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In California, the only reason people can oppose new projects is because the government enables them to have a say in someone else's property. So you don't have

In California, the only reason people can oppose new projects is because the government enables them to have a say in someone else's property. So you don't have to force development, but you do have to remove NIMBY's ability to veto projects. That starts with reforming permitting processes and zoning regulations.

shuckles 6y ago
Single family zoning, though invented in Berkeley, is a national phenomenon.
lazide 6y ago
‘Having a say in someone else’s property’ is really ‘voters voting for the rules and laws they want’. As long as the rules benefit most people who vote, why would they want to change it? And right now, that is exactly what is happening - it isn’t changing because most people who vote are benefitting from it. It’s a pretty fundamental part of a democracy. Until either 1) more people who don’t benefit from the current rules change the rules through voting, or 2) some non-democratic (in the sense of not directly answerable to an election) institution such as the courts change some rules, or 3) someone manages to convince the voting bloc to vote against their interests and change the rules, it is what is is. All the handwringing about the situation is just hot air.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Of course the people who want to move in don't get a vote.
  - lazide 6y ago
    The renters do - but they often don’t vote. And realistically, would you want to be subject to the laws passed by someone who doesn’t live in your area? Even if they say they’d like to? It’s bad enough with things like federal marijuana laws vs state ones, and those don’t control where you can live or what gets built next to where you already do.
    - rcpt 6y ago
      They don't get a say until they live there. Future residents have zero representation.
      - lazide 6y ago
        So you’re saying people who don’t live in an area...... don’t get to vote on the laws in that area? What else do you propose should happen? Should California allow Texans to vote on state propositions? Should Marin county voters decide on who the Santa Clara County Sheriff is? Since they haven’t moved there, how could you even decide which hypothetical future residence county they were voting for or eligible in? Would I get to vote in Vail, CO because I’ve always wanted to move there? What if I decide that’s actually silly, and change my mind - are my prior votes now invalid? What if I have 10 different places on my want to move list?
        jandrese 6y ago
        I'm saying it's silly to say that it's the law is the reflection of the will of the people with regards to new residence when they have had no say in crafting the law.
        lazide 6y ago
        It explicitly is though - the reflection of the will of the people living there right now (or at least those of them that get out and vote, which definitely isn’t everyone, but what else can you do?). You seem to be trying to include the will of a hypothetical future set of people that may or may not arrive - practically though, how would that even work?
        rcpt 6y ago
        If we're going to make slippery slopes might as well slide both ways. Should city councils be able to craft their own interpretation of civil rights? Should HOAs be allowed to imprison and execute people?
- closeparen 6y ago
  San Francisco did not make a law about how much housing to have and then enforce it. It crafted a system of discretionary reviews, lawsuits, and other project-level activism that turns each building permit into its own little lawmaking exercise. A major pro-housing goal is to shift the system towards one that's more law-governed, where the requirements are written down in advance and a building that meets the requirements must be approved. The accusation "NIMBY" does not even properly apply to a consistent, principled stance against development (that would be BANANA). It applies to e.g. people who agree in principle that a city needs apartment buildings, but grab onto any straw they can find to block the actual apartment building proposed on their block. San Francisco offers very many of these straws. The democratic solution is to shift decision-making to larger polities (e.g. state government) where the balance of interests is different, where you can get people dealing with the system of housing in abstract rather than only about their own block. Scott Wiener has already had some successes with this approach and I think we will see more. See also several municipalities responding to the YIMBY push by eliminating their single-family zoning categories and allowing duplexes everywhere.
  - lazide 6y ago
    That system at city hall exists because the Mayor (elected) and Board of Supervisors (elected) wish it to be so, and they wish it to be so, so they stay elected. All the measures you’re talking about are about point #3 - talking about housing abstractly so they don’t notice how it will impact them on their block, for instance, or shifting the ‘balance of interest’ to state wide so they don’t/can’t connect the laws they are voting for to their local impact. It might work - locals will be angry when they figure it out though, and there will be a backlash. The reality is, if the people living in San Francisco wanted development, they’d get it. If they don’t, you can try to trick, cajol, force, or ignore them until you get development - but don’t expect them to go along quietly.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      This sort of “efficient markets” claim is fully general: you can use it to discourage any kind of activism. If voters wanted things to be a certain way, they would already be that way! In practice we’re seeing engagement from people who weren’t previously engaged. NIMBYs are more loud and tenacious than they are numerous. Also support from people who perhaps thought (and perhaps still think) that developers are kind of slimy, but are now weighing housing supply effects as well. None of this was happening when only project sponsors and reactionaries cared.
- pharke 6y ago
  Resorting to voting in legislation to force your neighbours and, on a broader scale, the rest of the municipality to conform to some arbitrary rules should be considered a failure. It means that whoever the concerned group of people are were unable or unwilling to negotiate a reasonable compromise that suits all parties and have fallen back to using force to get their own way, so to speak. I think this is at the heart of the exodus from California, there is no common good will towards resolving disputes equitably. Everything is decided at the ballot box and so everything becomes a divisive issue with close to half the population being on the losing end no matter what the result. It's not surprising that people would up stakes to get away from this.
  - lazide 6y ago
    If you are referring to the propositions as a failure of the state, I tend to agree. It’s also the only way to directly address other propositions (like Prop 13). One thing I’ve seen in full force with for instance Prop 19 (which rolled back some of the egregious prop 13 issues such as broadly inheritable grandfathered property taxes), is that the easily accessible descriptions were all (charitably) misleading marketing fluff to sell the majority of the public on significant impacts to taxation on property that they would almost certainly not have passed if they had known the implications - people were scrambling even in Jan/Feb to figure out what it even meant for inherited real property. In most cases, it means it doesn’t actually make sense to do anything but sell it now; which is a huge shift from before, and will cost many children of regular middle class families hundreds of thousands of dollars long term (but correspondingly give 100’s of billions to the state, and close loopholes related to some commercial property or large family landlords)

shuckles 6y ago

Single family zoning, though invented in Berkeley, is a national phenomenon.

lazide 6y ago

‘Having a say in someone else’s property’ is really ‘voters voting for the rules and laws they want’. As long as the rules benefit most people who vote, why would they want to change it? And right now, that is exactly what is happening - it isn’t changing because most people who vote are benefitting from it. It’s a pretty fundamental part of a democracy. Until either 1) more people who don’t benefit from the current rules change the rules through voting, or 2) some non-democratic (in the sense of not directly answerable to an election) institution such as the courts change some rules, or 3) someone manages to convince the voting bloc to vote against their interests and change the rules, it is what is is. All the handwringing about the situation is just hot air.

jandrese 6y ago
Of course the people who want to move in don't get a vote.
- lazide 6y ago
  The renters do - but they often don’t vote. And realistically, would you want to be subject to the laws passed by someone who doesn’t live in your area? Even if they say they’d like to? It’s bad enough with things like federal marijuana laws vs state ones, and those don’t control where you can live or what gets built next to where you already do.
  - rcpt 6y ago
    They don't get a say until they live there. Future residents have zero representation.
    - lazide 6y ago
      So you’re saying people who don’t live in an area...... don’t get to vote on the laws in that area? What else do you propose should happen? Should California allow Texans to vote on state propositions? Should Marin county voters decide on who the Santa Clara County Sheriff is? Since they haven’t moved there, how could you even decide which hypothetical future residence county they were voting for or eligible in? Would I get to vote in Vail, CO because I’ve always wanted to move there? What if I decide that’s actually silly, and change my mind - are my prior votes now invalid? What if I have 10 different places on my want to move list?
      - jandrese 6y ago
        I'm saying it's silly to say that it's the law is the reflection of the will of the people with regards to new residence when they have had no say in crafting the law.
        lazide 6y ago
        It explicitly is though - the reflection of the will of the people living there right now (or at least those of them that get out and vote, which definitely isn’t everyone, but what else can you do?). You seem to be trying to include the will of a hypothetical future set of people that may or may not arrive - practically though, how would that even work?
      - rcpt 6y ago
        If we're going to make slippery slopes might as well slide both ways. Should city councils be able to craft their own interpretation of civil rights? Should HOAs be allowed to imprison and execute people?
closeparen 6y ago
San Francisco did not make a law about how much housing to have and then enforce it. It crafted a system of discretionary reviews, lawsuits, and other project-level activism that turns each building permit into its own little lawmaking exercise. A major pro-housing goal is to shift the system towards one that's more law-governed, where the requirements are written down in advance and a building that meets the requirements must be approved. The accusation "NIMBY" does not even properly apply to a consistent, principled stance against development (that would be BANANA). It applies to e.g. people who agree in principle that a city needs apartment buildings, but grab onto any straw they can find to block the actual apartment building proposed on their block. San Francisco offers very many of these straws. The democratic solution is to shift decision-making to larger polities (e.g. state government) where the balance of interests is different, where you can get people dealing with the system of housing in abstract rather than only about their own block. Scott Wiener has already had some successes with this approach and I think we will see more. See also several municipalities responding to the YIMBY push by eliminating their single-family zoning categories and allowing duplexes everywhere.
- lazide 6y ago
  That system at city hall exists because the Mayor (elected) and Board of Supervisors (elected) wish it to be so, and they wish it to be so, so they stay elected. All the measures you’re talking about are about point #3 - talking about housing abstractly so they don’t notice how it will impact them on their block, for instance, or shifting the ‘balance of interest’ to state wide so they don’t/can’t connect the laws they are voting for to their local impact. It might work - locals will be angry when they figure it out though, and there will be a backlash. The reality is, if the people living in San Francisco wanted development, they’d get it. If they don’t, you can try to trick, cajol, force, or ignore them until you get development - but don’t expect them to go along quietly.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    This sort of “efficient markets” claim is fully general: you can use it to discourage any kind of activism. If voters wanted things to be a certain way, they would already be that way! In practice we’re seeing engagement from people who weren’t previously engaged. NIMBYs are more loud and tenacious than they are numerous. Also support from people who perhaps thought (and perhaps still think) that developers are kind of slimy, but are now weighing housing supply effects as well. None of this was happening when only project sponsors and reactionaries cared.
pharke 6y ago
Resorting to voting in legislation to force your neighbours and, on a broader scale, the rest of the municipality to conform to some arbitrary rules should be considered a failure. It means that whoever the concerned group of people are were unable or unwilling to negotiate a reasonable compromise that suits all parties and have fallen back to using force to get their own way, so to speak. I think this is at the heart of the exodus from California, there is no common good will towards resolving disputes equitably. Everything is decided at the ballot box and so everything becomes a divisive issue with close to half the population being on the losing end no matter what the result. It's not surprising that people would up stakes to get away from this.
- lazide 6y ago
  If you are referring to the propositions as a failure of the state, I tend to agree. It’s also the only way to directly address other propositions (like Prop 13). One thing I’ve seen in full force with for instance Prop 19 (which rolled back some of the egregious prop 13 issues such as broadly inheritable grandfathered property taxes), is that the easily accessible descriptions were all (charitably) misleading marketing fluff to sell the majority of the public on significant impacts to taxation on property that they would almost certainly not have passed if they had known the implications - people were scrambling even in Jan/Feb to figure out what it even meant for inherited real property. In most cases, it means it doesn’t actually make sense to do anything but sell it now; which is a huge shift from before, and will cost many children of regular middle class families hundreds of thousands of dollars long term (but correspondingly give 100’s of billions to the state, and close loopholes related to some commercial property or large family landlords)