7 ms·

I think the real tl:dr of this article is: making affordable living spaces is easy if the laws and NIMBYs allow it. But they don't. So it's not.

oxide 10y ago
The more I learn about this situation the more surprised I am. George Carlin had a great bit about NIMBY-types, but in that bit the NIMBY-types, who don't want a prison built near them, have a "logical" viewpoint that he deconstructs: criminals don't hang around outside of a prison. Inmates who escape want to get as far away from the prison as possible, that's the point of escaping, after all. From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns? is that really what is keeping housing from being built? concerns over an eyesore? I don't see the "logical" viewpoint that can be deconstructed here, no wonder it's such a headache.
- aji 10y ago
  as I understand it, the argument is that "bad" construction will make the neighborhood less desirable and cause the value of their property to drop
- ng12 10y ago
  It all comes back to money. People who've seen 20x returns on their property value want to keep the money, people who've spent $5m on a small house want to justify that investment, and landlords want to keep renting their shoebox studio for $3k/mo. Arguments about neighborhood character are just trying to obscure the obvious greed.
  - EduardoBautista 10y ago
    Just a random opinion from someone who doesn't live in SF: I like to visit SF because of the architecture. It really is what makes it unique in the United States. It would be a shame to lose that.
    - tdaltonc 10y ago
      It's possible to have municipal deign standard for public facades, but still build new stuff.
    - ng12 10y ago
      Nobody is asking to bulldoze the Painted Ladies or Lombard. The problem is more about the Sunset, the Richmond, Forest Hills, Excelsior -- just these huge sweeping neighborhoods which are incredibly underzoned and underdeveloped. Or the people who fight development in SOMA because it blocks part of their view.
      - chrisseaton 10y ago
        Sunset is the strangest place I've ever seen from the air. A totally regular grid of housing with no almost no open spaces at all. Maybe you can't see it from the air but are there even community spaces where people gather? I can't even see any shopping or restaurant areas. It's all just regular roads. I can't imagine how you could make it any more developed. There isn't an inch of breathing space is there? If you built up how would anyone get around? In higher rise places even like London there are parks and a variety of spaces and variation in the layout to get around the extra vertical density.
        troygoode 10y ago
        I live in the Sunset. We have plenty of small parks and the Sunset runs the entire length of the enormous Golden Gate park, which stretches across half the city. There are plenty of restaurants and shops, most of which is not yet gentrified, and they just fit into the regular grid as mixed-use urban buildings (restaurant on the street level, apartments on the floor(s) above. There are no strip malls, big box stores, etc. Like much of the city, developing it further would likely mean building "up", yes. There are also an enormous number of single family homes in the Sunset, some of which could be converted into multi family apartment buildings to increase density. All that said, I'm not clear on how you'd actually accomplish the above. My family and I live here BECAUSE we wanted a single family home, a backyard, etc. SF obviously needs a vast increase in residential availability, but I'm certainly not the guy to ask about how to make it happen.
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    That is staggeringly presumptuous of you to claim, lacking a shred of evidence (or, for that matter, empathy).
  - mruniverse 10y ago
    One person's greed is another person's "just trying to cover the mortgage".
  - tzs 10y ago
    I think that is an overly simplistic view. There are plenty of people who live in a given city, or a given neighborhood in a city, because it was a good fit for the kind of place they wanted to live. In many non-tech fields jobs aren't concentrated so heavily in just a couple of cities. You can decide what you are looking for in terms of climate, commute, recreation, culture, transportation, and so on, find a city and neighborhood that has that, and then go there and find a job. These people often pick a place to live, with the intent of staying there for the rest of their working life, and raising their families there. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with greed when they oppose changes to the factors that led them to be there in the first place, especially when the people who want that change are people who came there not because they particularly wanted to live there but rather because some company they wanted to work for requires its employees to live there, and those people have no intention of staying long term. Next time I move, I'm going to be looking for a place with reasonably dark sky, good bicycling, a climate that is warm enough that I mostly don't need to turn on the heat, low enough density that if I want to listen to music or watch a movie at 3 AM I won't be bothering my neighbors (and vice versa), a decent chess within 60 miles, and good internet access. You can bet afterwards I'll vote against change that would change any of those, even if the proposed changes would raise the value of my property, because I'd be buying the property as a home, not as an investment that I can incidentally live in.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns? They also often have economic concerns, to wit, that increasing the supply of housing will, ceteris paribus, reduce the market clearing cost, reducing the value of the housing that they own. There are also quality of life concerns relating to expected effects of increased density on crime, on transportation and other infrastructure, and other things, as well. Those and aesthetic issues are more likely to be cited in public debate than the economic issue above, but I suspect for homeowners the economic issue is actually the overwhelming one.
  - the_hangman 10y ago
    A good friend of mine recently was able to purchase a home in the Bay Area (we're in our late 20's). It has been absolutely fascinating the last few months watching his views towards housing supply do a complete 180 from "We need to build more housing" to "If they can't afford it maybe living here isn't for them".
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Eh, criminals don't hang around outside of a prison, but that could mean they break into your house to steal a getaway car. I don't know. But I can understand people not wanting the possibility of a desperate escapee convict who has nothing to lose, loose in their neighborhood looking for a way out.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  There's a financial interest. Cheaper homes means your home is worth less. There's a tipping point, however. There's a point where you can no longer afford your home or the neighborhood. There's also a question of quality of life. A prison is one, extreme example. But an apartment building aimed at college students or young professionals might be another. High density housing might create more traffic, noise, parking problems, property issues, mess, and so on. As someone who recently moved out of a "low rent" neighborhood, I had my property thrown up on and vandalized multiple times, and been woken up in the middle of the night more times than I can count. I was not sad to move to a neighborhood not far away, but significantly quieter. I realize these problems are not related to the property per se, but certainly people chose a neighborhood for a variety of reasons that are not aesthetic. This isn't to dismiss the need to improving access to housing. I don't want to be NIMBY, but we seem to have this immovable dichotomy between liberal "expand access" policies and conservative "if you don't like the neighborhood, move" policies and no real way to reconcile them. EDIT: I have a short anecdote to try and illustrate my point. In my former neighborhood I was lucky to have a small, one car garage on an alley. Parking was at a premium and most residents in the converted rental housing (houses that were turned into multi-unit rentals) did not have parking. At least a handful of times per year, I would find a car blocking my garage. Perhaps I didn't leave for work until later in the day or something, but whoever needed that spot thought they were OK there for a while. This is not a trivial problem for me. I needed that car to get to work and now I either have to track down the owner or wait for a tow truck (and incur the owner's wrath which usually involved yelling at me from my yard or smashing my mailbox) and be late for work or wherever I was going. The problem is that this wasn't a serious issue to most people reading an article on HN (or even the local paper). It's not an issue that you make policy based on, but it is an issue for everyone who lived in the neighborhood, including the people who were forced to block my garage for lack of other parking. I can't call the cops and tell them I think my irate neighbor smashed my mailbox or call my city and tell them to do something about parking. I'm stuck with that problem until the slow wheels of planning fix it, and by then I've been late to work a dozen or more times.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    For most owners, there is no tipping point. Their house payments are fixed based on when they purchased the house, not on its appreciation since then.
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
>making affordable living spaces is easy if the laws and NIMBYs allow it Buckminster Fuller discovered this back in the 1930's with the Dymaxion House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house >"The first Beech-produced Fuller House was widely publicized. Soon 36,000 unsolicited orders, many with checks attached, were received for the Fuller House... None of the building codes would permit their erection. The severest blow of all was that both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws. No banks were willing to provide mortgages to cover the sale of the Fuller Houses." -Grunch of Giants
- carapace 10y ago
  This is the deeper form of the issue: Bucky pointed out that, by some time in the 1970's, we would have the technological capability to create a physical Utopia for all. The challenge he posed is "to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offence or disadvantage of anyone”
- whybroke 10y ago
  I know unions are a popular whipping boy on hn but blaming them for today's overpriced housing? And up-voting this nonsense? wow
whybroke 10y ago
Zoning changes may be a fine short term solution for a finite number of units. With rezoning, this plan, non-profit, government housing or any number of options become viable. But medium term, BART is already at maximum capacity and long term quality of life continues to drop and the economy chokes as housing cost per foot rises. The real solution is removing the policies that drive up housing prices. Repeal prop 13, eliminate the mortgage deduction, tax capital gains on house sales aggressively, limit realtors to hourly compensation, end collusion among apartment management firms, improve social security so the middle class is no longer dependent on equity to survive old age, don't use tax funds to bail defaulters on mortgage payments while there are other people living on the street.
- greedo 10y ago
  Your solutions would only make things worse. Repealing Prop 13 will hurt the middle class you want to help with increased Social Security. They'll be priced out of homes. Repealing it will also not lower housing costs. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction will do similar damage, as will eliminating the capital gains protections on primary residence sales. That would just encourage more people to sit on their houses instead of paying an extra 20% or so. Limiting realtors to hourly compensation? Why don't we limit you to hourly compensation? That's the nuttiest, out of left field suggestion I've ever heard. So much of your reply is nonsense that I'm tempted to think you're trolling, but nonsense isn't always a good indicator of that.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    >Repealing Prop 13... Would put houses that the owner can't afford on the market thereby increasing supply. Adequate social security would mean they don't then get dumped on the streets. >Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction... Waiting changes the tax burden? No. But a capital gains tax would deincentivize flipping houses, a practice that serves little purpose other than inflating prices. All the benefits of mortgage deduction are immediately swallowed by a commensurate increase in house price. People will always budget the same monthly payment, the only difference is whether the non-home owners (or future generation due to budget deficits) are unfairly burdened by having to make up for the missing tax revenue. The mortgage deduction is simply a funneling of money from the treasury to lending institution and provides zero long term benefit to the home owner. And Canada does not have it and their country has not fallen apart. >Limiting realtors to hourly compensation?... Hourly is good enough for lawyers, but salaried would also work. Seriously though, anything that does not incentive maximizing the sale price (such as pegging compensation to sale price) would reduce housing prices. Better would be tech simply replacing realtors entirely but unfortunately they have such clout in the assembly, their privileges are sacrosanct. >I'm tempted to think you're trolling... That is because you have never hear these ideas before exactly because they are not disseminated exactly because they would reduce housing prices which is political suicide and will cause TV views to turn the channel. I assure you not one of these ideas is my own and indeed they are well understood and discussed by very serious people eg[0], [1] and [2] [0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-econo... [1]http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/14/the-worst-tax-breaks/the-uselessness-of-the-mortgage-interest-deduction http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/14/the-worst-ta... [2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/15/heres-a-way-to-painlessly-phase-out-the-mortgage-interest-tax-deduction/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/15/heres-a-way-...

oxide 10y ago

The more I learn about this situation the more surprised I am. George Carlin had a great bit about NIMBY-types, but in that bit the NIMBY-types, who don't want a prison built near them, have a "logical" viewpoint that he deconstructs: criminals don't hang around outside of a prison. Inmates who escape want to get as far away from the prison as possible, that's the point of escaping, after all. From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns? is that really what is keeping housing from being built? concerns over an eyesore? I don't see the "logical" viewpoint that can be deconstructed here, no wonder it's such a headache.

aji 10y ago
as I understand it, the argument is that "bad" construction will make the neighborhood less desirable and cause the value of their property to drop
ng12 10y ago
It all comes back to money. People who've seen 20x returns on their property value want to keep the money, people who've spent $5m on a small house want to justify that investment, and landlords want to keep renting their shoebox studio for $3k/mo. Arguments about neighborhood character are just trying to obscure the obvious greed.
- EduardoBautista 10y ago
  Just a random opinion from someone who doesn't live in SF: I like to visit SF because of the architecture. It really is what makes it unique in the United States. It would be a shame to lose that.
  - tdaltonc 10y ago
    It's possible to have municipal deign standard for public facades, but still build new stuff.
  - ng12 10y ago
    Nobody is asking to bulldoze the Painted Ladies or Lombard. The problem is more about the Sunset, the Richmond, Forest Hills, Excelsior -- just these huge sweeping neighborhoods which are incredibly underzoned and underdeveloped. Or the people who fight development in SOMA because it blocks part of their view.
    - chrisseaton 10y ago
      Sunset is the strangest place I've ever seen from the air. A totally regular grid of housing with no almost no open spaces at all. Maybe you can't see it from the air but are there even community spaces where people gather? I can't even see any shopping or restaurant areas. It's all just regular roads. I can't imagine how you could make it any more developed. There isn't an inch of breathing space is there? If you built up how would anyone get around? In higher rise places even like London there are parks and a variety of spaces and variation in the layout to get around the extra vertical density.
      - troygoode 10y ago
        I live in the Sunset. We have plenty of small parks and the Sunset runs the entire length of the enormous Golden Gate park, which stretches across half the city. There are plenty of restaurants and shops, most of which is not yet gentrified, and they just fit into the regular grid as mixed-use urban buildings (restaurant on the street level, apartments on the floor(s) above. There are no strip malls, big box stores, etc. Like much of the city, developing it further would likely mean building "up", yes. There are also an enormous number of single family homes in the Sunset, some of which could be converted into multi family apartment buildings to increase density. All that said, I'm not clear on how you'd actually accomplish the above. My family and I live here BECAUSE we wanted a single family home, a backyard, etc. SF obviously needs a vast increase in residential availability, but I'm certainly not the guy to ask about how to make it happen.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  That is staggeringly presumptuous of you to claim, lacking a shred of evidence (or, for that matter, empathy).
- mruniverse 10y ago
  One person's greed is another person's "just trying to cover the mortgage".
- tzs 10y ago
  I think that is an overly simplistic view. There are plenty of people who live in a given city, or a given neighborhood in a city, because it was a good fit for the kind of place they wanted to live. In many non-tech fields jobs aren't concentrated so heavily in just a couple of cities. You can decide what you are looking for in terms of climate, commute, recreation, culture, transportation, and so on, find a city and neighborhood that has that, and then go there and find a job. These people often pick a place to live, with the intent of staying there for the rest of their working life, and raising their families there. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with greed when they oppose changes to the factors that led them to be there in the first place, especially when the people who want that change are people who came there not because they particularly wanted to live there but rather because some company they wanted to work for requires its employees to live there, and those people have no intention of staying long term. Next time I move, I'm going to be looking for a place with reasonably dark sky, good bicycling, a climate that is warm enough that I mostly don't need to turn on the heat, low enough density that if I want to listen to music or watch a movie at 3 AM I won't be bothering my neighbors (and vice versa), a decent chess within 60 miles, and good internet access. You can bet afterwards I'll vote against change that would change any of those, even if the proposed changes would raise the value of my property, because I'd be buying the property as a home, not as an investment that I can incidentally live in.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> From what I can tell, the NIMBY-types in SF only have...aesthetic concerns? They also often have economic concerns, to wit, that increasing the supply of housing will, ceteris paribus, reduce the market clearing cost, reducing the value of the housing that they own. There are also quality of life concerns relating to expected effects of increased density on crime, on transportation and other infrastructure, and other things, as well. Those and aesthetic issues are more likely to be cited in public debate than the economic issue above, but I suspect for homeowners the economic issue is actually the overwhelming one.
- the_hangman 10y ago
  A good friend of mine recently was able to purchase a home in the Bay Area (we're in our late 20's). It has been absolutely fascinating the last few months watching his views towards housing supply do a complete 180 from "We need to build more housing" to "If they can't afford it maybe living here isn't for them".
sliverstorm 10y ago
Eh, criminals don't hang around outside of a prison, but that could mean they break into your house to steal a getaway car. I don't know. But I can understand people not wanting the possibility of a desperate escapee convict who has nothing to lose, loose in their neighborhood looking for a way out.
stinkytaco 10y ago
There's a financial interest. Cheaper homes means your home is worth less. There's a tipping point, however. There's a point where you can no longer afford your home or the neighborhood. There's also a question of quality of life. A prison is one, extreme example. But an apartment building aimed at college students or young professionals might be another. High density housing might create more traffic, noise, parking problems, property issues, mess, and so on. As someone who recently moved out of a "low rent" neighborhood, I had my property thrown up on and vandalized multiple times, and been woken up in the middle of the night more times than I can count. I was not sad to move to a neighborhood not far away, but significantly quieter. I realize these problems are not related to the property per se, but certainly people chose a neighborhood for a variety of reasons that are not aesthetic. This isn't to dismiss the need to improving access to housing. I don't want to be NIMBY, but we seem to have this immovable dichotomy between liberal "expand access" policies and conservative "if you don't like the neighborhood, move" policies and no real way to reconcile them. EDIT: I have a short anecdote to try and illustrate my point. In my former neighborhood I was lucky to have a small, one car garage on an alley. Parking was at a premium and most residents in the converted rental housing (houses that were turned into multi-unit rentals) did not have parking. At least a handful of times per year, I would find a car blocking my garage. Perhaps I didn't leave for work until later in the day or something, but whoever needed that spot thought they were OK there for a while. This is not a trivial problem for me. I needed that car to get to work and now I either have to track down the owner or wait for a tow truck (and incur the owner's wrath which usually involved yelling at me from my yard or smashing my mailbox) and be late for work or wherever I was going. The problem is that this wasn't a serious issue to most people reading an article on HN (or even the local paper). It's not an issue that you make policy based on, but it is an issue for everyone who lived in the neighborhood, including the people who were forced to block my garage for lack of other parking. I can't call the cops and tell them I think my irate neighbor smashed my mailbox or call my city and tell them to do something about parking. I'm stuck with that problem until the slow wheels of planning fix it, and by then I've been late to work a dozen or more times.
- aetherson 10y ago
  For most owners, there is no tipping point. Their house payments are fixed based on when they purchased the house, not on its appreciation since then.

wu-ikkyu 10y ago

>making affordable living spaces is easy if the laws and NIMBYs allow it Buckminster Fuller discovered this back in the 1930's with the Dymaxion House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house >"The first Beech-produced Fuller House was widely publicized. Soon 36,000 unsolicited orders, many with checks attached, were received for the Fuller House... None of the building codes would permit their erection. The severest blow of all was that both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws. No banks were willing to provide mortgages to cover the sale of the Fuller Houses." -Grunch of Giants

carapace 10y ago
This is the deeper form of the issue: Bucky pointed out that, by some time in the 1970's, we would have the technological capability to create a physical Utopia for all. The challenge he posed is "to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offence or disadvantage of anyone”
whybroke 10y ago
I know unions are a popular whipping boy on hn but blaming them for today's overpriced housing? And up-voting this nonsense? wow

whybroke 10y ago

Zoning changes may be a fine short term solution for a finite number of units. With rezoning, this plan, non-profit, government housing or any number of options become viable. But medium term, BART is already at maximum capacity and long term quality of life continues to drop and the economy chokes as housing cost per foot rises. The real solution is removing the policies that drive up housing prices. Repeal prop 13, eliminate the mortgage deduction, tax capital gains on house sales aggressively, limit realtors to hourly compensation, end collusion among apartment management firms, improve social security so the middle class is no longer dependent on equity to survive old age, don't use tax funds to bail defaulters on mortgage payments while there are other people living on the street.

greedo 10y ago
Your solutions would only make things worse. Repealing Prop 13 will hurt the middle class you want to help with increased Social Security. They'll be priced out of homes. Repealing it will also not lower housing costs. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction will do similar damage, as will eliminating the capital gains protections on primary residence sales. That would just encourage more people to sit on their houses instead of paying an extra 20% or so. Limiting realtors to hourly compensation? Why don't we limit you to hourly compensation? That's the nuttiest, out of left field suggestion I've ever heard. So much of your reply is nonsense that I'm tempted to think you're trolling, but nonsense isn't always a good indicator of that.
- whybroke 10y ago
  >Repealing Prop 13... Would put houses that the owner can't afford on the market thereby increasing supply. Adequate social security would mean they don't then get dumped on the streets. >Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction... Waiting changes the tax burden? No. But a capital gains tax would deincentivize flipping houses, a practice that serves little purpose other than inflating prices. All the benefits of mortgage deduction are immediately swallowed by a commensurate increase in house price. People will always budget the same monthly payment, the only difference is whether the non-home owners (or future generation due to budget deficits) are unfairly burdened by having to make up for the missing tax revenue. The mortgage deduction is simply a funneling of money from the treasury to lending institution and provides zero long term benefit to the home owner. And Canada does not have it and their country has not fallen apart. >Limiting realtors to hourly compensation?... Hourly is good enough for lawyers, but salaried would also work. Seriously though, anything that does not incentive maximizing the sale price (such as pegging compensation to sale price) would reduce housing prices. Better would be tech simply replacing realtors entirely but unfortunately they have such clout in the assembly, their privileges are sacrosanct. >I'm tempted to think you're trolling... That is because you have never hear these ideas before exactly because they are not disseminated exactly because they would reduce housing prices which is political suicide and will cause TV views to turn the channel. I assure you not one of these ideas is my own and indeed they are well understood and discussed by very serious people eg[0], [1] and [2] [0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-econo... [1]http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/14/the-worst-tax-breaks/the-uselessness-of-the-mortgage-interest-deduction http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/14/the-worst-ta... [2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/15/heres-a-way-to-painlessly-phase-out-the-mortgage-interest-tax-deduction/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/15/heres-a-way-...