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The fact that we need tech companies to build housing on behalf of the city is a huge policy failure. The city should have just rezoned many parts of the city

The fact that we need tech companies to build housing on behalf of the city is a huge policy failure. The city should have just rezoned many parts of the city a long time ago for mixed used. But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. It’s only because of new RHNA mandates that they are required to zone for new housing. This is going to be a win for NIMBYs. I hope the cities involved will rezone other areas especially in single family neighborhoods such that we can get more housing when interest rates drop. There is a lot of demand still for housing and there are policy tools that can be leveraged to encourage more housing to be built.

4death4 3y ago
> But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?
- Clubber 3y ago
  >If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires? This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    covid restriction refugees ?
    - Clubber 3y ago
      A lot of people left big cities and states with heavy handed covid restrictions. Many came to the state where I reside and others.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - callalex 3y ago
    Have you had children, or do you plan to have children?
    - Clubber 3y ago
      >Have you had children, or do you plan to have children? Yes, I'm sure there's a gotcha in there, so go ahead.
      - callalex 3y ago
        Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.
        Clubber 3y ago
        >Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. That's not accurate. The birth/death rate is up-side down (more people die than are born), so they can live in a previously occupied house like I do. Also, people who retire often move to a lower cost of living city. I'm not against gradual, planned growth, but BUILD BUILD BUILD, like people in the Bay Area seem to want isn't what I would want either. It's happening in my city too and it sucks. >Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. I suspect they'll live where they want to and/or find work. I don't really have much say in that once they're adults. >If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply. There's a big difference between gradual, natural, planned expansion and rapid, explosive expansion. I want the former, not the latter. I suspect the main reason of the overpopulation of the Bay Area is directly related to the tech companies that reside there. Maybe they should spread out their workforce some more.
  - dtjb 3y ago
    > covid restriction refugees Is there any data that suggests such a loaded term is appropriate? It seems more likely that people were taking advantage of the new economic benefits of remote work.
- bendmorris 3y ago
  On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them. Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area. One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc. Then you have people just trying to get a cut.. https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e225000-to-not-protest-housing-development-1471826 https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e22500...
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert" Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too" Sick! Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.
- Kerrick 3y ago
  The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    >The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority. That's not democracy though. Can you give an example of where the minority overrode the tyranny of the majority in a democratic society? The major changes in the US regarding tyranny (civil rights act, 13th, 14th, 15th amendment) were due to the majority forcing change and overriding the tyranny of the minority.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  The residents who own property exert a far greater say on policy than those who don't, which is more a plutocracy than a democracy.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  No problem about that. But they should never complain about homelessness and congestion after voting against the solutions.
- callalex 3y ago
  In this case the democratic model doesn’t really work because the people who need the development to happen are people who will need a house in about 20 years. Most of those people are too young to vote, so are not represented by the democratic process. If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  I don't believe in giving power to local governments to do that.
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  there's a power imbalance between the homeowners and the renters. i'd be curious to see the makeup in the bay area of city council members who own vs rent. also there's discretionary zoning in the bay area which is a large driver of the problem imo. the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.
  - lazide 3y ago
    It’s because the renters usually don’t actually care to the extent of voting. They’re not invested because they literally aren’t invested. And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do.
    - greenie_beans 3y ago
      i'm a renter and i vote like hell. so do my friends, who are also renters. a homeowner can sell their house if they don't like something. it's more of a PITA but this is simply a false statement: "And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do. " not to mention, as a renter in a tight renter market, it's very hard to up and leave and find some place in a similar budget.
      - lazide 3y ago
        If you look at the stats, you’re very much outliers. And if you’ve ever owned before (I have) and also rented (I have), the difference in ability to move and sensitivity to market conditions is dramatically in renters favor the vast majority of the time. No renter is going to be looking at losing hundreds of grand trying to move in a downturn, for instance. Or like in ‘08, being stuck for years in frozen real estate markets or losing hundreds of grand or more. No renter is ever going to get hundreds of grand in cash money on sale either, if things go well. Just the paperwork involved in selling (let alone the other logistics) takes longer and is more involved than renting a new place, even in the tightest markets! Ownership has its privileges and its costs.
- mupuff1234 3y ago
  Being elected in a democratic way doesn't necessarily make something moral.
- mihaic 3y ago
  Nobody wants to pay taxes as well, but unfortunately we need a government to solve coordination issues, where not all parties can be satisfied. When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?
- itake 3y ago
  Homeowners are more politically active than renters. It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.
- nologic01 3y ago
  The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc). Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?
    - nologic01 3y ago
      Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.
      - Joker_vD 3y ago
        No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process. Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)
        Nasrudith 3y ago
        And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway. Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.
- brvsft 3y ago
  I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority? I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it. That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.
- kbenson 3y ago
  Because "residents" is a group defined by perspective. If the residents in a city don't want something, but the residents of a neighborhood do, which has authority? What about residents of a city compared to a state? How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there? What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  But it's not all residents, or even most residents. It's _some_ residents who are overrepresented in city governance. Many, many people in the Bay Area want more homes built.
  - lazide 3y ago
    If they actually voted, it wouldn’t be an issue - assuming their votes aligned with what they’re saying they want interest wise. For some reason, it rarely seems to though.
    - tech_ken 3y ago
      I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Most of the actually important housing policy isn't decided by direct vote, it's handled by an unelected committee which uses in-person feedback provided during open sessions to make decisions. A quick review of The Discourse turns up plenty of evidence that these types of arrangements often result in uneven participation in local planning decisions across demographics. If we want house policy to be "democratic" we need to consider how to plausibly canvas the local community and balance their interests against the well-being of the wider region.
      - lazide 3y ago
        If there was a large portion of the electorate that organized and wanted more housing, all those other changes would happen, as the controlling elected officials would be replaced. I’ve seen it. Rent control too. It’s rare though, as the segment of the population who does has historically poor turnover and is chronically confused and disorganized. Pro ‘keep it the same’ groups (and pro landlord groups) tend to be composed of retired professionals with decades of experience generating (and wading) through red tape, and have no issues rallying the most consistent voting block in any area - retirees who don’t want their largest assets and (literal) roof over their heads screwed with. What you’re talking about is that the governing structure gets setup to diffuse blame and obfuscate responsibility so activists don’t have any obvious individuals they can easily attack. That’s by design, but not the ‘problem’. Not the same thing.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Because we live in a country and state, not just a city. And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want. E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents. The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city). Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them. So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Think long and hard before you start taking that line - unless you want Trump or Biden or whoever next is in line (or Congress) being able to define your local zoning laws. Nothing good is going to come from that the vast majority of the time. Local zoning should be local so costs/side effects/benefits are associated with decisions as closely as possible. Otherwise, it would be trivial to penalize to the point of almost destroying entire states or regions because they were on the wrong side of some ideological line on another topic. Which would then be paid back 4 or 8 years later, of course.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I'm not taking any line, I'm describing the basic principles of representative democracy. The US is a little bit of an outlier in having a federal system so there are some limits to what Congress can do, but there aren't to what a state can do, and some of our states (like CA and NY) are the size of countries themselves. I'm not saying the majority of zoning decisions should be taken at the state/country level -- that would be ludicrous simply from an organizational standpoint. I'm simply describing that states are perfectly free to override local decisions whenever necessary, with full democratic legitimacy. How do you think the interstate highway system got built?
- fishtoaster 3y ago
  One role of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is to balance competing desires. Eg everyone wants good roads, but no one wants higher taxes. If you allow people to directly vote on each, people vote for higher costs and less revenue. So instead, we elect representatives to take a mix of popular (give us things) and unpopular (take things from us to pay for those things) positions at the same time. Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires. That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.
- ajross 3y ago
  > Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires? From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    The federal government has priority when the relevant power has been granted to it by the states. See the Tenth Amendment, which is unfortunately read/followed only slightly more frequently than the Third.
    - ajross 3y ago
      FWIW, that's not correct. The tenth amendment is a limitation on unenumerated powers. It says nothing about precedence of conflicting powers where those are enumerated. That's what the Supremacy clause is about, and it's abundantly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause Not that it really matters here, since the relevant conflict is between state and municipal law. But the 10th amendment tends to be pretty badly misunderstood by internet libertarians, so it was an interesting digression.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        I agree with everything you wrote except your first sentence. What of what I wrote was incorrect in the context of the unbounded claim that “feds win”, particularly on a thread dealing with real estate zoning issues?
- catlover76 3y ago
  "democracy" can mean a range of things, and, in addition, it's not really clear who the relevant group of people are whose collective will we should care about. For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority" "Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.
- tikhonj 3y ago
  Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do. Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!
- rnk 3y ago
  The us is in desperate shape with the housing policies that we have leading to a tremendous lack of housing availability in many large cities in the west where it's harder to spread out. California but also Seattle is another city. There's a shortage of housing, the housing that exists gets more expensive because there's more competition to get in, people are pushed farther out, the high prices push many to eventually living in cars, there's no place for low income people to go. This contrasts with Chicago where there's apparently a lot of low income housing. This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.
- xvector 3y ago
  Democracy is a terrible model for many things, and civil development is one of them.
- esalman 3y ago
  High-income, low-density suburban areas are actually economically sustained and subsidized by low-income, high-density downtown areas. This is why residents of such areas should not be the sole voice of democracy here. Source: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy
  - cbron 3y ago
    Interesting video, but it's all from the pov of the city's tax revenue and nothing else. Taking the first example, if they don't build the new food complex and keep the old one, less people will want to live in that city, and eventually the tax revenue will go down. Plenty of ghost towns around me that prove that point, you have to stay modern or you go under. As far as the suburb part, if those high income areas spend all their money downtown, then tax revenue downtown goes up but the source of money is still the suburbs. You have two sources of tax revenue in downtown (business + residents), but only one in the suburbs. So naturally tax revenue is lower in suburbs, but without them the downtown businesses wouldn't survive at all. It's a relationship, and it's odd they don't address this point. Also in the southwest there are plenty of suburb-only cities that grow rapidly without a downtown district playing major part.
mdgrech23 3y ago
It's weird b/c in most parts of our day to day lives we have no say. We live in a democracy but for the most part none of us can vote on anything meaningful but in this one particular area everyday citizens have a ton of power and they're voting to protect their owns means. I don't know man I look at the decisions made by politicians and they piss me off but when everyday citizens get a chance to make policy if you will they do shitty stuff like this blocking affordable housing. If I come across as bitter it's b/c I am. My town tried to build affordable apartments and NIMBYs blocked it.
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Dig1t 3y ago
The people on the zoning board are homeowners in the city! Of course they are going to zone things so that their neighborhood never changes. This is how it works in 99% of cities in the US and it’s terrible.
wwweston 3y ago
If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.
- fragmede 3y ago
  zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Maybe it would be best for Google to just go build them somewhere else. There's no actual rule that says we have to stack every human being in the country in Silicon Valley. Software engineering in particular is a business that lends itself being done from anywhere.
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eitally 3y ago
I'm a homeowner and I want more housing built. But I also want improvements to transit and for both bike & car commuting. It's great that a lot of the current crop of apartments are being built along Caltrain & light rail corridors, but those still mostly only keep people who work along those corridors off the roads, creating more congestion for everyone. 87, 880, 101, 85, and 280 (until you get past Cupertino) are all already basically parking lots during rush hours, and it's because people can't live near where they work. This was the entire point of companies like Google & Meta including residential development in their broader campus development plans in Menlo Park, Mountain View, and San Jose ... and if it doesn't happen, then which municipalities are going to pick up the slack to incentivize developers to build near those campuses?

4death4 3y ago

> But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

Clubber 3y ago
>If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires? This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  covid restriction refugees ?
  - Clubber 3y ago
    A lot of people left big cities and states with heavy handed covid restrictions. Many came to the state where I reside and others.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- callalex 3y ago
  Have you had children, or do you plan to have children?
  - Clubber 3y ago
    >Have you had children, or do you plan to have children? Yes, I'm sure there's a gotcha in there, so go ahead.
    - callalex 3y ago
      Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply.
      - Clubber 3y ago
        >Unless they are going to live with you forever, a new home must be built to contain them. That's not accurate. The birth/death rate is up-side down (more people die than are born), so they can live in a previously occupied house like I do. Also, people who retire often move to a lower cost of living city. I'm not against gradual, planned growth, but BUILD BUILD BUILD, like people in the Bay Area seem to want isn't what I would want either. It's happening in my city too and it sucks. >Unless you want your children to leave the state and live far away from you, new housing stock must be built to house them in your current town. I suspect they'll live where they want to and/or find work. I don't really have much say in that once they're adults. >If you don’t want your town to grow, you must take a vow of celibacy and convince every single one of your neighbors to do the same. Since that’s absurd, the only option left is to increase housing supply. There's a big difference between gradual, natural, planned expansion and rapid, explosive expansion. I want the former, not the latter. I suspect the main reason of the overpopulation of the Bay Area is directly related to the tech companies that reside there. Maybe they should spread out their workforce some more.
- dtjb 3y ago
  > covid restriction refugees Is there any data that suggests such a loaded term is appropriate? It seems more likely that people were taking advantage of the new economic benefits of remote work.
bendmorris 3y ago
On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  [flagged]
- lawlessone 3y ago
  Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them. Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area. One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc. Then you have people just trying to get a cut.. https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e225000-to-not-protest-housing-development-1471826 https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e22500...
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert" Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too" Sick! Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.
Kerrick 3y ago
The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.
- Clubber 3y ago
  >The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority. That's not democracy though. Can you give an example of where the minority overrode the tyranny of the majority in a democratic society? The major changes in the US regarding tyranny (civil rights act, 13th, 14th, 15th amendment) were due to the majority forcing change and overriding the tyranny of the minority.
anigbrowl 3y ago
The residents who own property exert a far greater say on policy than those who don't, which is more a plutocracy than a democracy.
boeingUH60 3y ago
No problem about that. But they should never complain about homelessness and congestion after voting against the solutions.
callalex 3y ago
In this case the democratic model doesn’t really work because the people who need the development to happen are people who will need a house in about 20 years. Most of those people are too young to vote, so are not represented by the democratic process. If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
I don't believe in giving power to local governments to do that.
greenie_beans 3y ago
there's a power imbalance between the homeowners and the renters. i'd be curious to see the makeup in the bay area of city council members who own vs rent. also there's discretionary zoning in the bay area which is a large driver of the problem imo. the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.
- lazide 3y ago
  It’s because the renters usually don’t actually care to the extent of voting. They’re not invested because they literally aren’t invested. And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do.
  - greenie_beans 3y ago
    i'm a renter and i vote like hell. so do my friends, who are also renters. a homeowner can sell their house if they don't like something. it's more of a PITA but this is simply a false statement: "And they can (and do) up and leave when something changes/they don’t like it there anymore, which is something the owners can’t do. " not to mention, as a renter in a tight renter market, it's very hard to up and leave and find some place in a similar budget.
    - lazide 3y ago
      If you look at the stats, you’re very much outliers. And if you’ve ever owned before (I have) and also rented (I have), the difference in ability to move and sensitivity to market conditions is dramatically in renters favor the vast majority of the time. No renter is going to be looking at losing hundreds of grand trying to move in a downturn, for instance. Or like in ‘08, being stuck for years in frozen real estate markets or losing hundreds of grand or more. No renter is ever going to get hundreds of grand in cash money on sale either, if things go well. Just the paperwork involved in selling (let alone the other logistics) takes longer and is more involved than renting a new place, even in the tightest markets! Ownership has its privileges and its costs.
mupuff1234 3y ago
Being elected in a democratic way doesn't necessarily make something moral.
mihaic 3y ago
Nobody wants to pay taxes as well, but unfortunately we need a government to solve coordination issues, where not all parties can be satisfied. When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?
itake 3y ago
Homeowners are more politically active than renters. It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.
nologic01 3y ago
The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc). Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process. Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)
      - Nasrudith 3y ago
        And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway. Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.
brvsft 3y ago
I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority? I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it. That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.
kbenson 3y ago
Because "residents" is a group defined by perspective. If the residents in a city don't want something, but the residents of a neighborhood do, which has authority? What about residents of a city compared to a state? How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there? What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.
tech_ken 3y ago
But it's not all residents, or even most residents. It's _some_ residents who are overrepresented in city governance. Many, many people in the Bay Area want more homes built.
- lazide 3y ago
  If they actually voted, it wouldn’t be an issue - assuming their votes aligned with what they’re saying they want interest wise. For some reason, it rarely seems to though.
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Most of the actually important housing policy isn't decided by direct vote, it's handled by an unelected committee which uses in-person feedback provided during open sessions to make decisions. A quick review of The Discourse turns up plenty of evidence that these types of arrangements often result in uneven participation in local planning decisions across demographics. If we want house policy to be "democratic" we need to consider how to plausibly canvas the local community and balance their interests against the well-being of the wider region.
    - lazide 3y ago
      If there was a large portion of the electorate that organized and wanted more housing, all those other changes would happen, as the controlling elected officials would be replaced. I’ve seen it. Rent control too. It’s rare though, as the segment of the population who does has historically poor turnover and is chronically confused and disorganized. Pro ‘keep it the same’ groups (and pro landlord groups) tend to be composed of retired professionals with decades of experience generating (and wading) through red tape, and have no issues rallying the most consistent voting block in any area - retirees who don’t want their largest assets and (literal) roof over their heads screwed with. What you’re talking about is that the governing structure gets setup to diffuse blame and obfuscate responsibility so activists don’t have any obvious individuals they can easily attack. That’s by design, but not the ‘problem’. Not the same thing.
crazygringo 3y ago
Because we live in a country and state, not just a city. And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want. E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents. The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city). Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them. So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.
- lazide 3y ago
  Think long and hard before you start taking that line - unless you want Trump or Biden or whoever next is in line (or Congress) being able to define your local zoning laws. Nothing good is going to come from that the vast majority of the time. Local zoning should be local so costs/side effects/benefits are associated with decisions as closely as possible. Otherwise, it would be trivial to penalize to the point of almost destroying entire states or regions because they were on the wrong side of some ideological line on another topic. Which would then be paid back 4 or 8 years later, of course.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I'm not taking any line, I'm describing the basic principles of representative democracy. The US is a little bit of an outlier in having a federal system so there are some limits to what Congress can do, but there aren't to what a state can do, and some of our states (like CA and NY) are the size of countries themselves. I'm not saying the majority of zoning decisions should be taken at the state/country level -- that would be ludicrous simply from an organizational standpoint. I'm simply describing that states are perfectly free to override local decisions whenever necessary, with full democratic legitimacy. How do you think the interstate highway system got built?
fishtoaster 3y ago
One role of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is to balance competing desires. Eg everyone wants good roads, but no one wants higher taxes. If you allow people to directly vote on each, people vote for higher costs and less revenue. So instead, we elect representatives to take a mix of popular (give us things) and unpopular (take things from us to pay for those things) positions at the same time. Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires. That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.
ajross 3y ago
> Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires? From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).
- sokoloff 3y ago
  The federal government has priority when the relevant power has been granted to it by the states. See the Tenth Amendment, which is unfortunately read/followed only slightly more frequently than the Third.
  - ajross 3y ago
    FWIW, that's not correct. The tenth amendment is a limitation on unenumerated powers. It says nothing about precedence of conflicting powers where those are enumerated. That's what the Supremacy clause is about, and it's abundantly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause Not that it really matters here, since the relevant conflict is between state and municipal law. But the 10th amendment tends to be pretty badly misunderstood by internet libertarians, so it was an interesting digression.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      I agree with everything you wrote except your first sentence. What of what I wrote was incorrect in the context of the unbounded claim that “feds win”, particularly on a thread dealing with real estate zoning issues?
catlover76 3y ago
"democracy" can mean a range of things, and, in addition, it's not really clear who the relevant group of people are whose collective will we should care about. For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority" "Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.
tikhonj 3y ago
Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do. Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!
rnk 3y ago
The us is in desperate shape with the housing policies that we have leading to a tremendous lack of housing availability in many large cities in the west where it's harder to spread out. California but also Seattle is another city. There's a shortage of housing, the housing that exists gets more expensive because there's more competition to get in, people are pushed farther out, the high prices push many to eventually living in cars, there's no place for low income people to go. This contrasts with Chicago where there's apparently a lot of low income housing. This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.
xvector 3y ago
Democracy is a terrible model for many things, and civil development is one of them.
esalman 3y ago
High-income, low-density suburban areas are actually economically sustained and subsidized by low-income, high-density downtown areas. This is why residents of such areas should not be the sole voice of democracy here. Source: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy
- cbron 3y ago
  Interesting video, but it's all from the pov of the city's tax revenue and nothing else. Taking the first example, if they don't build the new food complex and keep the old one, less people will want to live in that city, and eventually the tax revenue will go down. Plenty of ghost towns around me that prove that point, you have to stay modern or you go under. As far as the suburb part, if those high income areas spend all their money downtown, then tax revenue downtown goes up but the source of money is still the suburbs. You have two sources of tax revenue in downtown (business + residents), but only one in the suburbs. So naturally tax revenue is lower in suburbs, but without them the downtown businesses wouldn't survive at all. It's a relationship, and it's odd they don't address this point. Also in the southwest there are plenty of suburb-only cities that grow rapidly without a downtown district playing major part.

mdgrech23 3y ago

It's weird b/c in most parts of our day to day lives we have no say. We live in a democracy but for the most part none of us can vote on anything meaningful but in this one particular area everyday citizens have a ton of power and they're voting to protect their owns means. I don't know man I look at the decisions made by politicians and they piss me off but when everyday citizens get a chance to make policy if you will they do shitty stuff like this blocking affordable housing. If I come across as bitter it's b/c I am. My town tried to build affordable apartments and NIMBYs blocked it.

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Dig1t 3y ago

The people on the zoning board are homeowners in the city! Of course they are going to zone things so that their neighborhood never changes. This is how it works in 99% of cities in the US and it’s terrible.

wwweston 3y ago

If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.

fragmede 3y ago
zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Maybe it would be best for Google to just go build them somewhere else. There's no actual rule that says we have to stack every human being in the country in Silicon Valley. Software engineering in particular is a business that lends itself being done from anywhere.

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eitally 3y ago

I'm a homeowner and I want more housing built. But I also want improvements to transit and for both bike & car commuting. It's great that a lot of the current crop of apartments are being built along Caltrain & light rail corridors, but those still mostly only keep people who work along those corridors off the roads, creating more congestion for everyone. 87, 880, 101, 85, and 280 (until you get past Cupertino) are all already basically parking lots during rush hours, and it's because people can't live near where they work. This was the entire point of companies like Google & Meta including residential development in their broader campus development plans in Menlo Park, Mountain View, and San Jose ... and if it doesn't happen, then which municipalities are going to pick up the slack to incentivize developers to build near those campuses?