5 ms·

Surely part of the problem is that so many people love or want to live in a place that long-term, can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, and is

Surely part of the problem is that so many people love or want to live in a place that long-term, can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, and is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time? It seems like the last thing to do is fill the place up with more people. Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? I get the impression from CA property discussions (of SF especially) on this forum, that anything which drives up rents and makes it hard for the typical person on this forum to live there is de facto, wrong. It’s obvious and the received wisdom that the solution is to build build build. Are you so sure the solution for everyone who isn’t looking for a high-end techie salary (i.e. most people) isn’t for the industry to be less concentrated in one city? Plus the whole water poured into a desert and earthquake things. Now I realize this is all a massively unpopular viewpoint around these parts, but these parts are at their most “in a bubble” around this issue I think. It’s no shock that the people who stand to benefit most from their preferred solution are fanatically in favor of it, especially when the alternatives involve (in the short term) sacrifice, and ideologically undesired outcomes like continued regulation. The thing is, between people who spent a lifetime in a city not wanting it to turn into blocks of high-rises, and an influx chasing VC money, there really is more than the dichotomy of “the virtuous” and “the NIMBY.” Everyone here would benefit from reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. Edit: I knew going in that this was going to be downvoted to death, but I hold out some hope that it can get some thoughtful rebuttals too. Preferably light on the glib “Natural disasters happen in many paces” canard.

wongarsu 8y ago
> long-term, can’t get water The city is right next to the ocean. Desalination is expensive and not the most environmentally friendly thing, but it is an option if there is no other way to get enough water. > is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time Citation needed. There are other cities that are larger and have higher population density. > ideologically undesired outcomes like continued regulation Aren't most people actually asking for less regulation, especially less strict zoning?
- jhayward 8y ago
  > Aren't most people actually asking for less regulation, especially less strict zoning? No. People who want to do things that zoning doesn't permit are advocating certain things under the banner of "less regulation". It's not clear they actually have thought through the consequences of less regulation; it's just that they think it will get them the policy outcome they want. Years of going from idealized to actual implementation experience tells us that the most likely thing to happen is .. something other than what proponents have in mind. Most people who live in those homes don't want a major change that will destroy the values they find there. People advocating radical change for the most part explicitly plan to harm their interests and take pleasure in the prospect that they will be harmed.
- incompatible 8y ago
  Israel apparently does desalination quite cheaply.
dionidium 8y ago
> What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? The answer to the latter question seems to be contained within it.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
> can’t get water California has plenty of water, it's just allocated poorly. Agriculture uses most of it. And don't give that silly "but we need food!!!" response, nobody's gonna starve if water prices go up a bit. > is subject to deveststing earthquakes Doesn't seem to have impacted Tokyo too badly. Really, modern buildings don't have much of a problem here. If anything, the wildfires seem to cause more trouble than the earthquakes. > is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time Nah, California really isn't that densely populated. Besides, denser-type development would be mean less resource usage, person for person. > Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? Vienna is mostly 5 or 6 story buildings and scores extremely high on livability ratings, much higher than LA. I live in Munich right now which is similar and it's quite nice, so I'd say: yes. > Are you so sure the solution for everyone who isn’t looking for a high-end techie salary (i.e. most people) isn’t for the industry to be less concentrated in one city? Agglomeration of an industrial sector in a particular area is normal and fine. It happens, even though companies have to pay higher rents and higher salaries, because it's advantageous to productivity to concentrate a wide variety of specialists for a certain field in a particular area. If companies want to spread out more, of course that's fine, but forcing them to do so would almost certainly hurt their performance. If you want lots more high-paying jobs, maybe not the best idea. > The thing is, between people who spent a lifetime in a city not wanting it to turn into blocks of high-rises It's pretty amusing to see so many people who think a 5 story building qualifies as a "high rise". 5 stories is nowhere close to that, chief. > there really is more than the dichotomy of “the virtuous” and “the NIMBY.” Yeah, but California (and really the US as a whole) is chock full of NIMBYs whose policies definitely hurt others. Rent prices are a big problem right now, especially in any area that's booming, not just California, and the two big problems are incredibly restrictive zoning regulations, and no serious public housing efforts (and the latter is also impacted by the former anyway). > I hold out some hope that it can get some thoughtful rebuttals too. Perhaps you should first put forth some thoughtful arguments then? I don't see anything that can't be easily dismissed by anyone who's actually put forth a modicum of amateur research into this area. I read most of Cadillac Desert back in high school for one of my classes, I don't recall anything that sounds like it'd be unsolvable now. If you remember anything that would actually be hard to deal with, by all means, bring it up. So far everything you've mentioned is fairly trivial.
jakelarkin 8y ago
as if earthquake resistant structures can't be built or water efficiency is not a thing or 85% of the water in the state doesn't go to corporate agricultural welfare. I was going to rebut more of this but its a joke of an argument and rightly should be downvoted to infinite
- cknoxrun 8y ago
  There are better ways of communicating disagreement with people. I think trying to be a bit kinder would go a long way here.
  - jakelarkin 8y ago
    its a bad faith argument. a step above trolling.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  I don't think the amount of water in the state going to agriculture is relevant. I have read that the amount of water in the LA basin is enough for 100,000 people (don't know if that counts their lawns or not). Sure, there's water in California - hundreds of miles away up north. That doesn't help LA, though, without monster aqueducts.
  - jakelarkin 8y ago
    it is relevant because people keep making an awful argument there's not enough water for people to live in cities (LA, SF) , when the taxpayers of the state are literally subsidizing half-dozen monster dams & aqueducts so a commercial enterprise can take vast majority of the available fresh water and use it to grow crops like rice or almonds in the California desert and sell them abroad. also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
01100011 8y ago
I think there is a sort of millenial grudge that prevents otherwise intelligent people from realizing that unrestricted population growth in a desirable area can lead to bad outcomes. I usually use an extreme example to make my point: if 100 million people want to live in Hawaii, should current Hawaiians be forced/guilted/compelled to accommodate them? Is there any point at which you say to people 'no, you have to live somewhere less desirable'? I'm not saying LA is free of problems, but I'm pretty sure there aren't too many problems that can be solved by cramming more people into LA. I would like to see the density increase, sure, but then return areas to open space(as if that will ever happen, but a boy can dream).
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Increasing urbanization is a thing for a few centuries now, I don't see how this has anything to do with millenials? Sure, at the extremes there are adverse effects. But Los Angeles has 1/6th the population density of Paris (a city with strict building height restrictions). It isn't crammed at all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- slg 8y ago
  This type of zoning restriction only protects current property owners. They don't protect all current residents. If 100 million people wanted to live in Hawaii, almost every renter would be forced off the island in favor of one of those 100 million who was willing and able to pay more. Many of the property owners would also end up leaving once it became clear how much their property had increased in value. The current Hawaiians wouldn't be "forced/guilted/compelled to accommodate" the new residents. They would instead by "forced/guilted/compelled to" move off the island completely. Similarly the 4 million people who live in Los Angeles are not the same 4 million who lived in the city 20 years ago. The actual makeup of the city is constantly shuffled around as prices of rent change and different sets of people are willing and able to afford to live there. "Cramming more people into LA" would actually lead to more stability for current residents as it would stall the price increases of real estate by keeping the supply of housing more in sync with the rising demand for housing.
scythe 8y ago
>Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? Unrestricted growth would look like... the present day. LA has grown unrestricted in many ways. New land is continually cleared for houses. New highways are routinely built. The only thing which is restricted is growth that puts people closer together. LA residents have no qualms with supporting economic policies that ultimately fund housing construction in the outskirts of Riverside and San Fernando. LA residents benefit materially from this growth, via increased property values and cheaper services as new residents lend slack to the labor market. You want to protect the environment of southern California? Limit new employment. Enact urban growth boundaries. Stop subsidizing fire insurance. People will stop moving there -- I guarantee it. But LA residents don't want that. They want to continue to benefit from growth without having to meet any of the people whose high rents ultimately subsidize their utility bills. >can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, Water is just a pricing issue. The price of water will never rise too high for residential use. Desalination might triple the cost -- which is still cheaper than a heating bill in Minnesota. Earthquakes are a non-issue. Humans have built cities in earthquake zones for millenia. That includes Rome, Toyko, Mexico City and Calcutta.
megaman8 8y ago
well there's humane ways to limit growth, and then there's what CA does. If you want to limit growth, then you need to convince companies to move out, get the jobs out of there. once the jobs leave, the people leave. But continuing to have FB and google and various other companies lure more and more people from outside the state to CA and then not building enough housing for everyone, is just plain wrong. Sure, the people coming in can probably afford it, but it causes so many housing problems for everyone else.
- shados 8y ago
  Bingo. This was the root cause of the current problems. The area wanted the big lucrative jobs, but not the effect of the rich people it will create. There's not a whole lot of solutions to that.
- skgoa 8y ago
  >Sure, the people coming in can probably afford it, but it causes so many housing problems for everyone else. This is the big issue here. Current residents are getting pushed out by the rising prices that these new people will have to accept for lack of other good options. It fucks over everyone other than real estate owners. This effect happens in all cities across the globe, it's just much much stronger in Cali.
tzs 8y ago
> Surely part of the problem is that so many people love or want to live in a place that long-term, can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, and is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time? If you replace "water" with "food and water" (which seems a reasonable thing to do as both are necessary for people to live), and allow substituting hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, etc., for earthquakes...then doesn't your statement apply to nearly all large cities? They almost all have to import food, for example. How is that fundamentally different from importing water?

wongarsu 8y ago

> long-term, can’t get water The city is right next to the ocean. Desalination is expensive and not the most environmentally friendly thing, but it is an option if there is no other way to get enough water. > is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time Citation needed. There are other cities that are larger and have higher population density. > ideologically undesired outcomes like continued regulation Aren't most people actually asking for less regulation, especially less strict zoning?

jhayward 8y ago
> Aren't most people actually asking for less regulation, especially less strict zoning? No. People who want to do things that zoning doesn't permit are advocating certain things under the banner of "less regulation". It's not clear they actually have thought through the consequences of less regulation; it's just that they think it will get them the policy outcome they want. Years of going from idealized to actual implementation experience tells us that the most likely thing to happen is .. something other than what proponents have in mind. Most people who live in those homes don't want a major change that will destroy the values they find there. People advocating radical change for the most part explicitly plan to harm their interests and take pleasure in the prospect that they will be harmed.
incompatible 8y ago
Israel apparently does desalination quite cheaply.

dionidium 8y ago

> What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? The answer to the latter question seems to be contained within it.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

> can’t get water California has plenty of water, it's just allocated poorly. Agriculture uses most of it. And don't give that silly "but we need food!!!" response, nobody's gonna starve if water prices go up a bit. > is subject to deveststing earthquakes Doesn't seem to have impacted Tokyo too badly. Really, modern buildings don't have much of a problem here. If anything, the wildfires seem to cause more trouble than the earthquakes. > is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time Nah, California really isn't that densely populated. Besides, denser-type development would be mean less resource usage, person for person. > Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? Vienna is mostly 5 or 6 story buildings and scores extremely high on livability ratings, much higher than LA. I live in Munich right now which is similar and it's quite nice, so I'd say: yes. > Are you so sure the solution for everyone who isn’t looking for a high-end techie salary (i.e. most people) isn’t for the industry to be less concentrated in one city? Agglomeration of an industrial sector in a particular area is normal and fine. It happens, even though companies have to pay higher rents and higher salaries, because it's advantageous to productivity to concentrate a wide variety of specialists for a certain field in a particular area. If companies want to spread out more, of course that's fine, but forcing them to do so would almost certainly hurt their performance. If you want lots more high-paying jobs, maybe not the best idea. > The thing is, between people who spent a lifetime in a city not wanting it to turn into blocks of high-rises It's pretty amusing to see so many people who think a 5 story building qualifies as a "high rise". 5 stories is nowhere close to that, chief. > there really is more than the dichotomy of “the virtuous” and “the NIMBY.” Yeah, but California (and really the US as a whole) is chock full of NIMBYs whose policies definitely hurt others. Rent prices are a big problem right now, especially in any area that's booming, not just California, and the two big problems are incredibly restrictive zoning regulations, and no serious public housing efforts (and the latter is also impacted by the former anyway). > I hold out some hope that it can get some thoughtful rebuttals too. Perhaps you should first put forth some thoughtful arguments then? I don't see anything that can't be easily dismissed by anyone who's actually put forth a modicum of amateur research into this area. I read most of Cadillac Desert back in high school for one of my classes, I don't recall anything that sounds like it'd be unsolvable now. If you remember anything that would actually be hard to deal with, by all means, bring it up. So far everything you've mentioned is fairly trivial.

jakelarkin 8y ago

as if earthquake resistant structures can't be built or water efficiency is not a thing or 85% of the water in the state doesn't go to corporate agricultural welfare. I was going to rebut more of this but its a joke of an argument and rightly should be downvoted to infinite

cknoxrun 8y ago
There are better ways of communicating disagreement with people. I think trying to be a bit kinder would go a long way here.
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  its a bad faith argument. a step above trolling.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
I don't think the amount of water in the state going to agriculture is relevant. I have read that the amount of water in the LA basin is enough for 100,000 people (don't know if that counts their lawns or not). Sure, there's water in California - hundreds of miles away up north. That doesn't help LA, though, without monster aqueducts.
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  it is relevant because people keep making an awful argument there's not enough water for people to live in cities (LA, SF) , when the taxpayers of the state are literally subsidizing half-dozen monster dams & aqueducts so a commercial enterprise can take vast majority of the available fresh water and use it to grow crops like rice or almonds in the California desert and sell them abroad. also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct

01100011 8y ago

I think there is a sort of millenial grudge that prevents otherwise intelligent people from realizing that unrestricted population growth in a desirable area can lead to bad outcomes. I usually use an extreme example to make my point: if 100 million people want to live in Hawaii, should current Hawaiians be forced/guilted/compelled to accommodate them? Is there any point at which you say to people 'no, you have to live somewhere less desirable'? I'm not saying LA is free of problems, but I'm pretty sure there aren't too many problems that can be solved by cramming more people into LA. I would like to see the density increase, sure, but then return areas to open space(as if that will ever happen, but a boy can dream).

wongarsu 8y ago
Increasing urbanization is a thing for a few centuries now, I don't see how this has anything to do with millenials? Sure, at the extremes there are adverse effects. But Los Angeles has 1/6th the population density of Paris (a city with strict building height restrictions). It isn't crammed at all.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
slg 8y ago
This type of zoning restriction only protects current property owners. They don't protect all current residents. If 100 million people wanted to live in Hawaii, almost every renter would be forced off the island in favor of one of those 100 million who was willing and able to pay more. Many of the property owners would also end up leaving once it became clear how much their property had increased in value. The current Hawaiians wouldn't be "forced/guilted/compelled to accommodate" the new residents. They would instead by "forced/guilted/compelled to" move off the island completely. Similarly the 4 million people who live in Los Angeles are not the same 4 million who lived in the city 20 years ago. The actual makeup of the city is constantly shuffled around as prices of rent change and different sets of people are willing and able to afford to live there. "Cramming more people into LA" would actually lead to more stability for current residents as it would stall the price increases of real estate by keeping the supply of housing more in sync with the rising demand for housing.

scythe 8y ago

>Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? Unrestricted growth would look like... the present day. LA has grown unrestricted in many ways. New land is continually cleared for houses. New highways are routinely built. The only thing which is restricted is growth that puts people closer together. LA residents have no qualms with supporting economic policies that ultimately fund housing construction in the outskirts of Riverside and San Fernando. LA residents benefit materially from this growth, via increased property values and cheaper services as new residents lend slack to the labor market. You want to protect the environment of southern California? Limit new employment. Enact urban growth boundaries. Stop subsidizing fire insurance. People will stop moving there -- I guarantee it. But LA residents don't want that. They want to continue to benefit from growth without having to meet any of the people whose high rents ultimately subsidize their utility bills. >can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, Water is just a pricing issue. The price of water will never rise too high for residential use. Desalination might triple the cost -- which is still cheaper than a heating bill in Minnesota. Earthquakes are a non-issue. Humans have built cities in earthquake zones for millenia. That includes Rome, Toyko, Mexico City and Calcutta.

megaman8 8y ago

well there's humane ways to limit growth, and then there's what CA does. If you want to limit growth, then you need to convince companies to move out, get the jobs out of there. once the jobs leave, the people leave. But continuing to have FB and google and various other companies lure more and more people from outside the state to CA and then not building enough housing for everyone, is just plain wrong. Sure, the people coming in can probably afford it, but it causes so many housing problems for everyone else.

shados 8y ago
Bingo. This was the root cause of the current problems. The area wanted the big lucrative jobs, but not the effect of the rich people it will create. There's not a whole lot of solutions to that.
skgoa 8y ago
>Sure, the people coming in can probably afford it, but it causes so many housing problems for everyone else. This is the big issue here. Current residents are getting pushed out by the rising prices that these new people will have to accept for lack of other good options. It fucks over everyone other than real estate owners. This effect happens in all cities across the globe, it's just much much stronger in Cali.

tzs 8y ago

> Surely part of the problem is that so many people love or want to live in a place that long-term, can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, and is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time? If you replace "water" with "food and water" (which seems a reasonable thing to do as both are necessary for people to live), and allow substituting hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, etc., for earthquakes...then doesn't your statement apply to nearly all large cities? They almost all have to import food, for example. How is that fundamentally different from importing water?