38 ms·

This has little to do with the existence of zoning laws themselves, but the specific zones that they define. Japan has zones, so does Spain. But there's just no

This has little to do with the existence of zoning laws themselves, but the specific zones that they define. Japan has zones, so does Spain. But there's just nothing anywhere near as Restrictive as most US cities' R1 zone. Many places have R2s and R3s that are still more restrictive than the least dense thing than a Spanish city has. Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are also just as tough as their current zoning regulation. To solve the US density issue, localities have to be severely restricted in what they can block, but we also have to look at the bigger picture: What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? The answers are very uncomfortable.

nlavezzo 4y ago
> The answers are very uncomfortable. Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice is a pretty big leap given the many obvious benefits of the status quo for them. I imagine you could take almost any demographic and put them in a low density neighborhood with big yards, trees, low traffic, and neighbors that they've known for decades, and they're going to resist change.
- jackson1442 4y ago
  You can have all this (and more!) in cities as well. Lived in Seattle for a bit and my apartment had several neighborhoods of single-family homes within a couple blocks: each with mature trees, yards, and low traffic streets. Sure, the yard maybe isn't as massive as you can get in a suburb, but there's still plenty of space (and far more public parks). Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the added benefits of public transit and being walking distance to several grocery stores. Much better than suburbia in my opinion.
  - hcurtiss 4y ago
    But I do think that's a matter of opinion, and totally unrelated to prejudice.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    I mean, you’re basically saying that you can have suburbia in the city? If lots of people want it, the price will skyrocket, so then somebody will buy some land just outside the city and build suburbia there so more people can afford it. Rinse and repeat.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Having lived in Texas my whole life this idea was mostly foreign to me, but last year I visited Brooklyn and had my eyes opened
    - steveklabnik 4y ago
      ... and I moved to Texas from Brooklyn, and I can assure you, longer term residents than me are still finding it foreign. That's slowly changing...
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Old narrow-street, maybe an alley in the back, grid-layout suburbs with the odd block corner zoned commercial and all-neighborhood-streets routes to all kinds of businesses and parks and libraries and such are a whole different beast from the twisty-road car-dependent mazes of post-70s suburbia. And they're so much damn nicer. Too bad no-one builds them anymore.
    - twiddling 4y ago
      problem isn't zoning but design regulations. A lot of street design is dictated by being able to fire engine equipment in and turned around. Hence no new alleys are being built.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Basically how things were built pre-WW2? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=68s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=68s The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E Examples (Streetview): * https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+... * https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O... * https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON See also: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown Amsterdam, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
  - willnonya 4y ago
    "Basically how things were built pre-WW2?" Or, like many places still build them today?
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    > Basically how things were built pre-WW2? The majority of America was not some idyllic "streetcar suburb" even pre WWII. Majority of it was either grid based urban development or rural residential / agriculture in large plots (often 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640 acre plots). https://web.archive.org/web/20131108174122/http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/archives/777 https://web.archive.org/web/20131108174122/http://www.thegre... As agriculture got more efficient, and raising food for ones self became less common, and as cars became more prevalent these large rural plots often got sold to developers who would be tasked with breaking up the land into parcels and installing new roads and infrastructure. Even in 1906 in San Francisco, you can see that cars are beginning to overtake the cable car and horse carriage as the central form of transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY So it's natural that majority of American land was developed around the automobile.
- kiba 4y ago
  Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Cars are currently two tons noise and pollution machine. It's no wonder why people feel unsafe around them. You could restrict traffic to only bicycles and pedestrians combined with mixed zoning. Also, lawn mowers....They're extremely loud.
  - harvey9 4y ago
    Seems like a non sequitur
- api 4y ago
  > that are safe for kids It’s all about kids. Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars. The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core. Those spaces don’t have to be undeveloped or even outdoor but I have yet to see a city successfully create an environment safe enough that I’d let my small daughters run around. So while I agree that zoning is dumb and complicated, I also think it’s important to understand where people are coming from.
  - JAlexoid 4y ago
    I grew up in a Soviet planned city, with courtyard focused developments. Our playgrounds were(they still are) larger and more accessible, than anything my current neighbours kids get on their 2a of land in rural USA. Even the new developments in Eastern Europe provide a kid friendly courtyard. Shielded from all traffic and observable by literally the whole community. Suburbia should be reserved for the insane rich people, that hate their neighbors.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      Advantages for real-estate developers triumphed over the community-minded across a lot of the USA. I talked to my elderly Uncle, and he said that these zoning and quality of life issues were discussed quite a bit in the 1950s, but the "sprawl" pattern won in most cases. Shopping mall retail is another example of low-quality results in the USA, but with a different menu of inputs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      exactly - the problem is that House-absessed people do not understand how to build and manage apartments. In their imagination its just stacking towers without courtyards on top of each-other. When they have coirtyards, they looks lile prisons.
- SamBam 4y ago
  > and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Actually, suburban streets are significantly more dangerous than urban streets, in terms of number of children killed, as a fraction of both population and miles driven. > Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 5–13, with the rural rate (3.1) twice as high as the urban rate (1.5) > Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 14–17 in both urban and rural areas; the rate was 2.5 times higher in rural (12.5) than in urban areas https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db421.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db421.htm > cul-de-sac communities actually have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children. In fact, children in suburban communities are five times more likely to be killed in a pedestrian accident than urban children. https://www.lewisandtompkins.com/motor-vehicle-and-public-transportation/pedestrian-bicycle-accidents/pedestrian-bicycle-accidents-questions/i-live-on-a-quiet-cul-de-sac-in-the-virginia-suburbs-do-i-really-need-to-supervise-my-children-while-they-play-outside/ https://www.lewisandtompkins.com/motor-vehicle-and-public-tr... > City streets safer than suburban roads, study finds https://whyy.org/articles/study-city-driving-often-safer-than-the-burbs/ https://whyy.org/articles/study-city-driving-often-safer-tha... > Cul-de-Sacs Are Killing Us: Public Safety Lessons From Suburbia https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killing-us-public-safety-lessons-from-suburbia/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killi...
  - spockz 4y ago
    But why is that? Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. So what does the fraction look when we take children playing outside and be healthy instead of just children? The chance remains the same but for the ones that survive there is a better quality of life.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - willnonya 4y ago
      There is also a significant ant difference in the absolute numbers. Not to mention people tend to be much lore cautious in high traffic areas.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. So everyone already in their "safe" neighborhood will remain "safe". Except in rare circumstances no one is going to build a 10-lane expressway behind that tract of "safe" houses. Second you've got to be realistic about the socioeconomic factors behind those "safe" suburbs. The small, often winding suburban streets are largely impenetrable to buses and completely immune to light rail. This means public transit often used by "those people" (for whatever local definition of "those") is inaccessible from inside the "safe" suburban housing tracts. This is exacerbated by many suburbs lacking sidewalks. Inaccessibility of public transit was a design criteria for early suburbs preventing anyone that could afford a house but not a car from moving to them.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. I’m so in favor of up zoning, but some parts of California will be quickly thrust into a new reality. Santa Monica was the first town to fail the housing element. They previously had 1600 houses built in the last 8 years. Since failing recently, developers have submitted permits for 4000 units. That’s 20x above the yearly average. If I was a “desirable” town, I’d be very nervous to not comply. If I owned property in one of those towns I’d have been advertising it to developers hard too.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  > Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? You mean like all the medium-density neighborhoods of San Francisco? American R-1 suburbs are a nightmare for kids, and that's why you never see any kids outside there, tell me how this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA/@37.4562493,-122.160922,15.82z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa6b1117280ff:0xebbf998e5df289ab!8m2!3d37.4529598!4d-122.1817252 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA/@37.4562493... , in one of America's most expensive suburbs, is any sort of safe for kids.
  - hcurtiss 4y ago
    I live in a suburban R-1 neighborhood in Oregon and my kids play basketball, ride bikes, and roller skate in the street literally every day with boatloads of other kids. If that's your vision of a nightmare, I fear we're not going to agree on any of this.
    - veec_cas_tant 4y ago
      I'm seriously shocked by how many people value the idea that kids can play in the street. Why not a park or other recreation area? I get that it isn't entirely common in the United States to build walkable parks but that is a United States problem, not a city problem. Cities built for living should offer much better alternatives to children than playing in the street.
      - frenchy 4y ago
        > Why not a park or other recreation area How do they get there? What might not be obvious is that the parks are often far away, because you can't afford to maintain many parks because the tax base is too small.
        veec_cas_tant 4y ago
        I completely agree if we are talking about a typical suburb. A mixed-use area built for living doesn't have that issue. What I find really strange is that some people in these comments seem opposed to mixed-use areas BECAUSE their children will no longer be able to play in the streets. It's like some sort of weird, cyclical way of justifying the lack of proper pedestrian areas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Yes that is absolutely something people want. You can get that in cities if you give up on yard and instead share with parks. That said, some of the reasons people want it are uncomfortable. Some people don’t like change and moved somewhere based on how it looked in <year>, understandable, but change is a part of life especially as our population grows. Streets that are safe for kids are common in many parts of the world, in many different city structures, not just suburbs. So the “family friendly” myth about suburbs isn’t true. Regarding uncomfortable truths, if you go and listen to some of the town meetings, you’ll walk away with a couple points, of varying degrees of prejudice. Some people simply want it to be “exclusionary” to keep prices up, and to keep themselves feeling special. Those people in town meetings may suggest paying for affordable housing in another town to keep theirs as is. Some people will say they don’t want affordable housing because “we all know that those people bring crime”. This can be a varying degree of prejudice, whether it’s low income people or racial minorities, but invariably someone always says it.
  - GenerocUsername 4y ago
    Parks cannot replace yards as long as the homeless camps exist across every existing park in my city.
    - xp84 4y ago
      This is very true. Sadly there is zero chance of finding a politically-palatable solution for this one in California.
      - d3nj4l 4y ago
        What is the non-politically-palatable solution?
        nerdbert 4y ago
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  They absolutely can. In the end it should be their right... but... what happens now, is that they underpay for the infrastructure and services they get.
- xp84 4y ago
  many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being, but just wanted to add: Low traffic → Less cars driving How do you get less cars driving? People need realistic options. How do you get those options? Density to support transit and Density to support having businesses close to everyone's homes so they can just walk or bike. Car-dependent suburbia IS the problem, and the more of it you have in the city the bigger the problems of traffic and unaffordability get. Finally though: > want to keep them that way Look, don't get carried away. Unless a very significant block of homeowners in your beautiful leafy neighborhood are itching to sell, you have literally nothing to fear. Maybe when a large mall is demolished a mile away from you, someone will build something other than single-family tract homes. Big whoop. *Nobody is coming for your suburbs with bulldozers* just because "SFH" might not be enshrined as the only way anything can be developed.
  - nlavezzo 4y ago
    > many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being I'm not advocating for low density suburbs or for things to remain unchanged. My point was that the implication that some kind of nefarious prejudice was the main reason for homeowners wanting to keep the status quo, isn't fair or accurate.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    This is a very simplistic view. Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Depending on how the roads are designed, you can get a spread out neighborhood with no traffic on your street. I grew up on a cul-de-sac. There were 8 houses on the street. The only time there was a car on the street is when someone from one of those 8 houses went somewhere. There was zero traffic and the street was safe for kids to play in.
    - nerdbert 4y ago
      > Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Only if you arbitrarily cherry-pick the unit of analysis to support your argument. The only way to actually reduce cars per unit of land across all available land is to increase housing density so that sensible transportation alternatives like bicycle and metro become viable for the lazier marginal population.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? You're describing European cities, there. That is literally how I grew up in a big city, and we were lower middle class at best.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  I think the primary reason in 2023 is to keep housing values high and rising, not racism.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  The pro-density crowd cannot comprehend wanting to live in a quiet, safe, uncrowded town. They say the only possible motivations are money and racism.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    San Fransisco left behind "uncrowded town" quite a lot time ago.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Sure we can. We just think that can also look like this: https://youtu.be/5APjiZz_XCY https://youtu.be/5APjiZz_XCY Uncrowded is subjective I suppose but it's certainly no Manhattan.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    What we can't comprehend is forcing everyone in the country to live in the type of town you want. Move to bumfuck if you want a quiet uncrowded town. People near jobs want cheap housing.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > The pro-density crowd cannot comprehend wanting to live in a quiet, safe, uncrowded town. No, we just can't comprehend why you would expect the big city to be quiet and uncrowded. It's like moving to the tropics, and complaining that it rains too much, and that the skiing sucks. If you want quiet and uncrowded, there's the 99.9% of the country's land area that isn't taken up by coastal metros in the middle of a crippling housing crisis.
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    I live in Tokyo, in a central area (nearish to Shibuya). It's dense, but quiet, safe, and surprisingly not that crowded. There's a few children's play areas within a 2 minute walk. There's numerous parks around me, including dog runs. The anti-density crowd can't imagine allowing well planned towns and cities to exist in the US.
- dnissley 4y ago
  I would say that the reasons you stated above are uncomfortable because they are implicitly discriminatory to people outside those areas who want to move in. People who already live there are, in effect, saying "we're full up here, go somewhere else". And these are often the same people with signs in their front yard saying things like "no matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor" in multiple languages, or "climate change is real", or "no human is illegal" which espouse values in direct opposition to that implicitly discriminatory message.
- hadlock 4y ago
  Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them. The center of many city residential blocks are still quiet green oasis. Busy streets will still stay busy, quiet side streets tend to stay that way. Go look at any european city, or any city outside of the US really
  - parineum 4y ago
    > Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them. *Until the city decides they want to change it That's why people want to ensrine in law that those trees don't change. They don't trust the city to maintain homeostasis for the duration of their residency. What happens when people want to build a new apartment building but those trees are too big to safely build next to?
    - nerdbert 4y ago
      You make a very good point: Only cities chop down trees, private landowners absolutely never ever do.
      - parineum 4y ago
        They don't (legally) on city property. That's what we're talking about. If you move into a neighborhood where the city maintains the trees in the common areas (sidewalks, parks, etc.), it's not unreasonable to want to put a barrier between the city deciding, for example, it's too expensive to keep maintaining those trees so they are going to cut them all down. If I or my neighbor wants to cut down a tree is a completely different conversation. I appreciate your snark though, even though it's completely irrelevant.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Low traffic streets are a reason to remove cars, not people.
- _ZeD_ 4y ago
  ...and then you need a car because everything is literally miles away
  - zip1234 4y ago
    Cities are not loud. Cars are loud!
- scythe 4y ago
  > > The answers are very uncomfortable. > but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice This is a good example of why being coy rather than explicit is bad for productive discussion. Bigotry of its various forms is certainly one possible uncomfortable answer to the question. But there are others, like crime, or the effect of local property-value-to-enrollment ratio on school quality, or plenty of other problems that systematically occur in American cities. NIMBYism is by no means the exclusive domain of homeowners in low-density neighborhoods. Even when it comes from them, they are often concerned with developments that are not actually in their neighborhoods — their trees and yards not being in jeopardy. There's a fundamental distrust of the overall process of development that animates anti-growth sentiments not only in middle-class neighborhoods but also in, for example, the Mission.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Nothing about this would let a developer cut down your tree, build on your yard, etc. You just wouldn't be able to stop your neighbor from selling their property to a developer who might cut down trees and build things there. It's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about what your neighbors do with their property, just like it's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about which kinds of restaurants are close to your home. But should you be able to prevent your favorite restaurant from legally closing?
  - nlavezzo 4y ago
    Your neighbor doesn't currently have the right to do anything they want with their property though. They don't absolutely own it and have some kind of sovereign status. They can't turn it into a gas station or auto repair shop. They have the right to exclusive use of the land for the purpose of a single family dwelling built to certain specifications and abiding by various guidelines and regulations. When each neighbor bought into the neighborhood, they all signed up for this same basic deal. Many of them would likely have chosen to not spend their money on the property had their neighbors not been bound by the same rules. What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to. This absolutely does affect everyone in the neighborhood because an older neighborhood is more than a collection of unrelated properties, it is a collection of actual homes of similar size and character with a particular feel and aesthetic. A change to the rules may absolutely be necessary for the health of the city / population as a whole. Totally agree with this. Don't pretend though that it's not coming at the cost of infringing on the existing homeowners' reasonable expectations of what they bought into when they purchased their properties. Again, maybe it does need to happen, but homeowners are not unreasonable for wanting to keep their neighborhoods as they've always known and loved them.
    - zip1234 4y ago
      Buying a house and expecting nothing to change in one's neighborhood is completely unreasonable. Places change constantly.
      - 4y ago
- andrepd 4y ago
  > low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Suburban streets are extremely dangerous to kids (in fact being hit by a driver is the leading cause of death to kids under 14). You know what is safe? Walkable cities, pedestrianised streets, speed bumps wherever cars do drive inside the city, etc.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Even the prejudice part we don't have to dance around. I'm from the Netherlands, and for the first 24 years of my life have lived in lower working class neighborhoods, 3 in total. Low income families, people on wellfare, the like. In this case all white, so it's not a racial thing. All of these 3 neighborhoods were awful. Relatively high crime, vandalism, the public dumping of trash, alcoholism, very loud music blasting, shouting, just general anti-social behavior. The biggest quality of life improvement in my lifetime is that eventually I was able to afford living in a good neighborhood. Middle class to a bit above it. Families, stable citizens, civil, considerate, sane. The piece of mind this gives is invaluable. This is just one step up the ladder, I'm by no means rich. It's not elitism. It shouldn't be a high bar to feel comfortable, safe, and not constantly frustrated by obnoxious people, or the spaces ruined. But at the same time we should acknowledge that this "bar" is strongly correlated with class. For obvious reasons, in the lower classes more people have what I'll categorize as "social issues". And here's the thing. It's a rotten apple dynamic. Perhaps as little as 5-10% of the inhabitants are responsible for all this shit, yet the entire neighborhood becomes unlivable because of it. The real issue here is that these rotten apples are not addressed. Because it's near-impossible to address. The behavior is petty crime at best and often merely obnoxious and anti-social behavior. You can't put people in jail for that and they have to live somewhere. This is already the lowest end, there's nowhere else to go. So the positive here is that it's not racism (in my example), and not even classism. 90% of people in the lower classes are decent and social people. The real issue is the inability to deal with the 10% that is not. The dysfunctionals and anti-socials wrecking the place. I'm sure that each has their own story, but I'm not going to suffer my entire life at their whims. I've done plenty of that. You could say that this "prejudice" is very much grounded in reality. Sometimes you need to a reality check.
rnk 4y ago
It's not that mysterious why people want this. For people of means, they want to preserve the quality of life that they see in having mostly single family homes and in the past keep it full of white people with money, hopefully the only whites thing has faded. Of course racism was a core issue in how these exclusions panned out in the US. If I'm in a city and and I own one of these houses, it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property - because you can't build nearly as many SFH as you can apartments. I'm sure racism and fear of the other is still an issue (I'm from the south, I know it's an issue based on personal experience) but it's far more economic imho today. The end result is the same, people want to hold on to what they see as part of their "intrinsic value" in their neighborhood setup.
- hervature 4y ago
  > it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property This argument never made sense for me. Being able to put more units in the same space drastically increases the value of the land. It of course reduces the value of other things like having towering buildings around your 2 story home which blocks your view. In this sense, home owners need to turn to zoning to prevent that despite it being detrimental to their land value.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    They have a different argument, namely by making sure houses are less dense, the total number of houses being built in an area is far less than what the land can support, leading to artificial scarcity in the market. The artificially limited supply then leads to high prices.
    - hervature 4y ago
      Restricting supply obviously increases prices. That's economics 101. Their claim is that they are doing it precisely for economic gains. Whereas I'm saying that it is actually not about the economic gains because they are giving up economic value (much higher land value) in order to preserve non-economic things (neighborhood, view, etc.). My point is that an acre of land in the center of Manhattan is worth a lot of money. That value goes drastically down if something prevents you from building above 35 feet.
jp57 4y ago
> Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are also just as tough as their current zoning regulation. This. Houston has little or no zoning and is terribly sprawling and car-centric. Despite the lack of zoning, in most neighborhoods you can't just build whatever you want because of restrictive covenants. Developers build massive car-focused single-family-only developments and load them with covenants that prevent anything else from being built on the property after it is sold.
- bandofthehawk 4y ago
  You're right Houston doesn't call it zoning, but they basically have the same rules. This video sums it up well: https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  Next up, get rid of HOAs.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is. Perhaps just reduce the overwhelming supermajority requirements to dissolve them, perhaps. In many places your only viable option if you don't like your HOA is get elected to the board yourself along with enough like-minded neighbors. You might not be able to dissolve it, but you could seriously neuter the policies if you wanted.
    - JoshTriplett 4y ago
      > HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is. Yes, they're the most local demonstration of the fact that "democracy" is not an acceptable approach to decide what color I can paint my house, or what plants I can plant, or how soon after the 6am garbage pickup my garbage can has to be brought inside. They're also, often, not even a democracy: they're a loudest-ocracy, because most people have better things to do with their time than dictate what their neighbors can do. Destroy HOAs with fire. To be clear, echoing a point from elsewhere in this thread: nobody should have to have an asphalt manufacturing plant next to their home. But that same premise doesn't extend to "nobody should have a house next to them with an Unapproved Paint Color".
JAlexoid 4y ago
Dealing with HOAs is actually easier - transfer all infrastructure ownership and maintenance to them... you'll see some big changes real fast. Like treat HOA as a commercial entity for purposes of trash, water and sewage. (HOAs are, de facto, incorporated organizations). Tax land under the roads as plain land. As for localities - they should be mandated to reassess property values every X years and distribute infrastructure maintenance costs appropriately. I now live in a rural area, and I underpay taxes for the services I get... while smaller houses in town overpay.
- TimPC 4y ago
  This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard. You’ll end up with people paying $0 for infra for 70 years then suddenly having to buy multimillion dollar projects with no cash reserves. The net result will be widespread chaos and huge social pressure on government to bail out badly managed HOAs.
  - SECProto 4y ago
    Not different from the current system, where we elect politicians who promise not to raise taxes, so they defer maintenance on all infrastructure, until in 70 years we have to spend trillions replacing old pipes/bridges/roads that could have been kept up for decades longer with better maintenance. Except they can't go begging to the feds, because they've also have been voted in under platforms of "minimize tax increases" for 40 years, so they're also indebted.
  - JAlexoid 4y ago
    Chaos for badly managed HOAs, that will have to be dissolved and the property transferred to municipal control... disbanding bad HOAs and leaving properly managed HOAs. I didn't mention that bad HOAs should definitely have the option to not have to pony up... However, suburban homes have to get their taxes ramped up, because they are unsustainable at current levels.
enaaem 4y ago
First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.
- pitaj 4y ago
  Yep, municipalities should require a large deposit up-front to connect new neighborhoods to existing infrastructure, based on the amount of infrastructure (roads, water, sewer) the new neighborhood has.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  I second that. We moved from Manhattan an hour north into a rural area. Our town clears our road continuously during winter, while are property taxes are low single thousands. We get three trash pickups per week and other trash removal services included. We woefully underpay for those services.
- adrr 4y ago
  How does that work? Property tax is by city and suburbs are their own cities. For example, my city has implemented has implemented a Mello-Roos for new developments to fund new schools.
  - enaaem 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
    - adrr 4y ago
      Cherry picking cities can show anything. Let's look at SF compared to suburbs like Palo Alto. Separate cities with their own budgets and SF has one the highest tax revenues per resident in the US but since SF has high density and lacks of car access goes up, costs explode including labor. SF average city employee salary is $180k. SF infrastructure is below palo alto. Palo alto has better streets, better schools, better maintained parks even with standford paying no property taxes. You can see also see this in New York.
ipaddr 4y ago
The answers are very uncomfortable Like cleaner air, safer streets, less traffic and a better place to raise a child and/or dog with backyards and privacy.
- kiba 4y ago
  Streets are dangerous because of cars zipping around. Cars contribute to air pollution quality (until electrified) and noise quality. So, you ban cars from streets and allow only pedestrians and cyclists. Next, you allow local amenities to pop up so you don't feel the need to get a car out. The suburban pattern of development as it currently exists isn't the only way to facilitate the quality of life you're looking for.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    You can't ban cars before you have the infrastructure and commercial resources to replace what cars were used for.
  - florbo 4y ago
    When are US cities going to ban cars? My guess is 0-2 in the next century.
  - zip1234 4y ago
    Even electrified, tires shed loads of nasty particulates.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      And at higher speeds make a good chunk of the noise, too.
- lfuller 4y ago
  Nearly all studies regarding suburban vs. urban streets have shown that suburban streets have significantly higher rates of child deaths and injuries than urban streets.
sdenton4 4y ago
Dumb question, but how do HOAs enforce things? Presumably they have some binding agreement, but I can't imagine why someone would opt into one. 'Why yes, I'd love to pay dues and fines to my noisiest neighbors.'
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  > I can't imagine why someone would opt into one. You cannot buy without being a part of the HOA.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement. At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees. You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew. TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    > you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed I'd be curious about people's experiences and successes with this. Has anyone successfully pulled that off with a still-existing HOA?
    - adra 4y ago
      Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.
theironhammer 4y ago
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PaulHoule 4y ago
When I visited Palo Alto I found it a very strange experience, my ‘terrain reading’ skills that would lead me to a convenience store and similar affordances in most developed and developing countries did not work at all. It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building. Such a neighborhood would be different but still pretty nice by most people’s standards, you can see neighborhoods like that in L.A. or São Paulo. To be devil’s advocate though I’d say there are larger scale reasons why people might conclude that ‘California is full’. One is that the population density of California overall is about the same as Germany even though most of California is uninhabitable or massive farm fields. Certain regions of the coast are highly populated by U.S. standards even if they are nothing like Hong Kong or Singapore. The linear pattern of dense development means the radio spectrum is utilized like nowhere else in the US such that there are more OTA TVs channels in LA than some cable plans. California struggles with water and any population addition would require adding more infrastructure of all kinds. It could be more highways, it could be more public transit but it has to be paid for. And the US is a country that spends 10’s of billions to duplicate a train station in NYC or run rail from Bakersfield to Fresno. A reasonable person could very well try to gum up the gears in that machine no matter how they can. You might say that more population means more economic activity and more tax base but I am not so sure. A lot of it seems driven by inequity and monopoly power. Google and Facebook could not double their revenue by doubling their hiring in California and it is not so plausible that the next big startup in the U.S. would be able to accomplish what they’ve done. There was a time you could dream of selling a company like WhatsApp to Facebook even if going public was not in the cards but the monopolists would hate to have to spend that much to defend their positions and surely try to shape the environment to prevent that. (Now from Genshin Impact to Tik-Tok innovation in social/entertainment is happening in the PRC because that economy is more open to competition.)
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building. And you could probably maintain or even increase the amount of ground-level "yard" space per capita even while increasing population density. Of course it would need to be parks that you share.
JasserInicide 4y ago
>What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? Because it's actually what many people want. They want a house in the quiet suburbs that they can sell in 30 years for much more than it's worth. This is obviously all because nearly everyone alive that can vividly remember a time before WW2 are dead. All they know are car-centric architecture. And we all know how much people love change.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > that they can sell in 30 years for much more than it's worth Sooner or later this will collapse disasterously
rayiner 4y ago
> What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? The answers are very uncomfortable. That’s just urbanists smearing people with innuendo about racism to advance unrelated policy goals. It’s actually ironic, because one of the major population trends right now is “black flight” to the suburbs. People, especially families, like low density suburban zoning because it’s convenient. I live in a pre-zoning code suburb with houses packed tightly together. People are always fighting over parking spots, contractor trucks can block people into their parking spots or block the road, etc. There’s a lot of retired people, and they complain about families with young kids moving in due to the noise. (And these are white and white adjacent kids too.) My parents refused to move into the subdivision, and instead moved nearby to a 1 acre plot surrounded by trees where they didn’t have to interact with their neighbors.
- tptacek 4y ago
  If it was that simple, inner ring suburbs wouldn't all be zoned single-family, and it wouldn't take state-level action to allow multifamily dwellings to be built. Instead, they artificially restrict density, in defiance of market forces.
Spooky23 4y ago
The answer is that people benefit from stability, both financially and socially. Single and duplex zoning was a great deal for cities and close suburbs because they are operationally efficient - less services are required; fewer parks, fewer schools, fewer calls for fire and police service. It’s a good deal for people because financially it has been historically better to own a building and land vs rent or buy into coops. For existing, pre-1990 low density urban neighborhoods, retrofitting medium density housing is usually a shitshow. Why? - The areas of were detached houses that usually have yards, no parks, fire stations, etc. - Because of healthcare and tax policy, it’s very difficult to run the types of small businesses that are needed to support an urban lifestyle. Boutiques, restaurants/bars and similar - Because there are no local amenities, people still need cars, and there’s rarely enough parking to meet demand. - Schools are tied to geography, and changes in school assignments are impactful and traumatic to families. - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing. If you look at functioning urban environments like NYC, you see it all over the place. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. As small retail fades away, major big box scaled retail moves in. The neighborhood 20-40k sq ft grocery stores of my childhood (Key Food, Finest, A&P, ShopRite) are being displaced by bodegas at the low end and big developments on the high end - which drive demand for cars and exclude people relying on transit. You can only fix this stuff with fairly radical change, that will be very painful for lots of stakeholders.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > they are operationally efficient > Because there are no local amenities, people need cars Seems like the definition of inefficiency > - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing Damn
auctoritas 4y ago
If people live in a low density area, we can assume they want to live in a low density area. So it makes perfect sense they would be against making their low density area high density. What is so uncomfortable about that? To get at what your really implying though, what's wrong with maintaining some degree of cultural homogeneity in a neighborhood? It's a good thing in that it makes for high trust communities.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
The answer is very comfortable. Lots of people like a quiet neighborhood and a good amount of space to themselves. It might be a bit selfish, and there are undoubtably some exceptions, but the idea that the suburbs are full of awful people trying to keep out some specific segment is flat wrong. Most people are too concerned with keeping their day to day life together to sit around worrying about/hating on others.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? They need a way of keeping out black households without violating the legal prohibition on an HOA saying "no black owners".

nlavezzo 4y ago

> The answers are very uncomfortable. Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice is a pretty big leap given the many obvious benefits of the status quo for them. I imagine you could take almost any demographic and put them in a low density neighborhood with big yards, trees, low traffic, and neighbors that they've known for decades, and they're going to resist change.

jackson1442 4y ago
You can have all this (and more!) in cities as well. Lived in Seattle for a bit and my apartment had several neighborhoods of single-family homes within a couple blocks: each with mature trees, yards, and low traffic streets. Sure, the yard maybe isn't as massive as you can get in a suburb, but there's still plenty of space (and far more public parks). Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the added benefits of public transit and being walking distance to several grocery stores. Much better than suburbia in my opinion.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  But I do think that's a matter of opinion, and totally unrelated to prejudice.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  I mean, you’re basically saying that you can have suburbia in the city? If lots of people want it, the price will skyrocket, so then somebody will buy some land just outside the city and build suburbia there so more people can afford it. Rinse and repeat.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Having lived in Texas my whole life this idea was mostly foreign to me, but last year I visited Brooklyn and had my eyes opened
  - steveklabnik 4y ago
    ... and I moved to Texas from Brooklyn, and I can assure you, longer term residents than me are still finding it foreign. That's slowly changing...
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Old narrow-street, maybe an alley in the back, grid-layout suburbs with the odd block corner zoned commercial and all-neighborhood-streets routes to all kinds of businesses and parks and libraries and such are a whole different beast from the twisty-road car-dependent mazes of post-70s suburbia. And they're so much damn nicer. Too bad no-one builds them anymore.
  - twiddling 4y ago
    problem isn't zoning but design regulations. A lot of street design is dictated by being able to fire engine equipment in and turned around. Hence no new alleys are being built.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
throw0101a 4y ago
> Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Basically how things were built pre-WW2? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=68s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=68s The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E Examples (Streetview): * https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+... * https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O... * https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON See also: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown Amsterdam, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
- willnonya 4y ago
  "Basically how things were built pre-WW2?" Or, like many places still build them today?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > Basically how things were built pre-WW2? The majority of America was not some idyllic "streetcar suburb" even pre WWII. Majority of it was either grid based urban development or rural residential / agriculture in large plots (often 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640 acre plots). https://web.archive.org/web/20131108174122/http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/archives/777 https://web.archive.org/web/20131108174122/http://www.thegre... As agriculture got more efficient, and raising food for ones self became less common, and as cars became more prevalent these large rural plots often got sold to developers who would be tasked with breaking up the land into parcels and installing new roads and infrastructure. Even in 1906 in San Francisco, you can see that cars are beginning to overtake the cable car and horse carriage as the central form of transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY So it's natural that majority of American land was developed around the automobile.
kiba 4y ago
Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Cars are currently two tons noise and pollution machine. It's no wonder why people feel unsafe around them. You could restrict traffic to only bicycles and pedestrians combined with mixed zoning. Also, lawn mowers....They're extremely loud.
- harvey9 4y ago
  Seems like a non sequitur
api 4y ago
> that are safe for kids It’s all about kids. Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars. The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core. Those spaces don’t have to be undeveloped or even outdoor but I have yet to see a city successfully create an environment safe enough that I’d let my small daughters run around. So while I agree that zoning is dumb and complicated, I also think it’s important to understand where people are coming from.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  I grew up in a Soviet planned city, with courtyard focused developments. Our playgrounds were(they still are) larger and more accessible, than anything my current neighbours kids get on their 2a of land in rural USA. Even the new developments in Eastern Europe provide a kid friendly courtyard. Shielded from all traffic and observable by literally the whole community. Suburbia should be reserved for the insane rich people, that hate their neighbors.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    Advantages for real-estate developers triumphed over the community-minded across a lot of the USA. I talked to my elderly Uncle, and he said that these zoning and quality of life issues were discussed quite a bit in the 1950s, but the "sprawl" pattern won in most cases. Shopping mall retail is another example of low-quality results in the USA, but with a different menu of inputs.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    exactly - the problem is that House-absessed people do not understand how to build and manage apartments. In their imagination its just stacking towers without courtyards on top of each-other. When they have coirtyards, they looks lile prisons.
SamBam 4y ago
> and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Actually, suburban streets are significantly more dangerous than urban streets, in terms of number of children killed, as a fraction of both population and miles driven. > Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 5–13, with the rural rate (3.1) twice as high as the urban rate (1.5) > Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 14–17 in both urban and rural areas; the rate was 2.5 times higher in rural (12.5) than in urban areas https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db421.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db421.htm > cul-de-sac communities actually have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children. In fact, children in suburban communities are five times more likely to be killed in a pedestrian accident than urban children. https://www.lewisandtompkins.com/motor-vehicle-and-public-transportation/pedestrian-bicycle-accidents/pedestrian-bicycle-accidents-questions/i-live-on-a-quiet-cul-de-sac-in-the-virginia-suburbs-do-i-really-need-to-supervise-my-children-while-they-play-outside/ https://www.lewisandtompkins.com/motor-vehicle-and-public-tr... > City streets safer than suburban roads, study finds https://whyy.org/articles/study-city-driving-often-safer-than-the-burbs/ https://whyy.org/articles/study-city-driving-often-safer-tha... > Cul-de-Sacs Are Killing Us: Public Safety Lessons From Suburbia https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killing-us-public-safety-lessons-from-suburbia/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killi...
- spockz 4y ago
  But why is that? Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. So what does the fraction look when we take children playing outside and be healthy instead of just children? The chance remains the same but for the ones that survive there is a better quality of life.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - willnonya 4y ago
    There is also a significant ant difference in the absolute numbers. Not to mention people tend to be much lore cautious in high traffic areas.
giantrobot 4y ago
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. So everyone already in their "safe" neighborhood will remain "safe". Except in rare circumstances no one is going to build a 10-lane expressway behind that tract of "safe" houses. Second you've got to be realistic about the socioeconomic factors behind those "safe" suburbs. The small, often winding suburban streets are largely impenetrable to buses and completely immune to light rail. This means public transit often used by "those people" (for whatever local definition of "those") is inaccessible from inside the "safe" suburban housing tracts. This is exacerbated by many suburbs lacking sidewalks. Inaccessibility of public transit was a design criteria for early suburbs preventing anyone that could afford a house but not a car from moving to them.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. I’m so in favor of up zoning, but some parts of California will be quickly thrust into a new reality. Santa Monica was the first town to fail the housing element. They previously had 1600 houses built in the last 8 years. Since failing recently, developers have submitted permits for 4000 units. That’s 20x above the yearly average. If I was a “desirable” town, I’d be very nervous to not comply. If I owned property in one of those towns I’d have been advertising it to developers hard too.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? You mean like all the medium-density neighborhoods of San Francisco? American R-1 suburbs are a nightmare for kids, and that's why you never see any kids outside there, tell me how this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA/@37.4562493,-122.160922,15.82z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa6b1117280ff:0xebbf998e5df289ab!8m2!3d37.4529598!4d-122.1817252 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA/@37.4562493... , in one of America's most expensive suburbs, is any sort of safe for kids.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  I live in a suburban R-1 neighborhood in Oregon and my kids play basketball, ride bikes, and roller skate in the street literally every day with boatloads of other kids. If that's your vision of a nightmare, I fear we're not going to agree on any of this.
  - veec_cas_tant 4y ago
    I'm seriously shocked by how many people value the idea that kids can play in the street. Why not a park or other recreation area? I get that it isn't entirely common in the United States to build walkable parks but that is a United States problem, not a city problem. Cities built for living should offer much better alternatives to children than playing in the street.
    - frenchy 4y ago
      > Why not a park or other recreation area How do they get there? What might not be obvious is that the parks are often far away, because you can't afford to maintain many parks because the tax base is too small.
      - veec_cas_tant 4y ago
        I completely agree if we are talking about a typical suburb. A mixed-use area built for living doesn't have that issue. What I find really strange is that some people in these comments seem opposed to mixed-use areas BECAUSE their children will no longer be able to play in the streets. It's like some sort of weird, cyclical way of justifying the lack of proper pedestrian areas.
deleted 4y ago
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vineyardmike 4y ago
> Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Yes that is absolutely something people want. You can get that in cities if you give up on yard and instead share with parks. That said, some of the reasons people want it are uncomfortable. Some people don’t like change and moved somewhere based on how it looked in <year>, understandable, but change is a part of life especially as our population grows. Streets that are safe for kids are common in many parts of the world, in many different city structures, not just suburbs. So the “family friendly” myth about suburbs isn’t true. Regarding uncomfortable truths, if you go and listen to some of the town meetings, you’ll walk away with a couple points, of varying degrees of prejudice. Some people simply want it to be “exclusionary” to keep prices up, and to keep themselves feeling special. Those people in town meetings may suggest paying for affordable housing in another town to keep theirs as is. Some people will say they don’t want affordable housing because “we all know that those people bring crime”. This can be a varying degree of prejudice, whether it’s low income people or racial minorities, but invariably someone always says it.
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  Parks cannot replace yards as long as the homeless camps exist across every existing park in my city.
  - xp84 4y ago
    This is very true. Sadly there is zero chance of finding a politically-palatable solution for this one in California.
    - d3nj4l 4y ago
      What is the non-politically-palatable solution?
      - nerdbert 4y ago
JAlexoid 4y ago
They absolutely can. In the end it should be their right... but... what happens now, is that they underpay for the infrastructure and services they get.
xp84 4y ago
many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being, but just wanted to add: Low traffic → Less cars driving How do you get less cars driving? People need realistic options. How do you get those options? Density to support transit and Density to support having businesses close to everyone's homes so they can just walk or bike. Car-dependent suburbia IS the problem, and the more of it you have in the city the bigger the problems of traffic and unaffordability get. Finally though: > want to keep them that way Look, don't get carried away. Unless a very significant block of homeowners in your beautiful leafy neighborhood are itching to sell, you have literally nothing to fear. Maybe when a large mall is demolished a mile away from you, someone will build something other than single-family tract homes. Big whoop. *Nobody is coming for your suburbs with bulldozers* just because "SFH" might not be enshrined as the only way anything can be developed.
- nlavezzo 4y ago
  > many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being I'm not advocating for low density suburbs or for things to remain unchanged. My point was that the implication that some kind of nefarious prejudice was the main reason for homeowners wanting to keep the status quo, isn't fair or accurate.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  This is a very simplistic view. Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Depending on how the roads are designed, you can get a spread out neighborhood with no traffic on your street. I grew up on a cul-de-sac. There were 8 houses on the street. The only time there was a car on the street is when someone from one of those 8 houses went somewhere. There was zero traffic and the street was safe for kids to play in.
  - nerdbert 4y ago
    > Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Only if you arbitrarily cherry-pick the unit of analysis to support your argument. The only way to actually reduce cars per unit of land across all available land is to increase housing density so that sensible transportation alternatives like bicycle and metro become viable for the lazier marginal population.
anyfoo 4y ago
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? You're describing European cities, there. That is literally how I grew up in a big city, and we were lower middle class at best.
BurningFrog 4y ago
I think the primary reason in 2023 is to keep housing values high and rising, not racism.
dahfizz 4y ago
The pro-density crowd cannot comprehend wanting to live in a quiet, safe, uncrowded town. They say the only possible motivations are money and racism.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lamontcg 4y ago
  San Fransisco left behind "uncrowded town" quite a lot time ago.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Sure we can. We just think that can also look like this: https://youtu.be/5APjiZz_XCY https://youtu.be/5APjiZz_XCY Uncrowded is subjective I suppose but it's certainly no Manhattan.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  What we can't comprehend is forcing everyone in the country to live in the type of town you want. Move to bumfuck if you want a quiet uncrowded town. People near jobs want cheap housing.
- vkou 4y ago
  > The pro-density crowd cannot comprehend wanting to live in a quiet, safe, uncrowded town. No, we just can't comprehend why you would expect the big city to be quiet and uncrowded. It's like moving to the tropics, and complaining that it rains too much, and that the skiing sucks. If you want quiet and uncrowded, there's the 99.9% of the country's land area that isn't taken up by coastal metros in the middle of a crippling housing crisis.
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  I live in Tokyo, in a central area (nearish to Shibuya). It's dense, but quiet, safe, and surprisingly not that crowded. There's a few children's play areas within a 2 minute walk. There's numerous parks around me, including dog runs. The anti-density crowd can't imagine allowing well planned towns and cities to exist in the US.
dnissley 4y ago
I would say that the reasons you stated above are uncomfortable because they are implicitly discriminatory to people outside those areas who want to move in. People who already live there are, in effect, saying "we're full up here, go somewhere else". And these are often the same people with signs in their front yard saying things like "no matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor" in multiple languages, or "climate change is real", or "no human is illegal" which espouse values in direct opposition to that implicitly discriminatory message.
hadlock 4y ago
Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them. The center of many city residential blocks are still quiet green oasis. Busy streets will still stay busy, quiet side streets tend to stay that way. Go look at any european city, or any city outside of the US really
- parineum 4y ago
  > Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them. *Until the city decides they want to change it That's why people want to ensrine in law that those trees don't change. They don't trust the city to maintain homeostasis for the duration of their residency. What happens when people want to build a new apartment building but those trees are too big to safely build next to?
  - nerdbert 4y ago
    You make a very good point: Only cities chop down trees, private landowners absolutely never ever do.
    - parineum 4y ago
      They don't (legally) on city property. That's what we're talking about. If you move into a neighborhood where the city maintains the trees in the common areas (sidewalks, parks, etc.), it's not unreasonable to want to put a barrier between the city deciding, for example, it's too expensive to keep maintaining those trees so they are going to cut them all down. If I or my neighbor wants to cut down a tree is a completely different conversation. I appreciate your snark though, even though it's completely irrelevant.
CalRobert 4y ago
Low traffic streets are a reason to remove cars, not people.
_ZeD_ 4y ago
...and then you need a car because everything is literally miles away
- zip1234 4y ago
  Cities are not loud. Cars are loud!
scythe 4y ago
> > The answers are very uncomfortable. > but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice This is a good example of why being coy rather than explicit is bad for productive discussion. Bigotry of its various forms is certainly one possible uncomfortable answer to the question. But there are others, like crime, or the effect of local property-value-to-enrollment ratio on school quality, or plenty of other problems that systematically occur in American cities. NIMBYism is by no means the exclusive domain of homeowners in low-density neighborhoods. Even when it comes from them, they are often concerned with developments that are not actually in their neighborhoods — their trees and yards not being in jeopardy. There's a fundamental distrust of the overall process of development that animates anti-growth sentiments not only in middle-class neighborhoods but also in, for example, the Mission.
tshaddox 4y ago
Nothing about this would let a developer cut down your tree, build on your yard, etc. You just wouldn't be able to stop your neighbor from selling their property to a developer who might cut down trees and build things there. It's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about what your neighbors do with their property, just like it's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about which kinds of restaurants are close to your home. But should you be able to prevent your favorite restaurant from legally closing?
- nlavezzo 4y ago
  Your neighbor doesn't currently have the right to do anything they want with their property though. They don't absolutely own it and have some kind of sovereign status. They can't turn it into a gas station or auto repair shop. They have the right to exclusive use of the land for the purpose of a single family dwelling built to certain specifications and abiding by various guidelines and regulations. When each neighbor bought into the neighborhood, they all signed up for this same basic deal. Many of them would likely have chosen to not spend their money on the property had their neighbors not been bound by the same rules. What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to. This absolutely does affect everyone in the neighborhood because an older neighborhood is more than a collection of unrelated properties, it is a collection of actual homes of similar size and character with a particular feel and aesthetic. A change to the rules may absolutely be necessary for the health of the city / population as a whole. Totally agree with this. Don't pretend though that it's not coming at the cost of infringing on the existing homeowners' reasonable expectations of what they bought into when they purchased their properties. Again, maybe it does need to happen, but homeowners are not unreasonable for wanting to keep their neighborhoods as they've always known and loved them.
  - zip1234 4y ago
    Buying a house and expecting nothing to change in one's neighborhood is completely unreasonable. Places change constantly.
    - 4y ago
andrepd 4y ago
> low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Suburban streets are extremely dangerous to kids (in fact being hit by a driver is the leading cause of death to kids under 14). You know what is safe? Walkable cities, pedestrianised streets, speed bumps wherever cars do drive inside the city, etc.
fleddr 4y ago
Even the prejudice part we don't have to dance around. I'm from the Netherlands, and for the first 24 years of my life have lived in lower working class neighborhoods, 3 in total. Low income families, people on wellfare, the like. In this case all white, so it's not a racial thing. All of these 3 neighborhoods were awful. Relatively high crime, vandalism, the public dumping of trash, alcoholism, very loud music blasting, shouting, just general anti-social behavior. The biggest quality of life improvement in my lifetime is that eventually I was able to afford living in a good neighborhood. Middle class to a bit above it. Families, stable citizens, civil, considerate, sane. The piece of mind this gives is invaluable. This is just one step up the ladder, I'm by no means rich. It's not elitism. It shouldn't be a high bar to feel comfortable, safe, and not constantly frustrated by obnoxious people, or the spaces ruined. But at the same time we should acknowledge that this "bar" is strongly correlated with class. For obvious reasons, in the lower classes more people have what I'll categorize as "social issues". And here's the thing. It's a rotten apple dynamic. Perhaps as little as 5-10% of the inhabitants are responsible for all this shit, yet the entire neighborhood becomes unlivable because of it. The real issue here is that these rotten apples are not addressed. Because it's near-impossible to address. The behavior is petty crime at best and often merely obnoxious and anti-social behavior. You can't put people in jail for that and they have to live somewhere. This is already the lowest end, there's nowhere else to go. So the positive here is that it's not racism (in my example), and not even classism. 90% of people in the lower classes are decent and social people. The real issue is the inability to deal with the 10% that is not. The dysfunctionals and anti-socials wrecking the place. I'm sure that each has their own story, but I'm not going to suffer my entire life at their whims. I've done plenty of that. You could say that this "prejudice" is very much grounded in reality. Sometimes you need to a reality check.

rnk 4y ago

It's not that mysterious why people want this. For people of means, they want to preserve the quality of life that they see in having mostly single family homes and in the past keep it full of white people with money, hopefully the only whites thing has faded. Of course racism was a core issue in how these exclusions panned out in the US. If I'm in a city and and I own one of these houses, it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property - because you can't build nearly as many SFH as you can apartments. I'm sure racism and fear of the other is still an issue (I'm from the south, I know it's an issue based on personal experience) but it's far more economic imho today. The end result is the same, people want to hold on to what they see as part of their "intrinsic value" in their neighborhood setup.

hervature 4y ago
> it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property This argument never made sense for me. Being able to put more units in the same space drastically increases the value of the land. It of course reduces the value of other things like having towering buildings around your 2 story home which blocks your view. In this sense, home owners need to turn to zoning to prevent that despite it being detrimental to their land value.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  They have a different argument, namely by making sure houses are less dense, the total number of houses being built in an area is far less than what the land can support, leading to artificial scarcity in the market. The artificially limited supply then leads to high prices.
  - hervature 4y ago
    Restricting supply obviously increases prices. That's economics 101. Their claim is that they are doing it precisely for economic gains. Whereas I'm saying that it is actually not about the economic gains because they are giving up economic value (much higher land value) in order to preserve non-economic things (neighborhood, view, etc.). My point is that an acre of land in the center of Manhattan is worth a lot of money. That value goes drastically down if something prevents you from building above 35 feet.

jp57 4y ago

> Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are also just as tough as their current zoning regulation. This. Houston has little or no zoning and is terribly sprawling and car-centric. Despite the lack of zoning, in most neighborhoods you can't just build whatever you want because of restrictive covenants. Developers build massive car-focused single-family-only developments and load them with covenants that prevent anything else from being built on the property after it is sold.

bandofthehawk 4y ago
You're right Houston doesn't call it zoning, but they basically have the same rules. This video sums it up well: https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k
JoshTriplett 4y ago
Next up, get rid of HOAs.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is. Perhaps just reduce the overwhelming supermajority requirements to dissolve them, perhaps. In many places your only viable option if you don't like your HOA is get elected to the board yourself along with enough like-minded neighbors. You might not be able to dissolve it, but you could seriously neuter the policies if you wanted.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    > HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is. Yes, they're the most local demonstration of the fact that "democracy" is not an acceptable approach to decide what color I can paint my house, or what plants I can plant, or how soon after the 6am garbage pickup my garbage can has to be brought inside. They're also, often, not even a democracy: they're a loudest-ocracy, because most people have better things to do with their time than dictate what their neighbors can do. Destroy HOAs with fire. To be clear, echoing a point from elsewhere in this thread: nobody should have to have an asphalt manufacturing plant next to their home. But that same premise doesn't extend to "nobody should have a house next to them with an Unapproved Paint Color".

JAlexoid 4y ago

Dealing with HOAs is actually easier - transfer all infrastructure ownership and maintenance to them... you'll see some big changes real fast. Like treat HOA as a commercial entity for purposes of trash, water and sewage. (HOAs are, de facto, incorporated organizations). Tax land under the roads as plain land. As for localities - they should be mandated to reassess property values every X years and distribute infrastructure maintenance costs appropriately. I now live in a rural area, and I underpay taxes for the services I get... while smaller houses in town overpay.

TimPC 4y ago
This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard. You’ll end up with people paying $0 for infra for 70 years then suddenly having to buy multimillion dollar projects with no cash reserves. The net result will be widespread chaos and huge social pressure on government to bail out badly managed HOAs.
- SECProto 4y ago
  Not different from the current system, where we elect politicians who promise not to raise taxes, so they defer maintenance on all infrastructure, until in 70 years we have to spend trillions replacing old pipes/bridges/roads that could have been kept up for decades longer with better maintenance. Except they can't go begging to the feds, because they've also have been voted in under platforms of "minimize tax increases" for 40 years, so they're also indebted.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  Chaos for badly managed HOAs, that will have to be dissolved and the property transferred to municipal control... disbanding bad HOAs and leaving properly managed HOAs. I didn't mention that bad HOAs should definitely have the option to not have to pony up... However, suburban homes have to get their taxes ramped up, because they are unsustainable at current levels.

enaaem 4y ago

First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.

pitaj 4y ago
Yep, municipalities should require a large deposit up-front to connect new neighborhoods to existing infrastructure, based on the amount of infrastructure (roads, water, sewer) the new neighborhood has.
JAlexoid 4y ago
I second that. We moved from Manhattan an hour north into a rural area. Our town clears our road continuously during winter, while are property taxes are low single thousands. We get three trash pickups per week and other trash removal services included. We woefully underpay for those services.
adrr 4y ago
How does that work? Property tax is by city and suburbs are their own cities. For example, my city has implemented has implemented a Mello-Roos for new developments to fund new schools.
- enaaem 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
  - adrr 4y ago
    Cherry picking cities can show anything. Let's look at SF compared to suburbs like Palo Alto. Separate cities with their own budgets and SF has one the highest tax revenues per resident in the US but since SF has high density and lacks of car access goes up, costs explode including labor. SF average city employee salary is $180k. SF infrastructure is below palo alto. Palo alto has better streets, better schools, better maintained parks even with standford paying no property taxes. You can see also see this in New York.

ipaddr 4y ago

The answers are very uncomfortable Like cleaner air, safer streets, less traffic and a better place to raise a child and/or dog with backyards and privacy.

kiba 4y ago
Streets are dangerous because of cars zipping around. Cars contribute to air pollution quality (until electrified) and noise quality. So, you ban cars from streets and allow only pedestrians and cyclists. Next, you allow local amenities to pop up so you don't feel the need to get a car out. The suburban pattern of development as it currently exists isn't the only way to facilitate the quality of life you're looking for.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  You can't ban cars before you have the infrastructure and commercial resources to replace what cars were used for.
- florbo 4y ago
  When are US cities going to ban cars? My guess is 0-2 in the next century.
- zip1234 4y ago
  Even electrified, tires shed loads of nasty particulates.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    And at higher speeds make a good chunk of the noise, too.
lfuller 4y ago
Nearly all studies regarding suburban vs. urban streets have shown that suburban streets have significantly higher rates of child deaths and injuries than urban streets.

sdenton4 4y ago

Dumb question, but how do HOAs enforce things? Presumably they have some binding agreement, but I can't imagine why someone would opt into one. 'Why yes, I'd love to pay dues and fines to my noisiest neighbors.'

steveklabnik 4y ago
> I can't imagine why someone would opt into one. You cannot buy without being a part of the HOA.
vineyardmike 4y ago
It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement. At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees. You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew. TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  > you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed I'd be curious about people's experiences and successes with this. Has anyone successfully pulled that off with a still-existing HOA?
  - adra 4y ago
    Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.

theironhammer 4y ago

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PaulHoule 4y ago

When I visited Palo Alto I found it a very strange experience, my ‘terrain reading’ skills that would lead me to a convenience store and similar affordances in most developed and developing countries did not work at all. It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building. Such a neighborhood would be different but still pretty nice by most people’s standards, you can see neighborhoods like that in L.A. or São Paulo. To be devil’s advocate though I’d say there are larger scale reasons why people might conclude that ‘California is full’. One is that the population density of California overall is about the same as Germany even though most of California is uninhabitable or massive farm fields. Certain regions of the coast are highly populated by U.S. standards even if they are nothing like Hong Kong or Singapore. The linear pattern of dense development means the radio spectrum is utilized like nowhere else in the US such that there are more OTA TVs channels in LA than some cable plans. California struggles with water and any population addition would require adding more infrastructure of all kinds. It could be more highways, it could be more public transit but it has to be paid for. And the US is a country that spends 10’s of billions to duplicate a train station in NYC or run rail from Bakersfield to Fresno. A reasonable person could very well try to gum up the gears in that machine no matter how they can. You might say that more population means more economic activity and more tax base but I am not so sure. A lot of it seems driven by inequity and monopoly power. Google and Facebook could not double their revenue by doubling their hiring in California and it is not so plausible that the next big startup in the U.S. would be able to accomplish what they’ve done. There was a time you could dream of selling a company like WhatsApp to Facebook even if going public was not in the cards but the monopolists would hate to have to spend that much to defend their positions and surely try to shape the environment to prevent that. (Now from Genshin Impact to Tik-Tok innovation in social/entertainment is happening in the PRC because that economy is more open to competition.)

tshaddox 4y ago
> It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building. And you could probably maintain or even increase the amount of ground-level "yard" space per capita even while increasing population density. Of course it would need to be parks that you share.

JasserInicide 4y ago

>What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? Because it's actually what many people want. They want a house in the quiet suburbs that they can sell in 30 years for much more than it's worth. This is obviously all because nearly everyone alive that can vividly remember a time before WW2 are dead. All they know are car-centric architecture. And we all know how much people love change.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> that they can sell in 30 years for much more than it's worth Sooner or later this will collapse disasterously

rayiner 4y ago

> What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? The answers are very uncomfortable. That’s just urbanists smearing people with innuendo about racism to advance unrelated policy goals. It’s actually ironic, because one of the major population trends right now is “black flight” to the suburbs. People, especially families, like low density suburban zoning because it’s convenient. I live in a pre-zoning code suburb with houses packed tightly together. People are always fighting over parking spots, contractor trucks can block people into their parking spots or block the road, etc. There’s a lot of retired people, and they complain about families with young kids moving in due to the noise. (And these are white and white adjacent kids too.) My parents refused to move into the subdivision, and instead moved nearby to a 1 acre plot surrounded by trees where they didn’t have to interact with their neighbors.

tptacek 4y ago
If it was that simple, inner ring suburbs wouldn't all be zoned single-family, and it wouldn't take state-level action to allow multifamily dwellings to be built. Instead, they artificially restrict density, in defiance of market forces.

Spooky23 4y ago

The answer is that people benefit from stability, both financially and socially. Single and duplex zoning was a great deal for cities and close suburbs because they are operationally efficient - less services are required; fewer parks, fewer schools, fewer calls for fire and police service. It’s a good deal for people because financially it has been historically better to own a building and land vs rent or buy into coops. For existing, pre-1990 low density urban neighborhoods, retrofitting medium density housing is usually a shitshow. Why? - The areas of were detached houses that usually have yards, no parks, fire stations, etc. - Because of healthcare and tax policy, it’s very difficult to run the types of small businesses that are needed to support an urban lifestyle. Boutiques, restaurants/bars and similar - Because there are no local amenities, people still need cars, and there’s rarely enough parking to meet demand. - Schools are tied to geography, and changes in school assignments are impactful and traumatic to families. - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing. If you look at functioning urban environments like NYC, you see it all over the place. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. As small retail fades away, major big box scaled retail moves in. The neighborhood 20-40k sq ft grocery stores of my childhood (Key Food, Finest, A&P, ShopRite) are being displaced by bodegas at the low end and big developments on the high end - which drive demand for cars and exclude people relying on transit. You can only fix this stuff with fairly radical change, that will be very painful for lots of stakeholders.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> they are operationally efficient > Because there are no local amenities, people need cars Seems like the definition of inefficiency > - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing Damn

auctoritas 4y ago

If people live in a low density area, we can assume they want to live in a low density area. So it makes perfect sense they would be against making their low density area high density. What is so uncomfortable about that? To get at what your really implying though, what's wrong with maintaining some degree of cultural homogeneity in a neighborhood? It's a good thing in that it makes for high trust communities.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

The answer is very comfortable. Lots of people like a quiet neighborhood and a good amount of space to themselves. It might be a bit selfish, and there are undoubtably some exceptions, but the idea that the suburbs are full of awful people trying to keep out some specific segment is flat wrong. Most people are too concerned with keeping their day to day life together to sit around worrying about/hating on others.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? They need a way of keeping out black households without violating the legal prohibition on an HOA saying "no black owners".