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> "It shouldn’t take six years for any city to agree to give itself permission to build the sort of homes that every city once allowed." This is IMO the big th

> "It shouldn’t take six years for any city to agree to give itself permission to build the sort of homes that every city once allowed." This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.

rumanator 6y ago
> This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. And cities were awful due to that, I'm afraid. > Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. There's no need to pull out emotional conspiracy theories. Restrictions are in general due to the need to impose an urban plan that meets the urban planner's established goals for the community and also complies with environmental restrictions, such as traffic and noise levels. > but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach. Letting people freely build "second buildings on their property" is an euphemism for wanting to build shanty towns with no regard to living conditions or environmental restrictions. Each plot is defined based on a zoning expectation,which reflects real-world restrictions and an urban plan. If you want higher density construction then just work with your city to rezone and review the urban plan for your neighborhood. Expecting to be able to just build "houses" in your backyard is how you get firetrap shanty towns that violate environmental and safety restrictions. Just because you don't know why a fence is placed somewhere, that doesn't mean it has no purpose.
37r6ehehediud 6y ago
I'm not sure this scans. It would be true if the only regulations that applied were the ones being discussed but Portland goes out of its way to avoid large apartment buildings in many neighborhoods and they have a vendetta against building roads that aren't shit for some reason. If you removed all relevant regulations you wouldn't see the kind of buildings the article is praising you'd see large apartment buildings and suburbs sprawling jnto the woods. Good on Portland for doing something about the situation I guess but it's hard to feel impressed when they created the problem in the first place.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 6y ago
> I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, Even these, IMO, are government overreach. Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. Then leave it up to the insurance company to decide what standards will lower your premium. One insurance company might decide "look at Switzerland - they have very safe houses. Build everything to Swiss regulations, and we'll give you a 90% discount on the insurance price". Over time, safety and environmental standards, as well as costs to meet them, will get much better much quicker than current layers of government bureaucracy. The insurance should also cover for things like environmental spills on your land, the cost of pulling the building down and making the site nature again if the insurance is ever not renewed, etc.
- plasticchris 6y ago
  If you are in a flood plain they do. I assume it's the same for the others. But drainage is really more about dealing with density. In the town/city poor drainage on my lot could flood my neighbors house. In the country there's enough space it's not an issue.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    flood plains are usually more to do with elevations. If all of my home's runoff goes to my neighbor, its just runoff now. If their home doesn't have drainage (proper grade, etc), then its getting flooded regardless of your drainage. Your drainage may make it worse, but the reality is that the damage is already done. This may apply for more recent builds rather than homes 50-60yrs old.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  If my home fire causes my neighbor's house to burn down and kills his kids, the damage is beyond calculation. If everyone on my block has shitty fire prone houses built to the edge of their property line with no exits, we have a city-wide disaster. This has happened many times all over the country before building codes. > Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. I don't want any F*ing insurance requirements.
centimeter 6y ago
The FHA prevented landowners from using peaceful, private strategies to keep poor people off their block (which a 100% rational desire), so obviously they are going to use coercive government-based strategies instead.
- malandrew 6y ago
  > which a 100% rational desire Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency. Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically. In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up. It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - didibus 6y ago
    Not all rationale solutions are effective or ethical. Something being rationale does not make it appropriate. Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it. So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that. Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.
    - 6y ago
treis 6y ago
>I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach. Increasing density has definite externalities. Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested. Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property. We do need some way of balancing those concerns with development. IMHO, we've swayed too far towards one extreme. We should relax those restrictions while being cognizant that we don't swing too far back to the other extreme.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  In the city I live in (somewhere in Europe), there are no such restrictions. Every time someone sells their house they split the terrain in two and rebuild because it's more advantageous price wise. As a result terrains got smaller and smaller, we used to have a beautiful city with old buildings, tons of trees, large gardens, a really calm and safe place to raise a family, now it looks like shit and crime has gotten out of control. Now they're building towers downtown for low income housing. Not a fun experience if you've built your life with your family there.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Areas where it is profitable to do this are areas where housing demand is increasing. Which means that anybody who owns property in such an area can sell it for more than they paid for it, move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble. And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it.
    - mertd 6y ago
      > And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it. Counterpoint Bay Area. Industry hotspot, liberally allows office development, aggressively fights any new residential develpment and also freezes property taxes at the time of purchase.
core-questions 6y ago
> the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this? It's not unreasonable for normal middle-class folks to not want to have to live in a problematic, crime-ridden, situation with high personal-security risks and property crime. That's why we pay for police, after all.
- truth__indulger 6y ago
  Wow, White Supremacist much? Defending one's home or property or feeling entitled to "Safety" from "Crime" is White Privilege.
  - metiscus 6y ago
    This comment seems like Poe's law at work.
  - gedy 6y ago
    It this sarcasm? Wanting safety from crime is now same level as KKK or Nazis?
- bluGill 6y ago
  There are a lot of poor people who are not criminals who don't like being lumped in with the criminals. Welcome them, and show by example how to live a better crime free life. Show that education is what made you able to afford fun things. Show that you aren't actually smarter, but a few life choices that they can point their kids to (as an adult it is often too late) can bring their kids to your level.
  - ccsnags 6y ago
    I’m Appalachian. We have ridiculously low violent crime rates for the levels of poverty we have. I believe that this is a function of population density rather than any intrinsic trait of us hilljacks. I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that. There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.
ajmurmann 6y ago
I understand that most cities also have restrictions like minimum unit size and requirements for every unit to have it's own bathroom and kitchen. In the past people who just started out and poor people had the option to rent such rooms and that way afford to live in urban areas and avoid a crazy commute. To make that work now you have to find roommates and take over a unit that wasn't meant for this use case. It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have
- war1025 6y ago
  The silly thing in my opinion is that college dormitories are exactly that type of housing. No kitchens, shared bathrooms. Works perfectly fine for housing large numbers of young people. Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Dorms have RAs, security officers, cleaning staff, food courts, university police, and a wrap of social services that can nudge a person slipping back into line, or send them packing quickly. Landlords, rightly, shouldn't be able to send people packing with little to no notice. Without the security, social services, and cleaning staff I expect any project of the same scale as a large University to catastrophically fail due to public outcry regarding the inevitable decay of living conditions. The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems? I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
    - 6y ago
zjaffee 6y ago
That's ridiculous, there are other reasons for zoning laws outside of these things. Certain types of housing stock (i.e. condos and townhomes), need to be built to a higher quality than single family homes because it's much easier to tear down and replace a single family home or a rental apartment building should it move into disrepair. Over the long run this very regularly leads to housing units where the maintenance costs are far higher than the mortgage payment. Multiplex homes also run a greater risk of falling into disrepair over the long term if you have a situation of split ownership. The solution to our housing crisis cannot be more "missing middle" it needs to be larger scale projects with 50+ units each with strict standards around building quality.
siruncledrew 6y ago
Wouldn't this also be a win for real estate developers and property investors? - Purchase old home or lot. - Tear down old structure. - Build new 4-plex or 6-plex. - Sell/Rent 4-6 units on a plot. Example: "ABC" owns rancher on a single plot. Rents out rancher for $4000/mo. Current revenue is $48000/yr. "ABC" turns rancher into modern 6-plex on the same plot. Rents out each of the 6 units for $2000/mo. New revenue is $144000/yr. Of course, capital required to build a new structure will erode returns for initial years, but as long as the demand to live in Portland is still high, it seems like a more profitable strategy longterm? Unless I am totally off-base with these assumptions.
- burkaman 6y ago
  Yes, that's one of the main goals. They are encouraging affordable 6-plexes in the hopes of making housing in the city more affordable. Note that there is a rent ceiling based on the area, you can't build a 6-plex and charge whatever you want.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Indeed, the 6 plex is not profitable for developers seeking a quick buck. That exception is meant for non profits who want to fund affordable housing.
- strstr 6y ago
  Benefitting developers is a consequence. They are the middle man for housing. You can't get housing without aiding them (at least not easily). If your goal is to avoid benefitting developers, you will have a hard time encouraging housing.
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  This is in fact one of the core criticisms of these sort of policies. The concern is that by increasing the allowed density on land, the underlying price of the land also subsequently increases. Accordingly the "value" that one gets for their dollar decreases. While before one may have paid 1.2M for an house and full lot, now suddenly 1.2M can't buy a full lot, but 900k can buy a 1000sqft apt part of that lot. There's an upside for someone that needed more room and could never afford a 1.2M house, or a renter that just wants more apt options, but there's a downside for someone who could afford an entire house but is now seeing the price of an entire house go up. All this being said, in practice it is arguable whether the land values do increase that much. The fact that these changes are being applied city wide at once may limit the effect.

rumanator 6y ago

> This is IMO the big thing here. Cities used to allow this kind of construction. And cities were awful due to that, I'm afraid. > Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use. There's no need to pull out emotional conspiracy theories. Restrictions are in general due to the need to impose an urban plan that meets the urban planner's established goals for the community and also complies with environmental restrictions, such as traffic and noise levels. > but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach. Letting people freely build "second buildings on their property" is an euphemism for wanting to build shanty towns with no regard to living conditions or environmental restrictions. Each plot is defined based on a zoning expectation,which reflects real-world restrictions and an urban plan. If you want higher density construction then just work with your city to rezone and review the urban plan for your neighborhood. Expecting to be able to just build "houses" in your backyard is how you get firetrap shanty towns that violate environmental and safety restrictions. Just because you don't know why a fence is placed somewhere, that doesn't mean it has no purpose.

37r6ehehediud 6y ago

I'm not sure this scans. It would be true if the only regulations that applied were the ones being discussed but Portland goes out of its way to avoid large apartment buildings in many neighborhoods and they have a vendetta against building roads that aren't shit for some reason. If you removed all relevant regulations you wouldn't see the kind of buildings the article is praising you'd see large apartment buildings and suburbs sprawling jnto the woods. Good on Portland for doing something about the situation I guess but it's hard to feel impressed when they created the problem in the first place.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 6y ago

> I understand regulations around keeping homes safe, drainage, and fire safety, Even these, IMO, are government overreach. Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. Then leave it up to the insurance company to decide what standards will lower your premium. One insurance company might decide "look at Switzerland - they have very safe houses. Build everything to Swiss regulations, and we'll give you a 90% discount on the insurance price". Over time, safety and environmental standards, as well as costs to meet them, will get much better much quicker than current layers of government bureaucracy. The insurance should also cover for things like environmental spills on your land, the cost of pulling the building down and making the site nature again if the insurance is ever not renewed, etc.

plasticchris 6y ago
If you are in a flood plain they do. I assume it's the same for the others. But drainage is really more about dealing with density. In the town/city poor drainage on my lot could flood my neighbors house. In the country there's enough space it's not an issue.
- abfan1127 6y ago
  flood plains are usually more to do with elevations. If all of my home's runoff goes to my neighbor, its just runoff now. If their home doesn't have drainage (proper grade, etc), then its getting flooded regardless of your drainage. Your drainage may make it worse, but the reality is that the damage is already done. This may apply for more recent builds rather than homes 50-60yrs old.
ogre_codes 6y ago
If my home fire causes my neighbor's house to burn down and kills his kids, the damage is beyond calculation. If everyone on my block has shitty fire prone houses built to the edge of their property line with no exits, we have a city-wide disaster. This has happened many times all over the country before building codes. > Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. I don't want any F*ing insurance requirements.

centimeter 6y ago

The FHA prevented landowners from using peaceful, private strategies to keep poor people off their block (which a 100% rational desire), so obviously they are going to use coercive government-based strategies instead.

malandrew 6y ago
> which a 100% rational desire Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency. Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically. In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up. It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- didibus 6y ago
  Not all rationale solutions are effective or ethical. Something being rationale does not make it appropriate. Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it. So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that. Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.
  - 6y ago

treis 6y ago

>I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach. Increasing density has definite externalities. Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested. Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property. We do need some way of balancing those concerns with development. IMHO, we've swayed too far towards one extreme. We should relax those restrictions while being cognizant that we don't swing too far back to the other extreme.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
In the city I live in (somewhere in Europe), there are no such restrictions. Every time someone sells their house they split the terrain in two and rebuild because it's more advantageous price wise. As a result terrains got smaller and smaller, we used to have a beautiful city with old buildings, tons of trees, large gardens, a really calm and safe place to raise a family, now it looks like shit and crime has gotten out of control. Now they're building towers downtown for low income housing. Not a fun experience if you've built your life with your family there.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Areas where it is profitable to do this are areas where housing demand is increasing. Which means that anybody who owns property in such an area can sell it for more than they paid for it, move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble. And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it.
  - mertd 6y ago
    > And the gain wouldn't exist with stricter zoning because it comes from the fact that your property is worth more when somebody can buy it and build twice as much housing on it. Counterpoint Bay Area. Industry hotspot, liberally allows office development, aggressively fights any new residential develpment and also freezes property taxes at the time of purchase.

core-questions 6y ago

> the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this? It's not unreasonable for normal middle-class folks to not want to have to live in a problematic, crime-ridden, situation with high personal-security risks and property crime. That's why we pay for police, after all.

truth__indulger 6y ago
Wow, White Supremacist much? Defending one's home or property or feeling entitled to "Safety" from "Crime" is White Privilege.
- metiscus 6y ago
  This comment seems like Poe's law at work.
- gedy 6y ago
  It this sarcasm? Wanting safety from crime is now same level as KKK or Nazis?
bluGill 6y ago
There are a lot of poor people who are not criminals who don't like being lumped in with the criminals. Welcome them, and show by example how to live a better crime free life. Show that education is what made you able to afford fun things. Show that you aren't actually smarter, but a few life choices that they can point their kids to (as an adult it is often too late) can bring their kids to your level.
- ccsnags 6y ago
  I’m Appalachian. We have ridiculously low violent crime rates for the levels of poverty we have. I believe that this is a function of population density rather than any intrinsic trait of us hilljacks. I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that. There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.

ajmurmann 6y ago

I understand that most cities also have restrictions like minimum unit size and requirements for every unit to have it's own bathroom and kitchen. In the past people who just started out and poor people had the option to rent such rooms and that way afford to live in urban areas and avoid a crazy commute. To make that work now you have to find roommates and take over a unit that wasn't meant for this use case. It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have

war1025 6y ago
The silly thing in my opinion is that college dormitories are exactly that type of housing. No kitchens, shared bathrooms. Works perfectly fine for housing large numbers of young people. Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Dorms have RAs, security officers, cleaning staff, food courts, university police, and a wrap of social services that can nudge a person slipping back into line, or send them packing quickly. Landlords, rightly, shouldn't be able to send people packing with little to no notice. Without the security, social services, and cleaning staff I expect any project of the same scale as a large University to catastrophically fail due to public outcry regarding the inevitable decay of living conditions. The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems? I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
  - 6y ago

zjaffee 6y ago

That's ridiculous, there are other reasons for zoning laws outside of these things. Certain types of housing stock (i.e. condos and townhomes), need to be built to a higher quality than single family homes because it's much easier to tear down and replace a single family home or a rental apartment building should it move into disrepair. Over the long run this very regularly leads to housing units where the maintenance costs are far higher than the mortgage payment. Multiplex homes also run a greater risk of falling into disrepair over the long term if you have a situation of split ownership. The solution to our housing crisis cannot be more "missing middle" it needs to be larger scale projects with 50+ units each with strict standards around building quality.

siruncledrew 6y ago

Wouldn't this also be a win for real estate developers and property investors? - Purchase old home or lot. - Tear down old structure. - Build new 4-plex or 6-plex. - Sell/Rent 4-6 units on a plot. Example: "ABC" owns rancher on a single plot. Rents out rancher for $4000/mo. Current revenue is $48000/yr. "ABC" turns rancher into modern 6-plex on the same plot. Rents out each of the 6 units for $2000/mo. New revenue is $144000/yr. Of course, capital required to build a new structure will erode returns for initial years, but as long as the demand to live in Portland is still high, it seems like a more profitable strategy longterm? Unless I am totally off-base with these assumptions.

burkaman 6y ago
Yes, that's one of the main goals. They are encouraging affordable 6-plexes in the hopes of making housing in the city more affordable. Note that there is a rent ceiling based on the area, you can't build a 6-plex and charge whatever you want.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Indeed, the 6 plex is not profitable for developers seeking a quick buck. That exception is meant for non profits who want to fund affordable housing.
strstr 6y ago
Benefitting developers is a consequence. They are the middle man for housing. You can't get housing without aiding them (at least not easily). If your goal is to avoid benefitting developers, you will have a hard time encouraging housing.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
This is in fact one of the core criticisms of these sort of policies. The concern is that by increasing the allowed density on land, the underlying price of the land also subsequently increases. Accordingly the "value" that one gets for their dollar decreases. While before one may have paid 1.2M for an house and full lot, now suddenly 1.2M can't buy a full lot, but 900k can buy a 1000sqft apt part of that lot. There's an upside for someone that needed more room and could never afford a 1.2M house, or a renter that just wants more apt options, but there's a downside for someone who could afford an entire house but is now seeing the price of an entire house go up. All this being said, in practice it is arguable whether the land values do increase that much. The fact that these changes are being applied city wide at once may limit the effect.