You have to give a fair bit of credit to Phil Bokovoy for the defeat of NIMBYism. While living half the year in NZ, he sued to stop new housing being built in Berkeley, then forced UC Berkeley to withdraw offers already made to incoming students on the basis that there wasn't enough housing for them. If a YIMBY propaganda outfit had done a cartoon with a villain like this, it would have been dismissed as an absurd caricature.
Good article. Next frontier is places where housing isn’t as insane as SF/NYC but still unaffordable. Read the facebook group of any upper middle class suburb in the Midwest about proposed developments and you’ll want to drink bleach. Those will be a tougher nut to crack but it absolutely needs to be done.
Oregon is about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its vaunted land use system, enacted in 1973, that put strict development boundaries around cities (known as urban growth boundaries or UGBs) and prioritized the protection of farm and forest land. The latter has largely been a success. But the former created the problems that the recent legislation you cited was designed to address. So now we're on a path to more development in our cities, within those UGBs, although pushbacks continue in smaller cities in rural areas. What hasn't been addressed yet is the potential for more housing in rural areas, such as second housing units on farm land, where I've encountered the rural version of NIMBYism: As one of my farmer neighbors put it, more neighbors, more problems. Our land use system is going to have to deal with this issue as well.
Boulder CO was at the forefront of this as well and enacted all sorts of exclusionary land use regs that restrict building heights and an urban growth boundary in 1970 which basically just forced development to leap frog a few fields to the outlying towns of Superior, Erie and Longmont. It didn't reduce the vehicle congestion or smog issues though.
I'm curious about how the UGB works around Portland. Its metro famously spills over into Clark County, Washington (Vancouver). How does another county in another state undermine Oregon's policy?
Clark County (WA) is Exhibit A for both opponents and proponents of Oregon's land use system. Lots more development and cheaper housing are cited by the former. Sprawl and more automobile commuters across the Columbia by the latter.
The logistics of crossing a river with only 2 famously clogged bridges in the vicinity makes it quite a bit more contained, I believe. Vancouver and Camas are essentially suburbs of Portland, but I don't think it stretches much beyond that.
HOAs are the petite bourgeoise busy-bodies who want to police what color petunia you plant. They're terrible. The only thing to do is join the HOA and rewrite the rules to be no rules.
As a former HOA president I will say that HOAs perform an incredibly important duty which is to ensure a complex has adequate funds for long term maintenance. Without that every single complex would be at the whims of each owner somehow working together to maintain common or very expensive capital projects (roof replacement, painting, etc).
Now I 100% agree that most HOAs are filled with the crankiest nancies on the planet, people who dream of wielding power over their neighbors purely because they are deeply broken people and I did my best to make sure those people weren't on our board but I would say that HOAs are definitely not all bad.
Every HOA is in charge of a roof and that's the largest common expense (over 30 years) and one that people rarely if ever save consciously for. Saying an HOA fills no valid function only means you've never been part of a competent one or lived in a multi unit complex which absolutely requires one.
You have to love the Councilmember sitting at the end near the camera, desperately waving at his colleague to stop _speaking his intent to break the law_ into a live microphone, on camera.
But of course, in 2014, they got away with it. In 2022, things are going to be a lot more... interesting.
Approve of YIMBY, am a Bay Area resident for most of my life. The one limitation that needs to be in place in California is a demand for the water to be there. The prices have gotten ridiculous, this from a former real estate agent. There has been a 450% increase in housing in the Bay Area on average, since 1990, it erodes the feel of a town or city, and prices the kids out of the area they grew up in. YIMBY is a good start though, hoping for more.
"America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland." - Mark Twain/Tennessee Williams/et al
As an architect who has done multi-family (MF) projects in hot markets (Denver, Boulder, DC metro area, Nashville, Dallas, Phoenix) and other smaller cities like New Orleans & Memphis, the NIMBYism I've encountered over the decades is highly predicated on socio-economic standing of the neighborhoods where new developments are being proposed. Everyone says they're for affordable housing but just not near where they live. This is true, not just in well-educated, wealthy enclaves like Boulder but also in low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans.
The term "affordable housing" has been maligned and connected with failed public housing developments that most people have an aversion to it because they wrongly think it means "poorer" people will move into the neighborhood. Conversely if you label the MF housing as "market rate" people will resist because they wrongly perceive it will drive up housing costs and cause gentrification. If you label the MF project as "workforce housing" then,by-and-large, people will generally support it or not resist it because the project is targeting the lower/middle class housing demographic of teachers, nurses, tradespeople that are getting pushed out of the very cities they work.
It takes a lot of outreach, time, $, and thought to get a MF project through most planning departments. I had a MF project in New Orleans that was 100% affordable live/work housing take 7 YEARS to build 69 units because of land transfer delays and bureaucratic hurdles. And this is a city that knows it has a housing and affordability issue.
Meanwhile, I had a 300 unit MF project in Nashville get built in 18 months because the City streamlines MF infill projects in commercial/warehouse zones because they want more people living closer to the city center than sprawling out.
You run up against zoning ordinances (that are based on the poorly applied New Urbanist planning theories) that still erroneously think density is bad, that taller buildings are awful and under-parking is anathema to the American dream of having to drive every place. So you'll have cities like Phoenix that will green light 600-1000 unit developments on retired farmland as long as you make it look like a little town center so people forget they have to drive 40 mins each way to commute to downtown,
One of the problems that most Americans don't realize is the a majority of the zoning ordinances utilized in the U.S. promulgated from the early zoning codes of LA and later NYC. Codes that codified strict land use criteria, favored SFH and zoning via class and race. This is why 90% of America's cities all look and operate the same way, which is to say shitty and why most of American cities have no uniqueness to them.
The housing shortage won't go away by nibbling at the fringes or concentrating on just the large/medium sized cities. Revamping zoning laws is one thing, but educating the public as whole to adapt to denser living is a big ask and a Herculean effort. There is also the labor shortage in the construction industry that can't keep up with the demands as it stands, which means housing stock will take a long time to surpass demand.
You've kind of hit nail on the head...not about SF upzoning but car dependence in general. You're never going to convince Americans to raise kids in mid/high rise apartments. With few exceptions the only people that do this are first generation immigrants and poor people living in public housing high rises...back when these were more common. Vast majority of people want space and want a yard. I don't see this changing.
But i agree...aesthetically suburbs are often tacky. And cities are often non descript.
If more MF was designed and built for actual families (ie 2 and 3 bedrooms) with access to private outdoor space and interior courtyards and natural daylight and cross ventilation then I suspect more people would/could opt to raise their kids in the city. But as it stands, most MF is geared towards 1bd and studios with a modicum of 2br units thrown in. Projects I've worked on, we do interior courtyards and outdoor amenity spaces to make apartment / townhome living better but it's a hard sell to convince developers to do more family units.
Apartment living around the world is vastly different and in parts of Europe far better than American apartment living. Berlin is not a hyper-dense city but even its suburbs have denser land planning that most American cities and the quality is nicer too.
Maybe but urban infill developers of mid/high rise condos in US have a pretty good sense of demand and it isn't for families with kids...it's invariably for single people. It's not some pro-suburban conspiracy that limits 3/4 BR housing in which raising families might be more achievable. It's consumer demand. The examples of other countries are not convincing because other countries are not like America.
Now I will grant you in theory you might find more demand in inner collar suburbs for walkable row house living for families willing to trade space and newer builds for walkability and better commute times. But rowhouses are just not very affordable either unless they are in bad neighborhoods and sometimes not even then. So, when non wealthy people want to have kids in say DC, SF, NYC etc they often move to exurbs or flee to a lower cost city entirely. I don't see there being an easy technocratic fix for this.
To a degree. There's a bit of self-fulfilling demand at play as well. If you build only studios, 1 br and a few 2br then you won't attract small families (except out of desperation perhaps). But again, it's also about what kind of units get designed as well. The missing middle is a big part of this as well.
I'm not sure why Americans think European examples aren't applicable. They have similar housing shortages as well and similar demands. What our current housing and zoning policies say to Americans is that you are more than welcome to live near where you work, enjoy the amenities of city life, easy access to museums, restaurants, etc. as long as you don't have children or are wealthy enough to afford raising kids in the city. That's just bad policy all around in my opinion.
We like to think America is some unique country when it comes to housing, healthcare, you name it, but we're only unique in that we just fail to realize how shitty stuff is and accept it as the norm because we've become accustomed to it. American land use & housing policies are the ultimate sunken cost fallacy example.
One major difference between US and Europe is that most European urban cores were built out well before--usually centuries before--the automobile age. Another major difference is that many European countries have very politically strong ag lobbies who have been able to regulate land use limiting urban sprawl. A third difference is simply that America is a huge landmass in comparison. The damnedest thing---even towns built before the automobile age built very very wide streets. You can see this especially out west. There really is, going back to the pioneer days, something ingrained in the American psyche toward spreading out to open spaces. And as a matter of fact, I don't think most Americans would prefer the smaller accommodations, appliances etc typical of a European household.
Look I'm not disagreeing with you...I like European cities on the balance better than American ones, I like being able to walk places. I think it's better for communities and individuals on any number of levels. I don't like what cars have done to cities with all the setbacks and parking requirements they have. But despite a few microtrends toward walkable mixed use developments, it's not going to change much...not till there is a technological breakthrough that makes driving obsolete and even then it would take decades.
Having grown up in rural and small town America I was quite pleased when we moved to a bigger town about the time I got to high school. It seemed to me the bigger the town the more access I had to parks, museums, libraries, big churches and an endless variety of people. That love for city life never left so after I married and had a family moving to suburbia seemed to be a logical choice.
Little did I know that moving to suburbia would cause a culture shock, living among economically upscale people for whom space, privacy and distance from "low-class" people was an ingrained part of the value system. I will never forget a headline in one of the neighborhood papers, clinging to dark privacy after sunset, complaining about officials who wanted to "cram streetlight down our throats."
Having lived a couple of blocks from a printing company and neighborhood businesses that had been around for fifty to seventy-five years, passing occasional drunks on the sidewalk and dealing with people for whom English was not their mother tongue, I was dismayed to learn that my children would never grow up with the variety of people and experiences I had during and after my childhood.
I find it reassuring that growing numbers of people are realizing that by not joining a larger part of mankind they are denying themselves, their friends and family members a universe of benefits unknown and unappreciated in provincial America. Sadly I decided years ago that some people are simply not fit to live in town.
What amount of new housing will reduce housing cost? I'm skeptical that supply alone will materially change the cost of housing. It seems to me that in light of the examples of The Netherlands, Berlin and Austria (https://socialhousing.wien/) indicate that public involvement in the market has to happen before there is any price pressure on the private market.
Hmmm. Upon my own investigation, I'm actually not sure that Tokyo is such a convincing example of "affordability through YIMBY"...you did have a rapid decline in early 90's with deflation but the overall long term trend in rising unaffordability is unchanged https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-prices-in-japan-since-1956/
I mean, you do run into the fundamental Georgist point that no one (well, other than the Dutch) is actually making new land. So while you can conceivably increase supply up to structural or practical limits for apartments, the price-elasticity of supply for "amount of land that people can live on" is, in a sense, zero.
You could, of course, always develop marginal land in response to increasing population until you run out of that, in which case you now face the problem of "too many people, not enough land, and also no wild spaces left anywhere," which seems like a worse equilibrium than just "too many people, not enough land."
Vienna is a bad example because housing affordability there is largely the result of the city having a smaller population now than it did pre-WWII (when it was an imperial capital), as well as massive self-built sprawl elsewhere in Austria.
Small correction, Matt Haney is running for the CA Assembly, he’s currently an SF supervisor. (Where he was relatively YIMBY because the original YIMBY Sonja Trauss ran against him.)
He’s notable because the other supervisors broke local deference etiquette to block an affordable housing project in his district because it would’ve gentrified a Nordstrom valet parking lot.
I hope what’s happening is that there’s a large but poorly organized majority for YIMBY, and as it organizes it’ll naturally win. Complaining at planning board meetings is a really unusual hobby, but ~ no one participates in local government and so those people win out.
Which — fingers crossed — is why a well-organized statewide majority to disempower those people and the municipal governments they control will win.
Complaining at planning commission meetings is very important, YIMBYs need to do this! Planning commissioners are political appointees and are themselves often at best ignorant and at worst NIMBY on housing issues. It’s also important to get YIMBY arguments on the public record.
I’m not sure YIMBYs are exactly a majority, but I think/hope that as more information ~this excellent post makes its way into non-niche publications, people will become better informed. I think NIMBY arguments feel intuitively true to a lot of people, including well-meaning people who might well have different views if they had better information.
The problem is that future residents of opposed housing can’t vote since they don’t live there yet and the residents currently in the “backyard” can and are very vocal.
Do you honestly believe that people will collectively act against their own economic self-interest when it comes to enacting local policies that reduces their home values?
Upzoning raises individual home values. Downzoning can raise the neighborhood’s values, for a while, but cartels are naturally unstable.
And it was mostly invented to make their houses more expensive yet less valuable, so poorer people (aka Chinese immigrants in Berkeley) wouldn’t be able to buy one and afford it by running a home business.
Yes, I do, because that’s what NIMBYs in extremely expensive areas are currently doing.
A developer who could buy their house, put up a multi-unit building and pay much more for it than any would-be SFH owner is legally banned from making such an offer.
The only way legalizing development *reduces* the value of land is if you think ~everyone places a very high value on living in an SFH-only neighborhood, apartments are a weird blight that no one actually lives in, and ~everyone refuses to live near them. But most people aren’t doctrinaire NIMBYs!
Urbanist YIMBY's: upzoning and building more housing always causes housing prices to fall. What you never heard of the law of supply and demand?
Also Urbanist YIMBY's: widening highways and building more road space always creates more congestion and demand for road space. What you never heard of the phenomenon of "induced demand"?
Induced demand is possible, but all the evidence shows that it doesn't outweigh the simply effect of increased supply when it comes to market rate housing.
But the Asquith paper you cited though found only a relative decline in rents ie rents that went up more slowly than nearby places that didn't increase density. The other papers found very small absolute declines.
I don't deny that building lots more apartments might cause rents to fall slightly especially in comparison to what they would have been absent the building. And it might be good for other reasons to get more people living in SF. ..increased tax base, more support for transit etc.
But I claim that upzoning and increased density are greatly oversold if the ultimate social goal is to make California more affordable again relative to the rest of the nation.
California in 1972 was not significantly more expensive than the rest of the nation. Lots of middle class jobs that supported families with children. We're decades away from that. Basically all that's left of middle class in CA (at least in desirable coastal areas) are retired union and civil service workers aging and waiting to die in their overpriced homes they could never afford to buy today.
Well, let me ask you, would you support a lot more SFH construction in say, the ranchlands east of Oakland? Or is this only about progressive urbanism. Because let's face it in the northern part of the state at least, CA got into this mess not because of SF zoning but because beginning in the 80's the state started on a crash diet in tract home building that lasted down to the present day. The Bay area decided a long time ago it didn't want to be like LA. This is one big reason why CA housing is so screwed up.
ANd many of these YIMBY's have SF in their mental models of what should be different about the world...can't we put a bunch more high rises on the SF peninsula? But it blows my mind just across the bay in Oakland there are acres and acres of old and often abandoned warehouses that technically have a mixed use zoning. But the city is so paralyzed and can't make up its mind what to do, they sit year after year. I will believe CA might be a little serious about this housing thing once Oakland gets substantially redeveloped.
California in 1972 still had lots of virgin land in reasonable commuting distance on which to build sprawl, but that land had all been built on by the late 1980s.
True. But the phenomenon of induced demand often gets left out of these simplistic upzoning discussions. You could increase the density of SF by say 1.5 current levels and prices would not fall at all because SF having a ton of new housing come online would be more attractive to move to not less. Prices would only be cheaper relative to what they would have been had all those people moved to SF at current density. Bottom line: few if any examples exist of really desireable cities becoming actually affordable over time though upzoning and increased density. Places become cheaper when they become less desireable not more coupled perhaps with demographic changes such as decline in youngish educated people who find SF life attractive. This YIMBY thing is one of these dreamy theoretical technocratic solutions unlikely to have desired effect in the real world.
There maybe is no downside. Except that people are grossly over selling upzoning and increased density as a solution to CAs affordable housing crisis. The new people who move into SF are still going to be paying through the nose to live there. And people making $15-20hour will still find it unaffordable.
Roads create distance between points of interest. Parking even more so. Creating a road or a parking lot increases the distance one must travel in daily life, by making cities unwalkable. More cars are sold, more roads and parking lots are built, distances traveled grow... rinse and repeat ad eternum until the world is asphalted completely.
I don't think this is a tenable argument, Mr. Magnani. Asphalted surfaces have many downsides, but they do not increase travel distance to points of interest, and they do frequently decrease travel distance by creating direct routes.
In principle, you don't want to widen roads within a heavily walked corridor, but you may want to widen roads that provide access to that corridor, as arterials across spaces that are not as densely settled and walked. In residential space, parking acreage can be a trade off with housing verticality, and actually contribute to walkability, up to a certain level. The application of the basic principles require so much specific flexibility to be optimized in urban nodes of various sizes and established configurations that I think it's counterproductive to rely on principles too firmly. It's more important to catalogue and weigh the predictable trade-offs of alternative options in detail.
This is true in the short run but obviously not true in the long run. A city is a large amount of close built housing. And yet, housing prices are higher in cities. In the long term, denser cities means more concentrated activity which means more GDP. The long term, "supply and demand," impact of increasing density in a city is reduced prices away from the city.
Are these are as similar as you think they are? Beyond the points made in a few of the other comments, it matters who pays.
Taxpayers usually pay for roads. If induced demand means that new roads won't reduce traffic congestion, then new roads are a waste of taxpayer money.
Investors and developers usually pay for housing. If induced demand means that new houses won't reduce housing prices, that is of limited relevance to taxpayers, since they aren't paying.
I've found it frustrating how localities have mostly managed to jam up the decent state level reform efforts. Lots of bills but not much housing - indeed even supposedly relatively friendly LA city is well below national construction levels. I'm coming to the view that land use policy just can't be done on the municipal level.
Hopefully the state will make an example of San Francisco if it fails to produce an acceptable housing plan. Sadly Redondo Beach has squirmed out of the builder's remedy which otherwise would have produced a nice development right next to the harbor.
Is Tokyo an example of a city achieving greater affordability through YIMBY build, build, build policies?
Not based on this data. After price collapse in early 90's prices seem more or less back on post war trend. At best you could argue that rate of growth has been slowed somewhat.
Data and statistics are overrated. Don’t you know that economic policies should be derived from first principles on the basis of postulated human nature alone?!?
Before the 1960s, the Interstate Highway System and associated schemes induced suburban development in areas near cities that had never had close access to urban amenities before and where real estate was therefore extremely inexpensive. Garrison Keillor wrote a great piece a while back about touring the then-tallest building in Minneapolis with his elementary school class in the late 1940s and seeing the city basically end at the terminus of the old streetcar lines. This system really WORKED. A lot of space was opened up to a newly affluent country facing much higher rates of family formation than there was affordable housing in urban areas.
Today is different - Interstate expansion is basically dead. The environmental costs of too much suburbanization make are making it a non-option. Commutes between affordable residential and unaffordable job centers in urban areas are becoming untenably long (and contra to what terminally online people think the solid majority of jobs are not WFH friendly). YIMBYism is an awesome ideologically heterogenous group (yeah, liberals and socialists, some libertarians, even the occasional conservative to shout out to Chuck Marohn) to imagine a different way to accommodate economic and population growth. And I'm here for it!
When Noah wrote that 'most YIMBYs are lefties (because most people in overpriced metros are lefties), but a few are libertarian types or fed-up businesspeople, and a few are hardcore socialists', I wondered if there are also social conservative YIMBYs. One possible rationale is that cheaper housing might lead to higher marriage rates and higher birth rates.
For Charles Marohn, his YIMBY position sounds like an aspect of his career as a planner. Are there any general-purpose social conservative YIMBYs?
> The rise of remote work, which is spreading knowledge workers to smaller metros, has taken this housing crisis nationwide.
How does this work? Remote work gives people more freedom in where to live, so they can move out to cheaper areas with more houses. If the lack of housing is America-wide rather than just in big cities then this wouldn't help, but I don't see how it could make it *worse*.
As I see it, remote work (minorly) helps big cities because it means that rich knowledge workers move away from the big cities, decreasing demand. In turn, those remote workers move to smaller cities or more rural areas, increasing demand and driving up prices. If the prices before were just barely affordable for many of the people living there, prices suddenly become unaffordable.
More to the point, it means that affluent remote workers make high enough bids that high quality natural, recreational, or urban amenities can be made unaffordable. What used to happen in Vail and Whistler is now underway in Boise and Bozeman.
There is a lot of evidence for your observation in my neighborhood -- the mid-Willamette Valley 50-70 miles south of Portland and in Salem and its surrounding small cities. The housing price increases on a percentage basis in the small mid-Valley cities east and west of I-5 have far outstripped Portland's increases since the start of the pandemic, and areas in and around Salem show an influx of families with kids.
Remote work gives people more freedom in where to live, so they can move to desirable places that didn’t have as many jobs. If there are desirable places to live that weren’t yet as expensive as New York or San Francisco, they can now become very expensive.
But however much upwards pressure that puts on those cities, an equal amount of downwards pressure would be put on the cities they're leaving. I see how it can move the problem from one location to another, but not how it can make it worse overall.
It’s not an equal amount since one vacant housing unit in NYC is a much smaller percentage of the whole metro market than a newly occupied housing unit in much smaller Boise or Nashville.
I think that just comes down to a terminological question of how you measure "worse overall". If we used to have 80% of people living in cities with evenly matched residents and housing, and 20% of people living in cities with only half the required housing, and now we have 60% of people living in cities with evenly matched residents and housing, and 40% of people living in cities with 3/4 of the required housing, it's the same total imbalance, but some people might say it's worse because more people are experiencing the problem, and others might say it's less bad because the mismatch might not cause anyone to suffer as much residential stress.
You have to give a fair bit of credit to Phil Bokovoy for the defeat of NIMBYism. While living half the year in NZ, he sued to stop new housing being built in Berkeley, then forced UC Berkeley to withdraw offers already made to incoming students on the basis that there wasn't enough housing for them. If a YIMBY propaganda outfit had done a cartoon with a villain like this, it would have been dismissed as an absurd caricature.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/
Good article. Next frontier is places where housing isn’t as insane as SF/NYC but still unaffordable. Read the facebook group of any upper middle class suburb in the Midwest about proposed developments and you’ll want to drink bleach. Those will be a tougher nut to crack but it absolutely needs to be done.
Oregon is about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its vaunted land use system, enacted in 1973, that put strict development boundaries around cities (known as urban growth boundaries or UGBs) and prioritized the protection of farm and forest land. The latter has largely been a success. But the former created the problems that the recent legislation you cited was designed to address. So now we're on a path to more development in our cities, within those UGBs, although pushbacks continue in smaller cities in rural areas. What hasn't been addressed yet is the potential for more housing in rural areas, such as second housing units on farm land, where I've encountered the rural version of NIMBYism: As one of my farmer neighbors put it, more neighbors, more problems. Our land use system is going to have to deal with this issue as well.
Boulder CO was at the forefront of this as well and enacted all sorts of exclusionary land use regs that restrict building heights and an urban growth boundary in 1970 which basically just forced development to leap frog a few fields to the outlying towns of Superior, Erie and Longmont. It didn't reduce the vehicle congestion or smog issues though.
I'm curious about how the UGB works around Portland. Its metro famously spills over into Clark County, Washington (Vancouver). How does another county in another state undermine Oregon's policy?
Clark County (WA) is Exhibit A for both opponents and proponents of Oregon's land use system. Lots more development and cheaper housing are cited by the former. Sprawl and more automobile commuters across the Columbia by the latter.
The logistics of crossing a river with only 2 famously clogged bridges in the vicinity makes it quite a bit more contained, I believe. Vancouver and Camas are essentially suburbs of Portland, but I don't think it stretches much beyond that.
Ban HOA's.
My city will let me build an ADU. My HOA wont.
That is all.
HOAs are the petite bourgeoise busy-bodies who want to police what color petunia you plant. They're terrible. The only thing to do is join the HOA and rewrite the rules to be no rules.
HOAs are a waste of money and time. I essentially pay for a couple of dudes to do nothing but complain about lawn care.
As a former HOA president I will say that HOAs perform an incredibly important duty which is to ensure a complex has adequate funds for long term maintenance. Without that every single complex would be at the whims of each owner somehow working together to maintain common or very expensive capital projects (roof replacement, painting, etc).
Now I 100% agree that most HOAs are filled with the crankiest nancies on the planet, people who dream of wielding power over their neighbors purely because they are deeply broken people and I did my best to make sure those people weren't on our board but I would say that HOAs are definitely not all bad.
Well most HOAs here really have very little common infrastructure (if any).
It's just the roads which could just as well belong to the city.
The HOA really fills no valid function.
Every HOA is in charge of a roof and that's the largest common expense (over 30 years) and one that people rarely if ever save consciously for. Saying an HOA fills no valid function only means you've never been part of a competent one or lived in a multi unit complex which absolutely requires one.
No. Many HOAs here have no common real estate, except roads.
A few have a pool and some also have a gate. That's it.
The management company basically rakes in the money for doing nothing but administering an insurance for accidents on the common roads. Insanity.
If you want to know how Housing Elements worked up until the most-recent cycle, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfqmJNeHeqg
You have to love the Councilmember sitting at the end near the camera, desperately waving at his colleague to stop _speaking his intent to break the law_ into a live microphone, on camera.
But of course, in 2014, they got away with it. In 2022, things are going to be a lot more... interesting.
Approve of YIMBY, am a Bay Area resident for most of my life. The one limitation that needs to be in place in California is a demand for the water to be there. The prices have gotten ridiculous, this from a former real estate agent. There has been a 450% increase in housing in the Bay Area on average, since 1990, it erodes the feel of a town or city, and prices the kids out of the area they grew up in. YIMBY is a good start though, hoping for more.
"America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland." - Mark Twain/Tennessee Williams/et al
As an architect who has done multi-family (MF) projects in hot markets (Denver, Boulder, DC metro area, Nashville, Dallas, Phoenix) and other smaller cities like New Orleans & Memphis, the NIMBYism I've encountered over the decades is highly predicated on socio-economic standing of the neighborhoods where new developments are being proposed. Everyone says they're for affordable housing but just not near where they live. This is true, not just in well-educated, wealthy enclaves like Boulder but also in low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans.
The term "affordable housing" has been maligned and connected with failed public housing developments that most people have an aversion to it because they wrongly think it means "poorer" people will move into the neighborhood. Conversely if you label the MF housing as "market rate" people will resist because they wrongly perceive it will drive up housing costs and cause gentrification. If you label the MF project as "workforce housing" then,by-and-large, people will generally support it or not resist it because the project is targeting the lower/middle class housing demographic of teachers, nurses, tradespeople that are getting pushed out of the very cities they work.
It takes a lot of outreach, time, $, and thought to get a MF project through most planning departments. I had a MF project in New Orleans that was 100% affordable live/work housing take 7 YEARS to build 69 units because of land transfer delays and bureaucratic hurdles. And this is a city that knows it has a housing and affordability issue.
Meanwhile, I had a 300 unit MF project in Nashville get built in 18 months because the City streamlines MF infill projects in commercial/warehouse zones because they want more people living closer to the city center than sprawling out.
You run up against zoning ordinances (that are based on the poorly applied New Urbanist planning theories) that still erroneously think density is bad, that taller buildings are awful and under-parking is anathema to the American dream of having to drive every place. So you'll have cities like Phoenix that will green light 600-1000 unit developments on retired farmland as long as you make it look like a little town center so people forget they have to drive 40 mins each way to commute to downtown,
One of the problems that most Americans don't realize is the a majority of the zoning ordinances utilized in the U.S. promulgated from the early zoning codes of LA and later NYC. Codes that codified strict land use criteria, favored SFH and zoning via class and race. This is why 90% of America's cities all look and operate the same way, which is to say shitty and why most of American cities have no uniqueness to them.
The housing shortage won't go away by nibbling at the fringes or concentrating on just the large/medium sized cities. Revamping zoning laws is one thing, but educating the public as whole to adapt to denser living is a big ask and a Herculean effort. There is also the labor shortage in the construction industry that can't keep up with the demands as it stands, which means housing stock will take a long time to surpass demand.
You've kind of hit nail on the head...not about SF upzoning but car dependence in general. You're never going to convince Americans to raise kids in mid/high rise apartments. With few exceptions the only people that do this are first generation immigrants and poor people living in public housing high rises...back when these were more common. Vast majority of people want space and want a yard. I don't see this changing.
But i agree...aesthetically suburbs are often tacky. And cities are often non descript.
If more MF was designed and built for actual families (ie 2 and 3 bedrooms) with access to private outdoor space and interior courtyards and natural daylight and cross ventilation then I suspect more people would/could opt to raise their kids in the city. But as it stands, most MF is geared towards 1bd and studios with a modicum of 2br units thrown in. Projects I've worked on, we do interior courtyards and outdoor amenity spaces to make apartment / townhome living better but it's a hard sell to convince developers to do more family units.
Apartment living around the world is vastly different and in parts of Europe far better than American apartment living. Berlin is not a hyper-dense city but even its suburbs have denser land planning that most American cities and the quality is nicer too.
Maybe but urban infill developers of mid/high rise condos in US have a pretty good sense of demand and it isn't for families with kids...it's invariably for single people. It's not some pro-suburban conspiracy that limits 3/4 BR housing in which raising families might be more achievable. It's consumer demand. The examples of other countries are not convincing because other countries are not like America.
Now I will grant you in theory you might find more demand in inner collar suburbs for walkable row house living for families willing to trade space and newer builds for walkability and better commute times. But rowhouses are just not very affordable either unless they are in bad neighborhoods and sometimes not even then. So, when non wealthy people want to have kids in say DC, SF, NYC etc they often move to exurbs or flee to a lower cost city entirely. I don't see there being an easy technocratic fix for this.
To a degree. There's a bit of self-fulfilling demand at play as well. If you build only studios, 1 br and a few 2br then you won't attract small families (except out of desperation perhaps). But again, it's also about what kind of units get designed as well. The missing middle is a big part of this as well.
I'm not sure why Americans think European examples aren't applicable. They have similar housing shortages as well and similar demands. What our current housing and zoning policies say to Americans is that you are more than welcome to live near where you work, enjoy the amenities of city life, easy access to museums, restaurants, etc. as long as you don't have children or are wealthy enough to afford raising kids in the city. That's just bad policy all around in my opinion.
We like to think America is some unique country when it comes to housing, healthcare, you name it, but we're only unique in that we just fail to realize how shitty stuff is and accept it as the norm because we've become accustomed to it. American land use & housing policies are the ultimate sunken cost fallacy example.
One major difference between US and Europe is that most European urban cores were built out well before--usually centuries before--the automobile age. Another major difference is that many European countries have very politically strong ag lobbies who have been able to regulate land use limiting urban sprawl. A third difference is simply that America is a huge landmass in comparison. The damnedest thing---even towns built before the automobile age built very very wide streets. You can see this especially out west. There really is, going back to the pioneer days, something ingrained in the American psyche toward spreading out to open spaces. And as a matter of fact, I don't think most Americans would prefer the smaller accommodations, appliances etc typical of a European household.
Look I'm not disagreeing with you...I like European cities on the balance better than American ones, I like being able to walk places. I think it's better for communities and individuals on any number of levels. I don't like what cars have done to cities with all the setbacks and parking requirements they have. But despite a few microtrends toward walkable mixed use developments, it's not going to change much...not till there is a technological breakthrough that makes driving obsolete and even then it would take decades.
Having grown up in rural and small town America I was quite pleased when we moved to a bigger town about the time I got to high school. It seemed to me the bigger the town the more access I had to parks, museums, libraries, big churches and an endless variety of people. That love for city life never left so after I married and had a family moving to suburbia seemed to be a logical choice.
Little did I know that moving to suburbia would cause a culture shock, living among economically upscale people for whom space, privacy and distance from "low-class" people was an ingrained part of the value system. I will never forget a headline in one of the neighborhood papers, clinging to dark privacy after sunset, complaining about officials who wanted to "cram streetlight down our throats."
Having lived a couple of blocks from a printing company and neighborhood businesses that had been around for fifty to seventy-five years, passing occasional drunks on the sidewalk and dealing with people for whom English was not their mother tongue, I was dismayed to learn that my children would never grow up with the variety of people and experiences I had during and after my childhood.
I find it reassuring that growing numbers of people are realizing that by not joining a larger part of mankind they are denying themselves, their friends and family members a universe of benefits unknown and unappreciated in provincial America. Sadly I decided years ago that some people are simply not fit to live in town.
What amount of new housing will reduce housing cost? I'm skeptical that supply alone will materially change the cost of housing. It seems to me that in light of the examples of The Netherlands, Berlin and Austria (https://socialhousing.wien/) indicate that public involvement in the market has to happen before there is any price pressure on the private market.
Check out Tokyo. They built more housing and it made housing a.lot cheaper.
https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-built-its-way-to-abundant-housing/
How much of this is due to lower demand from Japan's demographic decline though?
Tokyo population 2022: 37,274,000
Tokyo population 2002: 34,904,000
Hmmm. Upon my own investigation, I'm actually not sure that Tokyo is such a convincing example of "affordability through YIMBY"...you did have a rapid decline in early 90's with deflation but the overall long term trend in rising unaffordability is unchanged https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-prices-in-japan-since-1956/
Why wouldn’t supply and demand apply to housing?
I mean, you do run into the fundamental Georgist point that no one (well, other than the Dutch) is actually making new land. So while you can conceivably increase supply up to structural or practical limits for apartments, the price-elasticity of supply for "amount of land that people can live on" is, in a sense, zero.
You could, of course, always develop marginal land in response to increasing population until you run out of that, in which case you now face the problem of "too many people, not enough land, and also no wild spaces left anywhere," which seems like a worse equilibrium than just "too many people, not enough land."
Vienna is a bad example because housing affordability there is largely the result of the city having a smaller population now than it did pre-WWII (when it was an imperial capital), as well as massive self-built sprawl elsewhere in Austria.
Small correction, Matt Haney is running for the CA Assembly, he’s currently an SF supervisor. (Where he was relatively YIMBY because the original YIMBY Sonja Trauss ran against him.)
He’s notable because the other supervisors broke local deference etiquette to block an affordable housing project in his district because it would’ve gentrified a Nordstrom valet parking lot.
I hope what’s happening is that there’s a large but poorly organized majority for YIMBY, and as it organizes it’ll naturally win. Complaining at planning board meetings is a really unusual hobby, but ~ no one participates in local government and so those people win out.
Which — fingers crossed — is why a well-organized statewide majority to disempower those people and the municipal governments they control will win.
Complaining at planning commission meetings is very important, YIMBYs need to do this! Planning commissioners are political appointees and are themselves often at best ignorant and at worst NIMBY on housing issues. It’s also important to get YIMBY arguments on the public record.
I’m not sure YIMBYs are exactly a majority, but I think/hope that as more information ~this excellent post makes its way into non-niche publications, people will become better informed. I think NIMBY arguments feel intuitively true to a lot of people, including well-meaning people who might well have different views if they had better information.
The problem is that future residents of opposed housing can’t vote since they don’t live there yet and the residents currently in the “backyard” can and are very vocal.
Do you honestly believe that people will collectively act against their own economic self-interest when it comes to enacting local policies that reduces their home values?
Upzoning raises individual home values. Downzoning can raise the neighborhood’s values, for a while, but cartels are naturally unstable.
And it was mostly invented to make their houses more expensive yet less valuable, so poorer people (aka Chinese immigrants in Berkeley) wouldn’t be able to buy one and afford it by running a home business.
Yes, I do, because that’s what NIMBYs in extremely expensive areas are currently doing.
A developer who could buy their house, put up a multi-unit building and pay much more for it than any would-be SFH owner is legally banned from making such an offer.
The only way legalizing development *reduces* the value of land is if you think ~everyone places a very high value on living in an SFH-only neighborhood, apartments are a weird blight that no one actually lives in, and ~everyone refuses to live near them. But most people aren’t doctrinaire NIMBYs!
Aren't fears of traffic congestion and/or parking shortages a bigger driver of suburban NIMBYism than greed for land price appreciation?
Urbanist YIMBY's: upzoning and building more housing always causes housing prices to fall. What you never heard of the law of supply and demand?
Also Urbanist YIMBY's: widening highways and building more road space always creates more congestion and demand for road space. What you never heard of the phenomenon of "induced demand"?
People can always drive more miles. They are far less likely to buy second homes.
>People can always drive more miles
Or take transit, or demand that it be made available. Having an empty home isn't good because you still have to pay taxes on it while it does nothing.
Induced demand is possible, but all the evidence shows that it doesn't outweigh the simply effect of increased supply when it comes to market rate housing.
I covered the evidence in this post:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-left-nimby-canon
But the Asquith paper you cited though found only a relative decline in rents ie rents that went up more slowly than nearby places that didn't increase density. The other papers found very small absolute declines.
I don't deny that building lots more apartments might cause rents to fall slightly especially in comparison to what they would have been absent the building. And it might be good for other reasons to get more people living in SF. ..increased tax base, more support for transit etc.
But I claim that upzoning and increased density are greatly oversold if the ultimate social goal is to make California more affordable again relative to the rest of the nation.
California in 1972 was not significantly more expensive than the rest of the nation. Lots of middle class jobs that supported families with children. We're decades away from that. Basically all that's left of middle class in CA (at least in desirable coastal areas) are retired union and civil service workers aging and waiting to die in their overpriced homes they could never afford to buy today.
YIMBYism needs to be done statewide, not just at the local level, which is what most of these YIMBY bills are about.
Well, let me ask you, would you support a lot more SFH construction in say, the ranchlands east of Oakland? Or is this only about progressive urbanism. Because let's face it in the northern part of the state at least, CA got into this mess not because of SF zoning but because beginning in the 80's the state started on a crash diet in tract home building that lasted down to the present day. The Bay area decided a long time ago it didn't want to be like LA. This is one big reason why CA housing is so screwed up.
ANd many of these YIMBY's have SF in their mental models of what should be different about the world...can't we put a bunch more high rises on the SF peninsula? But it blows my mind just across the bay in Oakland there are acres and acres of old and often abandoned warehouses that technically have a mixed use zoning. But the city is so paralyzed and can't make up its mind what to do, they sit year after year. I will believe CA might be a little serious about this housing thing once Oakland gets substantially redeveloped.
California in 1972 still had lots of virgin land in reasonable commuting distance on which to build sprawl, but that land had all been built on by the late 1980s.
This is also a bad comparison because driving is free. No such effect if the new roads are tolled.
True. But the phenomenon of induced demand often gets left out of these simplistic upzoning discussions. You could increase the density of SF by say 1.5 current levels and prices would not fall at all because SF having a ton of new housing come online would be more attractive to move to not less. Prices would only be cheaper relative to what they would have been had all those people moved to SF at current density. Bottom line: few if any examples exist of really desireable cities becoming actually affordable over time though upzoning and increased density. Places become cheaper when they become less desireable not more coupled perhaps with demographic changes such as decline in youngish educated people who find SF life attractive. This YIMBY thing is one of these dreamy theoretical technocratic solutions unlikely to have desired effect in the real world.
Under the scenario you describe, SF is more attractive and more people get to live there. I'm not seeing the downside.
There maybe is no downside. Except that people are grossly over selling upzoning and increased density as a solution to CAs affordable housing crisis. The new people who move into SF are still going to be paying through the nose to live there. And people making $15-20hour will still find it unaffordable.
So? Why should a place like SF be affordable to people making $15/hour? $15/hour jobs shouldn't exist in a place like SF.
東京
https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-better-case-1-japan/
Is this an example of doing housing better...building to make everything cheaper?
https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-prices-in-japan-since-1956/
Also average per capita square footage in Japan is 35 square meters vs 77 in the US. American's like space....always have.
Again, only a neoliberal technocrat would think Japanese model in any way transferable to US.
Real reply though...
Roads create distance between points of interest. Parking even more so. Creating a road or a parking lot increases the distance one must travel in daily life, by making cities unwalkable. More cars are sold, more roads and parking lots are built, distances traveled grow... rinse and repeat ad eternum until the world is asphalted completely.
I don't think this is a tenable argument, Mr. Magnani. Asphalted surfaces have many downsides, but they do not increase travel distance to points of interest, and they do frequently decrease travel distance by creating direct routes.
In principle, you don't want to widen roads within a heavily walked corridor, but you may want to widen roads that provide access to that corridor, as arterials across spaces that are not as densely settled and walked. In residential space, parking acreage can be a trade off with housing verticality, and actually contribute to walkability, up to a certain level. The application of the basic principles require so much specific flexibility to be optimized in urban nodes of various sizes and established configurations that I think it's counterproductive to rely on principles too firmly. It's more important to catalogue and weigh the predictable trade-offs of alternative options in detail.
This silly analogy fails because road prices are unaffected by supply and demand because government sets them at zero regardless.
This is true in the short run but obviously not true in the long run. A city is a large amount of close built housing. And yet, housing prices are higher in cities. In the long term, denser cities means more concentrated activity which means more GDP. The long term, "supply and demand," impact of increasing density in a city is reduced prices away from the city.
Maybe if we just gave everyone a camper van the housing and transportation issues would solve themselves.
Are these are as similar as you think they are? Beyond the points made in a few of the other comments, it matters who pays.
Taxpayers usually pay for roads. If induced demand means that new roads won't reduce traffic congestion, then new roads are a waste of taxpayer money.
Investors and developers usually pay for housing. If induced demand means that new houses won't reduce housing prices, that is of limited relevance to taxpayers, since they aren't paying.
What do you think?
Easy solution: eat the rich.
I've found it frustrating how localities have mostly managed to jam up the decent state level reform efforts. Lots of bills but not much housing - indeed even supposedly relatively friendly LA city is well below national construction levels. I'm coming to the view that land use policy just can't be done on the municipal level.
Hopefully the state will make an example of San Francisco if it fails to produce an acceptable housing plan. Sadly Redondo Beach has squirmed out of the builder's remedy which otherwise would have produced a nice development right next to the harbor.
It's not over till it's over. The developer may win this struggle with Redondo Beach yet:
https://reason.com/2022/09/09/this-renegade-california-developer-wants-to-build-a-2300-unit-megaproject-in-a-nimby-stronghold/
Is Tokyo an example of a city achieving greater affordability through YIMBY build, build, build policies?
Not based on this data. After price collapse in early 90's prices seem more or less back on post war trend. At best you could argue that rate of growth has been slowed somewhat.
https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-prices-in-japan-since-1956/
Data and statistics are overrated. Don’t you know that economic policies should be derived from first principles on the basis of postulated human nature alone?!?
Before the 1960s, the Interstate Highway System and associated schemes induced suburban development in areas near cities that had never had close access to urban amenities before and where real estate was therefore extremely inexpensive. Garrison Keillor wrote a great piece a while back about touring the then-tallest building in Minneapolis with his elementary school class in the late 1940s and seeing the city basically end at the terminus of the old streetcar lines. This system really WORKED. A lot of space was opened up to a newly affluent country facing much higher rates of family formation than there was affordable housing in urban areas.
Today is different - Interstate expansion is basically dead. The environmental costs of too much suburbanization make are making it a non-option. Commutes between affordable residential and unaffordable job centers in urban areas are becoming untenably long (and contra to what terminally online people think the solid majority of jobs are not WFH friendly). YIMBYism is an awesome ideologically heterogenous group (yeah, liberals and socialists, some libertarians, even the occasional conservative to shout out to Chuck Marohn) to imagine a different way to accommodate economic and population growth. And I'm here for it!
When Noah wrote that 'most YIMBYs are lefties (because most people in overpriced metros are lefties), but a few are libertarian types or fed-up businesspeople, and a few are hardcore socialists', I wondered if there are also social conservative YIMBYs. One possible rationale is that cheaper housing might lead to higher marriage rates and higher birth rates.
For Charles Marohn, his YIMBY position sounds like an aspect of his career as a planner. Are there any general-purpose social conservative YIMBYs?
> The rise of remote work, which is spreading knowledge workers to smaller metros, has taken this housing crisis nationwide.
How does this work? Remote work gives people more freedom in where to live, so they can move out to cheaper areas with more houses. If the lack of housing is America-wide rather than just in big cities then this wouldn't help, but I don't see how it could make it *worse*.
As I see it, remote work (minorly) helps big cities because it means that rich knowledge workers move away from the big cities, decreasing demand. In turn, those remote workers move to smaller cities or more rural areas, increasing demand and driving up prices. If the prices before were just barely affordable for many of the people living there, prices suddenly become unaffordable.
More to the point, it means that affluent remote workers make high enough bids that high quality natural, recreational, or urban amenities can be made unaffordable. What used to happen in Vail and Whistler is now underway in Boise and Bozeman.
There is a lot of evidence for your observation in my neighborhood -- the mid-Willamette Valley 50-70 miles south of Portland and in Salem and its surrounding small cities. The housing price increases on a percentage basis in the small mid-Valley cities east and west of I-5 have far outstripped Portland's increases since the start of the pandemic, and areas in and around Salem show an influx of families with kids.
Remote work gives people more freedom in where to live, so they can move to desirable places that didn’t have as many jobs. If there are desirable places to live that weren’t yet as expensive as New York or San Francisco, they can now become very expensive.
But however much upwards pressure that puts on those cities, an equal amount of downwards pressure would be put on the cities they're leaving. I see how it can move the problem from one location to another, but not how it can make it worse overall.
It’s not an equal amount since one vacant housing unit in NYC is a much smaller percentage of the whole metro market than a newly occupied housing unit in much smaller Boise or Nashville.
I think that just comes down to a terminological question of how you measure "worse overall". If we used to have 80% of people living in cities with evenly matched residents and housing, and 20% of people living in cities with only half the required housing, and now we have 60% of people living in cities with evenly matched residents and housing, and 40% of people living in cities with 3/4 of the required housing, it's the same total imbalance, but some people might say it's worse because more people are experiencing the problem, and others might say it's less bad because the mismatch might not cause anyone to suffer as much residential stress.