3 ms·

Plenty of people have written books about the issues you're talking about - they're well understood by many policymakers. But there's nothing illegal about disc

Plenty of people have written books about the issues you're talking about - they're well understood by many policymakers. But there's nothing illegal about discrimination against low income people, and older homeowners are about twice as likely to vote (and like 100x as likely to donate to candidates) as the people who are impacted. I'm open to any theory of change - I've been trying to come up with one for a decade, and I've had thousands of conversations about it.

jmoak3 3y ago
>I'm open to any theory of change - I've been trying to come up with one for a decade, and I've had thousands of conversations about it. Same, and I've only found one which works. Move.
philwelch 3y ago
At least in Seattle, a lot of the voters who are impacted don’t understand or agree with or possibly even care about how hard it is to get a building permit. If you run for city council in Seattle and promise to streamline building permits, maybe some older middle income homeowners will vote for you. But it turns out you can also win by talking about rent control or nationalizing Boeing and converting it to build city buses, or just accusing all your opponents of being shills for right wing billionaires. In an environment like that, even when the demagogues don’t actually take over the city government, they exert enough pressure on the Overton window that the more reasonable moderates have their hands tied.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Seattle and the Seattle Area has built a lot of housing over the last couple of decades. Whatever problem they have in SF, it isn't a problem here. Whenever people say "Seattle doesn't build enough", they mean in relation to rapidly growing demand, not in absolute numbers.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    No, we have a lot of the same problems as SF.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      We have much more construction than SF. We built roughly 60k units in the last 10 years, a 19% increase. And that is just for Seattle. > Among the 50 U.S. cities with the largest number of housing units in 2010, Seattle ranks third for the rate of growth in housing. See https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/central-seattle-absorbed-more-than-half-the-citys-housing-growth-in-the-last-decade https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/central-seatt... We build as well as any Texan free for all city does.
      - lazyasciiart 3y ago
        If you want to be mindlessly simplistic, we have the exact same problem as SF: we are not building enough units to meet demand. Otherwise, we have many of the same underlying problems that are preventing us from building enough units. Zoning, permitting, design review, building codes...
  - Schiendelman 3y ago
    Seattle here. Unfortunately, "a lot" isn't useful - as you point out, it's relative to demand. Sure, it's not AS BAD as SF, but it's still very bad. I believe I saw an estimate that the city alone would have 200k more bedrooms now if not for all the morass of crap that stops upward growth. And that also means there'd be tens of thousands fewer homes built out at the edges, saving farmland, reducing energy costs of transportation, reducing CO2...

jmoak3 3y ago

>I'm open to any theory of change - I've been trying to come up with one for a decade, and I've had thousands of conversations about it. Same, and I've only found one which works. Move.

philwelch 3y ago

At least in Seattle, a lot of the voters who are impacted don’t understand or agree with or possibly even care about how hard it is to get a building permit. If you run for city council in Seattle and promise to streamline building permits, maybe some older middle income homeowners will vote for you. But it turns out you can also win by talking about rent control or nationalizing Boeing and converting it to build city buses, or just accusing all your opponents of being shills for right wing billionaires. In an environment like that, even when the demagogues don’t actually take over the city government, they exert enough pressure on the Overton window that the more reasonable moderates have their hands tied.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Seattle and the Seattle Area has built a lot of housing over the last couple of decades. Whatever problem they have in SF, it isn't a problem here. Whenever people say "Seattle doesn't build enough", they mean in relation to rapidly growing demand, not in absolute numbers.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  No, we have a lot of the same problems as SF.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    We have much more construction than SF. We built roughly 60k units in the last 10 years, a 19% increase. And that is just for Seattle. > Among the 50 U.S. cities with the largest number of housing units in 2010, Seattle ranks third for the rate of growth in housing. See https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/central-seattle-absorbed-more-than-half-the-citys-housing-growth-in-the-last-decade https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/central-seatt... We build as well as any Texan free for all city does.
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      If you want to be mindlessly simplistic, we have the exact same problem as SF: we are not building enough units to meet demand. Otherwise, we have many of the same underlying problems that are preventing us from building enough units. Zoning, permitting, design review, building codes...
- Schiendelman 3y ago
  Seattle here. Unfortunately, "a lot" isn't useful - as you point out, it's relative to demand. Sure, it's not AS BAD as SF, but it's still very bad. I believe I saw an estimate that the city alone would have 200k more bedrooms now if not for all the morass of crap that stops upward growth. And that also means there'd be tens of thousands fewer homes built out at the edges, saving farmland, reducing energy costs of transportation, reducing CO2...