6 ms·

California, and the US, shouldn’t be afraid of density and upzoning

41 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

rb808 7y ago
This is fluff. Sure if you build a few multi families in 10% of lots it wont affect neighborhood characteristics much because you're only adding 10-20% more housing. Its doubling and quadrupling (even 10x) the number of housing units that is really needed and that affects everything - more cars, more schoolkids, more water, more trash, more crowds.
- magduf 7y ago
  >and that affects everything - more cars This right here is the root problem. If you increase housing density in America, everyone expects a place to put their car, and to be able to use a car to get around, so you don't improve stuff that much. We need to get rid of cars altogether as a primary people-mover; then you can really build things closer together, and not have to waste so much space on parking lots. Trash and water aren't problems; they don't take up a lot of space, though you do need a source of freshwater to supply the city, but unless you're in the desert that shouldn't be that big a problem. Schoolkids aren't a big problem in urban areas: people aren't having kids any more.
  - milkytron 7y ago
    I think attitudes will change when owning a car becomes more of an inconvenience than a convenience. Dense housing is the start of making it more inconvenient. Then, once owning a car is less convenient than other modes of transit, will we see alternatives that are better for those areas.
- ahoy 7y ago
  If your city is dense enough that you live within walking/bus distance of your work and basic necessities (groceries, etc) you dont need to have every single person own a car. The cars are a big part of the problem and as long as we keep building to accomodate them and not people things aren't going to improve
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > Its doubling and quadrupling (even 10x) the number of housing units that is really needed and that affects everything - more cars, more schoolkids, more water, more trash, more crowds. If you're 10x the number of housing units, there will be less cars though.
- lukeschlather 7y ago
  There's only more cars if there are more jobs, at least if you're looking at rush hour traffic. Adding residences in megacities like LA and SF isn't likely to increase the number of jobs, it will reduce the number of people commuting 30+ miles into the city, and thereby reduce the number of cars on the road (even if everyone still drives.)
cgriswald 7y ago
At least in my Bay Area town, the people already live here. We have serious problems with people living in RVs taking over entire streets. They don't just live in the RVs quietly. They spread their stuff (furniture, garbage, sometimes large collections of stolen goods) all over the street. They harass nearby businesses and homeowners. They park in ways that are not just technically illegal, but dangerous to drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Crime has gone up in nearby areas. I'm not saying RV people are all responsible for the crimes, but I'm aware of several instances where the crimes have been committed by the RV people. They're not all homeless, either. Many of them own homes in the East Bay or further afield and just do a week long commute to their $100K+ peninsula jobs. Single family houses are housing 6-10 adults. Their cars are all over the streets. Some neighborhoods are can barely be navigated, and its dangerous for driver and pedestrian alike. We'd all be better off if there were affordable apartments (with parking garages) for people to live in. We'd see an increase in city revenue. We'd reclaim our streets. We'd have a cleaner city. We'd have fewer accidents and safer walks. We'd no longer have city council members hiding behind 'compassion' when it comes to removing the RVs. Yet every single development is opposed. "It will make traffic worse." Not conceivably possible. Every development includes requirements of $$ to improve nearby streets and appropriate parking. Parking has gotten so much easier since one major development included public parking. (One guy argued that the amount of money a business was willing to offer wasn't enough to fix a problem area. As if it is not the responsibility of the city, county, and state to fix the existing problem. Or as if $X million is worse than $0 million for fixing a problem we already have.) "That area is already a mess!" Yes. It is. That's why it needs to be improved. "It only adds X homes!" X is better than zero. They're also generally trying to add them near downtown and public transport. "It will bring more people to the area!" I don't have the numbers on this, but I suspect this is largely a red herring. Anecdotally, several of my friends have left the area, many still live with their parents after graduating, and my girlfriend wants to leave. "They're only building luxury apartments!" So? It means more houses. It means all the houses get more affordable because supply is trying to meet demand. "But the town will be so different!" Different than when you grew up in 1965? It's already different. And it's trash. It'll be different from now and it will be better because it will actually be meeting our needs. "But my property values!" Just kidding. No one ever says this, but they all mean it.
patagonia 7y ago
The flip side of density increases is the changes in culture and required increase in shared resource organization. I’ve lived in NYC and in the country. You can’t simply increase housing density and have it work. You have to learn different ways to interact with people. You have to create shared transportation and parks infrastructure. And you have to admit there are trade offs. You do lose a lot when moving toward very high density cities. The night sky. Quiet. Calmness. Yards.
- duelingjello 7y ago
  The SF Bay Area was designed like LA... to require burning as much fossil-fuel as possible by spreading residential and commercial areas out far from each other, making walking impractical. Heck, even local trams and bus systems were destroyed by General Motors.[0] I remember seeing the remnants of a defunct local tram platform about ½ mile / 1 km west of Gunderson High School in San Jose across the way from where the first Light Rail line was installed. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- ahoy 7y ago
  You dont need NYC levels of density to achieve big improvements though. You just can't have a "city" full of single-family homes like you do in places like San Francisco. I'd also posit that the culture changes follow, and are directed by, the density. That's my speculation though.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    No, but you do need to incorporate public features that bigger cities have, like parks. That doesn't happen magically, you need to plan for that.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > The night sky There's no night sky in any suburb though ?
  - 7y ago
bryanmgreen 7y ago
I think this is a terrible argument. Talking about being "afraid of density" shifts the argument and action away from progress. The discussion should be that *we should try to avoid density" and we're failing at that. We need: 1) Faster and more efficient travel to/from hubs. 2) Organizations to embrace remote work.
- mikraig 7y ago
  Why should we avoid density? Societies get more urban as they progress. Density is the way of progress. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be smart and thoughtful about it, but ultimately density should be the goal.
  - swebs 7y ago
    >Societies get more urban as they progress I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase. Though as we've seen over the past few decades, the most advanced societies tend to have a decrease in birth rates after a certain point. I don't think we should be striving to turn the entire Earth into Kowloon.
    - mikraig 7y ago
      > I don't think we should be striving to turn the entire Earth into Kowloon. Oh of course not, that's an absolutely extreme example. Yes, advanced societies tend to have a decrease in birth rates. Yet, they still keep getting denser, as people move to cities. Density, if done thoughtfully, can lead to increased economic output, better health, better environmental outcomes, less traffic (holding population constant, anyways), etc.
    - milkytron 7y ago
      > I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase. I don't think so. Cities are much more efficient for the masses. If you have 20 people that all evenly dispersed within 20 square miles, or 20 people within a square mile, more progress can be made in the square mile.
adrianmonk 7y ago
Wake me up when the Bay Area (and California, and other places) becomes community-minded enough to care about solutions. My experience has been that it's a bunch of factions who can't/won't work together toward a common good. Until that changes, you can create all the smart, rational, reasonable, fact-based, win-win proposals you want, but they aren't going to happen if people aren't even trying to cooperate.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  SF seems only concerned with political issues. Ensuring that convicted felons are "justice involved persons" and that they have no change in privilege than someone who never broke the law in the first place.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    When someone has served their debt to society, they should be treated similar to someone who was never in prison. If you want to punish someone further, keep them in prison; Don’t let them go.
isthispermanent 7y ago
Who are the decisions makers for how a lot is zoned? Is it home owners, city council, etc.? Is it neighborhood based, city based?
- tehlike 7y ago
  City. Residents vote for council
DataWorker 7y ago
Building won’t fix the problem. A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. They are unoccupied because we allow people to speculate on real estate. Much of the real estate is bought by rich foreign investors and multinational corporations. This is a problem in many places of the world and just another aspect of globalization. Given all that, who benefits when new units are built? The developers obviously make money. The local government gets some mad money to play with. But mostly the real estate finance industry and big multinational corporations. Economists have run the numbers, the little guy doesn’t benefit at all from efforts to increase the housing supply. It can’t be increased enough to lower prices, it merely expands the speculative market, adding more wealth to the bottom line of the big winners in the game.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  > A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. Source? I can't imagine this is true given the ridiculous rent that a dwelling commands. Why leave cash on the table?
sdinsn 7y ago
Zoning laws should just be removed entirely.
throwawaysea 7y ago
People are allowed to make their own local decisions about how they want to live and govern. The notion that either California or the US should override local zoning laws is authoritarian, and does away with the agency of voters. I think there is a place for dense communities as well as non-dense ones. Different people need and thrive with different environments. Recently the focus on pushing only high-density (usually from the new wave of 'urbanist' blogs) looks to demonize anything that isn't high-density urban, and frankly it feels very us versus them.
JohnFen 7y ago
In my city, they've been making a strong effort to do exactly what the article recommends. My observation is that it absolutely does change the character of a neighborhood. Whether that change is bad, neutral, or good depends entirely on what sort of character you prefer. But there's no getting around the fact that greater density means that the area will be very different. Personally, none of this scares me. I consider it unfortunate, but it's also probably inevitable.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
California, firstly shouldn't be afraid of building: period. I mean, I'm looking at the voting pamphlet, at the mayors and the local politicians: all bragging about how many construction projects they've stopped and all the building they've prevented. It's sickening. I couldn't find a single candidate that didn't brag about preventing housing construction.

41 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

This is fluff. Sure if you build a few multi families in 10% of lots it wont affect neighborhood characteristics much because you're only adding 10-20% more housing. Its doubling and quadrupling (even 10x) the number of housing units that is really needed and that affects everything - more cars, more schoolkids, more water, more trash, more crowds.

magduf 7y ago
>and that affects everything - more cars This right here is the root problem. If you increase housing density in America, everyone expects a place to put their car, and to be able to use a car to get around, so you don't improve stuff that much. We need to get rid of cars altogether as a primary people-mover; then you can really build things closer together, and not have to waste so much space on parking lots. Trash and water aren't problems; they don't take up a lot of space, though you do need a source of freshwater to supply the city, but unless you're in the desert that shouldn't be that big a problem. Schoolkids aren't a big problem in urban areas: people aren't having kids any more.
- milkytron 7y ago
  I think attitudes will change when owning a car becomes more of an inconvenience than a convenience. Dense housing is the start of making it more inconvenient. Then, once owning a car is less convenient than other modes of transit, will we see alternatives that are better for those areas.
ahoy 7y ago
If your city is dense enough that you live within walking/bus distance of your work and basic necessities (groceries, etc) you dont need to have every single person own a car. The cars are a big part of the problem and as long as we keep building to accomodate them and not people things aren't going to improve
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> Its doubling and quadrupling (even 10x) the number of housing units that is really needed and that affects everything - more cars, more schoolkids, more water, more trash, more crowds. If you're 10x the number of housing units, there will be less cars though.
lukeschlather 7y ago
There's only more cars if there are more jobs, at least if you're looking at rush hour traffic. Adding residences in megacities like LA and SF isn't likely to increase the number of jobs, it will reduce the number of people commuting 30+ miles into the city, and thereby reduce the number of cars on the road (even if everyone still drives.)

cgriswald 7y ago

At least in my Bay Area town, the people already live here. We have serious problems with people living in RVs taking over entire streets. They don't just live in the RVs quietly. They spread their stuff (furniture, garbage, sometimes large collections of stolen goods) all over the street. They harass nearby businesses and homeowners. They park in ways that are not just technically illegal, but dangerous to drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Crime has gone up in nearby areas. I'm not saying RV people are all responsible for the crimes, but I'm aware of several instances where the crimes have been committed by the RV people. They're not all homeless, either. Many of them own homes in the East Bay or further afield and just do a week long commute to their $100K+ peninsula jobs. Single family houses are housing 6-10 adults. Their cars are all over the streets. Some neighborhoods are can barely be navigated, and its dangerous for driver and pedestrian alike. We'd all be better off if there were affordable apartments (with parking garages) for people to live in. We'd see an increase in city revenue. We'd reclaim our streets. We'd have a cleaner city. We'd have fewer accidents and safer walks. We'd no longer have city council members hiding behind 'compassion' when it comes to removing the RVs. Yet every single development is opposed. "It will make traffic worse." Not conceivably possible. Every development includes requirements of $$ to improve nearby streets and appropriate parking. Parking has gotten so much easier since one major development included public parking. (One guy argued that the amount of money a business was willing to offer wasn't enough to fix a problem area. As if it is not the responsibility of the city, county, and state to fix the existing problem. Or as if $X million is worse than $0 million for fixing a problem we already have.) "That area is already a mess!" Yes. It is. That's why it needs to be improved. "It only adds X homes!" X is better than zero. They're also generally trying to add them near downtown and public transport. "It will bring more people to the area!" I don't have the numbers on this, but I suspect this is largely a red herring. Anecdotally, several of my friends have left the area, many still live with their parents after graduating, and my girlfriend wants to leave. "They're only building luxury apartments!" So? It means more houses. It means all the houses get more affordable because supply is trying to meet demand. "But the town will be so different!" Different than when you grew up in 1965? It's already different. And it's trash. It'll be different from now and it will be better because it will actually be meeting our needs. "But my property values!" Just kidding. No one ever says this, but they all mean it.

patagonia 7y ago

The flip side of density increases is the changes in culture and required increase in shared resource organization. I’ve lived in NYC and in the country. You can’t simply increase housing density and have it work. You have to learn different ways to interact with people. You have to create shared transportation and parks infrastructure. And you have to admit there are trade offs. You do lose a lot when moving toward very high density cities. The night sky. Quiet. Calmness. Yards.

duelingjello 7y ago
The SF Bay Area was designed like LA... to require burning as much fossil-fuel as possible by spreading residential and commercial areas out far from each other, making walking impractical. Heck, even local trams and bus systems were destroyed by General Motors.[0] I remember seeing the remnants of a defunct local tram platform about ½ mile / 1 km west of Gunderson High School in San Jose across the way from where the first Light Rail line was installed. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
ahoy 7y ago
You dont need NYC levels of density to achieve big improvements though. You just can't have a "city" full of single-family homes like you do in places like San Francisco. I'd also posit that the culture changes follow, and are directed by, the density. That's my speculation though.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  No, but you do need to incorporate public features that bigger cities have, like parks. That doesn't happen magically, you need to plan for that.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> The night sky There's no night sky in any suburb though ?
- 7y ago

bryanmgreen 7y ago

I think this is a terrible argument. Talking about being "afraid of density" shifts the argument and action away from progress. The discussion should be that *we should try to avoid density" and we're failing at that. We need: 1) Faster and more efficient travel to/from hubs. 2) Organizations to embrace remote work.

mikraig 7y ago
Why should we avoid density? Societies get more urban as they progress. Density is the way of progress. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be smart and thoughtful about it, but ultimately density should be the goal.
- swebs 7y ago
  >Societies get more urban as they progress I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase. Though as we've seen over the past few decades, the most advanced societies tend to have a decrease in birth rates after a certain point. I don't think we should be striving to turn the entire Earth into Kowloon.
  - mikraig 7y ago
    > I don't think we should be striving to turn the entire Earth into Kowloon. Oh of course not, that's an absolutely extreme example. Yes, advanced societies tend to have a decrease in birth rates. Yet, they still keep getting denser, as people move to cities. Density, if done thoughtfully, can lead to increased economic output, better health, better environmental outcomes, less traffic (holding population constant, anyways), etc.
  - milkytron 7y ago
    > I think that's more of a side effect of a population increase. I don't think so. Cities are much more efficient for the masses. If you have 20 people that all evenly dispersed within 20 square miles, or 20 people within a square mile, more progress can be made in the square mile.

adrianmonk 7y ago

Wake me up when the Bay Area (and California, and other places) becomes community-minded enough to care about solutions. My experience has been that it's a bunch of factions who can't/won't work together toward a common good. Until that changes, you can create all the smart, rational, reasonable, fact-based, win-win proposals you want, but they aren't going to happen if people aren't even trying to cooperate.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
SF seems only concerned with political issues. Ensuring that convicted felons are "justice involved persons" and that they have no change in privilege than someone who never broke the law in the first place.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  When someone has served their debt to society, they should be treated similar to someone who was never in prison. If you want to punish someone further, keep them in prison; Don’t let them go.

isthispermanent 7y ago

Who are the decisions makers for how a lot is zoned? Is it home owners, city council, etc.? Is it neighborhood based, city based?

tehlike 7y ago
City. Residents vote for council

DataWorker 7y ago

Building won’t fix the problem. A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. They are unoccupied because we allow people to speculate on real estate. Much of the real estate is bought by rich foreign investors and multinational corporations. This is a problem in many places of the world and just another aspect of globalization. Given all that, who benefits when new units are built? The developers obviously make money. The local government gets some mad money to play with. But mostly the real estate finance industry and big multinational corporations. Economists have run the numbers, the little guy doesn’t benefit at all from efforts to increase the housing supply. It can’t be increased enough to lower prices, it merely expands the speculative market, adding more wealth to the bottom line of the big winners in the game.

helen___keller 7y ago
> A significant proportion of existing dwellings are unoccupied or under-occupied. Source? I can't imagine this is true given the ridiculous rent that a dwelling commands. Why leave cash on the table?

sdinsn 7y ago

Zoning laws should just be removed entirely.

throwawaysea 7y ago

People are allowed to make their own local decisions about how they want to live and govern. The notion that either California or the US should override local zoning laws is authoritarian, and does away with the agency of voters. I think there is a place for dense communities as well as non-dense ones. Different people need and thrive with different environments. Recently the focus on pushing only high-density (usually from the new wave of 'urbanist' blogs) looks to demonize anything that isn't high-density urban, and frankly it feels very us versus them.

JohnFen 7y ago

In my city, they've been making a strong effort to do exactly what the article recommends. My observation is that it absolutely does change the character of a neighborhood. Whether that change is bad, neutral, or good depends entirely on what sort of character you prefer. But there's no getting around the fact that greater density means that the area will be very different. Personally, none of this scares me. I consider it unfortunate, but it's also probably inevitable.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

California, firstly shouldn't be afraid of building: period. I mean, I'm looking at the voting pamphlet, at the mayors and the local politicians: all bragging about how many construction projects they've stopped and all the building they've prevented. It's sickening. I couldn't find a single candidate that didn't brag about preventing housing construction.