuse.
Yes, this is a problem.
trollhattan
@Fair Economist: And when the day arrives that bicycles have their own discrete paths away from traffic, secured parking at work, stores, and entertainment venues, then during nice weather some fraction of the population will choose to use one in lieu of a car.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Martin: My next door neighbor works for Rivian. I believe what you say about bikes. DC has put in a lot of great biking infrastructure over the past decade plus and I now bike a lot of places I used to drive because it’s as fast or faster, I get built in exercise, and it’s more fun than sitting in traffic staring at brake lights. They’ve done studies in dense urban areas and deliveries happen faster by bike than car. In places like London (and DC, NY, SF, etc.). Bikes can bypass a lot of congestion cars get stuck in.
If you want to see what sustainable cities and towns look like just look at the cities that were built before the advent of the car and maintained that level of density afterwards. Not being able to travel faster than a bicycle can go or horse can trot really encourages density and sustainability. Driving 15 miles to get groceries and other necessities just isn’t an option at that speed. Even 5 miles is really pushing it for regular errands.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Don’t really have anything to say about housing in NC (and I’m pretty late to the party anyway), but had to mention my experience with the climate in Raleigh from a N CA point of view. I went to 2 computer trainings in Raleigh. The first was in April, with the magnolia trees in bloom, and lovely Spring weather, and I thought “Nice place; I could live here”, especially with all the benefits of living near a university. The second was in EARLY June, and I thought I would get heatstroke from the heat and humidity while out birding. And the thunder and lightning storm I experienced while at a local park was terrifying. So I’m happy where I am!
Fair Economist
@trollhattan:
The current shortfalls are so enormous the new construction isn’t near enough to bring down prices basically anywhere in California. New Zealand has gotten house prices to come down after 5 years of construction at a rate of about 37,000 per year. Adjusted for population, that would be about 300,000 per year in CA, which is about 3 times what we’re currently building.
Martin
@eversor: Pro Publica has a really interesting feature on the current cause of rent inflation.
I think this is half the problem, the other half of the problem is the private equity folks figured out that if they bought all of the multifamily rentals in the US and then applied that algorithm, they could extract every possible penny out of the half trillion dollar apartment market.
A LOT of this could be solved with a considerate public housing policy, which CA is at least nudging into in an interesting way with project Homekey.
jonas
A little further east in Central New York, this is precisely what the SUNY system did in the 1980s when it established a new campus of the state polytechnic university near Utica. Instead of seeing an opportunity to redevelop the Rust Belt city’s beleaguered downtown with a vibrant urban campus, they stuck it in an isolated rural area several miles away on the complete other side of the Mohawk River. I guess the land was cheap or something, but what a boneheaded move from an urban planning perspective.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Electric bikes are great for urban areas, but I don’t think they’re practical for suburbia as it now exists. Big suburban arterial roads are currently too hostile to anything but cars for bikes to be a practical means of transportation. We’re going to have to reengineer a lot of roads to be more bike-friendly before bikes make much headway.
One other thing we should be doing is discouraging the kind of overweight monstrosities that currently rule the EV market. Rivian is certainly guilty of this themselves. Battery packs are a substantial fraction of an EV’s weight, so a big EV like one of Rivian’s pickups will need a correspondingly big battery to have a decent range. That same battery could probably serve 2 or 3 Nissan Leaf-sized vehicles with the same range, or even more if you’re willing to sacrifice range to make a dedicated commuter vehicle rather than one that’s still useful on the occasional road trip.
eversor
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I’ve noticed that and 320k is easy for us to afford. We looked at the Cathedral area and then got ate by HOA fees before moving into this condo.
As for Navy Yard a bunch of my former service buddies work down there and yeah it’s fucking silly. Tent cities, some of the open areas under bridges in the areas are shocking and yet they keep building luxury units. And yeah, it’s a DoD item. That this is there is fuck balls insane.
The SO actually wants NW. She likes old buildings and is willing to put up with it all. She likes all of that stuff it’s her jam and she really likes those areas. My VA loan qualifies for north of 450 so anything sub that is not an issue and our incomes are good enough for it. She’d also like the quieter NW area. She’s not into night life or anything like that. She wants old, quiet, classic, walkable, and pet friendly.
There’s also a safety issue at play. I’m a six foot, lifts weights, runs, bikes, swims, soccer, rugby, martial arts menace of a monster of a man. Also a vet. She’s a tiny, scrawny, little 5’4 46 year old filipina lady. I also grew up here in the crack era and she went to private school and had maids. I don’t get fucked with all that much and have a much higher tolerance for danger. Though the dirty secret is she’s in vastly better shape for her arge and does longer distance runs than I do, does more regular work outs, yoga,pilates, tennis, also does martial arts. She’s had a couple nasty incidents since COVID and does not want to move to areas where that might repeat. Especially as her niece is often with us as she goes to college in DC and we are vastly more fun than the parents and other aunts and step uncles. Translates as “we keep the good booze at home, have VR, video games, 4k OLED with 9.2 sound system, better food, live not in suburbia, have a nicer cat, don’t force a 21 year old to go to Church, and know when to get out of the way and go on a several hour hike when she’s with the guy she likes”. The rest of the family are religious busy bodies who force her to stay at home with a no boys rule that is sort of comedic when dealing with a 21 year old woman. “She’s not having sex”, yeah you keep telling yourself that. Whatever lets you sleep at night.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: Was recently booted from my 1964-vintage office building and it is being gutted and refitted for future use as an office building rather than replaced. IDK what the critical point is for deciding which path to take but the retrofit process is very expensive and time-consuming. So’s dismantling a 17-story building in the middle of downtown. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
BTW, if anybody wishes to bid on all that surplus asbestos and lead paint , I can get you names.
Martin
@Fair Economist: Yeah, estimates are that the state is 3 million units behind where it needs to be. The state needs to return to the level of frantic development it saw back in the 70s.
But the problem is the old adage that there are two ways to make money in real estate: build more housing, and don’t build more housing. There’s so much invested wealth that even the most liberal city in the US (San Francisco) has made it their mission to block any effort to help the homeless and people of color because even the biggest hippie turns into a Reaganite once they have 3 million in equity in their home.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
If California wants to make real progress, we need to consider wholesale watering down of the CEQA. It makes it too easy for NIMBYs to effectively block anything. Yeah, they can’t stop it forever, but they can make a lot of things unprofitable by threatening to tie them up in red tape for long enough. It says something that just about any big project the state government wants to happen on a reasonable time scale gets partial exemption from CEQA as part of its enabling legislation.
Suzanne
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Well, the secret is that those places aren’t as “declined” as one may think. Having bought a house two years ago in Pittsburgh, allow me to reassure you that our housing prices have also gone up significantly. Buffalo and Cleveland have also experienced a big climb. The places that have really declined and stayed that way are the places with no educational base. It really is about having a large population of college graduates and the employers who want them. Which leads to the hip restaurants and dog parks and stuff.
But allow me to be snobby for a minute…. I don’t know if we’re going to stay. There is a lot of low-grade bad behavior here. The meth freak who broke into my house, the neighbors who were hoarders and let their house catch on fire and now aren’t going to fix it, other neighbors who don’t take care of their lawns, people who let their dogs bark too much. This kind of behavior leads to decline and creates a vicious cycle.
ronno2018
We need to re-engineer the suburban sprawl and we need to do it now. Lots of examples of rural urban lines being setup. Sprawl is costly https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme . Good twitter dude — https://twitter.com/QAGreenways/status/1541806669834858496?s=20&t=bPelOcBQk1yWTXMRiafLcg
GoBlueInOak
Thankfully the tide is slowly starting to shift on housing policy. The unaffordability consequences of decades of NIMBYism that previously were mostly limited to high demand cities like San Francisco, NYC, Boston, etc has now metastasized to a national problem as work from home has distributed well paid workforces across the land. While we likely aren’t going to get any white flight racist reactionary conservative NIMBYs to change anytime soon, at least in progressive spaces the voice of the NIMBY left is slowly but surely being beaten back as it becomes increasingly clear that our land use, zoning and environmentally review processes which privilege the voices of loudmouth naysayers needs to come to an end.
The last 10 years have seen an explosion in economic studies coming out of university econ, law and public policy departments studying urban housing economics – which in a previous generation was a pretty sleepy field for budding economists to study. And we now have piles upon piles of academic literature demonstrating that “no Viriginia, building new housing doesn’t make everyone’s rents go up – the opposite in fact”.
Thankfully here in California, the YIMBYs are starting to rack up some victories and we have some new state laws that provide tools for pre-empting local control over housing development.
Housing affordability holds back economic growth. The efficiency gains from solving California (and NYCs) roadblocks to building new housing would have very positive impacts on national GDP as a whole. And its better for the climate as well – new housing is substantially safer, more structurally sound, and way more energy efficient than that 100 year old house everyone likes to claim is “better.”
Lower per capita water use, lower per capita electric use, better R values, etc – that’s what we get from higher density, new construction – particularly here in California where our state energy code (Title 24) for new construction is that most stringent energy code in the nation.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: Rivian may intend that large platform for delivery vehicles. I’m not sure if they are buying from Rivian, but UPS, Amazon, etc. are planning to electrify much of their delivery fleets. UPS plans to use hybrids for longer routes.
Suzanne
@trollhattan:
Development is always a calculation of the value of what you have vs. what it will cost (time and money and risk) to improve, and what the local market can demand. Renovation is usually easier than adaptive reuse (changing a building’s use from one occupancy type to another). Simple interior renovations, especially in office buildings…..NBD. Converting the office building to apartments…..a bigger endeavor.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Roger Moore: Making major arterials much more bike friendly isn’t that hard so long as you’re willing to take away a lane of traffic from cars – just put bike lanes in both directions – that takes up the space of one lane of traffic in one direction. Add a concrete barrier to separate the bike lanes from the cars them and you’re there. Cars turning left and right across the bike lanes is still something of a problem to solve but making space for bikes doesn’t necessarily require all newly built infrastructure. Here in DC they’ve made some former 2-way streets into 1 way streets to make space for bike lanes.
I’m disappointed that Montgomery County where I live (although I’m only a mile from the DC border) is way behind DC in biking infrastructure. I have been encouraging local officials to pick up the pace on getting more bike lanes and such put in. It’s starting to happen but needs to happen faster.
eversor
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I used to joke I have a BMW (and had one at the time) which is Bus Metro Walking. I did not drive. I lived in Rosslyn and biked to the Pentagon each day. Was GLORIOUS. Also oddly faster than with traffic. I know lots of us that did this. If the weather was bad I’d say fuck it and take the METRO. The car was for COSTCO. Hence I lost the car. There was no need and it was a giant expense I did not need.
The SO has cars cause she has to finish the year at her job up by Baltimore (talk about a hell commute) and then she will get a job down here. She didn’t get the “no car” thing when she moved and we moved over to an electric for her but you really don’t need it. Well, for here. We do need it for her to visit family and her trips to the various Asian stores she loves… and COSTCO.
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: I am glad Oregon did that; I am seeing a lot more duplexes to 4 plexes being built here in Bend, which has a severe affordable housing problem. Oregon gets a lot of things right and that’s because the state government has been blue for long enough to make these necessary changes.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I’m pretty sure I don’t live in Pittsburgh.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Suburbia as currently envisioned and built, yeah, but I’m pretty classically suburban (Irvine, planned community) and the city is trying VERY hard to transition to bike, with the community being the main impediment. The increased housing density is kind of forcing the issue.
The problem isn’t that people are unwilling to bike – we have massive recreational biking population here – it’s that it’s not safe to do so. Fix that, and biking will happen. As it stands, anyplace within 5 miles of me is faster to reach by bike than car because I’m pretty immune to traffic, and most traffic lights where bike infrastructure exists. So all of my doctors, grocery stores, the mall, every school, etc. are all faster to go to on bike than car. About one trip in 10 to the hardware store I take the car only because I need to carry something that I haven’t (yet) made a solution to haul with my bike (currently designing a lumber hauling trailer) and it’s the kind of stuff I’m not organized enough to have delivered.
But the point isn’t that we should have no cars. The point is that if we transitioned from one car per adult, to one car per household, you’d both solve about half of the remaining climate problem in the US, plus you’d save everyone money in the process. My bike is fucking cheap, both to buy and operate. And it’s really fucking cheap for my city to support because the infrastructure costs are so low, freeing up money to go instead into education or whatever.
So the goal isn’t zero cars, it’s one car per family, with the tasks the additional cars did replaced by bikes, trains, etc. I still have a car. My wife uses it most of the time, but I have it when I need it.
GoBlueInOak
@Martin: Some of those jurisdictions are going to get Builder’s Remedy good and hard until they submit a compliant Housing Element.
eversor
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
One of the reasons I like where I’m at in VA is we have bike lanes on the side of major highways like i66. I have a souped up specialized not a road bike and I can tear ass everywhere. Though sawing through Georgetown on the way to work some of those “bike lanes” have now been taken over by restaurants building platforms into them to support customers which is allowed because COVID and outdoor eating.
Suzanne
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I am picturing wrath hotter than the fire of a thousand suns if you tried to get Sun Belt cities to give up a lane of car traffic.
Holy shit, they tried it on ONE arterial in Tempe, which is famously bike-friendly. Turned one lane into a protected bike lane. The meltdowns at the City Council meetings were epic and they returned it to auto traffic.
GoBlueInOak
@Martin: Agreed – major problem. Especially when CEQA lawsuits gets applied to urban infill projects where there’s no undeveloped land or Greenfield’s being developed but is instead infill housing in already developed & urbanized locations – like surface parking lots in downtown San Francisco…
Martin
Yep. California keeps growing businesses despite the supposedly exorbitant rents/taxes/regulation/etc. Why? Because we have the educated workforce and the state very publicly leans into that. And access to that workforce beats everything else.
Why didn’t Kansas grow when they cut taxes? Because it further undermined their already lagging higher educational system. There wasn’t value in Kansas. No new industries were going to come out of Kansas. You can’t cut your way to growth.
Suzanne
@Martin:
Honestly, this is one reason I believe in free or very-close-to-free higher education in this country. (Even if the plumbers pay for it.) Educated people are absolutely the thing that will unlock the box for the country’s prosperity at this point.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: You ultimately need no-car bikeways, geographically challenging in most metro areas, I guess. But this is ‘murica, where cycling will never be a dominant form of transportation. (Also, have some folks never lived where a thing called “winter” occurs?)
TBF it will be extremely helpful when vehicles have made the transition from ICE to EV. I feel like a one-man smog check station when cycling in traffic. “That one’s running rich, that one’s burning oil, ugh, diesel.” Am a bigger fan of Teslas than most.
Martin
In what way does that differ from the white christian nationalist position that the US was founded as a white christian nation (ignore the slavery and genocide, if you don’t mind) and needs to stay that way?
I’m not saying they aren’t genuine in that view – they clearly are. But fuck that attitude. They don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Suzanne
@Baud: I think not taking care of your damn lawn is one of the grossest public behaviors. People rightly complain about HOAs, but they come from that douchebag who won’t keep his shit picked up.
eversor
@Martin:
I’m going to call bullshit here. Because the people I see that “bike” take all sorts of stupid risks hell I see bikes on the Whitehurst Freeway here dodging in and out of traffic. The kicker, on the weekend, they are rich, older white guys, on 10k bikes.
That’s the thing. The bikes are an upper middle class to wealthy thing and they (well we?) don’t give a flying flip about the dangers of it. Working class people won’t touch it. The basic middle class people won’t touch it. Biking is an upper class thing. The middle class might take an electric scooter, but that’s about it.
Work at a restaurant or department store downtown. Ain’t nobody riding a bike. Yet at the consluting and law firms I’ve worked at it’s hugely popular and a sign you are cool.
Hell if we didn’t have a private garage in our Georgetown, McPherson, and Metro Center locations I would not bike to work. Because that bike would be stripped and robbed blind in seconds in any of them. So unless you work a job high enough up the ladder to have a private guarded garage, with a private locker for bikes, it’s getting stolen end of story. So I only bike on trips or to and from work. I can’t bike to the downtown Japanese market with my SO and buy groceries even though it’s an upscale area because those bikes are going to get stolen.
Heck growing up in Chevy Chase MD land of BEER THE JUDGE right by that golf course we left the garage open one night and next morning all tools, bikes, and one car gone. It’s a massive issue.
Fancy places are going to offer you a financial incentive and place to safely store that bike. Make sub 60k fuck you get your bike stolen. Hell I worked for Deloitte in Rosslyn at one point and the bikes outside of that place with private security were routine robbed and stripped. Cops and security wouldn’t touch it because reasons (they didn’t want blow back) so it turned into a mess. Now we also have people who steal scooters and then hurl them into the Potomac River for shits and giggles. If I take the route by the river on the bike path each time you go over a bridge scooters in the river or creeks. It’s comedic.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Oh yeah. I am amazed at the people who think moving to Arizona is a reasonable thing to do, which is still very much a thing. As if water (or the lack of it) isn’t a real concern.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Suzanne: It’s frustrating because…every biker is a car off the roads and the main impediment with a lot of people biking, especially now that we have e-assist bikes that don’t require the rider to break a sweat unless they want to, is they just don’t feel safe sharing space with cars. If you put in the bike lanes some of the cars would disappear from that arterial and the congestion wouldn’t be so bad. Everyone might move faster.
They’re doing this kind of thing in my home town of Grand Rapids, MI and the good thing there (as it a lot of midwest cities) is that the traffic isn’t so bad that it actually slows car traffic down at all other than on certain select routes. And even those aren’t that super congested compared to what I see in the DC area. A city like Cleveland could lose a lane of car traffic on the vast majority of roads with multiple lanes and it wouldn’t impede automobile flow at all. Like take a road with two lanes in both directions, make it one lane in both directions with a permanent left turn lane so the left turners are never impeding traffic flow, you’ve gone from 4 car lanes total to 3 and you have space for bikes and cars move just as fast or faster.
Suzanne
@trollhattan: Relatively few people will want to bike on a no-car bikeway. The biggest reason is that you’re probably going somewhere. A store, your office, a post office, whatever. Those are all on streets.
The danger of biking is definitely what keeps me away. One of my colleagues was killed earlier this year while she was biking.
It’s probably anathema in liberal places, but only really strict enforcement against dangerous/antisocial behaviors like driving too fast, not mowing your lawn, etc. will produce any change.
Martin
@Suzanne: A very good (and impossible to implement at the state level) idea came out of UC which was to make higher ed free, and put a small supplemental tax on the income for every *graduate* for 20 years. Some fraction of that tax would go back to the institutions they attended.
This puts the cost recovery on the back end, when the graduate is getting the benefits of the education, avoids putting it on the plumbers, and provides incentives to the universities to both graduate students and to expand programs that lead to higher earnings. But a state can’t tax people who leave the state, so it’d need to be a national policy. For foreign students, retain the current up-front system and let them deduct those costs if they become residents.
Also addresses the problem of program growth because most high earning disciplines (medicine, engineering) are incredibly expensive to teach, so universities can’t afford to grow them relative to say humanities because the fees are uniform at the front end. And universities that don’t retain their students wouldn’t get any part of that return, so they’d make meaningful investments in retention, career counseling, etc.
GoBlueInOak
@eversor: US Census data disagrees. Percentage of people who commute via bike is relatively similar across household income groups and if anything, the bicycling rate declines slightly as income rises.
Baud
@Suzanne: I see your later comment where you talking about mowing. I do have my lawn mowed. I’m not an animal.
I don’t necessarily do a great job killing weeds.
GoBlueInOak
@Suzanne: Actually what improves bicycling safety is not enforcement but street design. We know this. There’s plenty of studies substantiating it at this point. We just need to do it.
And its not impossible. Bicycling nirvana Amsterdam used to be an automotive hellscape in the 1950s and 1960s until they made policy and street infrastructures changes.
And Paris until recently a traffic disaster. Mayor Hidalgo has moved heaven and earth to re-design Paris’ streets over the last decade into a pro-bicycling city and the impact has been amazing.
Build streets for safe bicycling and people of all ages and skill levels will bike. And I got news for people – it gets cold and rainy in Amsterdam and Paris too for extended periods. Heck, it gets downright winter nasty in Scandinavia and they have great bike infrastructure there too.
GoBlueInOak
@Suzanne: What does “taking care of your lawn” mean exactly? From my point of view, a well manicured front yard is a sign of an authoritarian personality. YMMV.
Martin
@Suzanne: Based on other areas, there’s a key inflection point where things flip. Paris started their bike transition 2 years ago and it’s been a massive success.
And businesses came to like it because cars are actually an impediment to customers. Remove the cars and you get pedestrian shopping districts with much, much higher traffic and revenues. How many stores do you pass by because it’s too much of a hassle to get into the parking lot, park, etc. You get a return to the 1950s downtown style shopping district rather than the standalone store surrounded by parking lots that discourage browsing, discovery, etc. Takes some time for that to develop though, so there’s this difficult transition period.
The key to my cities bike transition is we already have a big outdoor mall which is sufficiently close to that kind of shopping district that those of us who switch over to bikes can simply shift all of our shopping to an existing convenient location. We also have a set of bike infrastructure that many retail locations back up to, so when I go grocery shopping I don’t have any at-grade street crossings.
Fair Economist
@GoBlueInOak:
Gotta love the 7,000 high density units that filed in Santa Monica before they got a plan approved. San Francisco looks likely to get whalloped in January. But what I’m really excited about is a city not much on the radar: Cupertino. Apparently they are not able to get a plan approved at this point due to the red tape they’ve layered on themselves over the decades. With the symbolism and finances of being the HQ of the most valuable company on Earth, Apple, THAT could be spectacular.
Suzanne
@GoBlueInOak:
Oh, I know. But hot damn, it will not happen. I am being totally pragmatic at this point.
I will also note that street design is one layer of protection but enforcement is also required. I live on a narrow brick street now, built in the 19-teens, urban grid layout. It’s narrow, it’s bumpy, there’s cars parked on both sides of the street, we have “safe streets — children at play” signs up, people should be driving no more than 20mph……and yet, at least once a day, I see some asshole flying down the street. A kid got hit two blocks over last week.
I know that urbanists hate cul-de-sacs, and for good reason, but they do cut down in this shit. Racism is not the only reason people get frustrated.
Martin
And they did that because they were broke and couldn’t afford to build car infrastructure. Bike infrastructure was cheap though.
One key policy decision is to slow cars down. Norway is currently touting their achievement of zero pedestrian deaths and US policymakers keep asking them what technology they employed to achieve that, and they said they just lowered speed limits. That was it. That was the whole solution.
Speed differential is what kills. The reason I got a class 3 bike was so I could go pretty close to car speed (28 mph) on residential streets. Just not having cars passing me solves 90% of the problem.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
IIRC, Rivian is working on a commercial platform. They are also selling pickups- I’ve seen people using them as everyday drivers- and I think they’ve started delivering their SUV, too. Of course Rivian isn’t the only one doing this. The Ford F-150 Lightning starts at about 3 tons, which is a ton more than the base F-150. The Tesla cybertruck is going to be enormous, too. And this isn’t limited to electric trucks. All of Tesla’s cars are heavy, largely because of the big battery packs. Their lightest, the Model 3, is about 2 tons, and that goes to over 2 1/2 tons for the Model X. Even the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt are pushing 2 tons.
GoBlueInOak
@Fair Economist: Very much looking forward to Builder’s Remedy kicking in for a few cities in South Bay.
The Santa Monica thing was nuts – and those proposed projects all included BMR units such that if they were all actually built, would produce enough affordable housing to substantially met Santa Monica’s entire low-mod goals for its current RHNA cycle!
Fair Economist
@Martin:
With a LOT of even the nastiest suburban stroad setups, it’s pretty easy to run bike lanes in the back of the commercial districts. In general the current zoning worship of separated uses mean there are seams with few roads and activity that are often ideal for bike lanes – and curiously, sometimes extra valuable precisely because they join separated uses. It’s very low-hanging fruit.
Suzanne
@GoBlueInOak:
Take care of whatever is there, and keep it neat and clean and safe and free of dog poop, rodents, vermin, trash, and standing water. I don’t expect perfectly trimmed box hedges or English flower gardens. There is a middle ground between the kind of yard insanity you’re talking about, and my neighbors down the street, who haven’t mowed in six months and their bushes are dying and there are snakes.
Martin
@Fair Economist: San Jose writ large has the worst residential zoning in the US. What you might not realize, though, is that the big tech companies are 100% on board with housing reform. They are an ally of this effort because they understand just how damaging the status quo is to their operations.
What I’m a bit surprised by is that they didn’t do more to build their own housing. Some did, but not really on the scale they could have done.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: gotta be the most-abused part of the state regulatory pipeline, yeah?
GoBlueInOak
@Martin: Reducing speed limits is definitely a really useful policy change for improve bike/ped safety. Totally in favor of it – esp since its CHEAP. Stroke of the pen, change some street signs.
On the “what is possible” front – Paris is a rich city – they didn’t “need” to become a pro-bike city. Mayor Hidalgo has shown that big things are indeed possible if you just prioritize it and exercise some political capital to make it happen.
I just refuse to accept the “its just not practical here” argument. That shit is the same old same old lazy thinking that gets thrown out every single time the status quo is called into question and somebody is demanding change. We have plenty of money for it – I know this b/c every time somebody suggests widening a freeway, the money falls out of the sky overnight.
GoBlueInOak
@Suzanne: I suspect we might have widely divergent levels of what we’d consider a well maintained yard, but I would agree that “no snakes & rats” is a reasonable position…
Martin
@GoBlueInOak:
We got permission to remove our front lawn a number of years ago, over the objections of my neighbors. They all said they liked what we replaced it with. Then when I was out of town for a month we got some grass popping up because I wasn’t around to weed, and they all complained and I popped off on them – you guys complained when we got rid of the lawn and now you’re complaining that it’s coming back? It’s not even my grass – it’s your grass creeping back into my yard.
You cannot win this. This is why I don’t try. I do what’s right and they can all fuck off on their opinions because it will always be to complain about everything.
trollhattan
@eversor:
I call double-bullsihit because our poor and homeless comprise the largest cycling cohort in our metro area, and it ain’t close.
There’s a deepset hatred of cycling among a good fraction of drivers and all have enough “I saw a dude on a bike do a thing” stories for three rounds at the bar. Funny thing is for each “dude on a bike” story there are two-hundred “dude in a truck/car” stories they conveniently forget, and only one of those two types are an existential threat to the complainer driving their metal box.
Fair Economist
@Suzanne:
What turns out to be ideal is cul-de-sacs for cars with through connections for bikes and pedestrians. A number of European cities are cutting themselves into “zones” where cars can’t go directly from one to another.
Car access limitations are high status in the US (because everybody hates a car other than the person in it) – we could get a long way with some strategic roadblocks to make streets one way except for resident, and I think you can sell people on that.
GoBlueInOak
@Roger Moore: That CEQA basically treats developing housing on a parking lot in downtown San Francisco the same way it would treat building a glue factory in the Marin Headlands is…a problem.
Suzanne
@GoBlueInOak: Paris is not full of Americans who drive Ford F-150s. I believe they also have used significant congestion pricing for a while. They also have a good Metro. Those are really, really significant differences that stretch beyond infrastructure to culture and how people there view themselves in relation to their society. Those things are not changed just by building a protected bike lane.
The reality is that a lot of people really do not want to share space with bikes. I might think that’s dumb, but it’s true. I would start incentivizing them to think differently about it.
trollhattan
@Martin:
We were among the early oddballs replaced the lawn with arid-climate gardens, but today lawns are definitely in the minority on the block. Never happier than the day I gave away the mower.
The struggle against weeds is real.
Fair Economist
@Martin:
Could you come live by me? Please?
Martin
@GoBlueInOak: The thing is that it’s well proven that cars are an impediment to economic growth. They open up a certain kind of growth, but harm it overall.
You don’t even need money to do it. For the amount of money they’re spending to widen the 405 by one lane, they could have built full bike infrastructure in every city abutting the expansion. It’s so goddamn cheap to build.
I’m glad Caltrans has said they won’t be doing any more freeway expansions. We’re done. Expansion doesn’t improve traffic. It’s just a waste of money.
Roger Moore
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
You need to do more than just take a traffic lane away from cars. You also need to slow the cars down to closer to the speed of the bikes so they don’t kill anyone trying to make a right turn too fast. Also, keeping bikes well separated is hard when the road is lined with businesses that count on people being able to turn directly off the road and into their parking lot mid-block.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: When my kid returned from three weeks in Germany she was amazed to have not seen a single pickup the entire time.
I honestly believe in addition to they “don’t see the need” the big FU grills trucks all have now could never meet Euro pedestrian safety standards. How could they? [SMACK!]
GoBlueInOak
@Martin: Preaching to the choir. Cars are net drain on economies – the suburbs are net economic leeches on more economically productive locations largely as a consequence of having to support auto infrastructure.
While its bad news for Democrats electorally, I’ve been quietly cheering the run up in gas prices this year. Buy a fuel efficient car or EV next time, a**holes. Or get a bus pass.
GoBlueInOak
@trollhattan: Much like @Martin speed limit reduction as “one cool trick”, we could go a long way to fixing the over-sized cars/SUVs/trucks problem by changing the way those vehicles get dealt with in automakers CAFE calcs for their fleets.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
One underappreciated aspect of that “access to that workforce” is California’s disdain for non-compete clauses in employment contracts. A huge part of the knowledge economy is labor mobility, and non-compete contracts undermine that. My former boss is currently unemployed because he moved to PA and worked for a company that insisted on a non-compete contract. They were awful enough that he quit, and now he can’t find a job until the non-compete expires. So there’s a guy with a Ph.D. and 15 years of relevant experience sitting idle for a couple of years for no good reason. You can’t build a knowledge economy that way.
Fair Economist
@trollhattan:
I lived in Chicago 7 years without a car, and walked everywhere. I absolutely could have biked, too, had bikeways been available. Winter is not an obstacle.
trollhattan
@GoBlueInOak: Last week I saw >$7.00/gallon (gas and diesel) at a freeway exit station in town. Have to believe at least a few folks are pondering their spot on the Tundra wait list.
trollhattan
As humor, this takes the cake. Well played!
Roger Moore
@eversor:
I think biking is something that varies a lot regionally. Here in the LA area, there are a lot of poor people who bike because it’s cheaper than a car and more convenient- if also more dangerous- than public transit. A lot of that may be that the weather is more congenial to year-round biking than in many places. And they aren’t super worried about their bikes being stolen because they’re beaters that aren’t worth stealing.
Feathers
This all interests me because I am the daughter of a transportation planner (who was on several international committees) and also worked in the government department at a business school.
One thing to realize is that one of the things that needs to happen is turning land into housing into housing, instead of its current function in the US as a tax shelter. A great follow on this is @SarahTaber_bbw on Twitter. She is following it from the farming perspective on how land use has nothing to do with growing crops and everything about getting more subsidies and tax sheltering. The same thing happens with housing. We need to change the tax laws so that you don’t get to take business losses on empty condos if there are local housing shortages. This is why there are all those empty luxury units. You can make more money building very expensive apartments that you can write off as a “loss,” then you would renting the apartments. Because if your business model was to rent the apartments, you might actually have to lower prices to what people could afford. Then the scam would unravel.
Compare this to Germany. Note that this is the Germany I learn about over 10 years ago from a professor who studied German business, things may be different now. In Germany, the process for zoning changes included the local government capturing 100% of the changed value of the land in order to pay for infrastructure upgrades. Also, for any new housing project, the city would ask for proposals from developers, all of which had to show that the housing would be 100% affordable for nearby workers. The city would then approve one, pay the old owner for the value of the current value of the land, sell to the developer at the new price, pocketing the difference. There is (was) a strong preference for rental housing, because it meant that there was flexibility in terms of people being able to move if needed for work, as well as the ability to tear down old rental housing and build more densely if needed. Prof pointed out places where a new development was built. First people in were folks from a place about to be torn down. People could even ask to move in clumps, keeping next door neighbors and extended families living same distance apart in the new development. There would then be much denser housing built where the people used to live. As I said, this info may well be 20 years out of date, but it does show another way. Real estate in the US is very corrupt. As Sarah Taber says, we started this country by stealing the land, and we have gone on allowing people who own the land to act like thieves, exploiting those who need shelter or food for their own profit.
The neighborhood where I live is basically a very nice, walkable neighborhood of two family houses, close to Boston. It should probably be razed and replaced with an Allston level of four to five story apartment buildings, interspersed with parks. Private homeownership will probably doom any real way for the US to deal with climate change. We zoned for a 1960s-70s population. California seems to be leading the way for cities and towns to be required to increase the amount of housing to match the growing population.
Realize this is probably a dead thread now, but one of the real blocks to transportation infrastructure is the budgeting timeline used. I am not remembering the exact number of years, but 10 seems about right. Projects are judged based on do they earn back the government spending in 10 years. Highways do. Subways don’t. But the return on subways over 50 years is amazing. 100 years later it is so large as to be almost unmeasurable. But because we are locked into this 10 year rate of return, mass transit never really “budgets out” to be the better choice.
GoBlueInOak
@Roger Moore: And funnily enough, California is now poised to pass Germany as the 4th largest economy in the world.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
Cul-de-sacs would be fine if they were designed right. You could easily design cul-de-sacs so they blocked only cars but let foot and bike traffic through. It would serve the primary goal of stopping through traffic by cars while allowing pedestrians and cyclists to get where they’re going faster. I’ve seen more or less this plan in the real world, and it works great.
suzanne
@Roger Moore: My former neighborhood in PHX had some of that style of cul-de-sacs. They were great for the kids, who did most of their biking to school.
Roger Moore
@GoBlueInOak:
Changing the speed limit isn’t enough. People tend to ignore the speed limit and drive at the speed that feels comfortable to them given the way the street is designed. If you have straight, flat street with wide lanes, people will drive fast no matter what you set the speed limit. If you want people to slow down, you need to alter the street to make them less comfortable driving fast. Adding “traffic calming” devices like speed bumps or just making the street narrower in general are far more effective at slowing traffic than changing the speed limit signs.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Yeah, that’s how they are here where I live. City of 250K and basically no homes are on a through-street. They’re all on cul-de-sacs. Proper road hierarchy with arterials, distributors, and no residential streets provide access, so no car traffic. Neighborhoods are designed around local schools so highly walkable with green belts and pedestrian cut throughs. We have some dedicated pedestrian/bike bridges.
Mind you, this was all very pragmatic. The city built pretty much overnight and big schools were too slow to build, so we got lots of little ones. Buses were expensive so we don’t have any except for kids that can’t walk to school, etc. But a lot of nimbyism just never happened. My neighborhood was bought by lottery. You put your name in for a given model of house, and if you got picked, you had 72 hours to access the offer or you were out. Nobody really had the opportunity to bitch about things and if you gave them the chance, every one of those pedestrian cut-throughs would have a gate on it.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Yeah, it’s called ‘traffic calming’. Speed limits are generally considered a policy failure. If you want streets at 25 MPH, make it so the drivers don’t want to go faster.
The reason why I don’t give up on this stuff is that I don’t believe in American exceptionalism. I think we’re subject to the same forces as everyone else. We might resist them longer, but eventually we get there.
Roger Moore
@suzanne:
My neighborhood is just older than the age of cul-de-sacs, but it does limit through traffic by limiting the number of entrances to the neighborhood. The local school is located directly on the main thoroughfare that they limited the number of entrances onto. To make it easier for kids to walk there, they left a couple of pedestrian-only paths that go right to the school. It seems like something that would be easy to replicate.
I also found a couple of pedestrian shortcuts while on walks that go from one neighborhood to another. One of them probably saves half a mile of walking, and another saves at least 2 miles, probably 3. These are in the San Gabriel foothills in Southern California, where a lot of neighborhoods are built like fingers extending up a canyon. To get from one neighborhood to another by car, you have to drive down out of the canyon, over, and up the next one. The walking shortcuts let you skip that and go directly from one neighborhood to the next. One of them is actually a short fire road, but it’s clearly marked as OK for pedestrians.
Suzanne
@Martin: What you’re describing sounds much like almost every neighborhood I lived in in Phoenix. Probably about the same vintage, too. It’s nice for walking your dog, or for the kids walking to school or the park, but it isn’t what I would consider truly walkable in that you probably can’t walk to access the needs of life…. Grocery store, drug store, sandwich shop, bus stop, post office, bank, Chinese takeout, etc etc etc. The sunny suburbs are basically built for children, and they don’t do well for car-less adults.
When we moved to PGH, we definitely wanted to go the more urban, walkable route (no pun intended) because SuzMom has given up driving, and Spawn the Elder hasn’t learned yet. So now we live in a prewar part of the city that used to be a streetcar suburb, with the fine-grained street grid and housing density of that pre-car era (we have lots of duplexes and triplexes in the neighborhood). In many ways, it is great. My mom can get around easily with a small wheelie cart. But, as I’ve mentioned, there’s still plenty of problems. It only takes a couple of shitty neighbors to fuck up the whole block. It only takes a couple of people driving too fast on these narrow streets to hit a kid. One person not shoveling their snow to block a whole sidewalk. I’m a designer and I believe in the power of design to affect human behavior for the better. But design on its own has never been able to rid us of certain “social ills” — despite centuries of trying — and it takes a really strong social fabric, too.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
I really love streetcar suburbs; I think they’re what a lot of people are really looking for. While I live in Southern California, which people tend to think of as ground zero for car culture, a lot of the older cities were built around interurban railroads and streetcars. I’ve always managed to live in, or close to, those parts of Southern California, and they’re great.
My neighborhood is from shortly after the war, but the busy street that cuts it in half used to be a Red Car line. I just have to follow it a comfortable walk and I’m in the small town downtown that used to be built around the Red Car terminal. Before that, I lived about half a block from a street that used to have a streetcar running down it. The construction pattern- lots of businesses on the old street car street, housing on the narrow side streets- is really wonderful.
Hob
@Roger Moore: I think your comment is really a symptom of what comrade scotts a.o.r. is talking about. I know you mean well, but at least in northern California, for those of us who have been following this stuff for quite a while, it’s agonizing to see so many well-meaning progressives say things like “There’s a huge housing shortage, which is why prices are so far out of control” as if it’s just obvious that that’s the beginning and end of the reason, and as if anyone who says there’s more to it is just a naive tool of NIMBYs. (I have had to stop reading any posts on Lawyers, Guns & Money that talk about the SF Bay Area because they were so bad for my blood pressure; the otherwise very progressive front-pagers there, none of whom are particularly familiar with this area, have fully bought into the message of the astroturfed “YIMBY” lobby around here— pre-digested for them by people like Yglesias who they’re normally more skeptical of— and think nothing of contemptuously dismissing every local voice on this.)
I don’t know why it is so hard for people to understand this, but in an area where real estate is extraordinarily valuable and there’s a surfeit of rich people, if you simply force localities to grant permits for real estate development and count on deregulation to improve the supply, that is never, ever, ever going to produce affordable housing. Affordable housing is not what developers want to build; they want to build luxury housing. If the government absolutely requires them to include a pittance of affordable units then they’ll promise to do that and maybe end up actually doing it years from now, and it won’t add up anywhere near the necessary supply.
The market distortions in these areas are just too insanely intense for any kind of deregulatory approach— either a laissez-faire one, or the kind of thing Scott Weiner’s crowd have pushed where the state literally imposes anti-regulations to override localities— to make a dent on prices for regular people. It is incredibly unhelpful for liberals to keep saying that the whole problem is “we’re not building enough” and that local progressives fighting developer interests are just NIMBYs. That is a propaganda line, and those interests have gotten very good at confusing people with a superficially progressive-sounding version of it.
It’s not a huge mystery what government needs to do for this. Massive investment in publicly-funded housing, way higher affordable-unit requirements that are actually enforced for private developments, and aggressive action against owner/investors who keep vacant units off the market. Those are all things that the “just build more!” crowd don’t seem to give a shit about, and without those things, the idea of the state telling cities “build X more units or else” is laughable as a solution. Many of the “housing justice” people that you’re deriding have been quite clear in pointing those things out, but when they do, they are ignored and instead we keep getting comments about how those people never propose any solutions.
Betsy
@eversor: That’s half bullshit. Many low-income workers ride bikes to work. A lot of fast-food and grocery store workers in particular. You see them everywhere – bikes chained up behind the store, by the dumpsters or at the bollards in the dollar store parking lot.
Of course bike infrastructure is needed – people of color and low-income people have the highest rates of injury and fatality by far of any population that uses bikes, because the infrastructure isnt there or is deficient and unsafe. But driving a car isn’t an option for them.
Here they are, poor working people, saving the planet and not increasing our dependence on foreign oil, and this is how they get treated.
I hope they won’t be invisible to you at least!
Betsy
@Martin: Well said. Politics is one thing, but the laws of physics work the same everywhere.
And the Dutch weren’t always bicycling paradise. Same for the Danes and the Germans. Every German cathedral square was covered in wall-to-wall Audis in 1974.
Now look what Paris is doing. From traffic hell to comfortable easy bike boulevards in just three short years.