7 ms·

I'll share an unpopular opinion, loosely in defense of some elements of NIMBYism. I grew up in a small Marin County town called Point Reyes. It had 350 residen

I'll share an unpopular opinion, loosely in defense of some elements of NIMBYism. I grew up in a small Marin County town called Point Reyes. It had 350 residents when I grew up, now maybe 1,000. The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life. Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining. With recent California rules, affordable housing is being forced by the state. Any open parking lot, any church, any building not considered "fully utilized" is now being allocated for low income units. Even most low income residents in the town don't like it, as it doesn't match the character of the area whatsoever - it undermines the very reason people live here to begin with. I'm a unicorn founder so know I'm in a very privileged position. I actually bought a place in town which I'm turning in to multiple units for working class people because I didn't want someone else to buy it and turn it into a mansion. This is very different than state mandates that override any sort of local planning. I'm trying to help solve the problem while also preserving the essence of the community. I think it is overly simplistic to call NIMBYs evil and YIMBYs good. I like living in a small rural town. People move here because they want that. Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community. I also don't claim any moral high ground here - there is no right and wrong about this. We all have our desires about how we want the world to evolve, and I wish we could all respect the complexity of the situation vs putting people in competing good vs evil camps.

jeffbee 5y ago
When did you grow up there and did anyone have babies and if so where did they expect them to live? The current housing crisis is a demographic phenomenon created by longevity and birth rates 40 years ago. Those facts require the provision of a lot of new housing somewhere.
- crhulls 5y ago
  I grew up there in the 80s and 90s. It is a really tough challenge. It is important to note that almost all the people, even those forced out due to cost, are opposed to the current affordable housing plans. The statewide legislation is a very blunt instrument. It doesn't work well for small towns.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    The RHNA allocation for unincorporated Marin County is only 184 homes over the next 8 years, for the entire county of 828 square miles. Are you saying we can't figure out how to put one new dwelling on every 3000 acres? Edit: er, that was the previous 8 years. The next 8 years calls for 3569 new dwellings.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    I looked up Point Reyes Station CDP in the latest Census and the median age is 67 years. I hope you realize how deeply fucked up that is.
diob 5y ago
Property is tough in general. For most, they're coming into a game of monopoly that has realistically already ended. While I feel for those who "own" not wanting things to change, I feel more for those relegated to go around a board that's entirely owned (at least the parts worth owning).
returningfory2 5y ago
I entirely get the desire to live in a rural environment and keep Port Reyes as it is. The problem is that this desire is in direct conflict with housing being affordable. If everyone who lives in a non-dense neighborhood forces it to stay that way, new housing cannot be built and housing prices skyrocket because the population is increasing. This is literally the story of the Bay Area housing market. I think there is a balance between not changing the built environment too much (the NIMBY position, say) and building enough new housing to keep prices reasonable (the YIMBY position). The problem is that over the last decades public policy has been dramatically in favor of the NIMBY position. And I think what we're seeing now is a backlash against this.
- crhulls 5y ago
  I think there is obviously a balance. The problem is how it is being done. Currently Marin is going through something they call a housing element. They have hired a consultant group from LA to find lots they think would be good and are just rezoning things with a broad brush. I don't think the planners have even been to the county, let alone the town. The plan literally takes some of the vacant parts of town and encourages high density apartments. The prior affordable housing has also backfired. They did a development 20 years ago that was meant to provide local housing. But, because it had federal backing, it meant anyone could apply. A large number of people who live in the project are people on section 8 and disability with no ties to the region whatsoever. They don't work in or contribute to the community, but rather just get free apartments. To add insult to injury, many of the homes that were made under the original development became vacation rentals about 10 years after they were built (some expiration on deed restrictions or something). Here is an example: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19192461?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=39f579b8-5f32-4070-b42f-7c5e25dd60fd https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19192461?guests=1&adults=1&s=67... Clearly this is not what was intended. There has to be a better way.
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    What is the better way to satisfy housing demand than to build housing?
  - 5y ago
humanistbot 5y ago
Your position is indeed unpopular. Everything changes. The population keeps growing. Without development, there isn't enough space for all the kids of all the people you grew up with to stay in Point Reyes and have kids of their own. Also, you don't just live in some random rural town. You live on the most scenic highway in the state, at the exit to a massively popular national seashore, in a major metropolitan area that has experienced massive growth. And nobody is "forcing" development. That's all on the property owners. They are freely choosing to follow the financial incentives. The state "mandates" are just overriding local zoning laws that would have prohibited development by the property owners, or adding to the incentives for development. If the owners of a parking lot or the church want to keep it, the state would have to eminent domain it in order for it to be "allocated" for development.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  At some point the population has to stop growing. There’s not an infinite amount of everything (water, arable land, etc.) If you treat the world like it’s an all you can eat buffet, eventually we’ll be eating faster than the world can fill replenish the buffet, and something else will probably break before we get to that point.
  - krainboltgreene 5y ago
    Those things are concerning in the same way that with database design you have to be concerned that bigint columns have a maximum value.
    - devoutsalsa 5y ago
      Good thing Elon is helping up get a multi-master setup going. Latency will be a pain though.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    people have been predicting a Malthusian Collapse for centuries. Every time it gets close we have invented and innovated our way out of it. we already know how to do it we don't because it is marginally less expensive and labor intensive. Arable land running low go vertical, hydroponic farming is capable of growing far more in the same footprint. water running low is easy to fix instead of wasting thousands of gallons of water spraying a whole field, drip feed individual plants, where that is not feasable wind and solar powered desalination is a option. also fix water consumption laws tax heavy water users rather than home consumption.
ryukafalz 5y ago
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining. You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live. The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
- crhulls 5y ago
  If you talk to the people who grew up here, even the ones who were forced to move due to costs are not supportive of the current affordable housing plans. They want to come back and visit the town they grew up in. For example, I have a caretaker on my property who lives in a trailer and even he doesn't want the plans to go through - he wants the town to stay rural. I'm also on the village association and while almost everyone agrees there should be more affordable housing, we are almost all opposed to the broad brush stroke way it is being done. Huge apartment buildings in a small town is very different than doing things like limiting vacation rentals and allowing ADUs. I suppose my main point is that there is a lot of nuance involved - it isnt as simple as NIMBY bad YIMBY good.
  - vwoolf 5y ago
    even the ones who were forced to move due to costs The policies you advocate are the ones that raise the cost of housing by limiting supply. Your own preferred policies force people to move, who can't afford the rent.
    - crhulls 5y ago
      I acknowledge this - I am trying to point out that this is a complicated problem and even the people who would ostensibly benefit don't like the tops down state driven approach.
paxys 5y ago
This isn't an uncommon view, and touches on a lot of fundamental questions that are mostly unanswerable. What is a "town"? Is it comprised of 350 people living in a few houses and all the land which surrounds them? Do they get to decide how this common land should be used? Do they get to decide how private land next to them should be used, whether it belongs to a current resident or not? If person #351 wants to move in, should all existing residents get a vote?
- ip26 5y ago
  If it’s incorporated, mostly yes. If it isn’t, mostly no. It’s like HOAs. You are free to do what you want on private land. Except, an HOA is a contract wherein residents mutually agree to limits on that freedom. Buying property in an HOA or in an incorporated town is buying into that established mutual agreement.
xiaosun 5y ago
"The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life." Marin County is one of the most segregated counties in the Bay Area, and by design from legacy housing policies. It's hard to ignore the fact that "preserving the essence" is the same thing as "continue to be a heavily segregated" locale. "An inordinate number of the most segregated cities in the Bay Area are smaller cities that are more than 85 percent white in Marin County (Ross, Belvedere, Sausalito, San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are each in the top 10). Two of the top 10 are similarly small-sized, heavily white cities in San Mateo County (Portola Valley and Woodside)." https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-francisco-bay-area-part-2 https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
eldavido 5y ago
I'm pro-development, but, to a point. I actually agree with most of this. It seems the height of hubris for lawmakers in Sacramento to insist that no, you 350 people in this town, you don't know how the town should be developed, we're going to mandate it for you and force you to do it how we want, local character and situation be damned. I think the middle ground is that you have to be careful about what zoning and planning codes do and don't allow. In my view, a property owner like you should have pretty broad discretion about how a place gets developed. A lot of very nice-looking town centers developed in the late 1800s/early 1900s (North America) without zoning. It got done because it worked, more expensive/taller/nicer buildings near the middle of the city (on more valuable land) and less-expensive, "lower" uses toward the periphery. It's simple market incentives. The trouble comes when the tax code, zoning, or other policies discourage the natural, higher-intensity development from creating more housing on higher-value land. You're just looking at the incentives and being a good businessperson. People (blue collar) want a place to live. You're giving it to them at a price they can afford. This should be celebrated, not vilified. I also own (market rate) low-income housing. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there are a bunch of lots with older houses sitting vacant. I own an apartment there and would love to convert some of the existing (empty) houses into duplexes/four-plexes, but can't out of a misguided sense of it being a "single-family neighborhood". This makes no sense. I'm turning something people don't want, into something they do. The zoning completely ignores market forces out of a misguided attempt for neighbors to force their view onto other property owners. It's well-intentioned but, as other posters have said, carries a huge cost we need to talk about more openly.
vwoolf 5y ago
If you want to control a given parcel of land, buy it. If you don't own it, then you shouldn't get to control it. You're telling other people what they should or should not be able to build and, in the process, are creating society-wide distortions that systematically raise the cost of living: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388. Read that carefully. It's amazing how no one attaches numbers to these kinds of points of view: a GDP increase of more than 1/3 is a tremendous amount of money. NIMBYs make us all poorer.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  I want a constitutional amendment granting some property rights.
bastawhiz 5y ago
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining. > Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community. I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town. You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways. What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.
- ip26 5y ago
  I think the point is adding 10% more units to Point Reyes dramatically alters the town but increases the total housing supply of greater Marin County by zilch.
  - crhulls 5y ago
    Yes, exactly this. It doesn't really solve any problems (see my other comments - you can literally find affordable housing units propped up as vacation rentals on AirBnB). Putting huge apartment buildings in 1,000 person towns is very different than building upwards in city centers or along transportation corridors.
    - bastawhiz 5y ago
      It would seem to me that the people moving to Point Reyes aren't the sort of folks who want to live in an "affordable" studio apartment. So either the folks who'd live in those apartments are taking on a high cost of living with an absurd commute for the hell of it, or you don't actually care about the blue collar folks who are being gentrified out. If vacation rentals are actually a meaningful problem, have the city ban them. It's really that easy. Airbnb isn't a new phenomenon, and if anyone actually cared about the people being displaced instead of the buildings, they'd already be banned. The character of a town is more than just the buildings, it's the people who live there, too. It's obvious where the priorities are.
pvg 5y ago
The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life. Point Reyes and surroundings have been a popular tourism destination for decades, though. A large chunk of the people living there would not live there if it wasn't that - they benefit from it and from the proximity to a large urban center. Representing it as some sort of remote rural backwater doesn't quite capture the nature of the place.
- crhulls 5y ago
  It was a rural backwater years ago. I'm 38 and of the transition generation. It was always a bit touristy but many of the older folks who live there were hippies who wanted a cheap place to live far away from it all. I hear stories of how the houses even in the 70s were bought in cash because banks thought it was too risky to finance. I know the reason I like being here is because it is remote and rural and I have a sense of comfort living in a place that doesn't change much.
tines 5y ago
While driving up Highway 1 with my family on vacation, I drove past/through Point Reyes and admired what a beautiful town it was. I thought that I'd love to have grown up there. Alas, I'll never be able to live in California, that's a dream I'll have to be satisfied with not attaining.
- newman8r 5y ago
  Point Reyes and Tomales Bay are beautiful and unaffordable. But there's plenty of spots in California that are beautiful and also affordable. Look into the sierras, the deserts, the rural communities in San Diego county, etc. There' even places directly on the water on the Colorado River for under 400k.
davidw 5y ago
> I like living in a small rural town. Well, fine, live in one that's actually rural because it's rural, not because of NIMBY regulations keeping it in some weird artificial bubble. There are a shitload of them all over the west. This is a legit rural town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview,_Oregon - it's never going to be a big town because it's very remote. It's quite charming in its own way.
ip26 5y ago
We need a name for the middle ground. Build here, not there. BHNT? Force a discussion. If we have to build, where should we build, and where should we leave alone?
cipheredStones 5y ago
It's very funny that you wait until the fifth paragraph of your defense of NIMBYism to drop "now, I do possess many, many millions of dollars..." You're a fan of NIMBYism because NIMBYism is for people like you, who have no reason to worry about the price of housing. Any tradeoff whatsoever of "character" for affordability is bad from your perspective. Cities and towns change when more people want to live there. They either change by adding more housing, or they change by getting much more expensive and driving out people who can't afford it. If you can always afford it, and "character" to you means the buildings in the area rather than the blue-collar people who used to live there, naturally you prefer the latter.
amusedcyclist 5y ago
But there is actually right and wrong in this. If there were no consequences to NIMBY-ish no one would care, but the truth is from a house price and climate standpoint, we can't afford NIMBY-ism. I'm a homeowner in a pretty nice part of a large North American city and while I enjoy some aspects of my life, i think the current state of the world makes NIMBY-ism an objectively incorrect position. More people need to be able to afford to live in cities so that we can have more efficient , less carbon intensive lives on average.

jeffbee 5y ago

When did you grow up there and did anyone have babies and if so where did they expect them to live? The current housing crisis is a demographic phenomenon created by longevity and birth rates 40 years ago. Those facts require the provision of a lot of new housing somewhere.

crhulls 5y ago
I grew up there in the 80s and 90s. It is a really tough challenge. It is important to note that almost all the people, even those forced out due to cost, are opposed to the current affordable housing plans. The statewide legislation is a very blunt instrument. It doesn't work well for small towns.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The RHNA allocation for unincorporated Marin County is only 184 homes over the next 8 years, for the entire county of 828 square miles. Are you saying we can't figure out how to put one new dwelling on every 3000 acres? Edit: er, that was the previous 8 years. The next 8 years calls for 3569 new dwellings.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  I looked up Point Reyes Station CDP in the latest Census and the median age is 67 years. I hope you realize how deeply fucked up that is.

diob 5y ago

Property is tough in general. For most, they're coming into a game of monopoly that has realistically already ended. While I feel for those who "own" not wanting things to change, I feel more for those relegated to go around a board that's entirely owned (at least the parts worth owning).

returningfory2 5y ago

I entirely get the desire to live in a rural environment and keep Port Reyes as it is. The problem is that this desire is in direct conflict with housing being affordable. If everyone who lives in a non-dense neighborhood forces it to stay that way, new housing cannot be built and housing prices skyrocket because the population is increasing. This is literally the story of the Bay Area housing market. I think there is a balance between not changing the built environment too much (the NIMBY position, say) and building enough new housing to keep prices reasonable (the YIMBY position). The problem is that over the last decades public policy has been dramatically in favor of the NIMBY position. And I think what we're seeing now is a backlash against this.

crhulls 5y ago
I think there is obviously a balance. The problem is how it is being done. Currently Marin is going through something they call a housing element. They have hired a consultant group from LA to find lots they think would be good and are just rezoning things with a broad brush. I don't think the planners have even been to the county, let alone the town. The plan literally takes some of the vacant parts of town and encourages high density apartments. The prior affordable housing has also backfired. They did a development 20 years ago that was meant to provide local housing. But, because it had federal backing, it meant anyone could apply. A large number of people who live in the project are people on section 8 and disability with no ties to the region whatsoever. They don't work in or contribute to the community, but rather just get free apartments. To add insult to injury, many of the homes that were made under the original development became vacation rentals about 10 years after they were built (some expiration on deed restrictions or something). Here is an example: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19192461?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=39f579b8-5f32-4070-b42f-7c5e25dd60fd https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19192461?guests=1&adults=1&s=67... Clearly this is not what was intended. There has to be a better way.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  What is the better way to satisfy housing demand than to build housing?
- 5y ago

humanistbot 5y ago

Your position is indeed unpopular. Everything changes. The population keeps growing. Without development, there isn't enough space for all the kids of all the people you grew up with to stay in Point Reyes and have kids of their own. Also, you don't just live in some random rural town. You live on the most scenic highway in the state, at the exit to a massively popular national seashore, in a major metropolitan area that has experienced massive growth. And nobody is "forcing" development. That's all on the property owners. They are freely choosing to follow the financial incentives. The state "mandates" are just overriding local zoning laws that would have prohibited development by the property owners, or adding to the incentives for development. If the owners of a parking lot or the church want to keep it, the state would have to eminent domain it in order for it to be "allocated" for development.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
At some point the population has to stop growing. There’s not an infinite amount of everything (water, arable land, etc.) If you treat the world like it’s an all you can eat buffet, eventually we’ll be eating faster than the world can fill replenish the buffet, and something else will probably break before we get to that point.
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  Those things are concerning in the same way that with database design you have to be concerned that bigint columns have a maximum value.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Good thing Elon is helping up get a multi-master setup going. Latency will be a pain though.
- smegger001 5y ago
  people have been predicting a Malthusian Collapse for centuries. Every time it gets close we have invented and innovated our way out of it. we already know how to do it we don't because it is marginally less expensive and labor intensive. Arable land running low go vertical, hydroponic farming is capable of growing far more in the same footprint. water running low is easy to fix instead of wasting thousands of gallons of water spraying a whole field, drip feed individual plants, where that is not feasable wind and solar powered desalination is a option. also fix water consumption laws tax heavy water users rather than home consumption.

ryukafalz 5y ago

crhulls 5y ago
If you talk to the people who grew up here, even the ones who were forced to move due to costs are not supportive of the current affordable housing plans. They want to come back and visit the town they grew up in. For example, I have a caretaker on my property who lives in a trailer and even he doesn't want the plans to go through - he wants the town to stay rural. I'm also on the village association and while almost everyone agrees there should be more affordable housing, we are almost all opposed to the broad brush stroke way it is being done. Huge apartment buildings in a small town is very different than doing things like limiting vacation rentals and allowing ADUs. I suppose my main point is that there is a lot of nuance involved - it isnt as simple as NIMBY bad YIMBY good.
- vwoolf 5y ago
  even the ones who were forced to move due to costs The policies you advocate are the ones that raise the cost of housing by limiting supply. Your own preferred policies force people to move, who can't afford the rent.
  - crhulls 5y ago
    I acknowledge this - I am trying to point out that this is a complicated problem and even the people who would ostensibly benefit don't like the tops down state driven approach.

paxys 5y ago

This isn't an uncommon view, and touches on a lot of fundamental questions that are mostly unanswerable. What is a "town"? Is it comprised of 350 people living in a few houses and all the land which surrounds them? Do they get to decide how this common land should be used? Do they get to decide how private land next to them should be used, whether it belongs to a current resident or not? If person #351 wants to move in, should all existing residents get a vote?

ip26 5y ago
If it’s incorporated, mostly yes. If it isn’t, mostly no. It’s like HOAs. You are free to do what you want on private land. Except, an HOA is a contract wherein residents mutually agree to limits on that freedom. Buying property in an HOA or in an incorporated town is buying into that established mutual agreement.

xiaosun 5y ago

"The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life." Marin County is one of the most segregated counties in the Bay Area, and by design from legacy housing policies. It's hard to ignore the fact that "preserving the essence" is the same thing as "continue to be a heavily segregated" locale. "An inordinate number of the most segregated cities in the Bay Area are smaller cities that are more than 85 percent white in Marin County (Ross, Belvedere, Sausalito, San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are each in the top 10). Two of the top 10 are similarly small-sized, heavily white cities in San Mateo County (Portola Valley and Woodside)." https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-francisco-bay-area-part-2 https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...

eldavido 5y ago

I'm pro-development, but, to a point. I actually agree with most of this. It seems the height of hubris for lawmakers in Sacramento to insist that no, you 350 people in this town, you don't know how the town should be developed, we're going to mandate it for you and force you to do it how we want, local character and situation be damned. I think the middle ground is that you have to be careful about what zoning and planning codes do and don't allow. In my view, a property owner like you should have pretty broad discretion about how a place gets developed. A lot of very nice-looking town centers developed in the late 1800s/early 1900s (North America) without zoning. It got done because it worked, more expensive/taller/nicer buildings near the middle of the city (on more valuable land) and less-expensive, "lower" uses toward the periphery. It's simple market incentives. The trouble comes when the tax code, zoning, or other policies discourage the natural, higher-intensity development from creating more housing on higher-value land. You're just looking at the incentives and being a good businessperson. People (blue collar) want a place to live. You're giving it to them at a price they can afford. This should be celebrated, not vilified. I also own (market rate) low-income housing. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there are a bunch of lots with older houses sitting vacant. I own an apartment there and would love to convert some of the existing (empty) houses into duplexes/four-plexes, but can't out of a misguided sense of it being a "single-family neighborhood". This makes no sense. I'm turning something people don't want, into something they do. The zoning completely ignores market forces out of a misguided attempt for neighbors to force their view onto other property owners. It's well-intentioned but, as other posters have said, carries a huge cost we need to talk about more openly.

vwoolf 5y ago

If you want to control a given parcel of land, buy it. If you don't own it, then you shouldn't get to control it. You're telling other people what they should or should not be able to build and, in the process, are creating society-wide distortions that systematically raise the cost of living: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388. Read that carefully. It's amazing how no one attaches numbers to these kinds of points of view: a GDP increase of more than 1/3 is a tremendous amount of money. NIMBYs make us all poorer.

zbrozek 5y ago
I want a constitutional amendment granting some property rights.

bastawhiz 5y ago

> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining. > Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community. I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town. You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways. What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.

ip26 5y ago
I think the point is adding 10% more units to Point Reyes dramatically alters the town but increases the total housing supply of greater Marin County by zilch.
- crhulls 5y ago
  Yes, exactly this. It doesn't really solve any problems (see my other comments - you can literally find affordable housing units propped up as vacation rentals on AirBnB). Putting huge apartment buildings in 1,000 person towns is very different than building upwards in city centers or along transportation corridors.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    It would seem to me that the people moving to Point Reyes aren't the sort of folks who want to live in an "affordable" studio apartment. So either the folks who'd live in those apartments are taking on a high cost of living with an absurd commute for the hell of it, or you don't actually care about the blue collar folks who are being gentrified out. If vacation rentals are actually a meaningful problem, have the city ban them. It's really that easy. Airbnb isn't a new phenomenon, and if anyone actually cared about the people being displaced instead of the buildings, they'd already be banned. The character of a town is more than just the buildings, it's the people who live there, too. It's obvious where the priorities are.

pvg 5y ago

The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life. Point Reyes and surroundings have been a popular tourism destination for decades, though. A large chunk of the people living there would not live there if it wasn't that - they benefit from it and from the proximity to a large urban center. Representing it as some sort of remote rural backwater doesn't quite capture the nature of the place.

crhulls 5y ago
It was a rural backwater years ago. I'm 38 and of the transition generation. It was always a bit touristy but many of the older folks who live there were hippies who wanted a cheap place to live far away from it all. I hear stories of how the houses even in the 70s were bought in cash because banks thought it was too risky to finance. I know the reason I like being here is because it is remote and rural and I have a sense of comfort living in a place that doesn't change much.

tines 5y ago

While driving up Highway 1 with my family on vacation, I drove past/through Point Reyes and admired what a beautiful town it was. I thought that I'd love to have grown up there. Alas, I'll never be able to live in California, that's a dream I'll have to be satisfied with not attaining.

newman8r 5y ago
Point Reyes and Tomales Bay are beautiful and unaffordable. But there's plenty of spots in California that are beautiful and also affordable. Look into the sierras, the deserts, the rural communities in San Diego county, etc. There' even places directly on the water on the Colorado River for under 400k.

davidw 5y ago

> I like living in a small rural town. Well, fine, live in one that's actually rural because it's rural, not because of NIMBY regulations keeping it in some weird artificial bubble. There are a shitload of them all over the west. This is a legit rural town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview,_Oregon - it's never going to be a big town because it's very remote. It's quite charming in its own way.

ip26 5y ago

We need a name for the middle ground. Build here, not there. BHNT? Force a discussion. If we have to build, where should we build, and where should we leave alone?

cipheredStones 5y ago

It's very funny that you wait until the fifth paragraph of your defense of NIMBYism to drop "now, I do possess many, many millions of dollars..." You're a fan of NIMBYism because NIMBYism is for people like you, who have no reason to worry about the price of housing. Any tradeoff whatsoever of "character" for affordability is bad from your perspective. Cities and towns change when more people want to live there. They either change by adding more housing, or they change by getting much more expensive and driving out people who can't afford it. If you can always afford it, and "character" to you means the buildings in the area rather than the blue-collar people who used to live there, naturally you prefer the latter.

amusedcyclist 5y ago

But there is actually right and wrong in this. If there were no consequences to NIMBY-ish no one would care, but the truth is from a house price and climate standpoint, we can't afford NIMBY-ism. I'm a homeowner in a pretty nice part of a large North American city and while I enjoy some aspects of my life, i think the current state of the world makes NIMBY-ism an objectively incorrect position. More people need to be able to afford to live in cities so that we can have more efficient , less carbon intensive lives on average.