4 ms·

Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. The high density housing community seems to think

Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. The high density housing community seems to think everyone just needs an efficiency unit in a Soviet style housing block and anyone else is an entitled NIMBY. What the person said was developers don’t care about the community they’re building into. Loosening of community rules means they can move in start building the anti-NIMBY idealized massive communal living arcology in the on the east and west of your 100 year old Victorian neighborhood blocking the sun for 70% of the day, razing historic buildings and creating a construction zone for the next five years. Then once they’ve made everyone miserable for forever they pocket the profit and use it to buy a nice Victorian in a community with community zoning laws.

crooked-v 4y ago
> your 100 year old Victorian neighborhood Well, you know, it sure would be nice if people could build more of those tightly-clustered Victorians in, say, San Francisco, to continue the classic character of the city and replace ugly box houses... but zoning laws mean they can't.
- rrsmtz 4y ago
  Even if they could, they wouldn't. The modern trend is demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s.
  - opportune 4y ago
    Have you been to California? A lot of the housing they are demolishing to build 5-over-1s are kinda shitty 1950s-60s ranches. Not really beautiful at all.
  - techsupporter 4y ago
    I'm truly sorry if this comes off as a personal attack because I'm trying really hard for it not to be but my frustration bubbles over. > demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s YES. BECAUSE THAT'S ALL MODERN ZONING PERMITS. WHICH IS PRECISELY THE [bad word] PROBLEM. In our haste, particularly on the West Coast, to ensure that we build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, we've made zoning codes that produce THIS OUTCOME. There's a reply upthread that says that density advocates want to cram everyone into Soviet-style "dystopian" high rises and, to be honest, your reply here sounds a lot like that. A WORLD of difference exists between "detached dwelling on a 7,500 square foot lot" and "clone stamp 5-over-1 with empty retail on the bottom." BUT ZONING DOESN'T PERMIT IT. We absolutely should be building rowhouses and stacked flats and plaza housing and all of the other beautiful, people-scale-yet-still-dense, workable housing types that have been tried all over the planet yet America thinks we're too god damn special to have because "American Dream". If you have rules that say you can only build 5-over-1s, it should come as no shock at all when those are the only things being built, especially in the very tiny slice of areas where it's permitted to build anything dense at all.
    - rrsmtz 4y ago
      If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. From what I've seen, developers love building places like Mission Bay in SF and Seaport in Boston, made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies. If that's the vision of our utopian future, count me out.
      - crooked-v 4y ago
        Developers "love" building that stuff because... it's what zoning allows them to build. You would need to actually look at a place with better zoning to see a functional example, like suburban metropolitan Japan or France or Spain, where neighborhoods are often made of tightly-clustered detached homes (e.g. the old-fashioned Victorian row home equivalent) mixed with corner store retail.
      - techsupporter 4y ago
        > If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. It definitely is. I work in IT but one of my kids is in land use planning and they have regaled me with many stories of how builders come to the city (not in California) with plans. All of them involve a zoning variance and, more often than not, a trip through what is called Design Review. If the zoning change doesn't kill it--usually because they want a departure from what is called "floor area ratio" rules or from the "wedding cake" style zoning that is supposed to keep zones of detached housing "safe" from "impacts"--then design review absolutely does. Which dovetails into... > made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies ...your other point. It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning. Design review is often used as a cudgel to "catch" what zoning doesn't (so the rules say this kind of building is allowed but neighbors don't want it) and then administrivia it into, if not oblivion, then a very expensive project through things like "more building modulation" and "tamp down building massing" and "mitigate shadow impacts".
outworlder 4y ago
> Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. They are not _entitled_ to forever freeze a city just because they live there. I bet they would not like their town if it still looked the same as it was in 1890.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. My point is the NIMBY crowd have their point, and it’s unreasonable and unfair to assume they’re entitled asshats that hate poor people. Solutions where they exist will lie in the middle, otherwise in a democracy we have ways of resolving these things. However it really should be a city level decision - the whole point of having lots of cities is they can vary in their character and quality. Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good. The world shouldn’t revolve around some NIMBY, but a community of NIMBYs should be respected for their desires as the community. Ceding community control to the government and developers isn’t the right way to go.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    > They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. The voters of California have clearly decided that they aren't.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Yeah and I think they’ll regret it. If you think the voters of California are good stewards you’ve not paid attention to California.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Depends on the level of information available to voters. At the local level, decisions are usually terrible, as getting info about local elections is usually contained within patronage networks. At the state level, elections are much better, and state level elections are usually far more informed. There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13, that have severely harmed the state, but that's a common trap with all electorates. Overall I think California voters are newer on par with places like Minnesota thag have generally very good governance.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Yes, but on the flip side thousands of people will no longer be paying $3k/mo in rent for a shitty apartment, and homelessness will drop dramatically. The anti-NIMBY movement didn't come about because people want to override existing communities. It came about because people need a place to live, and NIMBYs were actively campaigning against it for decades with no consideration for the needs of others. Now, I think it's reached the stage where at least among young people making their lives miserable is honestly seen as a positive.
- Xeronate 4y ago
  People need a place to live but does that place have to be in California? It doesn’t make sense to talk about living in Santa Monica as a need.
  - hnav 4y ago
    that’s where the opportunity is, i’ve done a 2-3hr roundtrip commute to santa monica before, have you?
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Maybe it’s time to end commutes then?
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        How the heck is the janitor of the facebook campus going to remote work?
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        There won’t be a Facebook campus. The janitor will have to find another place to work, sadly.
        hnav 4y ago
dkhenry 4y ago
This is not at all true, if you wanted character to your community then the community should have approved a building plan that kept the character and allowed for more housing. As it stands these communities have said no to everything and now housing is being foisted upon them, and I say good. Too many people and families have been displaced by the absolutely absurd housing situation in California, and the failure of the people of California to address the cost of housing in their communities shows their abject dismissal of the overwhelming humanitarian toll they have inflicted on their neighbors and the environment.
thehappypm 4y ago
This is hardcore pearl-clutching. You know what’s really a problem? How dystopian America is. The opportunity and jobs are in big cities. But housing makes it impossible for many people to even live near the city. People want to solve this problem, but are blocked because people like that their neighborhood has street parking. It’s killing America and it’s really killing our ability to become a modern, progressive society.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I think the real problem is the density of opportunity and jobs in cities. I’m hopeful that remote work will break that tyranny to some extent. In five years when the emotions have cooled about return to office and the director of finance provides an analysis to the CFO about how much they could save and increase EPS while improving productivity using 2020/21 data and the CFO takes it to the board, that will be the end of the opportunity density in the cities.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Density of jobs is not a problem, it's a fundamental property and network effects are real. The problem is people that want to stop other people from being able to live the way they want.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      It’s a fundamental problem caused by the necessity to collocate to collaborate, which is largely not true any more. Jobs will diffuse away from cities as the people who live in the city out of obligation and have no desire leave. Some stay because they like it. Regardless the density will reduce. That’s a good thing. The hollowing out of the country into the coastal cities is a flaw not a feature.
      - thehappypm 4y ago
        Maybe some jobs don’t require colocating, but the majority still do. Any heavy industry, teaching, services, anything involving a lab, medicine.. working from home is not something just anyone can do.
jimnotgym 4y ago
As an aside... I find it fun that people in the US use the term 'Victorian' to describe an era. I like the idea of naming an era in a Republic after a foreign monarch. Incidentally, if it were 100 years old it would be Georgian. Vitoria died in 1901
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  No, the term describes an architectural style that was popular ~100 years ago. I might be off by some number of years. It is related to the era, but it is independent of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_architecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_architecture
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    Ummm more like 120 years ago, during the reign of Queen Victoria, just like your link says. > In the United States, 'Victorian' architecture generally describes styles that were most popular between 1860 and 1900
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Ok, I consider 100 years ago from the top of my head pretty reasonable, especially as someone who couldn’t care less about a foreign monarch or precision in dating architectural styles. But, regardless, it’s not referring to an era but to an architectural style. While it was most popular 120 years ago, there have been Victorians built since then. I know not every Victorian in SF is 120+ years old because the city was burned to the ground in 1906.
- panzagl 4y ago
  Georgian refers to George I-III here, so ends in the 1780's.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  In the USA, many “revival” style homes were built in the 19th and early 20th century. It wouldn’t be uncommon to find a Victorian next to a Georgian next to a Tutor. But they are just styles.
triceratops 4y ago
The government controlling what kind of housing you can build on your property sounds way more Soviet to me.

crooked-v 4y ago

> your 100 year old Victorian neighborhood Well, you know, it sure would be nice if people could build more of those tightly-clustered Victorians in, say, San Francisco, to continue the classic character of the city and replace ugly box houses... but zoning laws mean they can't.

rrsmtz 4y ago
Even if they could, they wouldn't. The modern trend is demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s.
- opportune 4y ago
  Have you been to California? A lot of the housing they are demolishing to build 5-over-1s are kinda shitty 1950s-60s ranches. Not really beautiful at all.
- techsupporter 4y ago
  I'm truly sorry if this comes off as a personal attack because I'm trying really hard for it not to be but my frustration bubbles over. > demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s YES. BECAUSE THAT'S ALL MODERN ZONING PERMITS. WHICH IS PRECISELY THE [bad word] PROBLEM. In our haste, particularly on the West Coast, to ensure that we build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, we've made zoning codes that produce THIS OUTCOME. There's a reply upthread that says that density advocates want to cram everyone into Soviet-style "dystopian" high rises and, to be honest, your reply here sounds a lot like that. A WORLD of difference exists between "detached dwelling on a 7,500 square foot lot" and "clone stamp 5-over-1 with empty retail on the bottom." BUT ZONING DOESN'T PERMIT IT. We absolutely should be building rowhouses and stacked flats and plaza housing and all of the other beautiful, people-scale-yet-still-dense, workable housing types that have been tried all over the planet yet America thinks we're too god damn special to have because "American Dream". If you have rules that say you can only build 5-over-1s, it should come as no shock at all when those are the only things being built, especially in the very tiny slice of areas where it's permitted to build anything dense at all.
  - rrsmtz 4y ago
    If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. From what I've seen, developers love building places like Mission Bay in SF and Seaport in Boston, made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies. If that's the vision of our utopian future, count me out.
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      Developers "love" building that stuff because... it's what zoning allows them to build. You would need to actually look at a place with better zoning to see a functional example, like suburban metropolitan Japan or France or Spain, where neighborhoods are often made of tightly-clustered detached homes (e.g. the old-fashioned Victorian row home equivalent) mixed with corner store retail.
    - techsupporter 4y ago
      > If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. It definitely is. I work in IT but one of my kids is in land use planning and they have regaled me with many stories of how builders come to the city (not in California) with plans. All of them involve a zoning variance and, more often than not, a trip through what is called Design Review. If the zoning change doesn't kill it--usually because they want a departure from what is called "floor area ratio" rules or from the "wedding cake" style zoning that is supposed to keep zones of detached housing "safe" from "impacts"--then design review absolutely does. Which dovetails into... > made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies ...your other point. It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning. Design review is often used as a cudgel to "catch" what zoning doesn't (so the rules say this kind of building is allowed but neighbors don't want it) and then administrivia it into, if not oblivion, then a very expensive project through things like "more building modulation" and "tamp down building massing" and "mitigate shadow impacts".

outworlder 4y ago

> Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. They are not _entitled_ to forever freeze a city just because they live there. I bet they would not like their town if it still looked the same as it was in 1890.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. My point is the NIMBY crowd have their point, and it’s unreasonable and unfair to assume they’re entitled asshats that hate poor people. Solutions where they exist will lie in the middle, otherwise in a democracy we have ways of resolving these things. However it really should be a city level decision - the whole point of having lots of cities is they can vary in their character and quality. Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good. The world shouldn’t revolve around some NIMBY, but a community of NIMBYs should be respected for their desires as the community. Ceding community control to the government and developers isn’t the right way to go.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  > They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. The voters of California have clearly decided that they aren't.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Yeah and I think they’ll regret it. If you think the voters of California are good stewards you’ve not paid attention to California.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Depends on the level of information available to voters. At the local level, decisions are usually terrible, as getting info about local elections is usually contained within patronage networks. At the state level, elections are much better, and state level elections are usually far more informed. There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13, that have severely harmed the state, but that's a common trap with all electorates. Overall I think California voters are newer on par with places like Minnesota thag have generally very good governance.

AussieWog93 4y ago

Yes, but on the flip side thousands of people will no longer be paying $3k/mo in rent for a shitty apartment, and homelessness will drop dramatically. The anti-NIMBY movement didn't come about because people want to override existing communities. It came about because people need a place to live, and NIMBYs were actively campaigning against it for decades with no consideration for the needs of others. Now, I think it's reached the stage where at least among young people making their lives miserable is honestly seen as a positive.

Xeronate 4y ago
People need a place to live but does that place have to be in California? It doesn’t make sense to talk about living in Santa Monica as a need.
- hnav 4y ago
  that’s where the opportunity is, i’ve done a 2-3hr roundtrip commute to santa monica before, have you?
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Maybe it’s time to end commutes then?
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      How the heck is the janitor of the facebook campus going to remote work?
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        There won’t be a Facebook campus. The janitor will have to find another place to work, sadly.
        hnav 4y ago

dkhenry 4y ago

This is not at all true, if you wanted character to your community then the community should have approved a building plan that kept the character and allowed for more housing. As it stands these communities have said no to everything and now housing is being foisted upon them, and I say good. Too many people and families have been displaced by the absolutely absurd housing situation in California, and the failure of the people of California to address the cost of housing in their communities shows their abject dismissal of the overwhelming humanitarian toll they have inflicted on their neighbors and the environment.

thehappypm 4y ago

This is hardcore pearl-clutching. You know what’s really a problem? How dystopian America is. The opportunity and jobs are in big cities. But housing makes it impossible for many people to even live near the city. People want to solve this problem, but are blocked because people like that their neighborhood has street parking. It’s killing America and it’s really killing our ability to become a modern, progressive society.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
I think the real problem is the density of opportunity and jobs in cities. I’m hopeful that remote work will break that tyranny to some extent. In five years when the emotions have cooled about return to office and the director of finance provides an analysis to the CFO about how much they could save and increase EPS while improving productivity using 2020/21 data and the CFO takes it to the board, that will be the end of the opportunity density in the cities.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Density of jobs is not a problem, it's a fundamental property and network effects are real. The problem is people that want to stop other people from being able to live the way they want.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    It’s a fundamental problem caused by the necessity to collocate to collaborate, which is largely not true any more. Jobs will diffuse away from cities as the people who live in the city out of obligation and have no desire leave. Some stay because they like it. Regardless the density will reduce. That’s a good thing. The hollowing out of the country into the coastal cities is a flaw not a feature.
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      Maybe some jobs don’t require colocating, but the majority still do. Any heavy industry, teaching, services, anything involving a lab, medicine.. working from home is not something just anyone can do.

jimnotgym 4y ago

As an aside... I find it fun that people in the US use the term 'Victorian' to describe an era. I like the idea of naming an era in a Republic after a foreign monarch. Incidentally, if it were 100 years old it would be Georgian. Vitoria died in 1901

fnordpiglet 4y ago
No, the term describes an architectural style that was popular ~100 years ago. I might be off by some number of years. It is related to the era, but it is independent of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_architecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_architecture
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  Ummm more like 120 years ago, during the reign of Queen Victoria, just like your link says. > In the United States, 'Victorian' architecture generally describes styles that were most popular between 1860 and 1900
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Ok, I consider 100 years ago from the top of my head pretty reasonable, especially as someone who couldn’t care less about a foreign monarch or precision in dating architectural styles. But, regardless, it’s not referring to an era but to an architectural style. While it was most popular 120 years ago, there have been Victorians built since then. I know not every Victorian in SF is 120+ years old because the city was burned to the ground in 1906.
panzagl 4y ago
Georgian refers to George I-III here, so ends in the 1780's.
nemo44x 4y ago
In the USA, many “revival” style homes were built in the 19th and early 20th century. It wouldn’t be uncommon to find a Victorian next to a Georgian next to a Tutor. But they are just styles.

triceratops 4y ago

The government controlling what kind of housing you can build on your property sounds way more Soviet to me.