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Author: u/smurfyjenkins
URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.37.2.53
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I’m in rural central Texas, not to be rural for much longer.
The pattern that I see is that a lot of development happens just outside the city limits. Building codes in unincorporated areas are much more lax.
Rancher on a tiny county road sells 200 acres to a developer. Developer builds 1,000 single-family homes and builds their own sewage-treatment facility and contracts with a water supplier, but otherwise does nothing for infrastructure.
Then people move in. Tiny county road gets swamped. Tiny county volunteer fire department gets swamped. County Sheriffs department get swamped. People complain. City annexes subdivision so that they can have the authority to make those improvements. Improvements take three times longer and cost three times as much than if they’d just done them from the start.
Even in New York, where 90 percent of the land is incorporated and that that is not is wild, this exact scenario happens. Apartment complexes pop up on side roads 3-5000 units, not even seeing if there's water for firefighters.
Then 1 generation lives there and their kids leave because they can't afford it.
What they've been doing around Phoenix AZ is unbelievable for someone who was born here.
We used to be surrounded by beautiful, colorful desert and now you've got to drive like an hour extra to get to it in all directions, like thousands and thousands of expensive homes only out of state folks can afford covering tons of gorgeous areas.
Now most of the roads and all the state parks in the city are just swamped with people all the time, when ten or twenty years ago it was a pretty relaxed low-density place with low cost of living.
I know New York has probably been living this reality for a while, but it still sucks...
I don't get it, though. Yes living near construction sucks but it's relatively temporary.
After it's done and you're living in a densified area, doesn't your property value go UP since its now closer to things...? Wouldn't it go down if it ended up in a poorly-planned sprawl-hood?
Listen, there's this misunderstanding that humans are rational and logical. We're not. We're emotional creatures driven by emotions, logic can maybe come later and is a helpful facade for emotional decisions. There are those who aren't, but your average NIMBY? I'd bet they're all kinds of emotional response driven and that doesn't lend itself to long term planning.
The problem is they’ve risen too fast for so long, that a overall correction to the proportion of working hours would mean they lose a bunch of “value”
And they rose too fast because propped up values with low borrowing rates, creating a "penalty" for people who might want to save money in a simple interest bearing account, without having to take market risk. Our Boom/Bust Economy of the last 20 years is what the end result is.
It's not the construction. It's the high-density housing itself that they hate. They hate that more people will be in the area. They hate that roads are going to be used more. They absolutely hate the fact there might be a bus stop with *gasp* people loitering on the sidewalk! Public transportation is for riff raff and hobos, after all.
Then there's the subtle prejudices in the back of their minds thinking everyone living there must be thieves and drug dealers because if they weren't they'd be buying more single family homes in a sprawling development.
You're forgetting the subtext and the real reason NIMBYs protest so much. They do NOT want lower cost housing in their neighborhood. Aka poor people and minorities and undesirables.
Higher density housing invariably means cheaper housing and that means that you have a lower economic class of people moving into that housing. That's what they fight to prevent.
My neighborhood has been under heavy construction for 10 years straight.
It's all luxury apartments so none of it is inexpensive or driving costs down. Plus it's all rentals, so anyone that would want to buy cant unless they save for a house (which are all at or around double than 5-10 years ago).
Exactly my feelings about it too. There's a few new mixed-use apartment buildings going in to my mostly SFH neighborhood and I'm thrilled. We've gotten a great gym and a post office in one, and I'm excited to see what's going in the others. Haven't even see traffic noticeably increase, but part of the reason my area is developing is because of the existing transit.
My property value has increased by about 30% in the last four years, even after the COVID boom and bust. Turns out that people do, in fact, like living in livable neighborhoods.
Density is one of the biggest drivers of success traditional in Urban Planning. It also leads to some cost savings in public utilities that would otherwise go unrealized. The issue is that the people that run the planning department: elected officials and city councilmen, are often not in it for the long haul and have the ability to sway planning departments.
the NIMBY perspective is that apartment dwellers are a lower class of people, and they ruin the neighborhood. Also, tall high-density housing blocks the view of 1 and 2 story low density housing. So zoning laws make it tough to created apartments (and even duplexes) and even tougher if the buildings are tall.
Those who own homes are overwhelmingly in favor of these zoning laws (it keeps their property values high, and tall buildings don't block their view). The only people opposed to these zoning laws are those who, at present, don't own a nice house in a low density neighborhood.
To add on to other points. New construction also tends to have horrible sound insulation. People move away to be away from the noise, and unless developers start spending more to properly sound proof homes people won't want to live in high density areas.
Two parts in the answer.
First about "being close to things": it actually doesn't bring much value, because many people will get a car anyway, and don't care much about being able to walk to a restaurant or bar. Especially not in Arizona where the Sun is trying to kill you for a large part of the year. Conversely, if you're in a situation where there is enough demand to sustain high density that allows walkable neighborhoods, keeping housing supply low will get your property value through the roof if you restrict supply by maintaining low density, traffic or not.
Second one about the ills of low-density, including traffic issues: it is a prisoner's dilemma question: if the growth is poorly-planned in the whole city, doing the right thing (allowing higher density) in your local neighborhood will have little impact on that. So if you prefer low density in your neighborhood (for whatever reason, including pushing property values up through scarcity), you're better off with that. Same thing if growth is actually well-planned: messing up in your local neighborhood by preventing denser housing will not make things much worse, so again, you're better off doing what is better for you.
NIMBYism in general is often a prisoner's dilemma: the positive impact in general does not balance out local interests. And the solution is well-known: it is to avoid having local decision-making for issues that are at a higher scale. Density is a regional issue (because it impacts regional cost of living, and regional transportation), that needs to be decided at the regional level, rather than letting local neighborhoods decide or veto.
> After it's done and you're living in a densified area, doesn't your property value go UP since its now closer to things...?
No. Because what made it valuable was the peace and quiet which is the exact opposite of what you get with a giant apartment building being in spitting distance of your front door. People who want a nice house with some land, low traffic, green spaces, and nature everywhere don't want to buy it because they'd be looking out the window and seeing... a giant building.
Temporary meaning many years, at least in Louisiana. The construction is obviously necessary but it certainly *feels* like forever. Also, infrastructure doesn't get built with the housing, but much later which causes traffic problems. Of course this could be solved by the state getting on it, and also actually investing in public transportation.
Where I live are still housing tracts from the early 60s back into the 50s even without streetlights. Major streets? Yes. Street over and beyond? Hell no.
Even some modern areas I’ve been in don’t have streetlights.
Developer(s) was supposed to put them in, but just took the money and ran. Doesn’t matter if it’s 1958, 1968 or 2018… same greed applies
I really wish they left every other mile just raw desert or farming. In the 90s glendale was full of orange groves and it broke up the sprawl. The current state of the city is mostly just huge roads, parking lots, residential or commercial, it's heart breaking. We could have built anything, we built this =(
Yeah, I grew up in Glendale in the 90s and it was growing then. I remember my teachers saying how in the late 70s and early 80s there were no houses across the street from the school, just fields. And there were always miles of houses there with interspersed fields as long as I knew it. Now all the fields are more houses and apartments and the desert area north of where they built the 101 is just houses.
I even remember working in Cave Creek a bit over 10 years ago and driving out there through the desert along Cave Creek Road, or Scottsdale Road, and now that whole area is just houses and businesses the entire way. They left a lot of natural desert between them, but in 10 years they basically mostly developed that stretch all the way to the Carefree Highway, which I think is insane. They had dirt roads out there 10 years ago, and now they're building new wide paved roads.
I live in L.A. and went to Vegas for the first time in several years, and was absolutely blown away by the dry ocean of housing you drive through before you hit the Strip. NONE of that was there 20-30 years ago. It was all just dust.
New York has sort of been dealing with it for hundreds of years, but because of the geography that made it desirable in the first place (lots of rivers) there has also been good reason to build vertically.
Phoenix just oozes out into the desert, consuming all the bursage and palo verdes and converting them to asphalt and golf courses.
I grew up on 10 acres of desert north of Phoenix. When we first moved there, it was 2 miles on a dirt road to the mailbox and 17 miles to the grocery store. It was a big deal in the 90s when we got a gas station and a pizza place. Now there are a 10 houses on the land and it's just a couple miles to the nearest McDonald's.
I think it's just everywhere. Urban sprawl.
I live in Nashville, and what's happened and is still happening here is unreal. Unprecedented growth for nearly 20 years now, it seems.
If it's within 40 miles of downtown, it has likely been developed or is about to be. And the price is 200-1000% what it was just 5-10 years ago.
Our infrastructure is falling apart around us.
I drove across the country twice in the last 2 years and have talked to people in tons of communities outside urban areas that all say the same thing you and I just said.
Born and raised in Phoenix too. The drive north on the 17 never ceases to amaze and sadden me.
Used to go to table mesa to star gaze and now it’s only slightly less light polluted than my house :/
I have family in construction in colorado and I was told that not only do cities impose higher property taxes on areas of new construction to pay for the infrastructure upgrades but the developers have to pay for a lot of it too
That's really on county government to let in development without requisite infrastructure improvements. The county can require developers to contribute to infrastructure such as intersections and traffic lights as needed. They can also increase property taxes on such developments with money earmarked for emergency services and schools.
In NC, at least, a land owner cannot be denied the right to develop just because roads, schools or other government services aren't up to snuff. It is private property rights, and if the town or county denies the permits they can sue where the courts will approve it.
And impact fees are illegal, so the local government can't get the tax money to build the infrastructure until the land is already developed.
Sounds like the suburbs surrounding Atlanta. Two-lane country road? Let's just drop 6 housing subdivisions along it, plus a high school and middle school.
20 years later... still a two-story lane country road. Not sure these people have figured out the "make actual improvements at some point in time" thing, though.
you forgot the part where the shady developer cuts corners on every possible aspect of the development so you wind up with sinkholes, flooding, cracked foundations, electrical fires, etc etc. And the politicians are all on the take of these scumbags too
I think the issue is there isn't a better way to do it that financially makes sense?
We all understand that we could plan things ahead and make it happen, but if people are not living there, you can't "hope they move there" and spend the money ahead of time, before the tax rolls generate the revenue to do the work. At least not at the county level anyway; it would take some state or national funding and there's huge risk associated to that.
Flew into Dallas a couple years ago and the sheer scale of suburban sprawl was almost impressive. Massive subdivisions as far as you could see (from 10-15,000 feet), with new subdivision being built everywhere there was a gap of any appreciable size.
Check out the YouTube channel Strong Towns. Suburbs aren’t sustainable even when they’re not so poorly developed. We need to get back to the walkable densities normative before the car.
We also have people do acre lots, get some chickens, and then try and get an ag exemption so the county/city has no money to spend on improving infrastructure anyway
You've also got the growth ponzi scheme going on with cities. People go in and build a subdivision which costs quite a bit to build and maintain. Developer eats the costs and just makes it back with home sails and then turns the area over to the city. The city is happy because now there are more houses and taxes and they didn't have to spend a ton of money to build out the roads and pipes etc. 20 years go by and now it's time to make repairs and the city can't afford it with taxes alone from the area because single family homes are so spread out and taxed so low thst they don't cover the maintenence to the area. Where does the city get the money to pay for it? Partially from newer subdivisions that they are getting taxes from but haven't had to maintain yet.
It's interesting to see enclave cities that can't expand at all because they're surrounded by another city. They end up having to cover all of their expenses the normal way and tou often see much higher taxes. Was interesting to see when I was looking at houses and you could have 2 houses across the road from each other with one in the inner city having 3 times the taxes of one in the outer city. I'm talking 400k houses in each with one having $300 a month in taxes and the other almost $1000.
Saw this happen in real time in a midwestern city I lived in. Township just outside city limits had a few thousand people in it. It’s was 98+% white and residents loved that they didn’t pay taxes into the nearby city. Over the following decade they massively expanded housing projects and generated enough political pressure that they got a dedicated freeway exchange built at the cost of 10s of millions of dollars for a population of maybe 15k people.
Meanwhile, in the dense inner core of the nearby city, which had at least 100k residents, public transit was nearly non existent. Like busses that ran every 45 min to an hour and that was about it. Somehow providing basic inner city transit is “socialism” while dropping 10s of millions of freeway projects is “needed infrastructure”.
This concept baffles me. I know it exists, but it's still insane to me.
I grew up in an area where you couldn't build a toolshed in the backyard without getting some sort of building permit (I'm exaggerating for effect, but the point still stands). Our area was sectioned between a steep mountain range and the ocean, so you could only 'grow' so much.
Cities require planning. Traffic, plumbing, power, water supply, internet, highways, etc. You can't just throw 100 people into a new area and then shrug and walk away.
I'm just astounded at it all
Go to any of the great old cities of the world and you’ll find at their center a completely unplanned chaotic mess. Paris. Cairo. London. Boston. Any amount of city planning is a relatively new invention. But i think that there is a certain charm that emerges when no one person puts their personal stamp on permanent things, but instead everybody chips in their own input and then they figure out how to fit it all together later.
And then you have the places that are over-planned like Brasilia, like a lot of high-rise suburbs in Europe, like a lot of ‘master-planned communities’ in the States. Everybody has a vision.
It’s a balance that works best, I think. Planning with a light touch.
Most cities are broke. Suburbs and other low-density neighborhoods require a very large amount of infrastructure spending per area and per citizen - so much that their own tax revenue isn't enough to fit the bill. It's a big drain on public budgets and has been shown in several recent studies.
Yeah, a good way to frame this would be that the suburbs are a drain on everyone's taxes. Maybe that'll make Americans start to hate them a little more.
The people who would rather die of a preventable infection or run less efficient hardware of all types will find a way to defend the suburbs until the "wrong people™" end up moving there.
> suburbs are a drain on everyone's taxes
Plus on top of that, spending $5000+ a year on car payments, gas, maintenance, insurance, roads, and accidents is also really expensive. Even more than the local taxes. If you have a modest town with 30,000 cars averaging $5,000 in costs per year, a town of just 70,000 people is burning $150,000,000 a year on cars alone. If they built a public transit system that could take half those cars off the road and cost those 70,000 people $100 million a year, the town would still come out WAAAAAY ahead.
Car-based infrastructure is nothing but forced public subsidies to the auto industry, oil industry, and property developers.
If people want more info about this I highly recommend watching YouTube videos by StrongTowns. They go into a lot of what makes a town strong, things that can change to make it stronger (even small gradual changes like getting rid of legal parking minimums), and where a town gets and spends its money.
The entire purpose of R1 zoning was to exclude poor people and POC. So no, no increase in public transport because according to these explicitly racist zoning rules only poor people use public transport.
Scrap R1 zoning, plan around medium to high density mixed use (ie: residential and retail) with public transport integrated into the design and watch as everyone discovers the cost of living significantly falls when you don’t have to plan cities around cars.
If the prospective urban planner doesn’t know about Not Just Bikes or hasn’t read “The Walkable City” then don’t employ them. Ideally they will have lived in cities outside the USA with low car adoption and high public transport utilisation for a couple of years too.
The NIMBYs have the perfect case against anything that will help with home prices:
Increase density? WE DON'T HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT THAT
Propose modest infrastructure package? IT WON'T DO ENOUGH
Propose massive infrastructure package that will meet an area's needs for decades? IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE AND WE DON'T NEED IT NOW ANYWAY
You just have to ignore these people and push forward on all fronts
Some of these are real stupid too. Like I can understand why you wouldn't want a huge apartment complex in the middle of every neighborhood, but what's wrong with some duplexes or 4-plexes instead of single family homes? Or maybe a few rows of townhomes? Denser housing construction doesn't necessarily have to be giant hundred unit apartment buildings.
Most of the racist, classist, etc things that NIMBY's do, intentional or unintentional, fall under the umbrella excuse "Preserve our neighborhood character!".
Residents should not have to sacrifice the basic functions and operation of a city just to help a few properties' values perpetually skyrocketing. Especially SFHs which are a tax drain on the city.
I always find the "preserve the neighborhood's character" argument hilarious. You know where I've sat and gone " wow this place has so much character! " Dense cities. Maybe some small towns. But never the fuckin suburbs
I live in a suburb that's 5 minutes from my downtown. It's a historical neighborhood with a ton of character and variety of houses. I wish there was more affordable housing too because our downtown is kinda struggling and more foot traffic would help. I don't really think it would affect my neighborhood people are just jerks and hate poor people.
I spoke at a city council meeting a few years ago where residents where fighting a change in zoning (allow ADUs on all lots and in some cases triplexes and quads) in a post war neighborhood. There were a lot of ADUs already,but it waslimited.
I read a letter to the editor from a concerned citizen of the neighborhood lamenting all these developers destroying their neighborhood and thier quality of life. At first, all the NIMBYs were nodding in agreement. But the they looked confused as some of the names of stores now gone we're not familiar to them.
I finally read the date of the letter: June 1952.
The homes and character of the neighborhood the were so desperate to protect 65 years before were the same evil developments NIMBYS back then we're fighting against.
Unpopular opinion on Reddit but....
I grew up in an affordable housing community. Townhouses and apartments and it absolutely aligned with every single negative stereotype people would expect. We were the bad kids in school, we were the kids who shoplifted and trashed playgrounds. It was still a relatively okay town, but we were the worst of it.
I bought a condo as an adult. A cheap one. Same crap. We had crime and problems with the neighbors.
Eventually moved to a house. Single family house, but the crappiest single family house neighborhood in the area...lots of rentals, lots of problems.
Then I bought an okay house. Middle of the pack. Life got real easy real fast, comparatively. But the schools, funded by property tax, weren't great.
Now I have a McMansion everyone on Reddit would make fun of. I pay $10k a year in property tax and my house looks just like every other house in the subdivision...
But every house looks great. Nobody throws parties at 2am. Nobody calls the police when their boyfriend and dad get into a fight. The neighborhood kids don't cause trouble. Nothing is broken, there is no graffiti, no groups of young adults sitting around getting drunk or saying inappropriate things to people who pass by. Nobody lets their dogs roam or bark all day. Nobody fights over shovelled Street parking or guards it with chairs.
And the schools. Not just the objective measures of quality, but the behaviors of the students....the ones that will be peers to my children.
I'm not saying rich people are better, they aren't. But I am saying wealthy people live life on easy mode and that allows them to perform better and make better choices.
More money == higher test scores
> SAT math and ACT scores each exhibit robustly positive correlations of 0.22 with household income.
More money == fewer problems with addiction
> The amount of substances being abused has increased over the years; unfortunately, low-income Americans are at a higher risk for addiction.
More money == less unwanted pregnancies
> Teen pregnancy is strongly linked to poverty, with low income level associated with higher teen birth rates.
More money == fewer absences from school
> Higher rates of school absence and tardiness may be one mechanism through which low family income impacts children's academic success.
More money == fewer behavioral problems at school
> Lower family income was related to higher rates of school disciplinary actions
More money == less likely to get an STI/STD
> There is a clear association between low SES and the risk of getting an STI. This is especially true among adolescents, teens, and young adults who are more sexually active.
More money == less likely to be obese
> In a general, people living in poverty are more prone to obesity than their financially better off counterparts
Etc etc etc etc etc....I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on. And those are all things that I consider negative, things that I don't want at my children's school.
I grew up poor. It's not a personal thing, it's pragmatic. Let's be real, even poor people don't want to live around poor people, for all of the reasons I've listed and more.
I'd even go so far as to say I do/would support a bunch of political/social reforms that woukd reduce the negative impacts of being poor, but they should be done systemically, on either the federal or state level. Getting something zoned multi-family residential isn't addressing the root problems that lead to all those negative things that people don't want to be around.
My kid is in preschool, and it's _already_ painfully obvious that there is a divide between the wealthy families and the less wealthy families in terms of the kids behavior.
The problem you're describing is that designated areas of affordable housing is how you build slums. Packing all the least fortunate people together in one block is bad policy. Mixed income affordable housing is key.
I bought a duplex in a low-income neighborhood full of rentals, and boy am I you, midway through your story. I cannot wait to live somewhere with neighbors that aren't awful excuses of human garbage. I grew up rural and in the suburbs. It's not even a close comparison. If someone on Reddit were to say I'm this or that awful thing because of it, it just wouldn't even phase me because the reality is so stark.
I was gonna point out that 10k in property tax isn't a lot...then I remembered I live in Texas where you pay that much annually for a $300,000 house in a lot of places.
In a town near Austin, they struggle to find anyone to staff stores because so much of the housing is on the higher end. It's such a stupid way to make your town/city struggle because businesses don't have any workers that can afford to live nearby.
Not that they're in the right but the people getting into those multifamily, duplexes, quads, etc. are generally middle class in major cities. It's not like they are drug dealers and petty thieves, but the NIMBY crowd acts like they are
Right. People are actually okay with luxury high rises. Not as much as single-family lots but luxury high rises can get built. The missing developments are low rise multiplexes . Because poorer people tend to be able to afford those, so people oppose them.
I think part of the problem is that most Americans have a pretty limited idea of what the range of density looks like. Too many conversations about infill development becomes tainted with visions of 'Manhattanization', wherein Americans have their two car garages forcefully repossessed in exchange for a Hong Kong coffin home. According to the US census, an urban area is defined as a place with a population density of 2,534 per square mile. That's about the population density of a typical sprawling car-oriented suburb. On the other end of the spectrum is Manhattan, with a population density of 72,918. Somewhere in between, we can have pretty remarkable levels of development without having to swear off the benefits of single family living.
Oak Park IL was for most of the 20th century the very picture of the American Suburb. It was the play ground of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America's greatest architects and strongest advocates for suburbanization; Hemingway called it a place of 'wide lawns and narrow minds'. This suburb of Chicago is mostly detached single family homes with reasonable sized yards. Oak Park has a population density of 12k per square mile. That's almost 5 times as dense as the car-oriented sprawling suburb that make the cut for 'urban area'. Another classic suburb is Ohio's Lakewood, who is so walkable the school district got rid of their busses because of how many children were already walking and biking to school. Neither city is some ultra compact urban hell scape, to the contrary, they look like snapshots of vintage suburbia.
Older suburbs like Oak Park and Lakewood offer an alternative to bad planning and urban sprawl without having to go 'full Manhattan'. What we need is better connected street grids and infill development that includes the a sprinkling of duplex's, townhomes, 6 unit apartments. This alone will be enough to add to the supply of housing in a way that wont make it feel like the neighborhood has totally changed, but will drastically increase the supply of housing. The real trick is getting everyone to buy in, because when some cities limit development when demand is high while another is more permissible, that when we end up with luxury apartments hyper concentrating in a single area.
Oak Park is a bit weird. Some streets used to have mansions with huge lawns. Eventually the owners sold their lawns and built extra houses on them. Im sure thats skewed the population density a bit over the past few decades. I grew up there and every so often Id make a friend, realize what street they said they lived on, and wonder if they were one of the rich ones who lived in a mansion still
Immediately south of Oak Park is Berwyn. Berwyn has the highest population density out of any town in Illinois. Nearly every house is a 2-flat (vertical duplex, each floor is a different apartment, some are split down the middle into 4 apartments). Most were built that way back in the 20s and marketed towards immigrants. Youd start off by renting the top floor, then eventually buy your own building and rent the top floor to someone you knew who wanted to immigrate here. Just a fun bit of trivia
if chicago is anything like NYC then if the area is zones for 1-4 family homes then it takes an act of city council to rezone it for denser housing and that means the local council member is the final decision.
faster, simpler and cheaper to just build more luxury homes
cheaper in that you don't have empty property sitting around for years while you beg for a zoning change while you pay the taxes and other expenses for that property
Yeah but the simple act of tearing down 2 and 4 unit buildings and replacing them with single family reduces the available housing stock and drives up prices.
Most cities have an assessment on your property. As fucked up as it sounds, sometimes the simple act of increasing property values for taxation purposes can in the end be a thing some planning departments / elected officials want.
They also tend to have their hands sliding into the pockets of politicians and planners, and are often willing to negotiate. There was a history of "If I do this here for you, can you do this here for me" type relationships.
Not really true. Most developers would happily build units because it's very good money as well. Better often.
It's just that to get all the permits takes so long that it's often not worth it. Plus I think in the US lots of places don't want it because it brings poorer people in lowering the quality of their neighbourhood.
An expensive area not wanting apartments is often not about it becoming busier but more about keeping certain people out so it stays a "nice" neighbourhood
The stock of 2-4 unit homes in Chicago is only drastically dropping in high income/high value neighborhoods.
In middle income neighborhoods, the stock is stable.
In low income neighborhoods, the stock is going down, but the entire low rent stock of the city is going down. This is in part due to old buildings being demolished as that actually increased the property value since the site is ready for new construction.
Chicago has housing issues, but not remotely because 2-4 unit housing is being bull dozed. [This is per the Institute for Housing Studies of DePaul.](https://www.housingstudies.org/releases/patterns-lost-2-4-unit-buildings-chicago/)
In my part of Atlanta, they tear down 1600 ft^2 (150 m^2 ) single-family houses--plus most of the trees on the lot--and replace them with 4000 ft^2 (375 m^2 ) McMansions. We're simultaneously making housing less affordable and hurting our tree canopy while not increasing housing density at all. It's painful to watch.
It seems today everyone is either way too rich or way too poor. I've managed to fall in the (lower end) of the middle, but I'm old, and I'm scared for my kids.
Tell that to the NIMBYs who show up to every local planning meeting to act like even the mildest forms of multifamily/missing middle housing is ruining their property values and destroying 'neighborhood character' or whatever euphemisms they want to use.
For me, it's the lack of nature between the apartment buildings. I'd happily live in dense, tall, sustainable housing, but every other block needs to have a forest on it, or at the very least, massive green space.
I'm an environmental engineer who cares about sustainability and know the costs of suburbia, so I live in dense housing in the city. My mental health cannot take much more concrete and asphalt, regardless of the sustainability. I really don't think human brains handle an unbroken city environment well... mine sure doesn't. Building denser is great, but we have to change how we design cities at the same time, otherwise I have hard time imagining it ending in anything but a dystopian concrete jungle.
Well, you're never going to really get nature in a city, but you can have plenty of greenery. I live in a Dutch city, I'd say medium density area, and still half of what I see out of my window is greenery.
You can though! Urban forests are amazing, improve air quality, mental health, rainwater infiltration, the heat island effect, and many other things. And manicured parks are not the same.
The issue is how we zone/price land in cities. You don't really make money from an urban forest, and the land is valuable, so the approach stalls in systems where only cash is king.
>Like I can understand why you wouldn't want a huge apartment complex in the middle of every neighborhood
I genuinely can't. People need to accept that they live in a city. It's incredibly selfish to think everyone is entitled to some bizarre 1950's dream suburb lifestyle with all the amenities of a city but the density of a sleepy farm town.
Truly tired of hearing nimbys complain about apartment residents like they're some kind of second class citizen. I've been in City council meetings where single family owners, with a straight face, say "we don't want *them* using our parks"
This is why America is so fucked up. Even in europe small towns are primarily apartments!
I'm not an expert on condos, but from my understanding they are harder to finance, and can be incredibly risky for developers since defect laws are pretty aggressive in most states. Unfortunately condos have become a thing for the ultra-wealthy in tier I cities as a result.
And then they wind up renting out those condos like apartments anyway...
That being said, my best rental experiences have been from upper middle class individuals renting out their apartment after moving into a single family home. Way better than dealing with some conglomerate. Although obviously it depends on the individual owner.
Where I used to live people (said, at least) that they were concerned about traffic infrastructure. That's a lot of extra cars to add to the neighborhood roads that weren't designed for them, especially during rush hour, making commutes extra hellish. And of course there isn't adequate public transit.
That's what they say in my area. But a) high density reduces traffic because it allows you to serve people with public transit and makes it so that people don't need to have cars, and b) the argument is ridiculous in my area because THERE'S NO TRAFFIC ANYWAY. The roads are enormous and empty most of the time. The traffic is elsewhere in the county, and closer to LA, but there's never any traffic in my city so what the heck are you talking about you racist nimbys.
If you build a lower-cost apartment near a bunch of single-family homes, then you’ll have a bunch of brown people moving in and trashing the whole neighborhood. (Sarcasm by me; likely legitimate thoughts from the boomers running zoning commissions)
Exactly. Planning meetings are just a wasteland of classist and racist arguments thinly veiled behind "for the children" appeals to their karen counterparts on planning departments. It's gross.
No one wants to share a paper thin wall with their neighbors. No one should have to be a churchmouse at all hours.
If building standards required robust sound proofing then perhaps high density housing would be more attractive.
> If building standards required robust sound proofing then perhaps high density housing would be more attractive.
A lot of modern building standards do, we've had the ability to for years.
>The International Building Code requires an STC of 50 for multi family construction, which is the point at which noise is reduced to a point that people generally feel like their homes are adequately insulated from noise. It is also the point at which respondents to surveys begin a drastic reduction in noise related complaints.
>With a Sound transmission class rating of 50, speech cannot be heard through the walls, and loud sounds are only faintly audible.
50 is already pretty good, but heck some are even trying to push for higher
>The National Research Council of Canada conducted research on the importance of sound insulation, and found that an effective STC rating of 55 is recommended,
I somehow lived in a cheap apartment that had good sound dampening. We could only hear things when arguing happened and even then I couldn't make out much. Nothing I couldn't drown out with the TV on a normal volume. It's definitely possible.
I lived in a modern townhouse with supposedly soundproof firewalls in between. Noise. Constant noise. Walls literally shaking from the neighbors who put up a damn inflatable bounce house in their living room. Couldn't even go grill on my patio without neighbors up my ass. Zero privacy in my "back yard" cause I didn't have a back yard. I had "walls in". I couldn't leave anything on the patio because the neighbors and their kids would just help themselves to it.
Moved to more rural. Single family homes on large lots (at least an acre) only. Literally never going back to anything more dense, and if I move anywhere it'll be to a bigger, more rural property.
It is really *that* simple. It's one of the most massive economic issues we face as a country, and the solution is right in our face, and we cannot seem to gather the political willpower to do something about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/us-housing-market-shortage-costs-san-francisco-cities/673121/
This article brilliantly explains how the housing crisis seeps into every aspect of modern american life, making us more depressed, isolated, and poor.
It's also one of the few issues where the solutions can be implemented at the state and local level, but as a country we seem to be all of out ideas that don't involve the Federal government throwing billions at a problem.
Also one of the few cases where the solution is pretty much free and even revenue positive.
Literally just allow building and if there's three homes where before there was one, you should get considerably more property taxes.
That's part of it, but those are just a few of the byzantine rules baked into local zoning codes that make it basically impossible to build anything without variances and approvals... which then give NIMBYs the ability to pressure politicians to block development they don't want to see.
We need wholesale reform of zoning and land use policy.
It's not just a property cost issue, this stuff makes a mockery of the notion of equality under law. Theoretically the law is supposed to apply to everyone equally, but when the rules are so convoluted that everything requires an exception, it's really no different than the days of begging the King for permission.
Except instead of the King, it's Karen and her buddies.
Yes! Thank you, the rules create a beggars landscape to build anything.
The rules should be so broad and wide open, that almost any residential, mixed use, or light commercial development is by-right approved. A developer says "I'm building 10 single bedroom apartments on this piece of land, it meets national and state codes." And the city stamps the paperwork in a couple weeks, and they build. Whether it has X parking or Y setback or it's under Z height doesn't matter. You shouldn't have to beg and plead to the local karens that will try to block even the best development.
It's a fundamental issue where the people who would benefit from lower prices (future residents who haven't bought yet) are definitionally excluded from the democratic process (because only current residents who have already bought can vote). It doesn't matter if the city as a whole would benefit, because that definition of "city" includes its future residents, which the present voting population does not.
They mention a very real reason why in the study- there is a perception, real or not, that densification reduces the property values of surrounding residents, producing NIMBY campaigns to fight off even the most innocuous changes to zoning code. It's so rough that in California, changes are having to be made at the state level to overrule "local control" in order to increase housing stock to meet population demands.
If I can soapbox for a second - people will *always* want to force development and change off to 'other places' as long as housing is one of the main ways that north Americans build wealth. If you want to live in a city, you should be held to the expectation that growth will happen, your ability to drive everywhere is **NOT** sarcosanct, and that the needs of the city supercede the wants of yourself and the "neighborhood character". If you want that, go move out to the sticks and have full control thru your property line.
Actually, another factor is in the 2010s rent prices began to be determined algorithmically for large property owners to maximize profit, not to find the equilibrium between supply and demand even if it resulted in vacancies which would previously be rented at a lower price. This had the effect of inducing small landlords to raise rent to the new "market price". Increased rent increased the sale price of rental properties which raised the sale price for all properties because potential home owners were competing against these investors.
Once property owners start to really come to terms with the fact that their office buildings are going to be 40+% vacant for the rest of time, I have a hunch this will start to change as they begin to convert a lot of these buildings to residential or mixed use.
EDIT: Regarding the viability of this, I see some hilariously misinformed comments that are just guessing. I work for a commercial real estate company. These conversions can and do happen.
They're already doing that with older office buildings, but a lot of recent construction are giant boxes without the amount of windows/ventilation you would want for residential use.
Sadly, this will be "solved" by loosening fire codes and making people desperate enough to put up with it.
It would take time for the codes to catch up. They would probably start by loosening what is considered the least offensive bylaws/codes to allow the early transition of these buildings into residential, and then over time find ways to work with the buildings to bring them back into code to be honest. Just from my experience.
>I work for a commercial real estate company. These conversions can and do happen.
How do they meet code requirements for windows in bedrooms? Most office buildings are set up with giant open floor plans. Only putting units around the outside would waste half the square footage. What unique solutions have you seen for that?
Generally speaking, the developer works with the municipality/jurisdiction well beforehand to accommodate code requirements, and you end up with a) smart design of residential floorplans (shotgun style, for example), b) some exemptions granted by the governing body (they want to see these redevelopments, too), c) use of large, amenity-driven common spaces, and d) centralized retail or office tenants remain in the properties.
I agree but it's easier said than done unless the residents want communal restrooms like dorms have.
Also the HVAC systems aren't set up to allow individual temperature preferences.
>I agree but it's easier said than done unless the residents want communal restrooms like dorms have.
That actually gets into some of the zoning restrictions at issue. Those kinds of communal residences are illegal under most zoning laws.
Why *shouldn't* there be some buildings like that? The residences would be dirt cheap. Sure, having your own bathroom is great, but if you're willing to have shared bathrooms why shouldn't you be *allowed* to pay for a place like that?
I live in Chicago, and that won't buy an empty lot in my neighborhood. They tore down two ~$350k houses on my block last year and put up $1.4m homes. Not teardowns. Post-war starter homes in relatively good shape. That's slowing down somewhat, at least.
Could be worse but I'm a paramedic in the area and that's still out of reach for me. Unfortunately inflation has been so goddamn awful that absolutely every stupid little thing chips away at my paycheck.
What they don’t tell you is that if you buy a house at $300k in Pittsburgh and it triggered a reassessment your property tax would be $7k a year and then the city takes 3% of your pay in income taxes. That’s only city and county taxes, doesn’t account for state tax or stuff like the second highest gas tax in the nation.
It’s a cheap city on paper until you realize you are shelling out about a grand a month on taxes.
Pittsburgh has zoning on the books that allows for row houses! Or townhouses, they're the same. This means that denser housing is welcomed, but many American cities are zoned soley for single family housing that needs minimum lot sizes, and minimum building sizes, outright banning the ability to build dense housing. There's some language on the zoning code [here](https://www.planning.org/pas/reports/report164.htm), towards the bottom under "Ordinance Provisions". The entire thing is a great read, though!
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-statistics/housing-shortage-tracker
This shows for example an area creates 2 jobs but only issues one new housing permit.
Did they change anything, or did they just hit a point where they needed to enforce rules that had been on the books for a long time?
I feel like various groups kinda weaponized existing laws more. And when laws are passed to try to mitigate some of the rising prices, those tangle with other things to cause gridlock (especially in places like SF).
Bay area also and that's what I've seen. People really just want to maintain the artificially inflated price of the house they bought 20 years ago and use every trick they can to prevent new development. When I lived in the mission Calle 24 sued a developer because their proposed building was "gentrifying" and would ruin the neighborhood culture, their reason? It had too many windows. I wish I was joking.
The biggest problem with SF and the bay in general is that nobody is willing to admit that the main answer to lots of problems is more housing units. They tack on all sorts of below market rate quotas etc, but also throw various procedural laws at things that raise prices. So you get a project that wants to replace a 6 unit building with a 10 unit building. One side is going to fight because it's replacing 6 more affordable units with 10 definitely not affordable units (construction costs alone make them not affordable, even if you don't use granite counter tops and fancy tile in the bathrooms), the other side is going to demand a big pile of environmental impact studies, traffic studies (what does 4 more residents do to traffic), and maybe "omg... There's already no parking, you need to add parking" and suddenly it's an 8 unit building instead of 10, even farther from affordable, etc.
The whole gentrification/displacement argument is a perfect example of how DEI sounds good on the surface, but it actually just a movement created and coopted by rich people to keep their assets appreciating.
I've lived in places that gentrified significantly while I was there / in the years after I moved and it's actually a really great thing.
Most of the neighborhood is owned housing that has been owned by decades, retail and other things tends to be run down with some boarded up. Transit is underserved. The first phase is almost always "not rich yet" people who can't afford anything better, but are in early stages of careers. Some landlord start making offers on buildings (or buying ones that are in disrepair/unoccupied) and fully renovating them. Businesses start to move in. Transit improves. People who were there before see significant lifts in property value. Etc.
> People really just want to maintain the artificially inflated price of the house they bought 20 years ago and use every trick they can to prevent new development.
Ding Ding Ding. Having one of the core essentials humans need as an investment tool isn't a great boon for society at large. We needed to build heavily and didn't because that would have dropped prices on homes and current owners were heavily reliant upon inflated house prices as their main source of wealth and retirement.
The biggest problem with SF and the bay in general is that nobody is willing to admit that the main answer to lots of problems is more housing units. They tack on all sorts of below market rate quotas etc, but also throw various procedural laws at things that raise prices. So you get a project that wants to replace a 6 unit building with a 10 unit building. One side is going to fight because it's replacing 6 more affordable units with 10 definitely not affordable units (construction costs alone make them not affordable, even if you don't use granite counter tops and fancy tile in the bathrooms), the other side is going to demand a big pile of environmental impact studies, traffic studies (what does 4 more residents do to traffic), and maybe "omg... There's already no parking, you need to add parking" and suddenly it's an 8 unit building instead of 10, even farther from affordable, etc.
I totally disagree. Everyone knows the problem is lack of housing but whether you want them to be built or not is the issue (to protect your own house value).
Most of the developments i see blocked are replacing old warehouses or doubling the amount of housing provided which means more BMR units available. Tearing down 10 units still going for $2k/mo to put up 40 units and 16 being BMR is a net add.
The problem is that at a high level, government should be working toward policies that enable them to be built - they're almost always supported by everybody who isn't a direct neighbor of a property.
The challenge is that the direct neighbors of any property have a giant toolbox of old laws that make the NIMBY crowd able to tie up useful development and drastically increase the cost of any project, but I don't think those are new laws or laws with that intent.
Then it's working as intended no? Home owners vote, home owners have been told that your home is your single best investment long-term investment option. And so you increase that investment by reducing supply through local legislation.
It also doesn't help that renters don't really vote. My old apartment building has 323 units and only 5 had someone who voted in the 2022 general election. Local elections generally have worse turnout so it could be 2 or 3 people in total voting for an entire building.
Exactly. Nobody is working to solve the actual problem. Because it isn’t housing per se, it’s the economics of those who will always fight against more housing. There is no incentive for them here. It’s all in the opposite direction.
This is very true, in my opinion measures that would decrease the cost of housing will be extremely hard to implement until it comes to a point where the majority of people aren't homeowners, or we shake the notion as a society that the only people you should care about are those in your immediate family.
although once internal mass migration takes effect due to climate change I'd imagine it will be much more popular.
Well, yeah, but conservatives aren't pining on about how we all need to band together to help!
Limousine liberals love to speak in "we" while making it well known they aren't included with *them*.
A quote from a Seattle newspaper i saw stuck with me "They'll fight every affordable housing proposal in their area then hammer a BLM sign onto their front yard."
Housing prices skyrocketing was the intended effect. Who benefits from expensive real estate? Established wealth. Who sets these policies that lead to rising housing costs? Politicians who answer to established wealth. The people who created this situation are quite happy with the status quo, I promise. You being house-poor ensures a supply of desperate workers for years to come.
To go one step further, you really can't distinguish between politicians, macro social policies, and entrenched wealthy elite. Referring to one refers to all of them. Why do you have to go back to the office after two years of getting more work done and being happier working from home? Are the wealthy people who run your company really so stupid that they can't see all the evidence that working from home is objectively better? Of course not. You moved further away, which caused house prices to dip, and corporate real estate suddenly became much less valuable as well. You have to come into the office so that the real estate that the ruling wealth has invested in will regain it's lost value and so the buildings they've already begun building will have bodies to fill them.
I live in a suburb of Atlanta but grew up downtown. And let me tell you, the people in my county who still live in rural areas fight tooth and nail against any sort of infrastructure or public transit etc, I guess thinking it will stop progress then are outraged when building happens anyway but everything is a mess. I'm not going to stereotype rural folk everywhere, but here in my experience there is SO much push back against road expansions, cut throughs, trains, busses etc then the audacity to complain their commute is awful, and that their property taxes go up ( because their homes increase in value). It's very frustrating to get anything done around here
This is super frustrating in Kansas City. The place is mostly parking lots. There's a demand to live downtown, but they made building condos or density essentially impossible. They've created an absurd level of urban sprawl through their urban planning policies. Really seems like an issue that'll never be solved.
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But all those cities spent the appropriate amount of money expanding the infrastructure and public transport to accommodate that increase, right?
I’m in rural central Texas, not to be rural for much longer. The pattern that I see is that a lot of development happens just outside the city limits. Building codes in unincorporated areas are much more lax. Rancher on a tiny county road sells 200 acres to a developer. Developer builds 1,000 single-family homes and builds their own sewage-treatment facility and contracts with a water supplier, but otherwise does nothing for infrastructure. Then people move in. Tiny county road gets swamped. Tiny county volunteer fire department gets swamped. County Sheriffs department get swamped. People complain. City annexes subdivision so that they can have the authority to make those improvements. Improvements take three times longer and cost three times as much than if they’d just done them from the start.
Even in New York, where 90 percent of the land is incorporated and that that is not is wild, this exact scenario happens. Apartment complexes pop up on side roads 3-5000 units, not even seeing if there's water for firefighters. Then 1 generation lives there and their kids leave because they can't afford it.
What they've been doing around Phoenix AZ is unbelievable for someone who was born here. We used to be surrounded by beautiful, colorful desert and now you've got to drive like an hour extra to get to it in all directions, like thousands and thousands of expensive homes only out of state folks can afford covering tons of gorgeous areas. Now most of the roads and all the state parks in the city are just swamped with people all the time, when ten or twenty years ago it was a pretty relaxed low-density place with low cost of living. I know New York has probably been living this reality for a while, but it still sucks...
The insistence on low density is what makes it expensive and sprawling today.
But no, the NINBYs will never support it because MY HOME VALUES ARE ALL THAT MATTERS
I don't get it, though. Yes living near construction sucks but it's relatively temporary. After it's done and you're living in a densified area, doesn't your property value go UP since its now closer to things...? Wouldn't it go down if it ended up in a poorly-planned sprawl-hood?
Listen, there's this misunderstanding that humans are rational and logical. We're not. We're emotional creatures driven by emotions, logic can maybe come later and is a helpful facade for emotional decisions. There are those who aren't, but your average NIMBY? I'd bet they're all kinds of emotional response driven and that doesn't lend itself to long term planning.
Plus there's the role of local politicians who are terrified to not be reelected and NIMBYS map neatly onto the people most likely to vote
Not if demand greatly exceeds supply, which is the current case in most urban areas due to nimby zoning laws.
The problem is they’ve risen too fast for so long, that a overall correction to the proportion of working hours would mean they lose a bunch of “value”
And they rose too fast because propped up values with low borrowing rates, creating a "penalty" for people who might want to save money in a simple interest bearing account, without having to take market risk. Our Boom/Bust Economy of the last 20 years is what the end result is.
It's not the construction. It's the high-density housing itself that they hate. They hate that more people will be in the area. They hate that roads are going to be used more. They absolutely hate the fact there might be a bus stop with *gasp* people loitering on the sidewalk! Public transportation is for riff raff and hobos, after all. Then there's the subtle prejudices in the back of their minds thinking everyone living there must be thieves and drug dealers because if they weren't they'd be buying more single family homes in a sprawling development.
After watching the Not Just Bikes youtube channel for a week or so, our transportation might be a bigger embarrassment than our healthcare
Not just people, but "those" people. There's a lot of class, and race, discrimination baked into single family zoning.
You're forgetting the subtext and the real reason NIMBYs protest so much. They do NOT want lower cost housing in their neighborhood. Aka poor people and minorities and undesirables. Higher density housing invariably means cheaper housing and that means that you have a lower economic class of people moving into that housing. That's what they fight to prevent.
My neighborhood has been under heavy construction for 10 years straight. It's all luxury apartments so none of it is inexpensive or driving costs down. Plus it's all rentals, so anyone that would want to buy cant unless they save for a house (which are all at or around double than 5-10 years ago).
Exactly my feelings about it too. There's a few new mixed-use apartment buildings going in to my mostly SFH neighborhood and I'm thrilled. We've gotten a great gym and a post office in one, and I'm excited to see what's going in the others. Haven't even see traffic noticeably increase, but part of the reason my area is developing is because of the existing transit. My property value has increased by about 30% in the last four years, even after the COVID boom and bust. Turns out that people do, in fact, like living in livable neighborhoods.
Density is one of the biggest drivers of success traditional in Urban Planning. It also leads to some cost savings in public utilities that would otherwise go unrealized. The issue is that the people that run the planning department: elected officials and city councilmen, are often not in it for the long haul and have the ability to sway planning departments.
the NIMBY perspective is that apartment dwellers are a lower class of people, and they ruin the neighborhood. Also, tall high-density housing blocks the view of 1 and 2 story low density housing. So zoning laws make it tough to created apartments (and even duplexes) and even tougher if the buildings are tall. Those who own homes are overwhelmingly in favor of these zoning laws (it keeps their property values high, and tall buildings don't block their view). The only people opposed to these zoning laws are those who, at present, don't own a nice house in a low density neighborhood.
To add on to other points. New construction also tends to have horrible sound insulation. People move away to be away from the noise, and unless developers start spending more to properly sound proof homes people won't want to live in high density areas.
We need good sound insulation between units to be put into the building code
Two parts in the answer. First about "being close to things": it actually doesn't bring much value, because many people will get a car anyway, and don't care much about being able to walk to a restaurant or bar. Especially not in Arizona where the Sun is trying to kill you for a large part of the year. Conversely, if you're in a situation where there is enough demand to sustain high density that allows walkable neighborhoods, keeping housing supply low will get your property value through the roof if you restrict supply by maintaining low density, traffic or not. Second one about the ills of low-density, including traffic issues: it is a prisoner's dilemma question: if the growth is poorly-planned in the whole city, doing the right thing (allowing higher density) in your local neighborhood will have little impact on that. So if you prefer low density in your neighborhood (for whatever reason, including pushing property values up through scarcity), you're better off with that. Same thing if growth is actually well-planned: messing up in your local neighborhood by preventing denser housing will not make things much worse, so again, you're better off doing what is better for you. NIMBYism in general is often a prisoner's dilemma: the positive impact in general does not balance out local interests. And the solution is well-known: it is to avoid having local decision-making for issues that are at a higher scale. Density is a regional issue (because it impacts regional cost of living, and regional transportation), that needs to be decided at the regional level, rather than letting local neighborhoods decide or veto.
> After it's done and you're living in a densified area, doesn't your property value go UP since its now closer to things...? No. Because what made it valuable was the peace and quiet which is the exact opposite of what you get with a giant apartment building being in spitting distance of your front door. People who want a nice house with some land, low traffic, green spaces, and nature everywhere don't want to buy it because they'd be looking out the window and seeing... a giant building.
Temporary meaning many years, at least in Louisiana. The construction is obviously necessary but it certainly *feels* like forever. Also, infrastructure doesn't get built with the housing, but much later which causes traffic problems. Of course this could be solved by the state getting on it, and also actually investing in public transportation.
Where I live are still housing tracts from the early 60s back into the 50s even without streetlights. Major streets? Yes. Street over and beyond? Hell no. Even some modern areas I’ve been in don’t have streetlights. Developer(s) was supposed to put them in, but just took the money and ran. Doesn’t matter if it’s 1958, 1968 or 2018… same greed applies
If more housing is available, your prop value goes down. Such is the problem with commodified housing.
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And the insistance that one must travel.absolutely everywhere by car, as if they'd spontaneously combust if the walked or took a bus
It's insane to me the amount of people moving out to places like Arizona when there's already next to no water available.
Phoenix was one of the three cities that we learned about in an urban planning class. The sprawl there is legendary.
I really wish they left every other mile just raw desert or farming. In the 90s glendale was full of orange groves and it broke up the sprawl. The current state of the city is mostly just huge roads, parking lots, residential or commercial, it's heart breaking. We could have built anything, we built this =(
Yeah, I grew up in Glendale in the 90s and it was growing then. I remember my teachers saying how in the late 70s and early 80s there were no houses across the street from the school, just fields. And there were always miles of houses there with interspersed fields as long as I knew it. Now all the fields are more houses and apartments and the desert area north of where they built the 101 is just houses. I even remember working in Cave Creek a bit over 10 years ago and driving out there through the desert along Cave Creek Road, or Scottsdale Road, and now that whole area is just houses and businesses the entire way. They left a lot of natural desert between them, but in 10 years they basically mostly developed that stretch all the way to the Carefree Highway, which I think is insane. They had dirt roads out there 10 years ago, and now they're building new wide paved roads.
I live in L.A. and went to Vegas for the first time in several years, and was absolutely blown away by the dry ocean of housing you drive through before you hit the Strip. NONE of that was there 20-30 years ago. It was all just dust.
New York has sort of been dealing with it for hundreds of years, but because of the geography that made it desirable in the first place (lots of rivers) there has also been good reason to build vertically. Phoenix just oozes out into the desert, consuming all the bursage and palo verdes and converting them to asphalt and golf courses. I grew up on 10 acres of desert north of Phoenix. When we first moved there, it was 2 miles on a dirt road to the mailbox and 17 miles to the grocery store. It was a big deal in the 90s when we got a gas station and a pizza place. Now there are a 10 houses on the land and it's just a couple miles to the nearest McDonald's.
In the words of Peggy Hill, "Phoenix is a monument to man's arrogance."
ok yeah, Phoenix is just madness
I think Phoenix is now the 5th largest metropolitan area in the US. I'm a native and it's crazy how much it's grown in the last 50 years.
This is the reality of having a growing population. There's just more people around in general.
"*I'm* not excess population in a region, *they* are" No one thinks they're the problem
I was here first
I think it's just everywhere. Urban sprawl. I live in Nashville, and what's happened and is still happening here is unreal. Unprecedented growth for nearly 20 years now, it seems. If it's within 40 miles of downtown, it has likely been developed or is about to be. And the price is 200-1000% what it was just 5-10 years ago. Our infrastructure is falling apart around us. I drove across the country twice in the last 2 years and have talked to people in tons of communities outside urban areas that all say the same thing you and I just said.
Born and raised in Phoenix too. The drive north on the 17 never ceases to amaze and sadden me. Used to go to table mesa to star gaze and now it’s only slightly less light polluted than my house :/
I have family in construction in colorado and I was told that not only do cities impose higher property taxes on areas of new construction to pay for the infrastructure upgrades but the developers have to pay for a lot of it too
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Yep. We live in a new neighborhood, started about 6 years ago. Our property taxes are double some of the developed areas
That's really on county government to let in development without requisite infrastructure improvements. The county can require developers to contribute to infrastructure such as intersections and traffic lights as needed. They can also increase property taxes on such developments with money earmarked for emergency services and schools.
In NC, at least, a land owner cannot be denied the right to develop just because roads, schools or other government services aren't up to snuff. It is private property rights, and if the town or county denies the permits they can sue where the courts will approve it. And impact fees are illegal, so the local government can't get the tax money to build the infrastructure until the land is already developed.
It's a good idea, but then the developers just go somewhere else. They're looking for the biggest return on their investment.
Most developers will just roll those costs into the properties they are selling. They don’t lose. The property owners always pay in the end.
Sounds like the suburbs surrounding Atlanta. Two-lane country road? Let's just drop 6 housing subdivisions along it, plus a high school and middle school. 20 years later... still a two-story lane country road. Not sure these people have figured out the "make actual improvements at some point in time" thing, though.
you forgot the part where the shady developer cuts corners on every possible aspect of the development so you wind up with sinkholes, flooding, cracked foundations, electrical fires, etc etc. And the politicians are all on the take of these scumbags too
I think the issue is there isn't a better way to do it that financially makes sense? We all understand that we could plan things ahead and make it happen, but if people are not living there, you can't "hope they move there" and spend the money ahead of time, before the tax rolls generate the revenue to do the work. At least not at the county level anyway; it would take some state or national funding and there's huge risk associated to that.
You missed the part where local people declined to do improvements themselves because of the cost. HOAs are notoriously cheap and shortsighted.
Flew into Dallas a couple years ago and the sheer scale of suburban sprawl was almost impressive. Massive subdivisions as far as you could see (from 10-15,000 feet), with new subdivision being built everywhere there was a gap of any appreciable size.
Check out the YouTube channel Strong Towns. Suburbs aren’t sustainable even when they’re not so poorly developed. We need to get back to the walkable densities normative before the car.
We also have people do acre lots, get some chickens, and then try and get an ag exemption so the county/city has no money to spend on improving infrastructure anyway
You've also got the growth ponzi scheme going on with cities. People go in and build a subdivision which costs quite a bit to build and maintain. Developer eats the costs and just makes it back with home sails and then turns the area over to the city. The city is happy because now there are more houses and taxes and they didn't have to spend a ton of money to build out the roads and pipes etc. 20 years go by and now it's time to make repairs and the city can't afford it with taxes alone from the area because single family homes are so spread out and taxed so low thst they don't cover the maintenence to the area. Where does the city get the money to pay for it? Partially from newer subdivisions that they are getting taxes from but haven't had to maintain yet. It's interesting to see enclave cities that can't expand at all because they're surrounded by another city. They end up having to cover all of their expenses the normal way and tou often see much higher taxes. Was interesting to see when I was looking at houses and you could have 2 houses across the road from each other with one in the inner city having 3 times the taxes of one in the outer city. I'm talking 400k houses in each with one having $300 a month in taxes and the other almost $1000.
Saw this happen in real time in a midwestern city I lived in. Township just outside city limits had a few thousand people in it. It’s was 98+% white and residents loved that they didn’t pay taxes into the nearby city. Over the following decade they massively expanded housing projects and generated enough political pressure that they got a dedicated freeway exchange built at the cost of 10s of millions of dollars for a population of maybe 15k people. Meanwhile, in the dense inner core of the nearby city, which had at least 100k residents, public transit was nearly non existent. Like busses that ran every 45 min to an hour and that was about it. Somehow providing basic inner city transit is “socialism” while dropping 10s of millions of freeway projects is “needed infrastructure”.
This concept baffles me. I know it exists, but it's still insane to me. I grew up in an area where you couldn't build a toolshed in the backyard without getting some sort of building permit (I'm exaggerating for effect, but the point still stands). Our area was sectioned between a steep mountain range and the ocean, so you could only 'grow' so much. Cities require planning. Traffic, plumbing, power, water supply, internet, highways, etc. You can't just throw 100 people into a new area and then shrug and walk away. I'm just astounded at it all
Go to any of the great old cities of the world and you’ll find at their center a completely unplanned chaotic mess. Paris. Cairo. London. Boston. Any amount of city planning is a relatively new invention. But i think that there is a certain charm that emerges when no one person puts their personal stamp on permanent things, but instead everybody chips in their own input and then they figure out how to fit it all together later. And then you have the places that are over-planned like Brasilia, like a lot of high-rise suburbs in Europe, like a lot of ‘master-planned communities’ in the States. Everybody has a vision. It’s a balance that works best, I think. Planning with a light touch.
Most cities are broke. Suburbs and other low-density neighborhoods require a very large amount of infrastructure spending per area and per citizen - so much that their own tax revenue isn't enough to fit the bill. It's a big drain on public budgets and has been shown in several recent studies.
Yeah, a good way to frame this would be that the suburbs are a drain on everyone's taxes. Maybe that'll make Americans start to hate them a little more.
The people who would rather die of a preventable infection or run less efficient hardware of all types will find a way to defend the suburbs until the "wrong people™" end up moving there.
> suburbs are a drain on everyone's taxes Plus on top of that, spending $5000+ a year on car payments, gas, maintenance, insurance, roads, and accidents is also really expensive. Even more than the local taxes. If you have a modest town with 30,000 cars averaging $5,000 in costs per year, a town of just 70,000 people is burning $150,000,000 a year on cars alone. If they built a public transit system that could take half those cars off the road and cost those 70,000 people $100 million a year, the town would still come out WAAAAAY ahead. Car-based infrastructure is nothing but forced public subsidies to the auto industry, oil industry, and property developers.
If people want more info about this I highly recommend watching YouTube videos by StrongTowns. They go into a lot of what makes a town strong, things that can change to make it stronger (even small gradual changes like getting rid of legal parking minimums), and where a town gets and spends its money.
The urban sprawl, plus the connections between their new, large urban areas? No.
Best I can do is a new football stadium take it or leave it.
The entire purpose of R1 zoning was to exclude poor people and POC. So no, no increase in public transport because according to these explicitly racist zoning rules only poor people use public transport. Scrap R1 zoning, plan around medium to high density mixed use (ie: residential and retail) with public transport integrated into the design and watch as everyone discovers the cost of living significantly falls when you don’t have to plan cities around cars. If the prospective urban planner doesn’t know about Not Just Bikes or hasn’t read “The Walkable City” then don’t employ them. Ideally they will have lived in cities outside the USA with low car adoption and high public transport utilisation for a couple of years too.
The NIMBYs have the perfect case against anything that will help with home prices: Increase density? WE DON'T HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT THAT Propose modest infrastructure package? IT WON'T DO ENOUGH Propose massive infrastructure package that will meet an area's needs for decades? IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE AND WE DON'T NEED IT NOW ANYWAY You just have to ignore these people and push forward on all fronts
Some of these are real stupid too. Like I can understand why you wouldn't want a huge apartment complex in the middle of every neighborhood, but what's wrong with some duplexes or 4-plexes instead of single family homes? Or maybe a few rows of townhomes? Denser housing construction doesn't necessarily have to be giant hundred unit apartment buildings.
They don't want multifamily development because it attracts the type of people who can't afford single-family homes. It is that simple.
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Most of the racist, classist, etc things that NIMBY's do, intentional or unintentional, fall under the umbrella excuse "Preserve our neighborhood character!". Residents should not have to sacrifice the basic functions and operation of a city just to help a few properties' values perpetually skyrocketing. Especially SFHs which are a tax drain on the city.
I always find the "preserve the neighborhood's character" argument hilarious. You know where I've sat and gone " wow this place has so much character! " Dense cities. Maybe some small towns. But never the fuckin suburbs
Yep. Brooklyn, Chicago, New York. They all have culture. Suburbs have a lack of POC, that's it
alaska suburbs have character. Chugiak and fox are both full of batshit people and crazy homemade houses
I live in a suburb that's 5 minutes from my downtown. It's a historical neighborhood with a ton of character and variety of houses. I wish there was more affordable housing too because our downtown is kinda struggling and more foot traffic would help. I don't really think it would affect my neighborhood people are just jerks and hate poor people.
I spoke at a city council meeting a few years ago where residents where fighting a change in zoning (allow ADUs on all lots and in some cases triplexes and quads) in a post war neighborhood. There were a lot of ADUs already,but it waslimited. I read a letter to the editor from a concerned citizen of the neighborhood lamenting all these developers destroying their neighborhood and thier quality of life. At first, all the NIMBYs were nodding in agreement. But the they looked confused as some of the names of stores now gone we're not familiar to them. I finally read the date of the letter: June 1952. The homes and character of the neighborhood the were so desperate to protect 65 years before were the same evil developments NIMBYS back then we're fighting against.
so many people think they’re better than other people
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Unpopular opinion on Reddit but.... I grew up in an affordable housing community. Townhouses and apartments and it absolutely aligned with every single negative stereotype people would expect. We were the bad kids in school, we were the kids who shoplifted and trashed playgrounds. It was still a relatively okay town, but we were the worst of it. I bought a condo as an adult. A cheap one. Same crap. We had crime and problems with the neighbors. Eventually moved to a house. Single family house, but the crappiest single family house neighborhood in the area...lots of rentals, lots of problems. Then I bought an okay house. Middle of the pack. Life got real easy real fast, comparatively. But the schools, funded by property tax, weren't great. Now I have a McMansion everyone on Reddit would make fun of. I pay $10k a year in property tax and my house looks just like every other house in the subdivision... But every house looks great. Nobody throws parties at 2am. Nobody calls the police when their boyfriend and dad get into a fight. The neighborhood kids don't cause trouble. Nothing is broken, there is no graffiti, no groups of young adults sitting around getting drunk or saying inappropriate things to people who pass by. Nobody lets their dogs roam or bark all day. Nobody fights over shovelled Street parking or guards it with chairs. And the schools. Not just the objective measures of quality, but the behaviors of the students....the ones that will be peers to my children. I'm not saying rich people are better, they aren't. But I am saying wealthy people live life on easy mode and that allows them to perform better and make better choices. More money == higher test scores > SAT math and ACT scores each exhibit robustly positive correlations of 0.22 with household income. More money == fewer problems with addiction > The amount of substances being abused has increased over the years; unfortunately, low-income Americans are at a higher risk for addiction. More money == less unwanted pregnancies > Teen pregnancy is strongly linked to poverty, with low income level associated with higher teen birth rates. More money == fewer absences from school > Higher rates of school absence and tardiness may be one mechanism through which low family income impacts children's academic success. More money == fewer behavioral problems at school > Lower family income was related to higher rates of school disciplinary actions More money == less likely to get an STI/STD > There is a clear association between low SES and the risk of getting an STI. This is especially true among adolescents, teens, and young adults who are more sexually active. More money == less likely to be obese > In a general, people living in poverty are more prone to obesity than their financially better off counterparts Etc etc etc etc etc....I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on. And those are all things that I consider negative, things that I don't want at my children's school. I grew up poor. It's not a personal thing, it's pragmatic. Let's be real, even poor people don't want to live around poor people, for all of the reasons I've listed and more. I'd even go so far as to say I do/would support a bunch of political/social reforms that woukd reduce the negative impacts of being poor, but they should be done systemically, on either the federal or state level. Getting something zoned multi-family residential isn't addressing the root problems that lead to all those negative things that people don't want to be around. My kid is in preschool, and it's _already_ painfully obvious that there is a divide between the wealthy families and the less wealthy families in terms of the kids behavior.
The problem you're describing is that designated areas of affordable housing is how you build slums. Packing all the least fortunate people together in one block is bad policy. Mixed income affordable housing is key.
I bought a duplex in a low-income neighborhood full of rentals, and boy am I you, midway through your story. I cannot wait to live somewhere with neighbors that aren't awful excuses of human garbage. I grew up rural and in the suburbs. It's not even a close comparison. If someone on Reddit were to say I'm this or that awful thing because of it, it just wouldn't even phase me because the reality is so stark.
I was gonna point out that 10k in property tax isn't a lot...then I remembered I live in Texas where you pay that much annually for a $300,000 house in a lot of places.
In a town near Austin, they struggle to find anyone to staff stores because so much of the housing is on the higher end. It's such a stupid way to make your town/city struggle because businesses don't have any workers that can afford to live nearby.
This is why they’re trying to employ high schoolers and younger.
Roll back them child labor laws! Gotta keep commerce moving.
Not that they're in the right but the people getting into those multifamily, duplexes, quads, etc. are generally middle class in major cities. It's not like they are drug dealers and petty thieves, but the NIMBY crowd acts like they are
Around Denver tons of brand new town houses are close to 1mil these days.
Right. People are actually okay with luxury high rises. Not as much as single-family lots but luxury high rises can get built. The missing developments are low rise multiplexes . Because poorer people tend to be able to afford those, so people oppose them.
I think part of the problem is that most Americans have a pretty limited idea of what the range of density looks like. Too many conversations about infill development becomes tainted with visions of 'Manhattanization', wherein Americans have their two car garages forcefully repossessed in exchange for a Hong Kong coffin home. According to the US census, an urban area is defined as a place with a population density of 2,534 per square mile. That's about the population density of a typical sprawling car-oriented suburb. On the other end of the spectrum is Manhattan, with a population density of 72,918. Somewhere in between, we can have pretty remarkable levels of development without having to swear off the benefits of single family living. Oak Park IL was for most of the 20th century the very picture of the American Suburb. It was the play ground of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America's greatest architects and strongest advocates for suburbanization; Hemingway called it a place of 'wide lawns and narrow minds'. This suburb of Chicago is mostly detached single family homes with reasonable sized yards. Oak Park has a population density of 12k per square mile. That's almost 5 times as dense as the car-oriented sprawling suburb that make the cut for 'urban area'. Another classic suburb is Ohio's Lakewood, who is so walkable the school district got rid of their busses because of how many children were already walking and biking to school. Neither city is some ultra compact urban hell scape, to the contrary, they look like snapshots of vintage suburbia. Older suburbs like Oak Park and Lakewood offer an alternative to bad planning and urban sprawl without having to go 'full Manhattan'. What we need is better connected street grids and infill development that includes the a sprinkling of duplex's, townhomes, 6 unit apartments. This alone will be enough to add to the supply of housing in a way that wont make it feel like the neighborhood has totally changed, but will drastically increase the supply of housing. The real trick is getting everyone to buy in, because when some cities limit development when demand is high while another is more permissible, that when we end up with luxury apartments hyper concentrating in a single area.
Oak Park is a bit weird. Some streets used to have mansions with huge lawns. Eventually the owners sold their lawns and built extra houses on them. Im sure thats skewed the population density a bit over the past few decades. I grew up there and every so often Id make a friend, realize what street they said they lived on, and wonder if they were one of the rich ones who lived in a mansion still Immediately south of Oak Park is Berwyn. Berwyn has the highest population density out of any town in Illinois. Nearly every house is a 2-flat (vertical duplex, each floor is a different apartment, some are split down the middle into 4 apartments). Most were built that way back in the 20s and marketed towards immigrants. Youd start off by renting the top floor, then eventually buy your own building and rent the top floor to someone you knew who wanted to immigrate here. Just a fun bit of trivia
In Chicago, they keep bulldozing 2 and 4 unit buildings to build huge single family homes. It’s insane.
if chicago is anything like NYC then if the area is zones for 1-4 family homes then it takes an act of city council to rezone it for denser housing and that means the local council member is the final decision. faster, simpler and cheaper to just build more luxury homes
Not cheaper necessarily but the end product sells for more, so it's more profitable.
cheaper in that you don't have empty property sitting around for years while you beg for a zoning change while you pay the taxes and other expenses for that property
It's already zoned for multifamily though, they're tearing down 3 flats and 4 flats and building single family.
Yeah but the simple act of tearing down 2 and 4 unit buildings and replacing them with single family reduces the available housing stock and drives up prices.
Most cities have an assessment on your property. As fucked up as it sounds, sometimes the simple act of increasing property values for taxation purposes can in the end be a thing some planning departments / elected officials want.
and that's how developers make money which is their goal
They also tend to have their hands sliding into the pockets of politicians and planners, and are often willing to negotiate. There was a history of "If I do this here for you, can you do this here for me" type relationships.
Not really true. Most developers would happily build units because it's very good money as well. Better often. It's just that to get all the permits takes so long that it's often not worth it. Plus I think in the US lots of places don't want it because it brings poorer people in lowering the quality of their neighbourhood. An expensive area not wanting apartments is often not about it becoming busier but more about keeping certain people out so it stays a "nice" neighbourhood
The stock of 2-4 unit homes in Chicago is only drastically dropping in high income/high value neighborhoods. In middle income neighborhoods, the stock is stable. In low income neighborhoods, the stock is going down, but the entire low rent stock of the city is going down. This is in part due to old buildings being demolished as that actually increased the property value since the site is ready for new construction. Chicago has housing issues, but not remotely because 2-4 unit housing is being bull dozed. [This is per the Institute for Housing Studies of DePaul.](https://www.housingstudies.org/releases/patterns-lost-2-4-unit-buildings-chicago/)
In my part of Atlanta, they tear down 1600 ft^2 (150 m^2 ) single-family houses--plus most of the trees on the lot--and replace them with 4000 ft^2 (375 m^2 ) McMansions. We're simultaneously making housing less affordable and hurting our tree canopy while not increasing housing density at all. It's painful to watch.
Atlanta. They city in a forest, that we somehow haven't cut down yet. But we're trying god damnit.
You don't need a forest when you can have a city of cops!
It seems today everyone is either way too rich or way too poor. I've managed to fall in the (lower end) of the middle, but I'm old, and I'm scared for my kids.
That hurts my soul.
Tell that to the NIMBYs who show up to every local planning meeting to act like even the mildest forms of multifamily/missing middle housing is ruining their property values and destroying 'neighborhood character' or whatever euphemisms they want to use.
For me, it's the lack of nature between the apartment buildings. I'd happily live in dense, tall, sustainable housing, but every other block needs to have a forest on it, or at the very least, massive green space. I'm an environmental engineer who cares about sustainability and know the costs of suburbia, so I live in dense housing in the city. My mental health cannot take much more concrete and asphalt, regardless of the sustainability. I really don't think human brains handle an unbroken city environment well... mine sure doesn't. Building denser is great, but we have to change how we design cities at the same time, otherwise I have hard time imagining it ending in anything but a dystopian concrete jungle.
Huh, this is a good point. It messes me up being in a city tbh. I think thats part of it.
Well, you're never going to really get nature in a city, but you can have plenty of greenery. I live in a Dutch city, I'd say medium density area, and still half of what I see out of my window is greenery.
You can though! Urban forests are amazing, improve air quality, mental health, rainwater infiltration, the heat island effect, and many other things. And manicured parks are not the same. The issue is how we zone/price land in cities. You don't really make money from an urban forest, and the land is valuable, so the approach stalls in systems where only cash is king.
>Like I can understand why you wouldn't want a huge apartment complex in the middle of every neighborhood I genuinely can't. People need to accept that they live in a city. It's incredibly selfish to think everyone is entitled to some bizarre 1950's dream suburb lifestyle with all the amenities of a city but the density of a sleepy farm town. Truly tired of hearing nimbys complain about apartment residents like they're some kind of second class citizen. I've been in City council meetings where single family owners, with a straight face, say "we don't want *them* using our parks" This is why America is so fucked up. Even in europe small towns are primarily apartments!
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I'm not an expert on condos, but from my understanding they are harder to finance, and can be incredibly risky for developers since defect laws are pretty aggressive in most states. Unfortunately condos have become a thing for the ultra-wealthy in tier I cities as a result.
You're also basically living in the same building as your HOA.
And then they wind up renting out those condos like apartments anyway... That being said, my best rental experiences have been from upper middle class individuals renting out their apartment after moving into a single family home. Way better than dealing with some conglomerate. Although obviously it depends on the individual owner.
Where I used to live people (said, at least) that they were concerned about traffic infrastructure. That's a lot of extra cars to add to the neighborhood roads that weren't designed for them, especially during rush hour, making commutes extra hellish. And of course there isn't adequate public transit.
It's almost like American's need to stop building out and start building up so that ridership justifies public transit...
That's what they say in my area. But a) high density reduces traffic because it allows you to serve people with public transit and makes it so that people don't need to have cars, and b) the argument is ridiculous in my area because THERE'S NO TRAFFIC ANYWAY. The roads are enormous and empty most of the time. The traffic is elsewhere in the county, and closer to LA, but there's never any traffic in my city so what the heck are you talking about you racist nimbys.
If you build a lower-cost apartment near a bunch of single-family homes, then you’ll have a bunch of brown people moving in and trashing the whole neighborhood. (Sarcasm by me; likely legitimate thoughts from the boomers running zoning commissions)
Exactly. Planning meetings are just a wasteland of classist and racist arguments thinly veiled behind "for the children" appeals to their karen counterparts on planning departments. It's gross.
> thinly veiled behind "for the children" meanwhile their cars are the #2 killer of those kids only recently surpassed by guns
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Many ideas sound great for other people but NIMBY -- most people
No one wants to share a paper thin wall with their neighbors. No one should have to be a churchmouse at all hours. If building standards required robust sound proofing then perhaps high density housing would be more attractive.
> If building standards required robust sound proofing then perhaps high density housing would be more attractive. A lot of modern building standards do, we've had the ability to for years. >The International Building Code requires an STC of 50 for multi family construction, which is the point at which noise is reduced to a point that people generally feel like their homes are adequately insulated from noise. It is also the point at which respondents to surveys begin a drastic reduction in noise related complaints. >With a Sound transmission class rating of 50, speech cannot be heard through the walls, and loud sounds are only faintly audible. 50 is already pretty good, but heck some are even trying to push for higher >The National Research Council of Canada conducted research on the importance of sound insulation, and found that an effective STC rating of 55 is recommended,
I somehow lived in a cheap apartment that had good sound dampening. We could only hear things when arguing happened and even then I couldn't make out much. Nothing I couldn't drown out with the TV on a normal volume. It's definitely possible.
After getting bed bugs from a neighboring rowhome in Philly, I will never share walls with neighbors again.
Noise, too, is a significant reason why so many Americans don't want to share walls with neighbors.
I lived in a modern townhouse with supposedly soundproof firewalls in between. Noise. Constant noise. Walls literally shaking from the neighbors who put up a damn inflatable bounce house in their living room. Couldn't even go grill on my patio without neighbors up my ass. Zero privacy in my "back yard" cause I didn't have a back yard. I had "walls in". I couldn't leave anything on the patio because the neighbors and their kids would just help themselves to it. Moved to more rural. Single family homes on large lots (at least an acre) only. Literally never going back to anything more dense, and if I move anywhere it'll be to a bigger, more rural property.
It is really *that* simple. It's one of the most massive economic issues we face as a country, and the solution is right in our face, and we cannot seem to gather the political willpower to do something about it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/us-housing-market-shortage-costs-san-francisco-cities/673121/ This article brilliantly explains how the housing crisis seeps into every aspect of modern american life, making us more depressed, isolated, and poor.
It's also one of the few issues where the solutions can be implemented at the state and local level, but as a country we seem to be all of out ideas that don't involve the Federal government throwing billions at a problem.
Also one of the few cases where the solution is pretty much free and even revenue positive. Literally just allow building and if there's three homes where before there was one, you should get considerably more property taxes.
Reduce minimum lot sizes, reduce parking requirements, raise height restrictions
That's part of it, but those are just a few of the byzantine rules baked into local zoning codes that make it basically impossible to build anything without variances and approvals... which then give NIMBYs the ability to pressure politicians to block development they don't want to see. We need wholesale reform of zoning and land use policy. It's not just a property cost issue, this stuff makes a mockery of the notion of equality under law. Theoretically the law is supposed to apply to everyone equally, but when the rules are so convoluted that everything requires an exception, it's really no different than the days of begging the King for permission. Except instead of the King, it's Karen and her buddies.
Yes! Thank you, the rules create a beggars landscape to build anything. The rules should be so broad and wide open, that almost any residential, mixed use, or light commercial development is by-right approved. A developer says "I'm building 10 single bedroom apartments on this piece of land, it meets national and state codes." And the city stamps the paperwork in a couple weeks, and they build. Whether it has X parking or Y setback or it's under Z height doesn't matter. You shouldn't have to beg and plead to the local karens that will try to block even the best development.
It's a fundamental issue where the people who would benefit from lower prices (future residents who haven't bought yet) are definitionally excluded from the democratic process (because only current residents who have already bought can vote). It doesn't matter if the city as a whole would benefit, because that definition of "city" includes its future residents, which the present voting population does not.
They mention a very real reason why in the study- there is a perception, real or not, that densification reduces the property values of surrounding residents, producing NIMBY campaigns to fight off even the most innocuous changes to zoning code. It's so rough that in California, changes are having to be made at the state level to overrule "local control" in order to increase housing stock to meet population demands. If I can soapbox for a second - people will *always* want to force development and change off to 'other places' as long as housing is one of the main ways that north Americans build wealth. If you want to live in a city, you should be held to the expectation that growth will happen, your ability to drive everywhere is **NOT** sarcosanct, and that the needs of the city supercede the wants of yourself and the "neighborhood character". If you want that, go move out to the sticks and have full control thru your property line.
Actually, another factor is in the 2010s rent prices began to be determined algorithmically for large property owners to maximize profit, not to find the equilibrium between supply and demand even if it resulted in vacancies which would previously be rented at a lower price. This had the effect of inducing small landlords to raise rent to the new "market price". Increased rent increased the sale price of rental properties which raised the sale price for all properties because potential home owners were competing against these investors.
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Once property owners start to really come to terms with the fact that their office buildings are going to be 40+% vacant for the rest of time, I have a hunch this will start to change as they begin to convert a lot of these buildings to residential or mixed use. EDIT: Regarding the viability of this, I see some hilariously misinformed comments that are just guessing. I work for a commercial real estate company. These conversions can and do happen.
They're already doing that with older office buildings, but a lot of recent construction are giant boxes without the amount of windows/ventilation you would want for residential use. Sadly, this will be "solved" by loosening fire codes and making people desperate enough to put up with it.
I would accept a high risk of dying in a fire in a heartbeat if that meant my rent could be under $1200.
That's what the Ghost Ship residents probably thought too :/
It would take time for the codes to catch up. They would probably start by loosening what is considered the least offensive bylaws/codes to allow the early transition of these buildings into residential, and then over time find ways to work with the buildings to bring them back into code to be honest. Just from my experience.
>I work for a commercial real estate company. These conversions can and do happen. How do they meet code requirements for windows in bedrooms? Most office buildings are set up with giant open floor plans. Only putting units around the outside would waste half the square footage. What unique solutions have you seen for that?
Generally speaking, the developer works with the municipality/jurisdiction well beforehand to accommodate code requirements, and you end up with a) smart design of residential floorplans (shotgun style, for example), b) some exemptions granted by the governing body (they want to see these redevelopments, too), c) use of large, amenity-driven common spaces, and d) centralized retail or office tenants remain in the properties.
I agree but it's easier said than done unless the residents want communal restrooms like dorms have. Also the HVAC systems aren't set up to allow individual temperature preferences.
>I agree but it's easier said than done unless the residents want communal restrooms like dorms have. That actually gets into some of the zoning restrictions at issue. Those kinds of communal residences are illegal under most zoning laws. Why *shouldn't* there be some buildings like that? The residences would be dirt cheap. Sure, having your own bathroom is great, but if you're willing to have shared bathrooms why shouldn't you be *allowed* to pay for a place like that?
They exist. Most people don't want to share a bathroom with 30 - 50 people.
They're illegal to build almost everywhere in the country.
My favorite type of comment in response to this is "It's not possible!" which ignores the fact that it has, indeed, been happening, and quite a lot.
I live in Pittsburgh and it’s not bad here, plenty of updated 2000+ sq ft 1920’s houses with Victorian charm for $200-300k+
I live in Chicago, and that won't buy an empty lot in my neighborhood. They tore down two ~$350k houses on my block last year and put up $1.4m homes. Not teardowns. Post-war starter homes in relatively good shape. That's slowing down somewhat, at least.
That'd get you a decent 3 BR in quite a few decent areas in Chicago.
Could be worse but I'm a paramedic in the area and that's still out of reach for me. Unfortunately inflation has been so goddamn awful that absolutely every stupid little thing chips away at my paycheck.
What they don’t tell you is that if you buy a house at $300k in Pittsburgh and it triggered a reassessment your property tax would be $7k a year and then the city takes 3% of your pay in income taxes. That’s only city and county taxes, doesn’t account for state tax or stuff like the second highest gas tax in the nation. It’s a cheap city on paper until you realize you are shelling out about a grand a month on taxes.
Pittsburgh has zoning on the books that allows for row houses! Or townhouses, they're the same. This means that denser housing is welcomed, but many American cities are zoned soley for single family housing that needs minimum lot sizes, and minimum building sizes, outright banning the ability to build dense housing. There's some language on the zoning code [here](https://www.planning.org/pas/reports/report164.htm), towards the bottom under "Ordinance Provisions". The entire thing is a great read, though!
I'm actually visiting Pittsburgh soon to see if I wanna move there. I want to live somewhere walkable where rent isn't $4000 a month.
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-statistics/housing-shortage-tracker This shows for example an area creates 2 jobs but only issues one new housing permit.
Did they change anything, or did they just hit a point where they needed to enforce rules that had been on the books for a long time? I feel like various groups kinda weaponized existing laws more. And when laws are passed to try to mitigate some of the rising prices, those tangle with other things to cause gridlock (especially in places like SF).
Bay area also and that's what I've seen. People really just want to maintain the artificially inflated price of the house they bought 20 years ago and use every trick they can to prevent new development. When I lived in the mission Calle 24 sued a developer because their proposed building was "gentrifying" and would ruin the neighborhood culture, their reason? It had too many windows. I wish I was joking.
The biggest problem with SF and the bay in general is that nobody is willing to admit that the main answer to lots of problems is more housing units. They tack on all sorts of below market rate quotas etc, but also throw various procedural laws at things that raise prices. So you get a project that wants to replace a 6 unit building with a 10 unit building. One side is going to fight because it's replacing 6 more affordable units with 10 definitely not affordable units (construction costs alone make them not affordable, even if you don't use granite counter tops and fancy tile in the bathrooms), the other side is going to demand a big pile of environmental impact studies, traffic studies (what does 4 more residents do to traffic), and maybe "omg... There's already no parking, you need to add parking" and suddenly it's an 8 unit building instead of 10, even farther from affordable, etc.
The whole gentrification/displacement argument is a perfect example of how DEI sounds good on the surface, but it actually just a movement created and coopted by rich people to keep their assets appreciating.
I've lived in places that gentrified significantly while I was there / in the years after I moved and it's actually a really great thing. Most of the neighborhood is owned housing that has been owned by decades, retail and other things tends to be run down with some boarded up. Transit is underserved. The first phase is almost always "not rich yet" people who can't afford anything better, but are in early stages of careers. Some landlord start making offers on buildings (or buying ones that are in disrepair/unoccupied) and fully renovating them. Businesses start to move in. Transit improves. People who were there before see significant lifts in property value. Etc.
That's because cities are *supposed* to have rebirth cycles. Fighting them is asinine.
> People really just want to maintain the artificially inflated price of the house they bought 20 years ago and use every trick they can to prevent new development. Ding Ding Ding. Having one of the core essentials humans need as an investment tool isn't a great boon for society at large. We needed to build heavily and didn't because that would have dropped prices on homes and current owners were heavily reliant upon inflated house prices as their main source of wealth and retirement.
The biggest problem with SF and the bay in general is that nobody is willing to admit that the main answer to lots of problems is more housing units. They tack on all sorts of below market rate quotas etc, but also throw various procedural laws at things that raise prices. So you get a project that wants to replace a 6 unit building with a 10 unit building. One side is going to fight because it's replacing 6 more affordable units with 10 definitely not affordable units (construction costs alone make them not affordable, even if you don't use granite counter tops and fancy tile in the bathrooms), the other side is going to demand a big pile of environmental impact studies, traffic studies (what does 4 more residents do to traffic), and maybe "omg... There's already no parking, you need to add parking" and suddenly it's an 8 unit building instead of 10, even farther from affordable, etc.
I totally disagree. Everyone knows the problem is lack of housing but whether you want them to be built or not is the issue (to protect your own house value). Most of the developments i see blocked are replacing old warehouses or doubling the amount of housing provided which means more BMR units available. Tearing down 10 units still going for $2k/mo to put up 40 units and 16 being BMR is a net add.
The problem is that at a high level, government should be working toward policies that enable them to be built - they're almost always supported by everybody who isn't a direct neighbor of a property. The challenge is that the direct neighbors of any property have a giant toolbox of old laws that make the NIMBY crowd able to tie up useful development and drastically increase the cost of any project, but I don't think those are new laws or laws with that intent.
CEQA has definitely been weaponized beyond its original scope in california to limit new construction
Once a group of people have established themselves it’s in their interests to increase the value of their own property.
Then it's working as intended no? Home owners vote, home owners have been told that your home is your single best investment long-term investment option. And so you increase that investment by reducing supply through local legislation.
It also doesn't help that renters don't really vote. My old apartment building has 323 units and only 5 had someone who voted in the 2022 general election. Local elections generally have worse turnout so it could be 2 or 3 people in total voting for an entire building.
Exactly. Nobody is working to solve the actual problem. Because it isn’t housing per se, it’s the economics of those who will always fight against more housing. There is no incentive for them here. It’s all in the opposite direction.
This is very true, in my opinion measures that would decrease the cost of housing will be extremely hard to implement until it comes to a point where the majority of people aren't homeowners, or we shake the notion as a society that the only people you should care about are those in your immediate family. although once internal mass migration takes effect due to climate change I'd imagine it will be much more popular.
Mayan Civilization part 2.
This is the limousine liberal conundrum in the US. They want to "help the little guy", but like, over there, not over here. Ew, gross.
Nimby - not in my backyard
BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
The study doesn't show it only happens in liberal cities. NIMBYism is an issue with both parties.
Well, yeah, but conservatives aren't pining on about how we all need to band together to help! Limousine liberals love to speak in "we" while making it well known they aren't included with *them*.
A quote from a Seattle newspaper i saw stuck with me "They'll fight every affordable housing proposal in their area then hammer a BLM sign onto their front yard."
Affordable well planned housing would literally solve most of America's problems
Housing prices skyrocketing was the intended effect. Who benefits from expensive real estate? Established wealth. Who sets these policies that lead to rising housing costs? Politicians who answer to established wealth. The people who created this situation are quite happy with the status quo, I promise. You being house-poor ensures a supply of desperate workers for years to come. To go one step further, you really can't distinguish between politicians, macro social policies, and entrenched wealthy elite. Referring to one refers to all of them. Why do you have to go back to the office after two years of getting more work done and being happier working from home? Are the wealthy people who run your company really so stupid that they can't see all the evidence that working from home is objectively better? Of course not. You moved further away, which caused house prices to dip, and corporate real estate suddenly became much less valuable as well. You have to come into the office so that the real estate that the ruling wealth has invested in will regain it's lost value and so the buildings they've already begun building will have bodies to fill them.
I live in a suburb of Atlanta but grew up downtown. And let me tell you, the people in my county who still live in rural areas fight tooth and nail against any sort of infrastructure or public transit etc, I guess thinking it will stop progress then are outraged when building happens anyway but everything is a mess. I'm not going to stereotype rural folk everywhere, but here in my experience there is SO much push back against road expansions, cut throughs, trains, busses etc then the audacity to complain their commute is awful, and that their property taxes go up ( because their homes increase in value). It's very frustrating to get anything done around here
Well yeah, people live in rural areas to get away from other people. Of course they're going to fight development encroaching on their area.
This is super frustrating in Kansas City. The place is mostly parking lots. There's a demand to live downtown, but they made building condos or density essentially impossible. They've created an absurd level of urban sprawl through their urban planning policies. Really seems like an issue that'll never be solved.