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Unfortunately (for you), your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people who want to live there by proh

Unfortunately (for you), your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people who want to live there by prohibiting the construction of homes for them. Do you value your quiet suburban neighborhood enough to buy and pay property taxes on the whole block or subdivision? If not, I recommend you look for estates on acreage in remote areas.

majormajor 6y ago
You could reframe the opposition as "your money shouldn't mean you can just come into our area and remake it however you want." Neither side is purely unsympathetic here.
- shuckles 6y ago
  Was one’s single family home a naturally occurring building? What gave one the right to build it? Your both sides argument sounds plausible but it’s not-sensical.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    That's sorta just how private property works. At some point, land was unowned, structures were unbuilt, etc. Ever since then, we've put the "rights" in the hands of the current owners and/or the government they live under... Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      And who was compensated when those rights were taken away from property owners by the invention of zoning in the early 1900s and down zoning in the mid 1900s? In addition, you are confusing owning a particular plot of land with rights over all neighboring plots. The latter is distinctly not your private property.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        Yes, that's where the government aspect comes in. But again, what you decry as "non-sensical" instead seems like it could also just be called "response of a community towards potential market failure modes." You are ascribing moral blame to just one side of a more complicated situation. It would be like if all I was talking about is how big developers bribe local governments to get permits to build their shit - neither side is blameless, both sides are understandable, there isn't a clear easy answer to "reduce harm."
        shuckles 6y ago
        I really don't understand your both sides argument. One side takes advantage of the fact that zoning is a local matter to advantage incumbents at huge expense to society at large. It also creates the bureaucratic infrastructure that favors large developers who can pay bribes informally (literal bribes) or formally (impact fees). The other side is all future residents who might want to live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and "commute til they qualify." How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on it. This was legal until very recently in our history. How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
        majormajor 6y ago
        If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family homes, and why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of minds to change! Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin. Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want. I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want. Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?
lisper 6y ago
> your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
- shuckles 6y ago
  Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality pretty well here: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be. Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.
  - lisper 6y ago
    > low-crime (usually coded as "quiet") In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra, literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace quiet". > Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
zepto 6y ago
“immiserate other people who want to live there“ Perhaps true, but what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks? Why do you not recommend those people to look for acreage in remote areas?
- shuckles 6y ago
  Building apartments is not a pox on a community. In fact, the most valuable real estate on the planet has lots of apartments. And are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
  - lazide 6y ago
    And what right do they have to impose on others to change and take damaging consequences so they can be happier or their life easier without compensating them for it?
    - shuckles 6y ago
      Views are not protected and neither is zoning. If you want to have the right to exclude apartments from a neighborhood, go ahead and buy all the land. I’d be surprised if single family zoning survived a legal challenge.
      - lazide 6y ago
        What are you talking about exactly?
  - zepto 6y ago
    > Building apartments is not a pox on a community. This is an opinion which is not universally agreed with. > are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community? No. If you look at the comment you are replying to, you’ll see that the question I asked was: > what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
AdrianB1 6y ago
Using your logic, you should never immiserate people that want to live in your house, maybe even in your bed just because you think you paid for it. Wanting to live in a place that is already occupied does not give the right to force people there to rebuild their houses into high density places. There is a lot of free land in that country where people can build skyscrapers with millions of cheap, small living pods inside.
- shuckles 6y ago
  I didn't make a single claim about coercing owners of private property. In fact, I ended by saying that if you want to maintain total control, you should go ahead and buy the neighborhoods you want to prevent from changing!
lazide 6y ago
He isn’t- but if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is! It’s not their responsibility - not anyone’s! - to take a shot in the nuts so someone else can be happy, despite any guilt tripping.
- shuckles 6y ago
  This only works if you slice and dice the polity. Who says zoning in the Bay Area should be decided by current residents? The super commuter service workers from Modesto should certainly have a say. So should the families displaced to Phoenix or Las Vegas. In addition, it is not a fair characterization to describe apartment buildings as "a shot in the nuts."
  - lazide 6y ago
    Why should Modesto have a say in what gets built in San Francisco? I’m pretty sure the folks in Modesto would be pretty pissed if San Francisco was dictating building rules to them! And Phoenix or Las Vegas aren’t even in the same states or legal jurisdictions. If you told them San Francisco was going to be able to tell them what to build or how, you’d just get laughed at. If you think building a high density apartment complex in the middle of a single family zoned subdivision against the residents wishes wouldn’t be taken as a ‘shot to the nuts’ of someone who had bought and lived there for years, you probably don’t know too many people who have? Fair or not, you can’t walk in and dictate to someone in that situation how they are going to take it, or what is reasonable and expect anything but well deserved anger.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      1. The people in Modesto are pissed! San Francisco’s housing prices have been spilling over into their city for years! And San Francisco imports almost its entire population’s worth of people during the day to work in and contribute payroll taxes to the city. It’s not the great argument you think it is to claim that none of these people have a stake in its land use. Additionally, Nevada and Arizona share a jurisdiction with California: the United States of America. The state is already taking land use out of city hands through SB35 et al., and this will only become more acute as each city loses credibility as a good faith actor. The federal government also dictates what can be built through mortgage policy. The subdivision itself was a policy invention to make it easy to guarantee federal mortgages. 2. Most residents do not give a crap about apartment buildings. Surveys prove this over and over. SB50, an upzoning bill, polled quite well with the general population. The ones who do will quickly get over themselves when it becomes clear that apartments aren’t a “shot to the nuts.” Honestly, this sentiment is extremely weird and endemic to America; most countries with great standards of living manage to live in varied urban topologies just fine.
xkcd-sucks 6y ago
By the same token, nobody living in a residential neighborhood should oppose construction of an oil refinery in it - The industry would contribute tax revenue, jobs etc. to the community and opposition based on nebulous "quality of life" concerns is selfish
- shuckles 6y ago
  Residential land is far too valuable for someone to ever propose an oil refinery or manufacturing on it. The separation between industrial uses and residential uses were already underway before residential zoning was invented, and there is no reason to believe single family residential - which is a particular and extremely restrictive form of residential zoning - is necessary to enforce this kind of basic planning distinction.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  There's a big difference between a power substation and an oil refinery. And depending on how that substation was built and the decisions made it can really negatively impact someone's use of their property. In my case the substation our PUD built across the street involved denuding the entire area of trees. This is mainly a problem because the freeway is right behind the trees they removed. So removing the trees made our front yard very difficult to inhabit for long periods of time because it's so loud. I'm not the only person affected either. And I wouldn't object had they built any kind of sound isolation. I wouldn't object to an oil refinery either if they can guarantee they won't suddenly explode and kill me while I sleep. The fact remains that we all have to be good neighbors to each other, and that cuts both ways.

majormajor 6y ago

You could reframe the opposition as "your money shouldn't mean you can just come into our area and remake it however you want." Neither side is purely unsympathetic here.

shuckles 6y ago
Was one’s single family home a naturally occurring building? What gave one the right to build it? Your both sides argument sounds plausible but it’s not-sensical.
- majormajor 6y ago
  That's sorta just how private property works. At some point, land was unowned, structures were unbuilt, etc. Ever since then, we've put the "rights" in the hands of the current owners and/or the government they live under... Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    And who was compensated when those rights were taken away from property owners by the invention of zoning in the early 1900s and down zoning in the mid 1900s? In addition, you are confusing owning a particular plot of land with rights over all neighboring plots. The latter is distinctly not your private property.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      Yes, that's where the government aspect comes in. But again, what you decry as "non-sensical" instead seems like it could also just be called "response of a community towards potential market failure modes." You are ascribing moral blame to just one side of a more complicated situation. It would be like if all I was talking about is how big developers bribe local governments to get permits to build their shit - neither side is blameless, both sides are understandable, there isn't a clear easy answer to "reduce harm."
      - shuckles 6y ago
        I really don't understand your both sides argument. One side takes advantage of the fact that zoning is a local matter to advantage incumbents at huge expense to society at large. It also creates the bureaucratic infrastructure that favors large developers who can pay bribes informally (literal bribes) or formally (impact fees). The other side is all future residents who might want to live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and "commute til they qualify." How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on it. This was legal until very recently in our history. How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
        majormajor 6y ago
        If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family homes, and why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of minds to change! Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin. Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want. I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want. Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?

lisper 6y ago

> your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)

shuckles 6y ago
Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality pretty well here: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be. Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.
- lisper 6y ago
  > low-crime (usually coded as "quiet") In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra, literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace quiet". > Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.

zepto 6y ago

“immiserate other people who want to live there“ Perhaps true, but what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks? Why do you not recommend those people to look for acreage in remote areas?

shuckles 6y ago
Building apartments is not a pox on a community. In fact, the most valuable real estate on the planet has lots of apartments. And are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
- lazide 6y ago
  And what right do they have to impose on others to change and take damaging consequences so they can be happier or their life easier without compensating them for it?
  - shuckles 6y ago
    Views are not protected and neither is zoning. If you want to have the right to exclude apartments from a neighborhood, go ahead and buy all the land. I’d be surprised if single family zoning survived a legal challenge.
    - lazide 6y ago
      What are you talking about exactly?
- zepto 6y ago
  > Building apartments is not a pox on a community. This is an opinion which is not universally agreed with. > are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community? No. If you look at the comment you are replying to, you’ll see that the question I asked was: > what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?

AdrianB1 6y ago

Using your logic, you should never immiserate people that want to live in your house, maybe even in your bed just because you think you paid for it. Wanting to live in a place that is already occupied does not give the right to force people there to rebuild their houses into high density places. There is a lot of free land in that country where people can build skyscrapers with millions of cheap, small living pods inside.

shuckles 6y ago
I didn't make a single claim about coercing owners of private property. In fact, I ended by saying that if you want to maintain total control, you should go ahead and buy the neighborhoods you want to prevent from changing!

lazide 6y ago

He isn’t- but if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is! It’s not their responsibility - not anyone’s! - to take a shot in the nuts so someone else can be happy, despite any guilt tripping.

shuckles 6y ago
This only works if you slice and dice the polity. Who says zoning in the Bay Area should be decided by current residents? The super commuter service workers from Modesto should certainly have a say. So should the families displaced to Phoenix or Las Vegas. In addition, it is not a fair characterization to describe apartment buildings as "a shot in the nuts."
- lazide 6y ago
  Why should Modesto have a say in what gets built in San Francisco? I’m pretty sure the folks in Modesto would be pretty pissed if San Francisco was dictating building rules to them! And Phoenix or Las Vegas aren’t even in the same states or legal jurisdictions. If you told them San Francisco was going to be able to tell them what to build or how, you’d just get laughed at. If you think building a high density apartment complex in the middle of a single family zoned subdivision against the residents wishes wouldn’t be taken as a ‘shot to the nuts’ of someone who had bought and lived there for years, you probably don’t know too many people who have? Fair or not, you can’t walk in and dictate to someone in that situation how they are going to take it, or what is reasonable and expect anything but well deserved anger.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    1. The people in Modesto are pissed! San Francisco’s housing prices have been spilling over into their city for years! And San Francisco imports almost its entire population’s worth of people during the day to work in and contribute payroll taxes to the city. It’s not the great argument you think it is to claim that none of these people have a stake in its land use. Additionally, Nevada and Arizona share a jurisdiction with California: the United States of America. The state is already taking land use out of city hands through SB35 et al., and this will only become more acute as each city loses credibility as a good faith actor. The federal government also dictates what can be built through mortgage policy. The subdivision itself was a policy invention to make it easy to guarantee federal mortgages. 2. Most residents do not give a crap about apartment buildings. Surveys prove this over and over. SB50, an upzoning bill, polled quite well with the general population. The ones who do will quickly get over themselves when it becomes clear that apartments aren’t a “shot to the nuts.” Honestly, this sentiment is extremely weird and endemic to America; most countries with great standards of living manage to live in varied urban topologies just fine.

xkcd-sucks 6y ago

By the same token, nobody living in a residential neighborhood should oppose construction of an oil refinery in it - The industry would contribute tax revenue, jobs etc. to the community and opposition based on nebulous "quality of life" concerns is selfish

shuckles 6y ago
Residential land is far too valuable for someone to ever propose an oil refinery or manufacturing on it. The separation between industrial uses and residential uses were already underway before residential zoning was invented, and there is no reason to believe single family residential - which is a particular and extremely restrictive form of residential zoning - is necessary to enforce this kind of basic planning distinction.
jschwartzi 6y ago
There's a big difference between a power substation and an oil refinery. And depending on how that substation was built and the decisions made it can really negatively impact someone's use of their property. In my case the substation our PUD built across the street involved denuding the entire area of trees. This is mainly a problem because the freeway is right behind the trees they removed. So removing the trees made our front yard very difficult to inhabit for long periods of time because it's so loud. I'm not the only person affected either. And I wouldn't object had they built any kind of sound isolation. I wouldn't object to an oil refinery either if they can guarantee they won't suddenly explode and kill me while I sleep. The fact remains that we all have to be good neighbors to each other, and that cuts both ways.