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Startup cities and the housing crisis: the only way out is up

50 points by jseliger 5y ago

jdhn 5y ago
>Instead, a bundle of new innovations in mass coordination, remote work, and digital currency allow us to sidestep politics and create independent and competitive cities. I'm what you could call bullish on bitcoin, but I'm not sure how it applies here? It has less friction than dealing with bank transfers between countries, but the article specifically deals with the US, not international housing issues.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Tax evasion? Paying employees without having to deal with the bureaucracy of the state/country they're living in by doing it on the black market?
  - samstave 5y ago
    How exactly does a company generate bitcoin from witch to pay employees from? Assume a company, now they want to pay people in BTC. how get BTC to pay employee - and what methods are used to accomplish. ELI5
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Sell their products and services for btc or buy it with the local currency?
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Even I've heard of exchanges.
- simmanian 5y ago
  I may not be very bullish on bitcoin but I can see that properly implemented digital currencies can allow communities to form much more easily and organically through increased transparency and verifiability. Not to mention that digital currencies can be integrated into many interactions and transactions natively.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency doesn't free companies or individuals from their legal obligations. Paying someone in crypto doesn't mean they don't owe taxes or that the company doesn't have to comply with relevant laws. If anything, paying employees in crypto adds more layers of accounting, administration overhead, and legal work. Distributing payroll money isn't a bottleneck for city growth, so I don't know why this author tried to wedge it into this article.
- CaptainZapp 5y ago
  > It has less friction than dealing with bank transfers between countries I'd wager that you're wrong. At least in transfers between most European countries.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  A lot of the cryptocurrency space is exploring different modes of “governance” today. In the sense of “I have this project which exists on Ethereum, the ecosystem is beginning to build up around it, and I know we’ll have to make changes to the project down the road as the environment changes: how do I discover what will be best for the project, how do I announce those decisions legitimately, and how do I fund the new resulting work?”. I’m wondering if the author was referring to this use of cryptocurrencies. It’s sad, but a lot of these cryptocurrency projects have implemented much more transparent and frictionless forms of voting than what we have in representative democracies today. You don’t have to search out and then show up to some hours-long meeting about a new construction project: there’s just a public vote, with attached forums for the discussion aspect. Pull up the front governance page and you can see every proposal currently up for vote, and every historical proposal. It’s all there, easily accessible. If a new city were born which achieved any similar degree of transparency/low friction in their direct governance, I would seriously consider moving to it. There are lots of “if”s there, but LOADS of our problems in cities amount to misaligned incentives, such that they would disappear if only we got the right incentives in place (e.g. NIMBY policies benefit existing high-networth homeowners at the cost of more vulnerable/younger renters. There are ways to balance things such that NIMBYism at least isn’t an economically profitable position to take). Experimentation is the way to discover better incentives, and strong governance is the way to enact/enforce those. Today every city in the country almost universally uses a paper-based representative government. There’s such little experimentation in the physical world at that level that you’d either have to believe that a) we’ve already found & enacted the most effective form of governance or b) there are undiscovered systems which could better meet the needs of modern-day citizens. My money’s on b. And though b doesn’t need cryptocurrency, today’s cryptocurrencies are capable/flexible enough that they could be slotted in for such a purpose far easier than anything else, so why not use them.
baron816 5y ago
Submitted this earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395148 A few big names are working to create a totally new city in the US, which they hope will eventually growth to a population of 5 million. Here’s their teaser site https://cityoftelosa.com/ https://cityoftelosa.com/
- ghaff 5y ago
  Eh. So basically create an an arcology somewhere that doesn't really have a current population--like in a desert somewhere--for pretty much people who can work remotely. Sounds like a big bet and doesn't sound especially attractive as a potential resident in a planned community.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  > What is equitism? > An economic system in which citizens have a stake in the city’s land – as the city does better, the residents do better. I think they’ve got half of this right: the city should own most of the land for the purpose of coordination. But I didn’t see anything indicating that citizens have any stake in the city’s land. Did they mean it literally? Like a requirement of citizenship is to purchase a share in the underlying land? Probably not. Anyway, I like that they’re exploring that half, at least. But the amount they couch on the details isn’t encouraging to me. Especially in the governance section, they didn’t say anything about citizens actually having any voting power — only “input” into city council discussions, which usually means you’re free to say things but you’ll just be ignored. If this whole thing revolves around some benevolent dictatorship then that’s nothing I want to be a part of.
zz865 5y ago
Sure the only way out is to encourage locations in areas which are seeing falling populations, or have space. You can buy a nice family house in the mid West or the South for a tenth of the price of SV. We shouldn't be doing anything to allow more people in California with climate change reducing the water supply even more.
- brownman332 5y ago
  Perhaps if the midwest or South were more tolerant of colored folks, you'd get more people venturing out there. For those not familiar with regional US politics and racism: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020/ https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/texas-republicans-pass-long-delayed-voter-suppression-bill.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/texas-republicans-pa... Until then, i'll stay on the coasts, thank you. And you dont get to decided if I should or shouldn't live somewhere.
  - staysafeanon 5y ago
    >Perhaps if the midwest or South were more tolerant of colored folks, you'd get more people venturing out there. Perhaps if you cared about the facts, you wouldn't make such blatantly false claims. "[Black] College graduates and middle-class migrants make up a major portion of the new migration. For instance, from 1965–2000, the states of Florida, Georgia, and Texas attracted the most black college graduates. The only state outside the former Confederacy that attracted a sizeable migration of black college graduates was Maryland, most of the population growth being in the counties surrounding Washington, D.C. In that same period, California was a net loser of black migration for the first time in three decades."[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
- ryan93 5y ago
  If california cut alfafa production in half they could support many millions of additional residents
- throw8383833jj 5y ago
seph-reed 5y ago
They show this cycle infographic in the article: https://profectusmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tabrrok5.jpg https://profectusmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tabrrok5... I think one very, very crucial but taken for granted aspect of this cycle is "Natural population growth occurs." It's stated as though this is inherent, and should be considered immutable. I disagree, and think that population growing beyond its capacity is not a symptom of capacity so much as growth. When I gain weight, I don't blame my jeans for not fitting.
zip1234 5y ago
We don't even have to build up that much to add a lot more housing. If San Francisco was the density of Paris, it would have over twice as many people and most of Paris has 5-7 story buildings tops.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Parts of the city have very different densities. I wonder how individual neighborhoods stack up as I suspect the sprawl in the Sunset, Presidio, and parts of the Marina, and various industrial sections are what bring down the averages.
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
    Mission is the densest after ~downtown. Main drags and outskirts are switching to 4+1 (progress!) but most of it remains 2-3. So even there, still a lot possible well before skyscrapers. Though rent control is double edged: needed to keep folks housed, but also prevents rebuilding. Interestingly, mission bay ucsf campus made a bunch of big buildings, so would seem consistent to add corresponding housing. Though expensive/dangerous..
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Yeah so Mission and Downtown both have densities greater than the mean Paris population density. Certainly improving density in the outer boroughs is probably a smarter decision but those areas also aren’t where SF builds the larger buildings and likely where the NYMBism will be strongest.
- acchow 5y ago
  How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? What would this process even look like? How do you get homeowners to do this and who would pay for it? Where would we even get the engineering and construction expertise to do this? You would call an endeavor like this not building “that much”?
  - 5y ago
annoyingnoob 5y ago
I bought my house new in 2010. As long as they were still building out the neighborhood the value of my home was capped at something slightly less than the new units. Once the building stopped the values started going up. I have a single family home. Now they are building apartments and condos nearby in large buildings - those units sell for more than I paid for a single family home in 2010. The fact that they are selling apartments for so much really drove up the value of my home. The inventory of expensive units did more for my home value than anything. Not sure my experience squares well with this article.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  They were simply selling apartments at market price. You fundamentally cannot increase the price of a good by selling it. What's more likely is that housing prices in your area have gone up so much that even apartments are now more expensive than what you originally paid. If there had been sufficient supply built in the market then prices wouldn't be so high. China has solved this problem by telling NIMBYs to fuck off and just confiscating their property to be redeveloped. I don't see why upzoning can somehow be considered bad.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    There has been continuous building in my area for at least 15 years. Many of those expensive apartments and condos are not selling fast because they need to find the right buyer.
bhalina 5y ago
As long as they build startup cities in climate-safe areas (hint: not Miami). https://inspiredhumans.pub/what-is-a-startup-city-796f1c02f172 https://inspiredhumans.pub/what-is-a-startup-city-796f1c02f1...
Barrin92 5y ago
I see these charter city posts pop up with some frequency now but I really want to know how this differs from the utopian city failures of the 20th century except that we've bolted more tech on it The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics. It's just the same dream that any anarchist commune has suffered from. Works okay if you're in a Kibbutz in Israel, doesn't work when you have a million people. These startup cities always describe their policy solutions in consumer terms. 'Come here and you get yimby-ism and social services and x, y and z'. Okay what if the good people of your city turn into nimbies though? Do they have a say? If not how's anyone going to stop them, police with batons? Police you curiously enough never see on any of the concept art of all the diverse, young people sitting in front of modernist coffee shops, which is weird because I have to assume the city has some.
- mediaman 5y ago
  Part of the idea is that this is self-sorting. NIMBYs are likely not going to move a city built on the foundation of density and easy permitting. Just like people who hate hot climates don't move to Phoenix. Build certain zoning policies into the city's charter that is hard to change. If NIMBYs move in, then - no, they don't get to change the charter with a simple majority.
  - shados 5y ago
    This. The reality is that finding a home you like is hard. You'll research neighborhoods, city policies, construction projects in the area, what the neighbors are like, what internet is available, taxes, etc. Then you find a place that matches your needs and you move it. That's time consuming, difficult and stressful, especially if you're buying the home. It's also time consuming and difficult to get out, especially across long distances. So once people are in, ANY change is problematic. Increased density and construction is the common case these days because that's what we need, but the same would happen in reverse. If NYC's mayor said they were going to eminent domain the whole place to make it a low density suburb, even the people who get to keep their homes would lose their shit. You don't live in Manhattan because you want a big yard for your 6 dogs and 3 chickens. When it comes to housing, any kind of change is hard. So if you start from scratch, there's not much problems.
endisneigh 5y ago
Zone all housing in the United States such that two and three families can be built anywhere a single family house stands and all housing problems will be resolved within a decade. It's that simple.
- wingineer 5y ago
  Or simpler: remove all zoning restrictions.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    that would also do it, but it's politically more difficult
  - rcpt 5y ago
    Seriously. Here in Long Beach we have honest-to-god oil derricks right in the middle of our neighborhoods and even on some school campuses. This is despite some of the most restrictive zoning laws one can imagine. If we're not stopping the heaviest of heavy industry from setting up shop right nextdoor then it's pretty obvious that zoning is nothing more than regressive rent seeking from property investors.
    - kyleee 5y ago
      Do they let you start a new oil rig these days or are all those somehow grandfathered in?
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  ..or quit importing so many people.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I highly doubt it would be that easy. Do people want multifamily dwellings in these rich areas with this problem? It seems many people making that sort of money want single family homes that can own.
helen___keller 5y ago
> The housing crisis won’t be solved by electing new city council members in old cities alone. The incentives for incumbent homeowners to restrict the supply of new housing are too strong. The bigger problem is that zoning law is created at the state level and then applied by each municipality, but housing prices are related to the housing stock of a metropolitan region of many municipalities. For every expensive city that is (relatively) developer friendly (say Cambridge MA or Boston MA, which both grew population by over 10% in the past decade) there is a ring of NIMBY inner suburbans like Newton MA, Arlington MA, Weston MA, who viciously oppose even a single apartment building[0]. [0] https://www.preserveweston.org/the-weston-whopper/ https://www.preserveweston.org/the-weston-whopper/
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Do most states have statewide zoning? Or did you mean to say “not created at the state level”?
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    my understanding is states determine zoning laws, which municipalities apply. For example, MA state zoning law determines that cities and towns need a supermajority vote to change their zoning plan, so it's usually politically infeasible for cities and towns to change their zoning except as maybe the occasional once-in-a-generation thing. As a result, most development around here happens through zoning variances, which have to be approved by the local zoning board and are subject to all sorts of hearings and generally get very held up compared to by-right zoning.
- shados 5y ago
  > there is a ring of NIMBY inner suburbans Which makes sense when you think about it. Imagine you live in Boston, and things are changing and being built up. You don't like it. People tell you "If you don't like it, leave". You're like "Ok" and move to Arlington. Fast-forward and the same thing happens again. You're gonna push back, because the whole reason you were there was to avoid it. Sometimes I feel like having longer term planning would help. It wouldn't help with the problem today, but if I knew that in 10 years there would be skyscrapers across the street, I could decide if I'm ok with it or not and leave if the latter. Sure, my property value would probably go down somewhat, but I wouldn't wake up on a Monday to the project starting.
m0llusk 5y ago
> The incumbent interests in cities like New York and San Francisco are so entrenched that the battle for housing deregulation is hopeless when fought with politics. This is an extremely bold statement. So far it has been difficult to make change, but consensus that there is a serious problem is relatively new and there have been some improvements. Recently in San Francisco a developer proposed a smaller building than possible in order to appease neighborhood concerns. When neighbors came out in opposition the developer changed to plans for a maximally large building and by new rules had no need of neighborhood approval. Even more dramatic changes to zoning have been proposed and come close to passing. Berkeley is now allowing four units where single family homes now stand. So there is significant progress and a change in the political balance. > If these regulations are so costly, why were they passed in the first place? The answer lies not in the aggregate cost-benefit calculation of land use regulations, but rather in the analysis of who pays the costs and who garners the benefits. This is absolutely wrong and critical to understanding the situation. Building codes and ordinances and environmental hearings were all put in place with the intention of functioning as reasonable restrictions to preserve quality of life. The idea was this would be similar to rules about clean air and water. The problems we see now developed slowly over time and have many contributing factors including social and organizational inertia and of course classism and racism and such like. What we need to do is understand how to preserve some basic level of quality of life without unreasonably impacting ability to build, especially in areas that are already dense or have unusual demand. We are increasingly in a time where young people who are underserved by housing markets are getting political influence while older property owning boomers are seeing their influence steadily reduced. > There are three stages to the Startup City. There are no such stages or Startup Cities. Cities are social and commercial constructions which are not wild bets on fast growth that can readily fail and be replaced. Cities have an absolute obligation to move forward carefully while they balance land use concerns, forms of taxation, and costs of labor and so on. > poorly managed cities like San Francisco or Jakarta ... > Próspera, a private city in Honduras ... Now that is all just sloppy. It takes only a small effort to confirm that these cities are in very different locations and contexts and have different strengths, weaknesses, resources, priorities, and so on.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
giantg2 5y ago
Frankly, I don't see this as actually happening. It would require people and companies to leave those existing HCOL cities - something they could do right now and move to any number of communities, but choose not to. How is this different?
xyzzy21 5y ago
Or "Out"...
tibiahurried 5y ago
I keep saying: do you wanna solve the house crisis for good? Make it so houses cannot be used as mean of investment. See Denmark. A foreigner can't just buy houses there. You have to live and work there. For as long as wealthy people and funds keep buying all the houses and rent them out, you are never going to solve the problem. Never, ever.
- huo 5y ago
  quick question for you, would that be a good or bad outcome for people who already own homes, in the short-term?
  - _flagged_ 5y ago
    Depends if they have children.
  - yhoneycomb 5y ago
    good for everyone
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Agreed. By definition a "good investment" goes up more than inflation. Do you want houses to keep going up more than inflation? If no, then they can't be a "good investment". The crazy thing here is people complain about their economy slumping. Imagine what would happen if we didn't have all this money going into houses... the money won't disappear. It will go somewhere in search of "good investment".
  - mchusma 5y ago
    Agree with this. You can want housing to be affordable or a good investment. It basically can't be both.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    People stuff money into bricks and mortar precisely because they consider other investments even worse. There isn't a great deal of optimism in the market right now, which contributes to the slump. People are being defensive. Looking at my own country, I cannot really pinpoint any single corporation I would trust to grow a lot in the 20s. Peeerhaps Avast, maybe. And looking at the recent Chinese governmental heavy-handed social engineering and crackdowns, I expect rich Chinese to start investing their money outside China even more furiously than until today.
magwa101 5y ago
I clicked through to the cities that are advertising for remote workers. Going from Cali to any of those states and the politics are shocking. Check out Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas.
dangs_penis 5y ago
HackerNews is an experiment.
magwa101 5y ago
This pov really smacks of libertarianism. "Government can't do it but we can"...chart, chart, etc. conclusion "Look!". The fact is small towns, cities, countries will not be able to afford climate change. Only a central national authority can, and in some cases, a larger authority (like an EU) will be required: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/climate-towns-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/climate-towns-ban...
logicalmonster 5y ago
Always remember the law of unintended consequences. Solving one problem by “building up” might create an endless variety of new quality of life issues. Take it from a current city-dweller, living in a dense concrete jungle can be a miserable, soul-crushing existence that’s a particularly horrendous place for raising children.

50 points by jseliger 5y ago

jdhn 5y ago

>Instead, a bundle of new innovations in mass coordination, remote work, and digital currency allow us to sidestep politics and create independent and competitive cities. I'm what you could call bullish on bitcoin, but I'm not sure how it applies here? It has less friction than dealing with bank transfers between countries, but the article specifically deals with the US, not international housing issues.

pjc50 5y ago
Tax evasion? Paying employees without having to deal with the bureaucracy of the state/country they're living in by doing it on the black market?
- samstave 5y ago
  How exactly does a company generate bitcoin from witch to pay employees from? Assume a company, now they want to pay people in BTC. how get BTC to pay employee - and what methods are used to accomplish. ELI5
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Sell their products and services for btc or buy it with the local currency?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Even I've heard of exchanges.
simmanian 5y ago
I may not be very bullish on bitcoin but I can see that properly implemented digital currencies can allow communities to form much more easily and organically through increased transparency and verifiability. Not to mention that digital currencies can be integrated into many interactions and transactions natively.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Cryptocurrency doesn't free companies or individuals from their legal obligations. Paying someone in crypto doesn't mean they don't owe taxes or that the company doesn't have to comply with relevant laws. If anything, paying employees in crypto adds more layers of accounting, administration overhead, and legal work. Distributing payroll money isn't a bottleneck for city growth, so I don't know why this author tried to wedge it into this article.
CaptainZapp 5y ago
> It has less friction than dealing with bank transfers between countries I'd wager that you're wrong. At least in transfers between most European countries.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
wallacoloo 5y ago
A lot of the cryptocurrency space is exploring different modes of “governance” today. In the sense of “I have this project which exists on Ethereum, the ecosystem is beginning to build up around it, and I know we’ll have to make changes to the project down the road as the environment changes: how do I discover what will be best for the project, how do I announce those decisions legitimately, and how do I fund the new resulting work?”. I’m wondering if the author was referring to this use of cryptocurrencies. It’s sad, but a lot of these cryptocurrency projects have implemented much more transparent and frictionless forms of voting than what we have in representative democracies today. You don’t have to search out and then show up to some hours-long meeting about a new construction project: there’s just a public vote, with attached forums for the discussion aspect. Pull up the front governance page and you can see every proposal currently up for vote, and every historical proposal. It’s all there, easily accessible. If a new city were born which achieved any similar degree of transparency/low friction in their direct governance, I would seriously consider moving to it. There are lots of “if”s there, but LOADS of our problems in cities amount to misaligned incentives, such that they would disappear if only we got the right incentives in place (e.g. NIMBY policies benefit existing high-networth homeowners at the cost of more vulnerable/younger renters. There are ways to balance things such that NIMBYism at least isn’t an economically profitable position to take). Experimentation is the way to discover better incentives, and strong governance is the way to enact/enforce those. Today every city in the country almost universally uses a paper-based representative government. There’s such little experimentation in the physical world at that level that you’d either have to believe that a) we’ve already found & enacted the most effective form of governance or b) there are undiscovered systems which could better meet the needs of modern-day citizens. My money’s on b. And though b doesn’t need cryptocurrency, today’s cryptocurrencies are capable/flexible enough that they could be slotted in for such a purpose far easier than anything else, so why not use them.

baron816 5y ago

Submitted this earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395148 A few big names are working to create a totally new city in the US, which they hope will eventually growth to a population of 5 million. Here’s their teaser site https://cityoftelosa.com/ https://cityoftelosa.com/

ghaff 5y ago
Eh. So basically create an an arcology somewhere that doesn't really have a current population--like in a desert somewhere--for pretty much people who can work remotely. Sounds like a big bet and doesn't sound especially attractive as a potential resident in a planned community.
wallacoloo 5y ago
> What is equitism? > An economic system in which citizens have a stake in the city’s land – as the city does better, the residents do better. I think they’ve got half of this right: the city should own most of the land for the purpose of coordination. But I didn’t see anything indicating that citizens have any stake in the city’s land. Did they mean it literally? Like a requirement of citizenship is to purchase a share in the underlying land? Probably not. Anyway, I like that they’re exploring that half, at least. But the amount they couch on the details isn’t encouraging to me. Especially in the governance section, they didn’t say anything about citizens actually having any voting power — only “input” into city council discussions, which usually means you’re free to say things but you’ll just be ignored. If this whole thing revolves around some benevolent dictatorship then that’s nothing I want to be a part of.

zz865 5y ago

Sure the only way out is to encourage locations in areas which are seeing falling populations, or have space. You can buy a nice family house in the mid West or the South for a tenth of the price of SV. We shouldn't be doing anything to allow more people in California with climate change reducing the water supply even more.

brownman332 5y ago
Perhaps if the midwest or South were more tolerant of colored folks, you'd get more people venturing out there. For those not familiar with regional US politics and racism: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020/ https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/texas-republicans-pass-long-delayed-voter-suppression-bill.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/texas-republicans-pa... Until then, i'll stay on the coasts, thank you. And you dont get to decided if I should or shouldn't live somewhere.
- staysafeanon 5y ago
  >Perhaps if the midwest or South were more tolerant of colored folks, you'd get more people venturing out there. Perhaps if you cared about the facts, you wouldn't make such blatantly false claims. "[Black] College graduates and middle-class migrants make up a major portion of the new migration. For instance, from 1965–2000, the states of Florida, Georgia, and Texas attracted the most black college graduates. The only state outside the former Confederacy that attracted a sizeable migration of black college graduates was Maryland, most of the population growth being in the counties surrounding Washington, D.C. In that same period, California was a net loser of black migration for the first time in three decades."[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
ryan93 5y ago
If california cut alfafa production in half they could support many millions of additional residents
throw8383833jj 5y ago

seph-reed 5y ago

They show this cycle infographic in the article: https://profectusmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tabrrok5.jpg https://profectusmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tabrrok5... I think one very, very crucial but taken for granted aspect of this cycle is "Natural population growth occurs." It's stated as though this is inherent, and should be considered immutable. I disagree, and think that population growing beyond its capacity is not a symptom of capacity so much as growth. When I gain weight, I don't blame my jeans for not fitting.

zip1234 5y ago

We don't even have to build up that much to add a lot more housing. If San Francisco was the density of Paris, it would have over twice as many people and most of Paris has 5-7 story buildings tops.

vlovich123 5y ago
Parts of the city have very different densities. I wonder how individual neighborhoods stack up as I suspect the sprawl in the Sunset, Presidio, and parts of the Marina, and various industrial sections are what bring down the averages.
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  Mission is the densest after ~downtown. Main drags and outskirts are switching to 4+1 (progress!) but most of it remains 2-3. So even there, still a lot possible well before skyscrapers. Though rent control is double edged: needed to keep folks housed, but also prevents rebuilding. Interestingly, mission bay ucsf campus made a bunch of big buildings, so would seem consistent to add corresponding housing. Though expensive/dangerous..
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Yeah so Mission and Downtown both have densities greater than the mean Paris population density. Certainly improving density in the outer boroughs is probably a smarter decision but those areas also aren’t where SF builds the larger buildings and likely where the NYMBism will be strongest.
acchow 5y ago
How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? What would this process even look like? How do you get homeowners to do this and who would pay for it? Where would we even get the engineering and construction expertise to do this? You would call an endeavor like this not building “that much”?
- 5y ago

annoyingnoob 5y ago

I bought my house new in 2010. As long as they were still building out the neighborhood the value of my home was capped at something slightly less than the new units. Once the building stopped the values started going up. I have a single family home. Now they are building apartments and condos nearby in large buildings - those units sell for more than I paid for a single family home in 2010. The fact that they are selling apartments for so much really drove up the value of my home. The inventory of expensive units did more for my home value than anything. Not sure my experience squares well with this article.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
They were simply selling apartments at market price. You fundamentally cannot increase the price of a good by selling it. What's more likely is that housing prices in your area have gone up so much that even apartments are now more expensive than what you originally paid. If there had been sufficient supply built in the market then prices wouldn't be so high. China has solved this problem by telling NIMBYs to fuck off and just confiscating their property to be redeveloped. I don't see why upzoning can somehow be considered bad.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  There has been continuous building in my area for at least 15 years. Many of those expensive apartments and condos are not selling fast because they need to find the right buyer.

bhalina 5y ago

As long as they build startup cities in climate-safe areas (hint: not Miami). https://inspiredhumans.pub/what-is-a-startup-city-796f1c02f172 https://inspiredhumans.pub/what-is-a-startup-city-796f1c02f1...

Barrin92 5y ago

I see these charter city posts pop up with some frequency now but I really want to know how this differs from the utopian city failures of the 20th century except that we've bolted more tech on it The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics. It's just the same dream that any anarchist commune has suffered from. Works okay if you're in a Kibbutz in Israel, doesn't work when you have a million people. These startup cities always describe their policy solutions in consumer terms. 'Come here and you get yimby-ism and social services and x, y and z'. Okay what if the good people of your city turn into nimbies though? Do they have a say? If not how's anyone going to stop them, police with batons? Police you curiously enough never see on any of the concept art of all the diverse, young people sitting in front of modernist coffee shops, which is weird because I have to assume the city has some.

mediaman 5y ago
Part of the idea is that this is self-sorting. NIMBYs are likely not going to move a city built on the foundation of density and easy permitting. Just like people who hate hot climates don't move to Phoenix. Build certain zoning policies into the city's charter that is hard to change. If NIMBYs move in, then - no, they don't get to change the charter with a simple majority.
- shados 5y ago
  This. The reality is that finding a home you like is hard. You'll research neighborhoods, city policies, construction projects in the area, what the neighbors are like, what internet is available, taxes, etc. Then you find a place that matches your needs and you move it. That's time consuming, difficult and stressful, especially if you're buying the home. It's also time consuming and difficult to get out, especially across long distances. So once people are in, ANY change is problematic. Increased density and construction is the common case these days because that's what we need, but the same would happen in reverse. If NYC's mayor said they were going to eminent domain the whole place to make it a low density suburb, even the people who get to keep their homes would lose their shit. You don't live in Manhattan because you want a big yard for your 6 dogs and 3 chickens. When it comes to housing, any kind of change is hard. So if you start from scratch, there's not much problems.

endisneigh 5y ago

Zone all housing in the United States such that two and three families can be built anywhere a single family house stands and all housing problems will be resolved within a decade. It's that simple.

wingineer 5y ago
Or simpler: remove all zoning restrictions.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  that would also do it, but it's politically more difficult
- rcpt 5y ago
  Seriously. Here in Long Beach we have honest-to-god oil derricks right in the middle of our neighborhoods and even on some school campuses. This is despite some of the most restrictive zoning laws one can imagine. If we're not stopping the heaviest of heavy industry from setting up shop right nextdoor then it's pretty obvious that zoning is nothing more than regressive rent seeking from property investors.
  - kyleee 5y ago
    Do they let you start a new oil rig these days or are all those somehow grandfathered in?
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
..or quit importing so many people.
giantg2 5y ago
I highly doubt it would be that easy. Do people want multifamily dwellings in these rich areas with this problem? It seems many people making that sort of money want single family homes that can own.

helen___keller 5y ago

> The housing crisis won’t be solved by electing new city council members in old cities alone. The incentives for incumbent homeowners to restrict the supply of new housing are too strong. The bigger problem is that zoning law is created at the state level and then applied by each municipality, but housing prices are related to the housing stock of a metropolitan region of many municipalities. For every expensive city that is (relatively) developer friendly (say Cambridge MA or Boston MA, which both grew population by over 10% in the past decade) there is a ring of NIMBY inner suburbans like Newton MA, Arlington MA, Weston MA, who viciously oppose even a single apartment building[0]. [0] https://www.preserveweston.org/the-weston-whopper/ https://www.preserveweston.org/the-weston-whopper/

twobitshifter 5y ago
Do most states have statewide zoning? Or did you mean to say “not created at the state level”?
- helen___keller 5y ago
  my understanding is states determine zoning laws, which municipalities apply. For example, MA state zoning law determines that cities and towns need a supermajority vote to change their zoning plan, so it's usually politically infeasible for cities and towns to change their zoning except as maybe the occasional once-in-a-generation thing. As a result, most development around here happens through zoning variances, which have to be approved by the local zoning board and are subject to all sorts of hearings and generally get very held up compared to by-right zoning.
shados 5y ago
> there is a ring of NIMBY inner suburbans Which makes sense when you think about it. Imagine you live in Boston, and things are changing and being built up. You don't like it. People tell you "If you don't like it, leave". You're like "Ok" and move to Arlington. Fast-forward and the same thing happens again. You're gonna push back, because the whole reason you were there was to avoid it. Sometimes I feel like having longer term planning would help. It wouldn't help with the problem today, but if I knew that in 10 years there would be skyscrapers across the street, I could decide if I'm ok with it or not and leave if the latter. Sure, my property value would probably go down somewhat, but I wouldn't wake up on a Monday to the project starting.

m0llusk 5y ago

> The incumbent interests in cities like New York and San Francisco are so entrenched that the battle for housing deregulation is hopeless when fought with politics. This is an extremely bold statement. So far it has been difficult to make change, but consensus that there is a serious problem is relatively new and there have been some improvements. Recently in San Francisco a developer proposed a smaller building than possible in order to appease neighborhood concerns. When neighbors came out in opposition the developer changed to plans for a maximally large building and by new rules had no need of neighborhood approval. Even more dramatic changes to zoning have been proposed and come close to passing. Berkeley is now allowing four units where single family homes now stand. So there is significant progress and a change in the political balance. > If these regulations are so costly, why were they passed in the first place? The answer lies not in the aggregate cost-benefit calculation of land use regulations, but rather in the analysis of who pays the costs and who garners the benefits. This is absolutely wrong and critical to understanding the situation. Building codes and ordinances and environmental hearings were all put in place with the intention of functioning as reasonable restrictions to preserve quality of life. The idea was this would be similar to rules about clean air and water. The problems we see now developed slowly over time and have many contributing factors including social and organizational inertia and of course classism and racism and such like. What we need to do is understand how to preserve some basic level of quality of life without unreasonably impacting ability to build, especially in areas that are already dense or have unusual demand. We are increasingly in a time where young people who are underserved by housing markets are getting political influence while older property owning boomers are seeing their influence steadily reduced. > There are three stages to the Startup City. There are no such stages or Startup Cities. Cities are social and commercial constructions which are not wild bets on fast growth that can readily fail and be replaced. Cities have an absolute obligation to move forward carefully while they balance land use concerns, forms of taxation, and costs of labor and so on. > poorly managed cities like San Francisco or Jakarta ... > Próspera, a private city in Honduras ... Now that is all just sloppy. It takes only a small effort to confirm that these cities are in very different locations and contexts and have different strengths, weaknesses, resources, priorities, and so on.

b9a2cab5 5y ago

giantg2 5y ago

Frankly, I don't see this as actually happening. It would require people and companies to leave those existing HCOL cities - something they could do right now and move to any number of communities, but choose not to. How is this different?

xyzzy21 5y ago

Or "Out"...

tibiahurried 5y ago

I keep saying: do you wanna solve the house crisis for good? Make it so houses cannot be used as mean of investment. See Denmark. A foreigner can't just buy houses there. You have to live and work there. For as long as wealthy people and funds keep buying all the houses and rent them out, you are never going to solve the problem. Never, ever.

huo 5y ago
quick question for you, would that be a good or bad outcome for people who already own homes, in the short-term?
- _flagged_ 5y ago
  Depends if they have children.
- yhoneycomb 5y ago
  good for everyone
_carbyau_ 5y ago
Agreed. By definition a "good investment" goes up more than inflation. Do you want houses to keep going up more than inflation? If no, then they can't be a "good investment". The crazy thing here is people complain about their economy slumping. Imagine what would happen if we didn't have all this money going into houses... the money won't disappear. It will go somewhere in search of "good investment".
- mchusma 5y ago
  Agree with this. You can want housing to be affordable or a good investment. It basically can't be both.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  People stuff money into bricks and mortar precisely because they consider other investments even worse. There isn't a great deal of optimism in the market right now, which contributes to the slump. People are being defensive. Looking at my own country, I cannot really pinpoint any single corporation I would trust to grow a lot in the 20s. Peeerhaps Avast, maybe. And looking at the recent Chinese governmental heavy-handed social engineering and crackdowns, I expect rich Chinese to start investing their money outside China even more furiously than until today.

magwa101 5y ago

I clicked through to the cities that are advertising for remote workers. Going from Cali to any of those states and the politics are shocking. Check out Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas.

dangs_penis 5y ago

HackerNews is an experiment.

magwa101 5y ago

This pov really smacks of libertarianism. "Government can't do it but we can"...chart, chart, etc. conclusion "Look!". The fact is small towns, cities, countries will not be able to afford climate change. Only a central national authority can, and in some cases, a larger authority (like an EU) will be required: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/climate-towns-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/climate-towns-ban...

logicalmonster 5y ago

Always remember the law of unintended consequences. Solving one problem by “building up” might create an endless variety of new quality of life issues. Take it from a current city-dweller, living in a dense concrete jungle can be a miserable, soul-crushing existence that’s a particularly horrendous place for raising children.