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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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!
> 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*.
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.
Ban HOA's.
My city will let me build an ADU. My HOA wont.
That is all.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-prices-in-japan-since-1956/
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!
> 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*.