One of the places were Democrats didn’t perform as well as expected was the cities (certainly in swing states). This has sparked discussion about the housing crisis and NIMBYism hurting our chances there and in the future.
In 2004, Dan Savage, then-editor of the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger, commissioned a piece on the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party. It likened cities to an “Urban Archipelago” — “islands of sanity, liberalism and compassion”:
For Democrats, it’s the cities, stupid—not the rural areas, not the prickly, hateful “heartland,” but the sane, sensible cities—including the cities trapped in the heartland. Pandering to rural voters is a waste of time. Again, look at the second map. Look at the urban blue spots in red states like Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico—there’s almost as much blue in those states as there is in Washington, Oregon, and California. And the challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered. And it’s sitting right there, on every electoral map, staring them in the face: The cities.
So, obviously, a maximalist case for Democrats catering to city voters. Anyway, Dan was interviewed by David Roberts for his podcast Volts:
David Roberts
Well, to once again draw a parallel, like Biden’s whole administration was devoted to policy meant to revive precisely those red areas of the country that have been hollowed out by globalization, et cetera, et cetera, minimum wage stuff and care stuff. Like Biden fought for those people and in response, they hated him. You know, like the working class in those areas, the white working class in those rural and exurban areas hated him like Satan. Even though on any sort of like tangible policy level, it was the most sort of like, you know, most working-class-friendly Democratic administration in years.
Dan Savage
And imagine, imagine if the same sort of investment and prioritization had been targeted at cities, not just during the Biden administration, but the Clinton administration, the Obama administration. There’s this constant sense that, well, these people out there in rural areas will come around if we just shoot enough ducks and pour enough money into their communities, and we can take for granted — one of the lessons, I think, from this, what we’re looking at from 2024 is that it was a mistake to take for granted the urban vote, which is also a way of taking for granted the votes of black and Hispanic people, queer people. Although LGBT people were one of the few sort of bright spots in this election where the Trump vote among LGBT fell from 2020, where it was an appalling, I think, 27% to just 12% in this election.
So, good on my fellow queers for recognizing the threat. But imagine if we had had the same campaign, not just of funding for the cities, building the cities, building public transportation in the cities that can alleviate people not of the freedom to own a car, but the burden of having to own a car, which is a form of anti-freedom, and building housing and poured money into the cities and encouraged in cities an identity among voters of “This is what Democrats do.” Democrats build big things and cities are big things that Democrats have built and are going to continue to build. And we haven’t done that.
One of Savage’s key arguments is that any kind of urban density leads to more Democrats: “you live in a very dense place and you get an immediate and very real sense of how interconnected we all are and reliant on each other we all are.” If you accept that, then the last 20 years of urban non-development in cities has hurt Democrats. Savage’s diagnosis:
The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political “leaders” have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don’t want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. […] But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it’s actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don’t have scarcity. We have scarcity because that’s what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.
He thinks the cities are so far gone that the only way to get more housing is for states to cram multi-family housing laws down the throats of cities.
Worth a listen if you’re interested in the maximalist case for the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party. Also, related to the discussion of podcasts in this morning’s post, this one is packaged up the way it should be: with a transcript. I didn’t even listen to it, just read it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
You’d think Lemiuex over at LGM wrote this.
Reminder everybody: the people nationally and here pushing this market urbanist bullshit as it pertains to housing are pushing something that was originally started as an astroturf group in CA funded mostly by Peter Thiel. They are essentially a propaganda arm laundering far-right, libertarian economic theory intended to create wealth through increased commodification of housing. It’s pushed by the most powerful financial actors on the planet, promoted by the biggest newspapers & enacted by every big city mayor & loads of electeds.
The housing justice people I network in the NYC/NJ area indicate based on their outreach, a possible reason a place like NYC saw a rightward shift is because of the impact these policies have had in the region over the last 5-7 years. They figure if elected Dems won’t do the right thing (that public policy should *not* be concerning itself in the slightest with promoting market development as some panacea when it’s clearly shown to have the exact opposite effects; instead, our political focus should be 100% on building up non-market alternatives in this area), then screw em, we’ll stay home.
So, some neoliberal, trickle-down, market-urbanist fauxgressive seems to think that doubling down on policies that might explain weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities is the answer. Yeah, right. His hot take is no more compelling (or accurate) than anybody else’s hot take.
Stroll around places like Williamsburg or Brooklyn, today, and you’ll see shining examples of the trickle-down, market-urbanist grift and you’ll see they’re entirely unaffordable. That was the point. The trickle-down, market-urbanist snake oil is nothing more than the real estate developer lobby set to gaslight the public for their own benefit. Not that different from the fossil fuel or tobacco lobby and they use pretty much the same messaging techniques.
A good read from somebody on the ground:
https://fuelgrannie.com/2020/10/24/open-your-eyes-to-opennewyork/
Since the 1970s, apostles of growth have decried local control of land use as the evil that has to be stamped out if housing is ever to become abundant and broadly affordable. Today the gospel of market-oriented centralization has achieved hegemony—embraced by the planning profession, many environmentalists, virtually the entire news media, numerous academics, and the denizens of neoliberal think tanks from coast (Berkeley’s Terner Center) to coast (NYU’s Furman Center).
The most disappointing thing for me has been watching environmentalists embrace this market fundamentalism as applied to housing, with its fake “abundance” mantra – as if the real estate industry would *ever* build until prices drop. It reveals their lack of a theory.
NIMBY always gets trotted out as a rhetorical device by these clowns cuz it’s easier to debate a strawman than an old black lady getting displaced. This clown pushes the same false narrative that all Nimbys are wealthy, elderly, elitist and racist homeowners, but in truth the modern Nimbys’ cultural alignment has morphed more into politically progressive, socially open and include many renters, including older, working-class-income creatives with stabilized leases.
Per another Brooklyn-based housing justice advocate, the NIMBY trope is a racist co-opting by developers of civil rights language to denigrate and describe local residents who challenge Big Real Estate (it’s an excellent read by a lawyer in NYC who deals with this stuff constantly):
https://twitter.com/leahfrombklyn/status/1591855425238241280
Another good piece on the total unrealistic outcomes this con results in:
https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/opinion/what-the-census-taught-me-about-the-nimby-vs-yimby-debate/
They are a lobbying movement whose goal is to remove legal mechanisms for community input from land use decisions. Essentially, it’s rich white guys trying to remove any input from historically redlined communities. Deregulation is the holy grail, again, something everybody here is familiar with as a concept and the people behind it like Thiel.
Again, I’m not here to debate the front pagers who push this nonsense nor the commentors who do the same thing. I spend a lot of my time pushing back on that crap here in Denver (and losing), not trying to change their minds. But I do hope to provide another voice to this discussion on our almost Top 10000 *liberal* blog that every time people here push this crap, billionaires like Thiel sit back and in their best Montgomery Burns impression say “Excellent”.
A couple of more reads:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/01/the-only-thing-worse-than-a-nimby-is-a-yimby
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/01/yimby-want-to-raise-your-rent/
Mag
Throat cramming… always a vote winner.
Kay
Interesting mm, thanks.
Shawn Fain went to “heartland” auto facilities last week. The first comment by an Ohio autoworker to the Toledo Blade was a sneering insult that Fain is a “communist”. Okey doke, buddy. Make 15 an hour forever. I’ll be fine.
I keep telling people there is plenty of opportunity in the rural rust belt for young white men thanks to Obama and Biden’s investment but media is married to their idea of the put-upon white male demo so they ignore facts. I can get them in a skilled trades program. They don’t want the work. They want to be bitcoin billionaires or Rogan-style influencers. They don’t want to work.
Baud
@Kay: Maybe more women can enter the trades.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: First, sorry, I didn’t link to the whole podcast. Fixed.
Second, what do you make of Savage’s example, not quoted in the post, that in his neighborhood, he’d like to replace his single family dwelling with a fourplex or larger and just take an apartment in that building instead of having the big house? But he can’t due to zoning/etc.
I’m no expert on Denver housing but in the Berkeley neighborhood, it looks like that’s what they’re doing. They allow teardowns and in return you have to build a duplex.
That seems like one reasonable suggestion.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: thank you for all of that.
Jinchi
Nice to read of somebody who thinks Democrats ought to cater to their own voters, instead of wondering if Dems should “compromise” on abortion or be crueler to immigrants and trans people.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: They are.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
It’s funny but I see that same “They don’t want to work” comment a ton on the right. I don’t know what to make of it other than some manifestation of the horseshoe.
What do you mean by the media ignoring the facts, at least as it pertains to rurl white dudes who express sentiments of being “left out”? I always think it’s simply rurl white dudes dog whistling about race, women, gays, etc., and not really about jobs or wanting/notwanting to work.
Miss Bianca
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: funny…around here in the sticks of red Colorado it’s the rich white people with money who are WILDLY RESISTING even the most modest changes in local land use code and zoning, they are that committed to making sure that only rich white people can afford to live here. As to the workers who serve their coffee or teach their grandchildren or wipe their asses at the assisted living center when they stroke out on their beautifully manicured properties? Fuck those worthless poors, let them commute here from Pueblo or points even further afield.
I for one fucking welcome the thought of centralizing land use codes and decision-making at the state level, on the grounds that local control means nothing at all gets done to address housing needs here.
Fair Economist
It’s good to see people finally catching on to the fact that people can’t live in places that don’t exist. We know how to fix housing prices – build enough. Austin has shown us how – even though it’s not a particularly large metro area, it’s now building 19,328 units per year, and *finally* we’re seeing a city where housing prices are dropping.
It shouldn’t really be a shock. Back during initial urbanization, we saw much higher construction rates. Chicago nearly doubled its housing supply in the 1890’s alone. We don’t need *that* much, but we need far more than the 1%/ year increases typical of most American cities.
I agree with Savage that this election has proven beyond a doubt that actually helping the rurals just doesn’t do us any good. Like he said, Biden did great for the rural population and it didn’t help at all. Help the urbanites and suburbanites and get them excited for voting for us.
Melancholy Jaques
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
That’s quite a homework assignment. I will do my best to finish it this weekend. I do not know much about this issue, so I appreciate your insights and the links you provided.
With respect to the Savage interview, I am not buying the premise that Democrats have not done anything for the cities or for African-Americans and Latinos. Maybe that’s an argument for another day.
Our problem in presidential elections isn’t rural voters, it’s suburban and exurban white people. For a variety of reasons – infuriating reasons – they do not connect their steady voting for Republicans with actual policy outcomes.
Democrats saved and invigorated Michigan’s auto industry and Michigan voted for Trump twice.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
This was an episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.
Suzanne
Just to note….. blue states are gonna get creamed in the next round of Congressional seat apportionment. CA, NY, and others are not building enough housing for the people who want to live and work there, and redder states are gaining population. I think NY and CA are each projected to lose three districts each.
The economy is only functional if people can live where jobs are. Our overlords said we couldn’t make remote work a large-scale thing.
Kay
@Baud:
At one point Obama had a program where they not only got free tuition for a certicate in one of the trades they got a gas card to get to class. It went begging. They weren’t interested in such lowly work.
I tell them they have to pass a algebra class. One class. Get a 70 or better and I can get them into a trades program. That’s a bridge too far for them. So, so sick of the whining.
The women in the rural rust belt are doing better than the men because the women work harder, because they aren’t told they’re entitled to 100k a year by their parents and GOP politicians and media. It’s no more complicated than that.
Fair Economist
@Miss Bianca:
It’s pretty telling that one of the few countries that’s managed to tame its housing prices in spite of an insanely high population density, Japan, has *nationalized* zoning control. Housing supply affects the whole country. Allowing local areas to control it is courting disaster – as we see in the US with our astronomical housing prices in spite of low population density.
TBone
@@mistermix.bsky.social: As soon as we moved in here I called the township to see if I could rent space we’re not using to a college student or young professor. Nope, you may only have relatives, I was told. Entire basement is livable, has windows, etc. and would make a perfect efficiency apartment. College town nearby has different zoning than my township, with apartments in old homes all over the place.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Miss Bianca: I am contemplating a move to Colorado and I see the same thing.
One thing Savage pointed out was that the absolute resistance to doing some teardowns and rebuilds in his neighborhood and others that are primarily single family dwellings is that newcomers end up in tiny apartments lined up near the new transit that was built on highway right-of-ways. Savage was a proponent of expanding the monorail since it could be built over existing housing, but that was nixed.
RTA seems similar to me — there are huge (expensive) apartments built around every light rail stop out in the close-in suburbs and that housing is still unaffordable and somewhat unpleasant. Yet there are also blocks and blocks of sprawly suburban housing built in the 50’s/60’s/70’s where there could be teardowns with denser housing built. Not happening, though, from what I can see.
Again, not a Denver housing expert, just someone coming into the market and seeing what’s there.
hrprogressive
A much simpler take might go like this:
20 years ago, “pundits” were convinced that the electorate would get younger, less white, less heteronormative, and those trends were irreversible since the GOP was focusing solely on “old white people”, and within a couple of election cycles, a “Permanent Democratic Majority” was in the offing.
Certain classes of people just projected that the Youngs, Non-Whites, and Gays would trend Blue, within a generation or so, and the GOP would be rendered irrelevant.
Then, over the last 20 years, by and large, the modern Democratic Party took all those projections and those people for granted.
And the people didn’t like being taken for granted while prosperity was stolen from them, and the politicians only gave a shit about them when they needed cash and their votes.
So, here we are.
And unless those people are actively courted again, they won’t be coming back.
Jeffg166
The felon won Pennsylvania by 130,223 votes. There are 808,580 registered Democrats in Philadelphia. 551,735 voted. 256,735 didn’t. I don’t know why they didn’t vote. Maybe they are old and not able to get to the polling places. An aggressive mail in vote should be launched to make sure people know they have that option.
Kay
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
They keep returning to this idea that people where I live have been “abandoned”. It isn’t true. It hasn’t been true for years.
We have a state of the art vocational high school here on the campus of a state of the art community college that will train you for any kind of industrial/manufacturing/allied enigineering career you desire. If you’re low income it’s free. We’re flush with resources for young white rural men. What we can’t do is make them go get it.
You have to graduate high school and take and pass what is 8th grade algebra. That’s too much – they won’t do it.
Suzanne
@Fair Economist:
Another thing that is totally fucken broken is project-based public comment and design review. So citizens get to elect their City Council or aldermen or whatever. There is also a public comment period on changes in zoning code. Fine, great. I agree with all of this,
But then, in many municipalities, projects are required to go through “design review” before they even get to Council approval, and that approval is needed before there’s a building permit. This is totally dumb and wastes huge stacks of $$$. Developers get down the road — pretty far, millions of dollars in design fees in — and then the “design review board”, which is usually a bunch of unelected volunteers, gets to make multiple rounds of changes to the project that are totally based in aesthetics. Nothing has to be based in concerns about health and safety or the law, nothing evidence-based at all. Just shit like, “We don’t like gray buildings”.
There is also a public notification and comment period for building projects. Again, months of lost time and bureaucracy. I have no problem with a predictable comment period for changes in the law, but I have a big problem with these public comment periods on individual projects, because it is capricious as fuck. The public comments my projects have received include such pearls of wisdom as:
“I don’t like the loading dock there, can you move it away from my condo?”
“I was hoping you would design it to look like a pueblo.”
“Can you make the trees grow faster?”
(Those are verbatim.)
TBone
I had high hopes when this happened. Still waiting for anything to develop.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-estate/2024/08/17/new-real-estate-agent-rule/74825644007/
I may go to my grave still waiting…🙄
Miss Bianca
@@mistermix.bsky.social: yeah, Polis gets hammered a lot for his proposal to centralize zoning and land use decisions, but I liked it. The only “local control” argument that made any sense to me at all had to do with water, which is absolutely a concern for this state, but using “oh, what about WATER” as an excuse when we still have golf courses, grass lawns, and major, water-intensive agricultural production seems a bit fatuous to me.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Deleted. Emailed you.
danielx
OT but too good to pass up – Matt Gaetz withdraws his name from consideration as AG.
Guess he REALLY didn’t want his fetishes to come up in testimony.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/21/trump-administration-transition/
trollhattan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
LGM front-pagers are hopeless on housing affordability costs and especially, those of popular and expensive urban MSAs. Seem to earnestly believe rapturing all the NIMBYs (a very squishy group to identify) a phalanx of developers would march right in and build so very much new housing, rents and sales prices would plummet to much rejoicing.
Uh, nope.
SpaceUnit
In my neck of the woods NIMBYism is pretty much the only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on.
Belafon
Which is why it was effective for Republicans to get Democrats to help them pass the stimulus checks and child tax credits during the pandemic and refuse to help Democrats pass them again under Biden.
Suzanne
I will note that I also fundamentally believe that zoning requirements need to be based in health, safety, and welfare concerns, and not aesthetics. There are valid concerns around adjacency of zones, height and shadow, sight visibility triangles, water runoff and permeability, fire protection, etc.
But, like, opposing construction of an apartment project down the road because you don’t want “apartment people” living by you? Get bent. You think the new building is ugly? Sorry. We built ugly shit for millennia, you’ll be okay.
Belafon
@trollhattan: The NIMBY people in my area are homeowners.
emjayay
@Fair Economist: Side streets in Japan are what we might call an alley with no room for even sidewalks. Just a stripe on each side and that space might have telephone poles etc. in it (electricity isn’t often undergrounded). Buildings typically fill the whole lot from front to back with about two feet of space on each side and a little more in back. No back yards or even usually a bit of garden. A huge number of apartments are small studios with most housing being equivalent in space to a single wide trailer. If you want a car – even a little box Kei car – you have to prove you have a parking space since there is nowhere to park on the street and room on any lot is scarce.
To approach anything like that level of density would require completely replotting and rebuilding even our oldest cities.
Citizen_X
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “some neoliberal, trickle-down, market-urbanist fauxgressive”
Dan Savage? Seriously? A puppet of Peter Thiel? Okay.
And NIMBY concerns are *not* driven by the richest landowners? No, I’m not going to believe that it’s the one part of American life where poor people are in charge. It doesn’t look that way in any city in the country.
Anyway, I thought it was a good interview with some interesting ideas. YMMV.
Melancholy Jaques
@trollhattan:
I would like to add a point often left out of these discussions. There are millions of people who do not want to see housing prices go down. They own their homes and they very much want the price to go up. Their financial futures might depend up on it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
A better analysis on Austin’s so-called “rent drop”:
https://twitter.com/KyrstensCloset/status/1827067900097966204
https://twitter.com/KyrstensCloset/status/1829971950632124897
https://twitter.com/ProfDavidFields/status/1798767538916168115
Another example is here in Denver. There are currently 23K vacant rental units with 48K *more* coming online within 2.5 years. And yet, rents don’t drop.
Now, the rise of rents has leveled off after a massive jacking of them all over the place. But the trickle-down, market-urbanists moved the goalposts in that for years they indicated rents would drop. When they didn’t, they instead said “oh, we meant the rate of rental increases would slow down”. Not the same thing.
I’m trying to find a post from a public engagement session one of these clowns attended I think in SF where he outright admitted that the only way new builds would happen would be if rents continued to rise but I can’t find it.
gvg
I don’t think the housing mistakes are identical in all areas. The results are a lot of areas have a shortage, but I listen to people describe what is happening in their area, and it doesn’t match someone else’s description nor my own area. I also don’t think identical solutions are possible for each area. I lived in Orlando for 25 years and now I live in a much smaller city Gainesville, which is a college town, and I have been here 30 years. They don’t have the same issues and that is related to history too. Plus the industries or jobs in an area and when the boom bust cycle happened to them is totally different and really impacted building. They are only about a 100 miles apart.
Kay talks about all the jobs in her area. Those haven’t happened here really. Florida was never a manufacturing area so there is not an old industry to come back nor trade unions to give good training. Most jobs training I have known people to get has been a scam, not good apprenticeships with pay. We have been selling our climate for decades, but nobody is really sure how to adapt to climate change. Agriculture is big here but not growing. Citrus was king and it’s on life support. Fishing was big but declined decades ago. How can we pick a city growth policy when we don’t know what is going to happen? The politicians are stalling. Imagine that other areas have their own unique histories and problems? I can’t imagine a federal policy could handle many different areas well.
Fair Economist
@Suzanne:
And many of these things involve “public comment” which is insanely biased against those who need the housing. You can’t go to a meeting if you’re working two jobs to make ends meet, and especially not if you can’t even live in the district because they’ve blocked housing.
Public comment for aesthetics, as you point out, is ridiculous.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@trollhattan:
The same statements get echoed here, as in right now. It’s depressing to see.
Starfish (she/her)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
@Miss Bianca:
NIMBYs in my community are very much real. They like to pretend that the duplexes, triplexes, and student condos do not exist in their college town when they can be found every few blocks. Zoning has changed so that some of these things cannot be rebuilt. If there is two acres, they will call that a “farm” and create an easement for it.
And when all the former farms are turned into mega-mansions, they will continue to not update zoning to reflect reality.
I do agree that we should look at ways to keep jobs from being concentrated in a few cities, but “NIMBYism is not real” is not one of those ways.
emjayay
@Suzanne: I’m gonna disagree on aesthetics. In Brooklyn for example even the cheapest buildings from the 1930s (I live in one) have some sense of detail and differentation from the next one. The hallway floors are indestructible tiling with some color and pattern. Larger apartment building, even though basically a huge box, have some design theme which extends into the lobby which is big enough to offer a nice entry to the building and space for waiting for a ride or whatever.
Some newer buildings are OK, but many are plain gray boxes built as cheaply as possible, often with balconies – which are often not big enough for even a chair or two, but only there to claim having a balcony. These degrade the neighborhood and offer no sense of a place anyone would actually want to live in.
An old apartment building on a corner of my block was torn down and a new condo building put in its place. The back yard was paved for parking and the first floor apartments have to keep their drapes closed 24/7 because they are at eye level and a few feet from the sidewalks. This is building for profit not for living in.
One difference between previous periods and today is competition. Another was probably just people’s expectations for a minimum kind of housing. Even in the 1950s there were empty lots and spaces not yet sold for housing. Today people have to rent or buy whatever they possibly can, so junk gets built. The same thing applies to outer neighborhoods in San Francisco where I used to live. Almost anything built after 1960 is cheap junk.
Aesthetics and quality control is worth it.
Suzanne
@Fair Economist: The aesthetics argument especially sticks in my craw, because ugly shit gets built with design review board approval. Everyone has seen those ugly apartment buildings (5-over-1’s) that look like someone threw up every color of brick or siding in the factory. Guess what? That’s because design review boards will ixnay “undifferentiated facades”.
My colleagues and I joke about “break-it-up-itis”, this idea that a simple facade has to go in and out repeatedly to be interesting. All that shit does is add cost and complexity, and it looks super-dated already.
We built beautiful buildings and ugly buildings before design review.
evodevo
@Suzanne: I was on a P&Z commission for 4 years. You hit it on the head. Whenever a zone change was up for votes, the surrounding residents would show up in force to protest against ANY change in the status quo. And the remarks were as idiotic as you mentioned…
Starfish (she/her)
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Rail is expensive and requires a bunch of regulation. We were promised rail here, and built a station for it. And that station is now the bridge to nowhere because our bus services got cut so shiny new station with nothing going there. I think they will get some service back to it in 2026.
Tom Levenson
The NIMBY capture theory rings especially true today in my little corner of the urban landscape.
Just last night our Town Meeting rejected* an incredibly modest measure to increasing housing. (How modest: it was a zoning change to allow homeowners in two-family zoned districts to add a third unit within the existing maximum Floor Area Ratio.)
That insanely incremental change was voted down because developers might buy houses that were under the FAR, tear them down, and build three unit buildings with more living space than was there before. (Note: nothing in existing zoning prohibits tearing down a structure and replacing it with a bigger building with two larger “luxury” apartments in it.)* Or because having a small percentage of homes in those districts house more people thus doing something something something to the character of the town. Etc.
My town, Brookline, prides itself on its liberal, even progressive nature. And we are, I guess, until progress might happen here. Feh.
*IOW: people who say they recognize we are in a housing crisis and who say that they want to incentivize more smaller units instead of luxury developments so as to bend the rent/buy cost curve, chose to allow developers to build bigger big units, but not to increase the number of units in a given structure by fifty percent. We see you.)
Am I pissed.
Yes I am.
Fair Economist
@emjayay:
Japan’s effective population density is many time what we have in the States. We don’t have to be as dense as them. A 20% increase in housing would do it – that only needs every 5th house made into a duplex, although the economics would work better by just adding an occasional apartment building to every neighborhood.
Martin
Yeah, I run in the urbanist space and that’s been one of those ‘no shit’ observations for like 15 years now. A lot of us figured Amtrak Joe would get it, and he did – a little. But most urban transformation are being done in defiance of federal support rather than with it.
I took two trips this year – one to France and one a (largely nonconsensual) road trip from Iowa to NY and back. One of the things I love about CA is the contrast from urban to agricultural areas, and how full of activity the ag communities are. Most farms have people working in most fields most days here.
But driving across the midwest and spending time in a few small farming towns, there is NO labor. In 2500 miles I saw farm activity twice – both harvesting corn, and in both cases there were 2 people working – one driving the tractor and one driving the truck collecting the corn. I live in a city of 300,000 people in the OC and the organic farm a mile from my house has at least a dozen people working on it every fucking day – more than I saw across 2500 miles. These small rural towns were killed by their own. Farmers sold out their labor to John Deere, and the reason for that town to exist disappeared because the landowner does all the work and maybe, twice a year, they hire some contractors who drive in from god knows where. Ag in CA looks NOTHING like ag anywhere else in the US, at least at scale. Sure there are pockets everywhere, but there’s nothing in CA that looks like Iowa – devoid of labor. I don’t know to blame the farmers, who tend to be little kings of their little town, or the supply chain or both, but there’s fuck-all the cities can do to address this. Ag policy is something the GOP owns with both hands, and a hell of a lot of it sits in state legislatures that are in the hands of the GOP. CA has double the ag revenue of the next largest state and is 13th on fed ag subsidies. Feds don’t do shit for us.
But France was enlightening. In a week crisscrossing the big agricultural region there, there was nothing that looked like industrial ag. I’m sure it was there, but it sure as shit wasn’t on the scale of even a modest US midwestern state. There was no sign of feed lots. Every town had farms with a little pasture with cows in them. There was little sign of national scale supply chains. Each town seems to have its own local supply chain, and those products were cheap – cheaper than here, I suspect because each layer in the system is mostly just trying to make payroll and not appease investors. The boulangerie makes their own bread and charges enough to cover costs, and doesn’t seek to create billionaires off of efficiency and scale. And as a result towns in France have functioning economies because there are a wide range of local services offered.
It’s not that CA isn’t trying to do what Iowa is doing – we are. 80% of all almond trees on this planet are in California, and in only a handful of farms – we have a shit-ton of industrial ag, but where there rest of the country largely chose to find efficiency in automation and rejected crops that couldn’t be automated (why these states have huge crop monocultures), CA had this migrant labor and soaked up all of the ag that was hard to automate. And all of that labor meant that our ag communities are quite strong. They aren’t rich, but there are full slates of services there. As such, CA has a reasonable balance of urban and rural jobs, though those jobs serve very different demographics. We think of the Central Valley as being rural, but 6.5 million people live there – more people than Missouri, St Louis included. We moved the HSR route from along the western side of the valley were there’s almost nothing (which would have been cheap and easy to build) up through the populated part of the valley so those populations could have access (at great cost in dollars and time.)
Meanwhile after farmers sold out their labor to John Deere, John Deere is moving production from plants in Iowa that were propping up some of the remaining industrial towns there to Mexico. Like, what are Democrats supposed to do about that? They have no say in local or state politics. Their senators are fully invested in maximizing corn profits, not jobs. Like, okay. That’s sucks. Maybe diversify your ag and bring jobs back? Most of what we grow in CA used to be grown in Iowa. Maybe relearn how to grow carrots and not deport the people who would help you harvest them?
Starfish (she/her)
@Miss Bianca: Yeah. What about water? What about traffic? We can’t possibly do that flood mitigation effort because it will lower my property value, and I would prefer to drown my neighbor.
Suzanne
@emjayay:
If people are living in it, then they are, by definition, a place someone wants to live in. If it’s that ugly that no one wants to live in it, it’ll sit empty and the owner will finally offload it at some point and someone will demo it and build something nicer.
Again, we built ugly shit for millennia and somehow found a way through it.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Agreed. They’re really not necessary to society any more. We just need them to get them convicted of the lowest level, non-violent felony on the books. That way they don’t get to vote.
Once that’s accomplished, they simply are not my problem anymore.
Starfish (she/her)
@trollhattan: Some of the urbanists are about walkable and bikable neighborhoods, and they are looking at that through a climate change lens.
Melancholy Jaques
@hrprogressive:
I just disagree with this. I understand that in 21st century American every person, every demographic has a narrative of resentment because they do not get what they believe they should have. What I don’t get is why it is always the Democrats who are the targets of the resentment.
Our party is the only one that has done a goddamn thing for the non-billionaire masses since 1980. Maybe consider that in a consumer capitalist economy, elected officials don’t have the ability to make everyone’s life prosperous.
Fair Economist
@Suzanne: Am I a little weird? I prefer the broken-up modern apartment buildings to the older Von Mises or Brutalist chunky blocks.
That said, I’m still with you on aesthetic review – it’s a scandal. An entire generation having no affordable place to live is vastly more important than apartment building facades.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I’ve posted this before but it’s another overview of what we’re talking about. There is some agreement on aspects of this, not much, but it is there.
Everybody should read up on the issues of the Commodification of Housing and The Rentership Society. This was first pushed in a paper in 2011, typically found at Morgan Stanley’s web site.
The guy who wrote the first piece revised it in 2015 after he formed a private equity group to buy up houses:
https://sylvanroad.com/wp-content/uploads/Rentership-Revisited.pdf
Companies like Blackstone now own 300-500K SFHs that they in turn only rent. There was a piece earlier in the year on this effort in Atlanta. 8 years ago there were no companies involved in buying houses and converting them to rentals, now there’s at least 10 and it’s starting to have an impact. It’s replicating itself nationwide.
Compound that with the Short Term Rental issues that are choking home ownership availability (good piece on Canada that’s no different than here):
https://thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-canadian-housing/
away from people, and it’s a real problem.
How to fix that is where people like me clash with the “market urbanist” crowd (which, always remember, were first founded as an astroturf group in CA primarily funded by Peter Theil) since most of them are about deregulation and developer profits, not addressing *affordability*. I digress. Back to the Rentership Society angle.
We bailed out the banks, and then the banks and developers realized they could buy up all the foreclosed property as commodities. And it is not just the foreclosed properties that have fallen prey to the speculators. Lotsa neighborhoods in “hot” cities have been a workforce housing neighborhood for 120 years because of the relatively small houses 800-1500 SF (typical). However these small footprint houses exist on standard city lots (3000-6250 SF). Since we have shit zoning with no design/development standards and no control over unit size, speculative developers have commoditized neighborhoods. They buy relatively affordable houses with cash, competing and winning against residential buyers who need mortgages. Then they scrape and build tacky tasteless abominations at 4x the existing Floor-to-Area-Ratio, and sell them for in excess of $1.2M.
Then there’s this asinine market urbanist movement fueled by the Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase set screaming about how we need to tear down all the single-family housing and build multifamily. Single family neighborhoods are low risk development areas with high ROI. That’s why the banks want to redevelopment them. It is not because it will lead to true sustainable redevelopment. The blanket upzoning battlecry against SF neighborhoods overlooks the areas where we should prioritize that kind of residential development: transit station areas, rapid transit corridors, planned growth areas which are frequently tax sucks compromised of auto-oriented big box and single-use commercial development.
There is a thoughtful way to do it, Minneapolis, (at least on paper). They achieved that paper goal with significant regulation of design plus enormous political commitment to design focused neighborhood plans and policies. And even then, pretty much nothing has changed in terms of what kind of new builds occur or any downward trend in rents or sales prices.
So we lose attainable housing stock and neighborhood character, while the market urbanist Lords of the Flies dance around the fire of neighborhood commoditization. To quote a former chief planner in Madison WI:
“It is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever witnessed in 30 years as a city planner. So now we’ve created a city that is plummeting in livability rankings because we’ve sold out to speculators who don’t care about the wreck they leave in their wake.”
Enough housing never gets built, but the developers and real estate interests make money off of what does get built because when the profit margins get too low, they stop building–it’s not like building widgets. And the commodification of housing continues which is the entire point.
Market urbanists have controlled Auckland NZ for a decade. They enacted tons of market urbanist theories and it didn’t change the number of new places built since and it remains one of the most expensive markets on the planet. I’d encourage people to look at this analysis:
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-upzoning-myth-response
Finally, Patrick Condon, a noted market urbanist for years, has a new book out basically saying he was wrong all this time and that the data shows that:
https://48hills.org/2024/09/vancouver-study-shows-how-the-yimby-narrative-has-failed-in-real-time/
Finally, the Urban Institute of all people (they typically push a lot of neoliberal, market urbanist orthodoxy) came out with a long piece on *a* way to maybe help decommodify housing:
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/Decommodification%20and%20Its%20Role%20in%20Advancing%20Housing%20Justice.pdf
But, as others have mentioned, there’s a shitload of capital out there looking for a place to sit and since 2012, it’s increasingly getting parked in real estate…and the result is the commodification of housing. And who loses? The poor and middle classes.
If we taxed the rich more/better, well, that’s a start short of affixing their heads to the ends of pikes.
Martin
@Kay: We saw similar dynamics in higher ed. Women just outworked the men. They knew they had to work harder so they did.
That’s the backside of inequality – sometimes the people you are holding down rise to the challenge and as you equalize the system, the folks that created the inequality start to look incredibly uncompetitive. So women were more competitive on admissions and then once at the university were more likely to graduate and to graduate higher in the class than the men. In every discipline. Across every ethnic group. In engineering, there weren’t a lot of women but academically they just creamed the guys because they reliably did the work. They just worked harder and took it more seriously.
emjayay
@Fair Economist: I know. I was just offering a different side to anyone glorifying the Japanese solution who hasn’t been there.
Suzanne
@evodevo: One of my favorite project experiences was when I was managing design for a assisted-living senior facility. The Town provided three acceptable architectural styles: Owner could pick from “Mission”, “Mediterranean”, and something else. Whatever. So the Owner picked Mission style.
So we get to design review, and one of the reviewers criticized the project saying — I shit you not — “It looks like a religious building”. I responded, “Missions are religious buildings”.
Fake Irishman
@hrprogressive:
I’m sorry, how did we take those voters for granted? We passed comprehensive health care reform that got younger, poorer and working class folks access to decent care through the exchanges or good care through Medicaid. We narrowed the racial gap in insurance coverage and health care access. We’ve fought for better transit and fewer highways. We’ve leaned into racial equity so that we’re focusing on cleaning up areas with We put $40 billion fucking dosllars into the infrastructure bill to yank out all the lead pipes in America after Flint got screwed over by a GOP emergency manager. Democratic-led city councils and county boards and state legislatures have steadily been passing small and medium-sized zoning reforms that don’t give away the store to the tech bros in dozens of cities, like legalizing ADUs and chopping back on parking minimums. We bailed out public transit during the pandemic. Free lunches for urban and rural school kids. With Biden, Renewable energy grants to ensure that working class and poor urban folks don’t get left behind in the energy transition. With Obama, energy audits and weatherization for poor folks in old homes struggling with energy bills. A lot is that housing stock is in urban areas.
Look, we all know Dems aren’t perfect, but our party has generally done a good job delivering on promises and learning lessons between administrations, despite really narrow and/or ideologically diverse majorities. (Clinton didn’t get big healthcare reform done, but Obama did, Obama failed on climate legislation, but Biden got it across the finish line. Obama didn’t get a big enough stimulus passed, Biden went all in on cutting unemployment etc etc etc) Also Clinton and Obama did get some smaller wins in places they failed (chip and hipaa, car and trucks regs, a major renewable energy package in the stimulus)
But as Baud and Kay have noted, if enough voters don’t have their back, well…..
Also, I love Dave Roberts and he’s hurting like the rest of us right now, but he has done multiple episodes on housing reform as a part of climate, and most of the action is coming from state and some local Democrats.
End rant.
Fair Economist
@trollhattan:
Historically, though, that’s what’s happened. When you build *enough*, prices come down. And enough is not all that much – it’s just that almost none is possible in most urban areas.
We’re getting a good contrast here in Southern California. LA proper has been semi-tolerant of infill construction, and has gotten a moderate amount build. Orange County hasn’t, other than Irvine. Result: rental prices continue to climb in OC, while they’ve leveled off in LA.
Martin
@Suzanne: The US would be well served figuring out how to return to masonry/stone buildings. They are durable and have a ton of thermal mass and are cheap to heat/cool. Meanwhile we build this shit out of composites that catch fire if you stare at them too hard. I know they are expensive to build, but they are cheap to maintain. How many 5 over 1s are still going to be in our cities in a century? Damn near every brownstone in Brooklyn built in the 1880s that my family settled in are still there. Masonry rowhomes are cheap to buy and own, and for some reason we reject them.
As to the NIMBYs, the most entitled FYIGM people I’ve ever encountered are SF liberals.
cmorenc
As a solid D voter, I find myself in the awkward position of solidarity with my local R-leaning suburban Raleigh neighborhood comprised of upscale homes on half-to/full-acre lots in fierce resistance to allowing a through street connection to a new housing development proposed for a neighborhood-adjoining 40-acre previously undeveloped infill property. Without this connector, the new more dense development will effectively be a cul-de-sac with entrance on another commuter street isolated from ours.
To be fair, the proposed development is much denser than out neighborhood, but not even remotely for low or modest-income housing. Think very high end condos or luxe houses similar to our neighborhood, just on more compact lots. In our favor is that the street in our neighborhood that would potentially be connected is only 20 ft wide with no curbs and sidewalks (because we are in a watershed protection zone with restrictions on impermeable surfaces) which is currently isolated from outside commuter traffic and the street is safe enough for everyone to use it as a de facto sidewalk walking dogs, kids riding bikes etc, and that would change if the through connection is allowed. Especially since the capacious middle school is at the other end of the street and the cut-through would allow school parents from elsewhere to avoid two traffic lights along a very busy major arterial street.
Yeah, I know I am hypocritically stepping on good urban density and inter connection principles, but OTOH we would like to be able to safely stroll with our dog without getting run over by commuters in a hurry. So NIMBY ya mutherforkin’ commie hippies. :=} The resistance is about more than property values or racism – some black folks live in our hood, and they are with us on the street connection issue).
Suzanne
@Fair Economist:
I am a weirdo who actually likes Brutalist architecture. I don’t love the eight-colors-of-brick-plus-lime-green stuff I see getting built.
But I also don’t worry about it, really. Cities change and styles change and I don’t sweat it.
There’s ugly houses on my street, and these houses are approaching a hundred years old. Whatever. It gets more interesting over time.
Suzanne
@Martin:
Energy efficiency codes have made this more difficult. We have stricter requirements for continuous insulation now, to increase the R-value of the building envelope. Masonry transmits a shit-ton of heat, so the more complicated wall design adds a lot of cost and complexity.
That’s why you see all these insulated composite-metal-panel things like Centria and DriDesign all over the place.
rikyrah
The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) posted at 4:58 PM on Wed, Nov 20, 2024:
Good news: Democrats in Montana gained 10 seats in the state House and 2 seats in the state Senate—breaking the GOP supermajority.
That’s the most seats Democrats have won in the Montana legislature in 30 years.
(https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1859370640018403750?t=mNgX_gWKfCzj0Ghydxkx1Q&s=03)
Fair Economist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Auckland’s development worked. Their prices are currently coming down, and if you look at the chart in that graph, you can see that the 2017 reforms stopped the housing price increases. All the increase since was in the inflationary insanity of 2020-22 – which happened everywhere in the developed world due to monetary policy.
Right now Auckland’s prices about about 10% more than they were in 2017. That is a HUGE, HUGE win! Compare to Orange County, where they’re up 50% just since 2020.
YIMBYism works.
rikyrah
scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) posted at 10:14 AM on Thu, Nov 21, 2024:
20 yrs ago, Bush 43 was reelected in part due to Republican messaging against same sex marriage. Since we’ve become more accepting of gays and lesbians, the GOP had to find an even smaller, more marginalized group to go after – trans people – and it worked (again)
(https://x.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1859631417207988664?t=rYxVbV20mSR5YRl0qSsV_w&s=03)
Fake Irishman
@Melancholy Jaques:
Until 2024, Suburban whites areas were drifting toward the Dems. (2015-2023).
Fair Economist
@Suzanne: And part of the point of a city is that some people *do* prefer broken up facades. And some *do* prefer Brutalist-adjacent blockiness. And there’s room for both! People have different preferences, and we should accomodate them.
Martin
@Fair Economist: I live in Irvine if people haven’t figured that out yet, and we’ve added 100,000 people each of the last two decades and the city is planning to add another 100K but it now needs to come from redevelopment because we’ve built out almost all the land. We have a lot of 1-story commercial/light industry that will get rezoned and moved. The city hasn’t figured out that we can’t cap out because none of the other cities around us will build anything – so we’re left to soak up all of the counties growth. There are benefits to that – we’re maybe a year from being the largest city in the county, about to be one of the 50 largest in the US and a lot of us keep advocating for growth. But there’s no transit. The county is utterly incompetent at transit, and the city is just starting to learn how to do it. Meanwhile, there is no single family to speak of being built (good). It’s all medium density/mixed use (good). But there’s no transit (terrible). The city’s 2040 and 2045 development plans are lining up car-free neighborhoods because in order to continue the growth, we have to remove the space for cars (the US dedicates more land area to cars than housing) which means we have to get really good at transit really quickly. The planners are on board with that, the city council isn’t because there are enough residual SFH owners to oppose transit. I’ve been advocating for limited and controlled retail development within residential communities such as cafes/bodegas/pubs if only to relieve some of the traffic by building places people would walk to because whats’ likely to happen is these new development areas become difficult to access by car, and the SFH neighborhoods get difficult to serve with transit, and the SFH neighborhoods (which are falling into the minority in terms of pop) find they are cut off from convenient services. People going to get really cranky then.
trollhattan
Example of “how to do something.”
Note especially AB 2079. The State has outlawed one of the most common tools used by anti-growth groups. Separately, ADUs cannot be banned.
Let’s talk land use. Our biggest downtown office tower just sold, for tens of millions below the last purchase. Know why? 27% occupancy. The modern city model is broken and here, the City has reversed their post-war strategy of attracting offices to the city core while clearing out residential neighborhoods. Today the focus is on mixed use: business, retail, entertainment, living. Thousands of apartments have been added the last decade with more under way. This process will take decades and in the meantime, the postwar inner burbs have become hollow shells, due to leapfrog development farther out. This, the County must address. There’s space aplenty for tens of thousands of new homes, but a lot of rezoning is implied.
Kayla Rudbek
@cmorenc: could the connection be a bicycle and pedestrian path rather than a street for cars? Check the Dutch Cycling Embassy for ideas, maybe?
Fair Economist
@cmorenc:
That’s a legitimate objection. Traffic calming is a great solution. A couple of bollards and you can walk in peace.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Whoa. Weird since Tester lost.
Suzanne
@Fair Economist:
I will also note that I fundamentally don’t think I have the right to expect that things match my preferences. Again, there are valid concerns of health, safety, and shared welfare in the built environment, and I think it’s good to enshrine that in law. But my rights end there. I don’t believe that anyone has the right to dictate what others do with property beyond those concerns.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: 👍
R E.I.T.s (real estate investment trusts) and other corporate “industrial” buyers are bad for everyone.
Banning is
contemplatedcomplicated.https://www.boston.com/real-estate/local-news/2024/04/03/should-mass-ban-corporate-home-buyers/
Baud
Joe Biden is on Blue sky! (Unofficially)
trollhattan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Oh lordy, your piece has me recalling the vast swathes of housing here vacuumed up during the Great Recession and how much stock remains in speculator/capital management group hands. It was a megashift in ownership patterns that remains, nearly two decades later.
Related is all the unoccupied and/or run down commercial property owned by cranks/corporations waiting for “their payday.” Many are easy to ID just scrolling around the city using Google satellite view.
trollhattan
@Baud: Joesky!
Almost Retired
@Fair Economist: Good observation about LA. The infill and the density goals around Metro stations has kept a grossly-over-priced housing market from becoming a super-duper-grossly-overpriced housing market. Economists may use other terms.
My LA County beach-adjacent suburb loosened the rules for ADUs in SFR neighborhoods. So far, it doesn’t seem to be working. The only ADUs I see going up are in conjunction with tract home tear-downs, which are replaced with lot-and-height-limit McMansions.
And with respect to aesthetics, the current vogue in McMansion design here seems to be sterile Medical Office chic. Ghastly, and they make me suddenly appreciate mid-Century Dingbats from a comparative aesthetic standpoint.
Fair Economist
@Martin: It’s tough on Irvine to have to shoulder the entirety of OC’s housing demand. Sadly the NIMBYites have gotten control of my city council (Orange) and blocked all development except that which can be forced through using the state laws. And, predictably, since Orange is aging, that’s thrown them into a major budget crisis, since SFH does not pay for itself over the long run. For a long time they patched it up with development fees, but now they’re not getting development fees and – boom.
The city could fix its budget woes with a few dozen apartment buildings – not much for a city as large as Orange – but, no, gotta protect the “character of the neighborhoods”. By, among many other things, canceling all the social events that used to make this a nicer place. Goodbye summer pools. Goodbye Christmas celebrations. Probably goodbye school crossing guards (they got a temporary reprieve). My neighbor character feels so protected.
TBone
@trollhattan: 😊
Martin
@trollhattan: We’re dealing with that here – and the main problem is that the SFH residents will vote out the city council if they do anything other than car accommodation. They know it’s detrimental to the long term health of the city, so they work around the margins. Meanwhile people like me advocate for transit, ped infrastructure, etc. from within the SFH community, but man – it’s rough. A lot of my being down right now after this election is just feeling beat down of being able to affect any local change as well. I am accustomed to setting my sights on a goal during my career and successfully politicking and social engineering my way to a solution, and I am failing so fucking hard in this other environment that it’s really breaking me. I don’t know if it’s just nearly impossibly hard, or I just suck at it.
trollhattan
@cmorenc:
Having spend nearly a week hopping between Raleigh and Winston-Salem recently, the pace of growth is impossible not to notice. It’s legit tricky to pull off gracefully and holy hell, are your freeways teetering on the edge of reaching capacity (which hits more like a light switch than a faucet).
Fall there is dang nice!
JustRuss
@Martin:
I was in France last month and watched a couple vehicles across the valley do that dance. But yes, lots of smaller farms. I know France used to subsidize family farms pretty heavily, not sure if that’s still the case.
Fair Economist
@Almost Retired:
There’s been a lot of talk about “missing middle” housing – duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, etc. The problem with that is that they are very expensive when modifying SFH. They really only make economic sense if you’re going to do a teardown *anyway*. If we had 60 years, we could build that way, but we don’t. We should have built neighborhoods like that from the start, but it’s too late now.
Where there’s been success in increasing housing supply in the US so far, it’s been mostly by multistory apartment building, backed up with townhome developments. ADUs are *good*, they *help*, but they’re just not enough by themselves.
JMG
My son and his wife and child live in Brooklyn. One reason voters there might be turning against Democrats is that the city government and state government are both quite dysfunctional. He worked for five years at the MTA, working on user interfaces for digital communications for the subway system. He loved the work, but left for his own sanity dealing with the political bullshit. It isn’t even like it’s a corrupt machine, it’s like 1000 little corrupt machines all running around at once. When it takes a generation to introduce the garbage can to Manhattan, no wonder people are pissed.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
There are two pieces done on Auckland by an Australian economist that counter any of this trickle-down, market-urbanism is successful BS being peddled:
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/london-out-built-auckland-no-one
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-upzoning-myth-response
In short, Auckland upzoned from 400K units to 1million in 2016. Didn’t change the number of new builds, it remains at 15K per year. The market told Auckland’s politicians that no matter how they UPZONED HARDER!!!!!!, they, the market, were only gonna build what was profitable to build, nothing more.
Also too, the original snake oil being peddled was that prices would *drop*. It wasn’t until there was enough data, and enough pushback from people not on the real estate/developer payroll in some form, that the trickle-down, market-urbanist crowd shifted the goalposts “Oh, what we meant to say all these years is that the rate of increase would be reduced”.
Auckland remains one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent:
https://home.nzcity.co.nz/news/article.aspx?id=388252
Again, we see this in Denver where this trickle-down, market-urbanism BS isn’t “encumbered” by design reviews and all the other little side-digressions that are tossed out to divert attention from the underlying issues at hand.
“Infill” development, which has happened at a frenetic pace over the last 10 years as every entitled white person of a certain age has wanted to move here to live in a “hot” neighborhood when and where they want, was promoted by our previous, idiot, mayor. And yet, to hear the white dude-bros here who make up the activism for developers, it’s not enough.
Developer builds some ugly piece of shit 8-story apartment in a designated “Transit Oriented Development” zone and to be honest, nobody objects to the apartment being built, they object to how shitty it’s built and looks. It’s zoned for higher but they won’t build higher because they won’t make money. I’ve heard them say this repeatedly.
The same thing for parking, another favorite whipping boy for the market urbanist crowd. Developers have (now) more leeway in terms of what parking they provide. Guess what? They don’t build down to that because they can’t rent units that don’t have parking. One of *the* most hated developers in Denver (who’s so awful, all the other developers hate him) said that to my face once, probably the only truthful thing that ever came out of his pie hole.
Soooo, effective regulatory capture (as has happened here) or political capture (like in Auckland) doesn’t mean shit. It only fuels speculative builds, furthering the commodification of neighborhoods.
trollhattan
@Martin: Sympathies.
Meaningful change is so lengthy and gradual, it’s hard to be positive about accomplishing much at all in real time.
Perhaps my biggest “thing” is carving out non-motor vehicle corridors from N,E,S into downtown’s core. With a grid first laid out in the mid 1800s then boxed in by interstates last century, it’s really tough to do. But with 300 sunny days/year I truly believe we can get a LOT of folks out of their cars.
Know our incoming mayor conversationally, and he has the right mindset to continue the positive trends, even if the office doesn’t have a lot of clout vs. the city council. And the county is a wildcard.
Suzanne
@Fair Economist: I will note that my neighborhood here in Pittsburgh has a lot of that missing-middle stuff…. duplexes and triplexes, and SFHs that have been bought and subdivided into apartments. We also have some places where a developer bought a couple of adjacent lots and built 3-4 townhouses on that lot. It’s fine. Most of the neighborhood is still SFH, but the mix is very livable.
But then we also have a project under construction that has a few designated below-market-rate units and some of the neighbors are losing their shit.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
That’s interesting because here in Denver, again a hotbed for the pro-developer, mass gentrification of the City, the, as you refer to it “SFH community” has advocated for what you’ve described for years and has had quite a bit of success in that regard.
Mainly because such things are seen as gentrification accelerators but hey, it’s one thing that actually cuts across the policy divide here.
That being said, the City does it so hamfistedly and so ugly, the very people who wanted it now roll their eyes at the mass confusion and eyesores popping up that are making it less safe in some ways.
But that’s Denver, perhaps there’s a good idea in there but the execution is botched beyond belief.
cmorenc
@Kayla Rudbek: That is exactly the compromise our neighborhood is supportive of – a pedestrian – bike path connector but not for motor vehicles.
Fair Economist
@Martin:
I was shopping at the District this weekend and holy cow, what a hell segregating retail from residential created. How could anybody in Irvine be opposed to mixing cafes/bodegas/pubs into residential areas with that dystopia to look at?
Betsy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I came here to say this.
As an urban planner with decades in the field, I completely agree.
oldgold
NOW: Per pool, 2 ambulances and several vans that appeared full of Secret Service
have left Mar-a-Lago in the last few minutes.
oldgold
@oldgold: False Alarm. Was VP’s motorcade
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud:
Maybe his GOTV helped marginal districts over the line, even though he lost statewide (?)
I’ll put this on the list of numbers I want to look at as we go forward.
Archon
My friends and I were talking about that. Democrats who want to show up on a horse and cowboy hat in these rural communities and tell them they are the salt of the earth to pander to their ego, fine but we shouldn’t do SHIT for them.
Democrats absolutely need a blue city strategy.
Fair Economist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Auckland’s housing prices increased 10% over the past 7 years. That’s the best result of any successful city in the English-speaking world. Auckland’s upzoning is a proven and remarkable success.
If our cities had had the housing price increases of Auckland we’d have President-elect Harris right now, misogyny, racism, and disinfo notwithstanding.
Glory b
@Melancholy Jaques: THenk you.
It always seems like no one can ever explain why black people understand the assignment when no one else can.
I’m still waiting for an explanation (other than racism) for why those young people etc, have been so entranced by Republicans.
What are they offering?
I’ll also note that Harris was the only one with a housing plan.
Baud
Texas just did this as well.
Ken B
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Republicans and other right wingers; every accusation is a confession.
Like you say, they’ve been making that accusation for a long time.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
What’s funny is that, again at least here, our old core neighborhoods (to include mine) are full of “mything middle” housing. People don’t object to that per se, they simply object to the form-based, block shit that gets built should something get scraped.
Also too, our core neighborhoods eagerly embrace true low-income housing…not that any gets built.
One exception, a 4-story apartment built in the 20s and owned by a non-profit devoted to real 30% AMI, supportive housing. They filed for a demo permit. As president of the Registered Neighborhood Org, I met with them their architect and encouraged people in the immediate vicinity to engage.
They wanted to scrape and put in a 7-story structure which would triple the number of 30% AMI supportive housing. People applauded when hearing that. No issues going forward.
I can go to plenty of neighborhoods here where that would be the case…and many that would lose their shit. Those ‘hoods are the ones where wholescale scraping over the last 12 years has occurred and 4million dollar 4000 sq ft homes go up (our city’s ‘developer class’ do that in targeted neighborhoods). So yeah, we all have some commonality here when it comes to dealing with people like that.
I was also just involved in an actual rezoning request that would bring the parcel in line with what was done 14 years ago when the City “updated” the zoning code. There were objections mainly because the building there now is actually a great space for small, service businesses the neighborhood wants and needs…and is affordable space. What is going in there won’t be that.
I hosted a neighborhood meeting where the developer spoke and the main person objecting spoke. Then hosted Q&A, then took a straw poll. People objecting were about 55%. I submitted a formal letter to the City simply outlining the steps we took and the results, not taking a formal stance.
The City then asked the POC objecting to the rezone if she’d go into mediation with the developer and we’ve had a positive outcome in that some of the concerns have been addressed. It helps that the developer’s not a raging narcissistic sociopath they way virtually all of em are.
So, even in a city like Denver where the playing field is decidedly tilted against actual residents, if you get sincere players on both sides, you can reach agreement.
But the underlying racism when trotting out the NIMBY trope of the general trickle-down, market-urbanist, remains (see link above that spells it out in gory detail).
Betty Cracker
Cities in Florida are growing and turning red. Before committing to an urban focus more broadly, maybe Dems should look into why that is. Could be a problem unique to Florida, but maybe not.
Glory b
@Suzanne: Pittsburgh?
What neighborhood are you referring to?
I have a couple young relatives looking to rent or buy there.
suzanne
@Glory b: Happy to advise. Watergirl has my email address…. write to her and she’ll forward to me.
trollhattan
Local infill example, hope this Googlemap link works.
ETA, nope. This?
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5639555,-121.5111432,594m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTExOC4wIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExMjM0SAFQAw%3D%3D
Built on an abandoned former lumber mill site, it’s a mixed-use combination of single-family detached townhomes, multifamily condos, multifamily rentals. IIRC some are low-income setaside units(?). Can’t recall anybody fighting rezoning from industrial to residential, maybe? Nobody yelled about gentrification.
Build-out finished last year, construction took perhaps a decade and planning? Who can guess. It’s mere minutes from downtown and the capitol and is anchoring redevelopment of the entire Broadway corridor west end.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Yeah, in Denver, every rail stop is crowded with apartments that are probably partially empty because the rent is too damn high. In Rochester, there was a bunch of building of high-end apartments downtown, far beyond what the market will bear.
My understanding is that the developers’ financing is contingent in part on the developer sticking to the “plan” for the development, which includes minimum rents. If they lower rents, the financing can be called, so they’re just sitting around hoping for a miracle, I guess. In the meantime, people can’t afford the housing.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Describes the inverse of California. Our red areas are suburbs and the sticks, not cities. Okay, maybe Bakersfield and Redding, but they’re plopped in the sticks.
Glory b
@Baud: Carnegie Mellon did the same, I think $100,000.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Kay:
My take from the small town where I grew up is, as has been happening for a couple of generations, the kids with potential and gumption just leave and move to the city. Then we’re left with, for lack of a better term, the ne’er do wells. They’re often kids from poorer families, but not always.
trollhattan
@Baud:
“Mom, dad, look, free tuition! Uh, how do I get into MIT?”
I keed, that’s a great thing. Bro went to MIT and he’s not super weird, moderately weird at most.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
There’s a boatload of material out there on how rent prices are fixed, almost like a cartel. I don’t deal with the rental side of this discussion nearly as much as everything else so don’t have immediate links on that.
Not to mention plenty of tax issues (that I will admit, don’t know in gory detail) that make it doable (?) for big apartment holders to only rent so many in order to keep rents at the level they want. You’ll often see people on both sides of this meta issue talk about a vacancy tax. I don’t think any consensus (much less political will) has come to any agreement on the efficacy of that approach.
I’ve had more than one developer here tell me flat out they’ll never lower rents because that’s seen as a reflection on the property’s worth (their words, not mine). They have some target growth per year and make sure the units in the mix don’t undercut that.
I finally found a post where a noted shill said the inside words (look at the Jay Parsons quote):
https://twitter.com/decadimitry/status/1836638929845375130
And I finally found the video of the dude standing in front of the San Fran CC and saying “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up.”:
https://twitter.com/LeeHepner/status/1748427532020642161
Martin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I take those points, but not every environment matches those parameters. My city is younger than I am and has no historical component apart from a few agricultural buildings. We’re built around a major university, corporate headquarters and tech. One of the recurring problems with the city is nobody ever wants to leave it. The weather is close to perfect, we have really nice amenities, and there is a distinct diversity to the place that serve a lot of communities quite well.
One of the larger impediments is that we have massive consolidation of land ownership – with basically one landlord covering the entire city. It is rife for abuse and said developer has done a great job of funneling money into schools and services to make the city desirable. It’s equally obvious that will end the second there is nothing more to develop.
One consequence of Prop 13 is that the moment you stop growing and turning over inventory, you wither. Your tax base dries up, and we’re still in the growth phase and the city plans to stay there for another 2 decades. All bets are off when that ends as Fair Economist observes. But the law constrains cities to that plan.
But I think it’s unfair to overlook that urbanists do call for non-market housing – to undercut the cycle of landlord rent-seeking. Part of our advocacy for retail in residential neighborhoods is part of that effort – allowing businesses to build up with a service focus to own their own land, and therefore might have some longevity, rather than be at the constant whims of the retail developers here. As to the SD piece arguing that many of these service workers can’t bike/bus to work – that was literally the entire utilitarian cycling community here 5 years ago – people that couldn’t afford a car working jobs that were reasonably close. They’d ride along the arterials at 5AM and quite often get murdered by some SUV. We have quite good recreational cycling infrastructure but it usually doesn’t serve places of employment, etc. That’s the part we’re trying to change. Tragically, the university is one of the places it also doesn’t serve and that’s the place that would most eagerly take up the opportunity – but rapid growth of the university left the city committing every inch to car infrastructure and retrofitting bike in is now an exercise in road diets – which is politically tricky. But the university is itself compelled by the state to grow, and the city has to accommodate.
We’re similar to Palo Alto which has taken a different path and tried to protect against growth. Median home price there is now $3.6M and the mayor has been trying to get business to leave to reduce demand. None of it worked – things just got more unaffordable.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: I naively hoped that when our cities grew, Dems would be more competitive here. The opposite is happening, and it’s empowering all the worst people. I don’t want other states to catch that disease.
Martin
@trollhattan: I suspect it’s a Florida thing. Their growth was often dominated by northern whites moving down there. We used to be the core of republican OC and Republicans don’t stand a chance here now (HB is who keep our house races close). But our growth is primarily immigrants and students moving into the workforce.
Florida’s population is quite old and getting older. My city is one of the only places in OC getting younger. Median age in FL is 42. Here it’s 33 – younger than Santa Ana now, making us the youngest population city in the county. Mission Viejo is 46 and they are increasingly Trumpy.
tobie
From my perch in rural white America, everything David Roberts says is true. Rural America is heavily subsidized, whereas cities are starved for funds. And the federal govt turns a blind eye to small businesses when it comes to taxes. I see my low-skilled, no-skill small biz neighbors cheat on their taxes and enjoy state and federal aid, while claiming they have never accepted a handout in their life unlike, you know, those people. The hypocrisy burns.
Betty Cracker
@tobie: That tracks with what I see. My Trumpiest cousin deliberately parked his piece of shit vehicle in the path of a storm and collected a FEMA check. All while grousing about government spending on layabouts and cheats. Dude, look in the mirror!
Starfish (she/her)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: RTD evaluated is bus lines with a racial justice lens making sure that the folks who did not have access to cars did not lose their public transportation. Unfortunately, that means all the people who pay taxes, did lose their public transportation. A whole lot of the commuter lines were killed and are slowly being added back, maybe.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Makes me want to root for Musk’s proposed spending cuts.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
That is awful. People in states like NC, TN, etc. are really hurting.
tobie
@Betty Cracker: The irony of all this is that I–and I’m sure all BJers–wouldn’t begrudge anyone investments in rural hospitals and rural broadband if there were just some sense we all share in this natl project in which a good govt tries to create conditions for everyone to succeed.
Starfish (she/her)
@Betty Cracker: I think the Florida thing is like the Texas thing. There are some special people in everyone’s life that want to move to Texas. They can afford more house there, but Grimes is not getting child support from Elon in Texas because there is a maximal cap on child support in Texas. They also want to be in a place with no gun regulations.
Oh! Oh. The Florida thing is the crypto thing. A lot of crypto people moved there
This story about the state wanting to diversify retirement funds into crypto seems bad.
Ken B
@danielx: Gaetz won reelection before Trump appointed him. Did he resign for both terms, or does he get sworn in for the new term?
And if he comes back, seems like the ethics report should be released.
Am I missing something?
Martin
@Betty Cracker: I’m increasingly of the view that a lot of this spending needs to be sent back to the states. It seems to me that federal tax transfers from blue to red states for ag subsidies, FEMA, etc are simply subsidizing opposition to tax collection for the programs they demand. Maybe if Florida wants to provide emergency relief after disasters, they should have the debate of how to pay for it, rather than rely on Democrats to hand it to them in exchanging for not paying taxes themselves.
Martin
@Ken B: My understanding is he resigned from this congress to the next, and that ethics reports end with the end of the congress (which is why they were about to release their report) and need to be restarted in the next.
Citizen Alan
@@mistermix.bsky.social: I hold out hope that my RWNJ sister’s younger two children will give up on Mississippi and let me help them find teaching jobs in California. But I’ve given up on the older nephew who is basically a slacker-loser. He makes $12k a year doing layout and writing advertising copy for the local weekly newspaper, and he seems to have no aspirations to ever make anything more. Last time we spoke even tangentially about politics, he indicated that he got all his news from podcasts and Youtube videos and he loved Alex Jones.
Soprano2
@Kay: And yet I hear constant complaining about kids being pushed to go to college instead of trade schools. The dirty little secret is that those trade jobs are high paying but physically taxing. Lots of people want a high paying job they can do in an office. It takes a toll when you work in the trades. Lots of people don’t want to make that tradeoff.
cain
When I was in part of an HOA board in an upper middle class neighborhood (that is also racist, ask me how I know) it was always about preserving property values.
I get that having dense housing is not the American way especially for boomers and gen xers. Even I have some issues with that. I used to get annoyed at “cookie cutter” housing development that seem both of poor quality and made the neighborhood look boring. I loved the neighborhood where I grew up which had many different types of houses. Now you get like 3 types.
I’m still kind of meh about the cookie cutter thing, but intellectually realize that dense housing is necessary. But sometimes old habits die hard.
cain
@Soprano2:
Not just that. The office jobs could be done remotely. That means they can move anywhere and still work at the same place. The attraction of mobility is great. I mean I am going to visit my parents and I can still work and stay with them longer. That’s pretty cool.
Kent
Honestly, these days some of the most interesting high density urban development is happening in red-ish cities in red states. Partly because there isn’t so much NIMBY obstructionism and veto points available.
Like in Texas these days you can find interesting new urban neighborhoods in Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio that blow away anything you might find in Silicon Valley.
Basically because you can still build shit in those cities without 25 years of environmental review processes and people hand-wringing about “historic parking lots” and similar shit.
lowtechcyclist
@cmorenc:
I’m OK when neighborhoods are each one big cul-de-sac off the main road, with respect to cars. But I wish there were walking/biking paths between neighborhoods that back up onto each other. Kids who are old enough to roam a bit on their own should be able to safely visit friends who aren’t necessarily in their own neighborhood.
In your case, maybe that could be proposed as an alternative – having a foot and bike path connecting the two neighborhoods, rather than a road?
Martin
@Kent: San Jose has the highest percentage of SFH zoning of any city in the US. The valley is terrible about housing policy/zoning.
Being in a city doing aggressive development, it’s quite clear that the only real impediment to better development is city policy/willingness. We’ve had no problem rezoning and plowing through parcels to build new units – and doing so reasonably quickly. Again, 100,000 people in the last 10 years – 50% growth. I’ll note that in those 10 years the value of my home went up from $800K to $1.7M, so so much for eroding property values.
Suzanne
@Kent: I see people argue that younger people today have a degree of entitlement about their housing. Statements like, “Your grandparents raised four kids in 800 square feet” and other avocado-toast-y nonsense.
My grandparents also didn’t get polio vaccines. Like, we can do better.
And I will also note: my grandparents didn’t have design review and mandatory setbacks and minimum lot sizes and HOAs and a whole regulatory apparatus that today’s homeowners have in place, so the idea of entitlement cuts both ways, AFAIAC.
Kent
I live in cul-de-sac city too, although not on the Texas scale. We still have some connections.
I think there is a future where we could connect a lot of these different neighborhoods with paved walking paths/bike paths in a reasonably cheap manner such that we have good safe biking connections even without building new roads. Would require some eminent domain some places but doable. It would make the suburbs more livable and less car-centric.
Martin
@Suzanne: I think this is a little misplaced. My grandparents raised 2 kids in an 800 square foot house. My adult kids grandmother lives in a 3500 sq ft McMansion that she’s desperate to empty of heirlooms that none of us have space for. My son, earning ~$150K is just getting by in a 1br, thanks to not having a car. My daughter has no expectation of being able to move out of our house for years.
Their entitlement is for literally anything.
From what I can tell design review and mandatory setbacks and minimum lot sizes and HOAs are all vestigial institutions from efforts to keep black people out of neighborhoods as the federal government advanced civil rights. They were argued as valid tools to preserve property values and we have fully internalized the propaganda, though now instead of keeping black people out of our neighborhoods, it’s our own children.
Martin
@Kent: Yeah, in a lot of cases, like mine, you can’t walk because we put up impassable barriers (7′ high stuccoed concrete walls in my case) as a quasi-gated-community-keep-the-riffraff-out effort which means the restaurant across the street I can see through my 2nd floor window is faster to drive to than walk because they both require a roughly ¾ mile circuitous route out of the neighborhood there – 4 stop signs, and a traffic light – even though I can literally throw a rock and hit it.
I’ve got a masonry blade for my circular saw and could remedy the problem in about 15 minutes. No eminent domain required. And about 95% of the situations I see like this would be similarly simple. And the thing is – what would make the neighborhood VASTLY safer is having residents out walking and talking to each other. As it is, half of the people here don’t even recognize who lives here – only which cars live here. If there was a stranger in the neighborhood, I don’t think they’d even realize it.
Suzanne
@Martin: I agree with you.
The system is very clearly non-functional right now, and it’s not young people’s entitlement that broke it.
Mendo
As mistermix points out, this is the maximalist case. But it’s a strong one. I am approx. 98% YIMBY in a city that has been 100% NIMBY for most of the last half century, and I try not to fall victim to the pundit’s fallacy and let my pet issues extend to national politics, but the argument here is solid. Housing/shelter and transportation are vital issues to absolutely everyone, so if you’re not getting the housing and transportation policy right in the cities, you’re screwing over 10s of millions of people, as well as affecting migration flows from city to suburb and from state to state. If that’s not a national issue, I don’t know what is.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
That’s the point, it’s a scam. Never done what it’s been sold as doing anywhere. Ever.
But hey, we’re simply back to the trickle-down, market urbanists (who never actually address the issues, instead it’s an attempt to yell SQUIRREL! about hyper-micro issues like a single project design review) trying to divert attention from the real issues.
These are either people on the real estate industry payroll in one form or another (yunno, architects, planners, real estate developers, construction types, etc) or people too clueless to know that the only folks who say these things are being paid.
And the developers are laughing at them from their mountain homes in Telluride, or Aspen, or a yacht.
It’s telling that these are overwhelmingly white people who leverage that entitlement into a 21st century version of “urban renewal”. Mechanics are different this time: eminent domain and condemnation aren’t needed. Instead, a de-regulatory mission combined with regulatory capture like blanket upzoning increases the value of the land so the owners are incentivized to knock down current more affordable units for expensive new builds.
Housing justice history was always about creating inclusionary neighborhoods, not about de-regulation and fighting over zoning and structures. The playbook by the people here who spout this grift is to steal social justice language to promote private development for either personal gain or displacement.
These people are housing libertarians, nothing else.
Martin
Except that’s not the pattern here. Maybe it will be in the future, but we’re not gentrifying residential – we’re knocking down light commercial/industrial and replacing it with housing. At least though 2045 there’s no plan to swap out housing, though city planners tell me that in the 2050 plan they might need to start doing that. In that case they tell me it’s likely to be some of the older single family neighborhoods around the university where the density would be most beneficial. It’s already illegal for the city to protect them under R1, so in theory developers can already move in, buy properties and build multi-family, but there isn’t yet a need to do so. One of the planners said they have their eye on one of the municipal golf courses as well. It’s also well positioned for housing, and they could retain half of it as green space and still fit in a lot of units. The city has a mandate by the state to build 25,000 units by 2029, 10K of which need to be low income (which is laughably $125K/yr for a family of 4). They can’t not build those so the city either needs to annex more land in the highly flammable foothills, or nuke the Tesla dealership from orbit (can I push the button please?).
Vail
@Martin: thanks for this overview – I really learned a lot, and I live in a farming community in Oregon. We have the visible – mostly migrant – labor, still. And that’s exactly right about France.
Again, thanks for saying all of this. Super helpful.
AM in NC
The most interesting non-fiction book I’ve read lately is related to this issue, and I didn’t know it was central to this issue before I read this book:
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.
Zoning around PARKING is at root of most of our housing/building issues in cities. It is INSANE.
Seems like it would be a boring book, but it was fascinating. And eye-opening.
I recommend it to anyone interested in land-use or housing issues. Or just generally curious about how our urban spaces operate and developed.