7 ms·

Does any city have a well functioning design review process or are they all captured by incumbents to slow down development?

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I think a common feature of places I have seen with reasonable construction processes is that they do not have control of construction approval at the city level.
jackmott42 4y ago
It is amazing how one person can have a view that developers have all the power and can never be stopped. Others have the view that NIMBY's have all the power and nothing can get developed. Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not.
- erulabs 4y ago
  But that's exactly the point - not everything ends up with a high rise on it. Clearly, not enough of a percent of "everything" has a high rise, or there would be no housing shortage! You feel there are too many, but if there was no desire for high rises, no one would build them!
- myroon5 4y ago
  ~3/4 of Seattle land doesn't really allow new housing: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/city-report-widespread-single-family-zoning-is-damaging-seattle-and-needs-changing https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/city-repor...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  > Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not. I'd like to know what definition you're using for "everything" here because the vast majority of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes and indeed that's mostly what gets built.
- jamestimmins 4y ago
  This is patently untrue. Cities like LA and SF should have high rises everywhere, but instead they have 1 story homes from 1955 selling for $2 million.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrese 4y ago
    LA and SF seem trapped by their design. Sure they need way higher density, but that would require transit that handles density better than cars on a road. But in order to build high capacity transit they want people to prove that it would be fully utilized and that won't be true if you're servicing areas that are currently all single family homes. So high density housing can't be build because there is no transit, and high capacity transit can't be built because there is no high density housing.
    - BryantD 4y ago
      SF is trapped because there are well-organized community groups in the Western half of the city that will actively block density increase for the same sorts of reasons described here. You can get to higher density incrementally, but not if it’s always stopped at the beginning.
    - jamestimmins 4y ago
      Yes and no. That's certainly a factor, but outside of work, people also tend to stay pretty close to their neighborhoods (I've been able to walk to my grocery store in the last 3 neighborhoods I've lived in). There's also been substantial work to build new mass transit, but housing hasn't increased substantially around the transit stops. Edit: I'm referring to LA. My impression is SF is small enough that this isn't a big issue.
      - josuepeq 4y ago
        SF is small, hilly, and consists of many square miles of single family homes; with cars being the predominant way around town. Less than 2000 feet from the geographical center of town, I live in a fully detached single family home with a huge backyard. My Walkscore of 35 equates to the nearest full line supermarket being a solid mile away, mostly flat, the nearest corner store is 0.8 miles away with 364 feet of elevation changes, too. :30 minutes between runs of the bus means that all of my neighbors and I tend to drive everywhere. Trust me, this is not ideal.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Developers can bribe individual politicians but NIMBYs hold all the power. NIMBYs control the votes. Developers don't. > Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not. Also this is just false.
__derek__ 4y ago
That's a contradiction in terms, AFAICT. I was excited to find this in the post: > Meanwhile, a bill moving forward in the legislature introduced by Representative Amy Walen (D-48, Bellevue) would ban design review for housing projects statewide. I have this bookmarked to contact my reps and senator to join as co-sponsors.[1] [1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023&Initiative=false https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023...
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Two new apartment buildings recently went up where I live. Both have roughly the same number of units inside, and the units are of similar size. One is ugly, and the other blends nicely into the neighborhood, even incorporating some green space and planted trees. There's no reason why the ugly one couldn't have been nicer looking, other than that the developers didn't bother to make the place look more like the surrounding buildings, and nobody required them to do otherwise, even though it would have been a trivial extra cost. Dogwhistle for NIMBYs though it may be, something akin to "neighborhood character" is a legitimate thing that residents benefit from (including and perhaps especially lower-income residents who would otherwise be priced out), and its loss is absolutely an externalized cost in terms of qualify of day-to-day life. Green spaces, shade trees, etc. are nontrivial in their importance to residents, and the importance of deliberately preserving or expanding those features actually increases as density increases, because otherwise they will be lost and possibly gone forever. So I don't think it makes sense to be an absolutist about design review. But there do need to be some checks in place to prevent abuse by incumbent property owners. I don't know what those would look like, but I also know that a treeless street walled in with apartment buildings and no local shops or other amenities makes for a sad shitty neighborhood. Housing equity needs to be about the complete lifestyle, not just about making more physical square feet that humans can theoretically inhabit. Otherwise we're just repeating a denser version of the same development mistakes that gave us stroads and suburban sprawl. Of course, "existing condo sues other condos" isn't quite the same thing. The loss of the view is legitimately an externality, but here I think it comes down to a question of whether the current owners are entitled to their view, or if it was always a temporary benefit that would exist only until other condos were built.
DrewADesign 4y ago
The Boston setup works great. The folks on the Boston Redevelopment Authority make a ton of money on the DL. Oh did you mean work well for the general public?
- jfk13 4y ago
  Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud?
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    > Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud? Though it was recently restructured, the BRA's long history of corruption is extremely well-documented and publicized. I'm not sure what would compel someone to leave a comment like this without taking two seconds to google it. Cynically slinging mud, maybe?
sokoloff 4y ago
From my limited exposure to Cambridge, MA’s, it seems well balanced to me. As an abutter, I’ve gotten notices of a few different projects nearby and chosen to attend the meeting on each one (mostly to learn in case I wanted to go through the process for our property sometime; in each case, I went having submitted written comments in favor of whatever the neighbors were proposing to do, even in a case where I think what they chose is frankly pretty ugly). In the course of attending those, I usually got to sit through 3-5 others each time. All of the discussions seemed quite reasonable and almost all were approved as proposed or with only minor changes. When an abutter is making obviously nonsense arguments, they get to say their piece and then the project is approved; when there are genuine concerns about the proposed variance, the design board seems to help the applicant reach a state that balances applicant’s desire to use their property and whatever the underlying reason for the rule they’re seeking relief from is.
- MrFoof 4y ago
  In the case of Cambridge, MA, a reasonable stance is kind of required if the city is going to materially grow further. Without it, Cambridge would stagnate if progress was halted by quagmires of bickering. The only real thing of note is larger apartment buildings are largely put in the SE and NW ends of the city. For those who've never been, Cambridge is one of the densest cities in the entire US -- ~122,400 people over 6.4 square miles of land -- even though it's predominantly three story tenements throughout, and still maintains a 1950s Americana "Main Street USA" running through the core of the city. -- ----- Though a fair number of the Boston "suburban cities" (save Brookline) have been re-reviewing their zoning and review processes. They all know they're landlocked and out of room with regulations that prevented further building what was already there. It's been nice to see that become increasingly relaxed to allow things to get done.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    A more ambitious culture that was any good at engineering megaprojects could just build skyscrapers on top of the Charles and instantly gain a bunch more land area. Might even be easier than building skyscrapers and then tunneling a freeway under them.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Design review in general is bad, if only because requiring individual approvals on projects is cumbersome to do for every single thing. For example, projects compliant with zoning in New York can be built as-of-right and all review processes are administrative (e.g. fire code compliance)
BryantD 4y ago
Seattle has a particularly bad one. As far as I can tell it’s a general problem — our light rail expansion has been slowed down by the same tendency to wait until there’s near-unanimous consent. Edit: I reminded myself elsewhere that SF is also pretty bad as this goes.
nostromo 4y ago
Despite the all complaining you'll see on the Urbanist, Seattle's process is pretty good for a big city -- which is probably why it's been one of the fastest growing prior to the Covid exodus from downtown. Seattle has recently had more cranes deployed than any other metro in the US, despite being a much smaller city -- not exactly the bane of the YIMBY. Design review can slow things down, sure, but they eventually do get built. These buildings will be around for 100+ years, taking a year to get the design right for everyone isn't the end of the world. And there are a bunch of easy things we could do to get more housing made, with fewer drawbacks like rushing out massive towers, like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods.
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  > like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods This is such a middle of the road, easy, low-drawback compromise that I can't believe it's not happened already.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    It's a perfectly reasonable proposal, unless you are living next to where a fourplex is being built, and you're worried about "those people" moving in nearby, where "those people" are either "poor" or "not white," depending on how much honest the NIMBY protestors are being. There are empty lots around the corner from me, and I hope they build as much housing on them as possible.
    - nostromo 4y ago
      > "those people" are either "poor" or "not white" This argument actually does your argument a disservice. And I agree with your argument. I've talked with plenty of NIMBYs in my neiborhood when an apartment building was going through approval. They aren't racists. And in fact they are often people of color. Their concerns aren't with poor people either. They tend to mention things like parking, traffic, density, character. Instead of immediately calling them racists, I think it's better to take them at their word and build and argument against it from there.
vkou 4y ago
Only ones ran by authoritarians who don't give two figs about community input. So, old Communist planned cities, modern China, Singapore, etc. The end result is often much more livable than the endless suburban hellsprawl that we get here.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I think a common feature of places I have seen with reasonable construction processes is that they do not have control of construction approval at the city level.

jackmott42 4y ago

It is amazing how one person can have a view that developers have all the power and can never be stopped. Others have the view that NIMBY's have all the power and nothing can get developed. Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not.

erulabs 4y ago
But that's exactly the point - not everything ends up with a high rise on it. Clearly, not enough of a percent of "everything" has a high rise, or there would be no housing shortage! You feel there are too many, but if there was no desire for high rises, no one would build them!
myroon5 4y ago
~3/4 of Seattle land doesn't really allow new housing: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/city-report-widespread-single-family-zoning-is-damaging-seattle-and-needs-changing https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/city-repor...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ryukafalz 4y ago
> Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not. I'd like to know what definition you're using for "everything" here because the vast majority of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes and indeed that's mostly what gets built.
jamestimmins 4y ago
This is patently untrue. Cities like LA and SF should have high rises everywhere, but instead they have 1 story homes from 1955 selling for $2 million.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 4y ago
  LA and SF seem trapped by their design. Sure they need way higher density, but that would require transit that handles density better than cars on a road. But in order to build high capacity transit they want people to prove that it would be fully utilized and that won't be true if you're servicing areas that are currently all single family homes. So high density housing can't be build because there is no transit, and high capacity transit can't be built because there is no high density housing.
  - BryantD 4y ago
    SF is trapped because there are well-organized community groups in the Western half of the city that will actively block density increase for the same sorts of reasons described here. You can get to higher density incrementally, but not if it’s always stopped at the beginning.
  - jamestimmins 4y ago
    Yes and no. That's certainly a factor, but outside of work, people also tend to stay pretty close to their neighborhoods (I've been able to walk to my grocery store in the last 3 neighborhoods I've lived in). There's also been substantial work to build new mass transit, but housing hasn't increased substantially around the transit stops. Edit: I'm referring to LA. My impression is SF is small enough that this isn't a big issue.
    - josuepeq 4y ago
      SF is small, hilly, and consists of many square miles of single family homes; with cars being the predominant way around town. Less than 2000 feet from the geographical center of town, I live in a fully detached single family home with a huge backyard. My Walkscore of 35 equates to the nearest full line supermarket being a solid mile away, mostly flat, the nearest corner store is 0.8 miles away with 364 feet of elevation changes, too. :30 minutes between runs of the bus means that all of my neighbors and I tend to drive everywhere. Trust me, this is not ideal.
hackerlight 4y ago
Developers can bribe individual politicians but NIMBYs hold all the power. NIMBYs control the votes. Developers don't. > Yet somehow everything ends up paved over with a high rise on it eventually, like it or not. Also this is just false.

__derek__ 4y ago

That's a contradiction in terms, AFAICT. I was excited to find this in the post: > Meanwhile, a bill moving forward in the legislature introduced by Representative Amy Walen (D-48, Bellevue) would ban design review for housing projects statewide. I have this bookmarked to contact my reps and senator to join as co-sponsors.[1] [1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023&Initiative=false https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023...

nerdponx 4y ago
Two new apartment buildings recently went up where I live. Both have roughly the same number of units inside, and the units are of similar size. One is ugly, and the other blends nicely into the neighborhood, even incorporating some green space and planted trees. There's no reason why the ugly one couldn't have been nicer looking, other than that the developers didn't bother to make the place look more like the surrounding buildings, and nobody required them to do otherwise, even though it would have been a trivial extra cost. Dogwhistle for NIMBYs though it may be, something akin to "neighborhood character" is a legitimate thing that residents benefit from (including and perhaps especially lower-income residents who would otherwise be priced out), and its loss is absolutely an externalized cost in terms of qualify of day-to-day life. Green spaces, shade trees, etc. are nontrivial in their importance to residents, and the importance of deliberately preserving or expanding those features actually increases as density increases, because otherwise they will be lost and possibly gone forever. So I don't think it makes sense to be an absolutist about design review. But there do need to be some checks in place to prevent abuse by incumbent property owners. I don't know what those would look like, but I also know that a treeless street walled in with apartment buildings and no local shops or other amenities makes for a sad shitty neighborhood. Housing equity needs to be about the complete lifestyle, not just about making more physical square feet that humans can theoretically inhabit. Otherwise we're just repeating a denser version of the same development mistakes that gave us stroads and suburban sprawl. Of course, "existing condo sues other condos" isn't quite the same thing. The loss of the view is legitimately an externality, but here I think it comes down to a question of whether the current owners are entitled to their view, or if it was always a temporary benefit that would exist only until other condos were built.

DrewADesign 4y ago

The Boston setup works great. The folks on the Boston Redevelopment Authority make a ton of money on the DL. Oh did you mean work well for the general public?

jfk13 4y ago
Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud?
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  > Do you have evidence to support that accusation, or are you just cynically slinging mud? Though it was recently restructured, the BRA's long history of corruption is extremely well-documented and publicized. I'm not sure what would compel someone to leave a comment like this without taking two seconds to google it. Cynically slinging mud, maybe?

sokoloff 4y ago

From my limited exposure to Cambridge, MA’s, it seems well balanced to me. As an abutter, I’ve gotten notices of a few different projects nearby and chosen to attend the meeting on each one (mostly to learn in case I wanted to go through the process for our property sometime; in each case, I went having submitted written comments in favor of whatever the neighbors were proposing to do, even in a case where I think what they chose is frankly pretty ugly). In the course of attending those, I usually got to sit through 3-5 others each time. All of the discussions seemed quite reasonable and almost all were approved as proposed or with only minor changes. When an abutter is making obviously nonsense arguments, they get to say their piece and then the project is approved; when there are genuine concerns about the proposed variance, the design board seems to help the applicant reach a state that balances applicant’s desire to use their property and whatever the underlying reason for the rule they’re seeking relief from is.

MrFoof 4y ago
In the case of Cambridge, MA, a reasonable stance is kind of required if the city is going to materially grow further. Without it, Cambridge would stagnate if progress was halted by quagmires of bickering. The only real thing of note is larger apartment buildings are largely put in the SE and NW ends of the city. For those who've never been, Cambridge is one of the densest cities in the entire US -- ~122,400 people over 6.4 square miles of land -- even though it's predominantly three story tenements throughout, and still maintains a 1950s Americana "Main Street USA" running through the core of the city. -- ----- Though a fair number of the Boston "suburban cities" (save Brookline) have been re-reviewing their zoning and review processes. They all know they're landlocked and out of room with regulations that prevented further building what was already there. It's been nice to see that become increasingly relaxed to allow things to get done.
- zamnos 4y ago
  A more ambitious culture that was any good at engineering megaprojects could just build skyscrapers on top of the Charles and instantly gain a bunch more land area. Might even be easier than building skyscrapers and then tunneling a freeway under them.

bobthepanda 4y ago

Design review in general is bad, if only because requiring individual approvals on projects is cumbersome to do for every single thing. For example, projects compliant with zoning in New York can be built as-of-right and all review processes are administrative (e.g. fire code compliance)

BryantD 4y ago

Seattle has a particularly bad one. As far as I can tell it’s a general problem — our light rail expansion has been slowed down by the same tendency to wait until there’s near-unanimous consent. Edit: I reminded myself elsewhere that SF is also pretty bad as this goes.

nostromo 4y ago

Despite the all complaining you'll see on the Urbanist, Seattle's process is pretty good for a big city -- which is probably why it's been one of the fastest growing prior to the Covid exodus from downtown. Seattle has recently had more cranes deployed than any other metro in the US, despite being a much smaller city -- not exactly the bane of the YIMBY. Design review can slow things down, sure, but they eventually do get built. These buildings will be around for 100+ years, taking a year to get the design right for everyone isn't the end of the world. And there are a bunch of easy things we could do to get more housing made, with fewer drawbacks like rushing out massive towers, like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods.

WaxProlix 4y ago
> like allowing duplexes or fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods This is such a middle of the road, easy, low-drawback compromise that I can't believe it's not happened already.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  It's a perfectly reasonable proposal, unless you are living next to where a fourplex is being built, and you're worried about "those people" moving in nearby, where "those people" are either "poor" or "not white," depending on how much honest the NIMBY protestors are being. There are empty lots around the corner from me, and I hope they build as much housing on them as possible.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    > "those people" are either "poor" or "not white" This argument actually does your argument a disservice. And I agree with your argument. I've talked with plenty of NIMBYs in my neiborhood when an apartment building was going through approval. They aren't racists. And in fact they are often people of color. Their concerns aren't with poor people either. They tend to mention things like parking, traffic, density, character. Instead of immediately calling them racists, I think it's better to take them at their word and build and argument against it from there.

vkou 4y ago

Only ones ran by authoritarians who don't give two figs about community input. So, old Communist planned cities, modern China, Singapore, etc. The end result is often much more livable than the endless suburban hellsprawl that we get here.