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That's totally fine and dandy. I encourage you to do so. What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban

by ng12 9y ago

That's totally fine and dandy. I encourage you to do so. What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.

ryandrake 9y ago
But that's what all this YIMBY stuff is: People wanting to drive bulldozers into existing suburban neighborhoods with 1/2 acre lots and single-family homes, and urbanize them with apartments and townhomes. But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.
- ng12 9y ago
  Who's talking about bulldozing Tracy? The article is about a three-unit condo in the already dense Berkeley/Emeryville area.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    To use two extremes. Berkeley is probably somewhere in the middle with some single-family areas and some more urban areas.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Only due to the hills and the older homes. Berkeley is an urban area, full stop. It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs
  - mercutio2 9y ago
    Legally a condo, but notably, no shared walls, so nothing like apartments or town homes. Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  We have to pick our priorities here. If you want to live in a big, desirable city, you have to make the sacrifices that come with high-density living. If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style. Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.
    - ng12 9y ago
      Yeah, let me get out my violin for the people who made millions on appreciation alone. Sell your house and move somewhere rural if that's what you want. You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?
matheweis 9y ago
I spent the last 10 years in a moderately rural area, and unfortunately unless you want to be a Walmart greeter or work at the Amazon store there aren’t a whole lot of employment options left. The last few tech jobs there were very quickly being sucked out by centralization into various cloud services.
- ng12 9y ago
  And that's the problem -- people want it both ways. They want the wild economy and real estate appreciation but don't want to deal with the reality of living in a boom town. It's classic "I got mine" syndrome.
lliamander 9y ago
And if they move to a rural area with more room, but a decade down the line people start immigrating there en masse and building town homes all over the place, reshaping the community to fit their (the new peoples') needs rather than adapt to the existing community?
- closeparen 9y ago
  You seem to be expressing an ideology in this thread that the ability to exist and occupy space is a default-deny privilege that communities should only have to grant if they want to. I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be? Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?
  - davemp 9y ago
    What the heck are you talking about? There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      So what’s your plan for spreading those out? Because the former isn’t happening (or even practical in many areas) and the latter presents an order of magnitude more difficult logistics (ie, expense) that would balloon costs. It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping
    - 0xB31B1B 9y ago
      What you want is socialism for the rich. In a working land market, a group of 3 people could outbid a single person for property in your neighborhood and build a suitable dwelling for them that objectively is not disruptive to the community. You want to use government power to prevent these three families from buying the land and make sure only one of them can.

by ng12 9y ago

That's totally fine and dandy. I encourage you to do so. What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.

ryandrake 9y ago

But that's what all this YIMBY stuff is: People wanting to drive bulldozers into existing suburban neighborhoods with 1/2 acre lots and single-family homes, and urbanize them with apartments and townhomes. But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.

ng12 9y ago
Who's talking about bulldozing Tracy? The article is about a three-unit condo in the already dense Berkeley/Emeryville area.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  To use two extremes. Berkeley is probably somewhere in the middle with some single-family areas and some more urban areas.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Only due to the hills and the older homes. Berkeley is an urban area, full stop. It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs
- mercutio2 9y ago
  Legally a condo, but notably, no shared walls, so nothing like apartments or town homes. Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.
mywittyname 9y ago
We have to pick our priorities here. If you want to live in a big, desirable city, you have to make the sacrifices that come with high-density living. If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style. Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.
  - ng12 9y ago
    Yeah, let me get out my violin for the people who made millions on appreciation alone. Sell your house and move somewhere rural if that's what you want. You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?

matheweis 9y ago

I spent the last 10 years in a moderately rural area, and unfortunately unless you want to be a Walmart greeter or work at the Amazon store there aren’t a whole lot of employment options left. The last few tech jobs there were very quickly being sucked out by centralization into various cloud services.

ng12 9y ago
And that's the problem -- people want it both ways. They want the wild economy and real estate appreciation but don't want to deal with the reality of living in a boom town. It's classic "I got mine" syndrome.

lliamander 9y ago

And if they move to a rural area with more room, but a decade down the line people start immigrating there en masse and building town homes all over the place, reshaping the community to fit their (the new peoples') needs rather than adapt to the existing community?

closeparen 9y ago
You seem to be expressing an ideology in this thread that the ability to exist and occupy space is a default-deny privilege that communities should only have to grant if they want to. I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be? Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?
- davemp 9y ago
  What the heck are you talking about? There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    So what’s your plan for spreading those out? Because the former isn’t happening (or even practical in many areas) and the latter presents an order of magnitude more difficult logistics (ie, expense) that would balloon costs. It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping
  - 0xB31B1B 9y ago
    What you want is socialism for the rich. In a working land market, a group of 3 people could outbid a single person for property in your neighborhood and build a suitable dwelling for them that objectively is not disruptive to the community. You want to use government power to prevent these three families from buying the land and make sure only one of them can.