8 ms·

You’re forgetting that the people living in those towns don’t want you to suddenly increase the housing stock by 5x and with it the class sizes. Why should a m

by koolba 3y ago

You’re forgetting that the people living in those towns don’t want you to suddenly increase the housing stock by 5x and with it the class sizes. Why should a minority of people, especially those that don’t even live in these towns, dictate how the town will be changing? If dense housing is the bees knees, make people want to live in cities.

redserk 3y ago
Everyone was new to their town at some point.
davidw 3y ago
This attitude is why we have a housing crisis. Not banks or Blackstone, not RealPage, not foreign buyers, not short term rentals. Those things may not help, but the lid on the housing supply are people in your city who, ironically, generally are a small but involved minority who show up to say NO to housing and NO to a diversity of housing types.
adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
increasing housing stock doesn't increase class size. some of the extra people you get are teachers and so the school hires more teachers and runs more classes.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
Conversely: why should my neighbor get to dictate if I get to build a duplex on my property.
- koolba 3y ago
  Same reason you have a say in whether there’s a strip mine or a landfill across the street from your property. The residents come together and decide on the rules by which they will be governed. Just because they don’t jive with exactly how you’d want things doesn’t mean the system is not working as it’s intended.
  - secstate 3y ago
    But that's a silly example, because proving net-harm from industrial uses across from residential is easy. Proving net-harm from denser residential is generally an exercise in NIMBY-ism that slides very smoothly into classism and racism about who would live in those denser units. Residents coming together to decide on rules by which they are governed can get us public lynching too. It doesn't mean it's good governance.
    - koolba 3y ago
      The example is meant to be silly to demonstrate that there’s clearly some limit of what is acceptable and it’s the stricter intersection of every level of government within the bounds of what’s constitutional. One of those levels is the local government consisting of the people that already live in a municipality. There’s no inherent right, whether constitutionally granted or innately, for you to build whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like. Just like I can’t go build a shack in the middle of NYC’s Central Park. Framing it as racism or classism is a sign that you don’t have any other valid arguments. It’s literally just an excuse for a land grab!
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > The example is meant to be silly to demonstrate that there’s clearly some limit of what is acceptable But you can use sensible rules for this like "does this impose a significant negative externality" that neatly allow you to exclude a landfill from a residential area but not a new residential building. > and it’s the stricter intersection of every level of government within the bounds of what’s constitutional. The entire question is what those laws should be. For example, should states or federal lawmakers prevent towns from imposing restrictive zoning rules, as permitted under their various constitutions? > There’s no inherent right, whether constitutionally granted or innately, for you to build whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like. Just like I can’t go build a shack in the middle of NYC’s Central Park. You can't go build a shack in Central Park because you don't own the land in Central Park. The issue here is when you do own the land and all you want to do is build housing during a housing shortage. > Framing it as racism or classism is a sign that you don’t have any other valid arguments. Only if you don't present any other valid arguments. Also, "this is racism or classism" can be a valid argument when it is in fact racism or classism. Just because it's massively overused doesn't mean it's never actually true. > It’s literally just an excuse for a land grab! The proposal does not involve the use of eminent domain.
MarkSweep 3y ago
It is a reasonable concern. So reasonable in fact that everyone has it and thus the natural state of things is American cities all try to ban dense housing. Hence the housing crisis. This is the logic behind some states like California trying to reduce the amount of local control over how dense housing can be. It is a state-wide problem that every city is disincentivized to solve. While you were probably using hyperbole, I don’t think it’s easy to 5x the population of a city with infill housing. Just financing, land acquisition, demolition, construction, and sales takes a while. Government redtape only adds more time.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  If you’re trying to 5x the population of any city with a housing cost issue then I suppose you are going to have a lot more problems than housing.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Do we really need to 5x the population? Or would adding a studio apt to the basement of every SFH solve it (not saying this should be the solution, just thinking scope of problem)? FWIW, I spent a few weeks working remote/vacationing in Cape Canaveral, FL two years ago (the town, not the military base). It has mixed housing - SFHs, duplex, and two-story (~8 unit) apartment blocks - it seemed to work well. It felt like a place I could happily live (other than the heat).
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> You’re forgetting that the people living in those towns don’t want you to suddenly increase the housing stock by 5x and with it the class sizes. It's actually easier to have smaller class sizes with higher density because you spend less on transportation and real estate and can use the money hire more teachers, or lower your taxes, or do whatever you like with it. > Why should a minority of people, especially those that don’t even live in these towns, dictate how the town will be changing? Because it's every town operating under the same set of incentives. Existing homeowners don't want more housing because they want the value of their existing home to go up through scarcity. It's the same in every town, so if you want to build "cities" anywhere the decision on whether it can be done in a particular place can't be solely in the hands of the people who have the financial incentive to say no. > If dense housing is the bees knees, make people want to live in cities. If people didn't want to live in cities then why does the housing there cost more?
- koolba 3y ago
  > It's actually easier to have smaller class sizes with higher density because you spend less on transportation and real estate and can use the money hire more teachers, or lower your taxes, or do whatever you like with it. In practice, new housing increases the denominator (number of students) more the than numerator (tax dollars). This is because the existing tax base includes non-residential land that only provides tax dollars without increase school costs. So any new housing is always a net loss. > Existing homeowners don't want more housing because they want the value of their existing home to go up through scarcity. The flip side of that is that people who don’t have those houses want to take that away without paying the market price for that land. > If people didn't want to live in cities then why does the housing there cost more? Historicaly, being close to high paying jobs was a major driver. There’s also an annual resupply of starry eyed graduates. Though I’ll be honest to not understand why anyone would pay a premium to live like a sardine. The air quality alone is enough reason to move out of the city.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > In practice, new housing increases the denominator (number of students) more the than numerator (tax dollars). This is because the existing tax base includes non-residential land that only provides tax dollars without increase school costs. So any new housing is always a net loss. The assumption here is that you would have only new residential housing. But zoning that allows for higher density construction also allows for new businesses that pay taxes and have no children. And you would also have to be making assumptions about the ratio of taxes paid to number of kids. But the people who move into small cheap apartments and condos are most often college students and retirees, who don't have kids yet (and wouldn't continue to live there if they did) or their kids are already grown. From which you get new tax dollars but no new students. Whereas the people who can afford a 3- or 4-bedroom unit have money and pay an above-average amount of tax, so they might have kids but they're paying their own way. This is also not just a fraction with a numerator and a denominator. Many of a government's expenses are fixed costs, e.g. most single-lane suburban roads are nowhere near capacity and would not need to be expanded or even experience congestion if the amount of traffic on them doubled. Each new resident you get paying taxes increases the tax base over which you can amortize those fixed costs. Moreover, the ratio is irrelevant. If someone is paying $21,000 in taxes and then their presence requires the government to spend $20,000 more in services, you'd have a net gain of $1000 from their presence regardless of what the ratio is for some other people or existing residents. > The flip side of that is that people who don’t have those houses want to take that away without paying the market price for that land. They are paying the market price for that land. In order to build a multi-story building, you first have to buy a piece of land to put it on. What they're doing is making more efficient use of that land, by creating e.g. 10 housing units on a lot currently being used for 1. That reduces the market price of housing units by supply and demand, but the higher price was only ever a result of artificial scarcity. > Historicaly, being close to high paying jobs was a major driver. So a shorter commute makes up for a higher price. But if you prohibit housing construction, this trade off only gets worse. The job is in the city, you could have lived in a 6-unit building 20 minutes away, but if those are prohibited then you need 6 times as much land for the same number of residents and now they either have to pay more even for the 20 minute commute or take the far away housing with a 60+ minute commute. Whereas if you allow the 6-story buildings, anyone who wants the 20-minute commute can live there and anyone who wants to live in a single-family home can live five blocks away with nearly the same commute but for a lower price than they'd have had to pay when those higher density buildings weren't there satisfying housing demand. > Though I’ll be honest to not understand why anyone would pay a premium to live like a sardine. Density and small units are not inherently associated. You can put 4000 sq ft units in a multi-story building and still have ten times the density as a single-family home of the same size as one unit. > The air quality alone is enough reason to move out of the city. Tell that to the suburban ignoramuses who think it's a good idea to burn wood: https://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/chart_circles.gif https://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/... That graphic isn't even to scale. The pellet stove looks like it's only a little over twice as bad as an oil furnace when it's actually more than a hundred times worse, and the wood stoves and fireplaces people have are an order of magnitude worse than that.

by koolba 3y ago

redserk 3y ago

Everyone was new to their town at some point.

davidw 3y ago

This attitude is why we have a housing crisis. Not banks or Blackstone, not RealPage, not foreign buyers, not short term rentals. Those things may not help, but the lid on the housing supply are people in your city who, ironically, generally are a small but involved minority who show up to say NO to housing and NO to a diversity of housing types.

adgjlsfhk1 3y ago

increasing housing stock doesn't increase class size. some of the extra people you get are teachers and so the school hires more teachers and runs more classes.

dghlsakjg 3y ago

Conversely: why should my neighbor get to dictate if I get to build a duplex on my property.

koolba 3y ago
Same reason you have a say in whether there’s a strip mine or a landfill across the street from your property. The residents come together and decide on the rules by which they will be governed. Just because they don’t jive with exactly how you’d want things doesn’t mean the system is not working as it’s intended.
- secstate 3y ago
  But that's a silly example, because proving net-harm from industrial uses across from residential is easy. Proving net-harm from denser residential is generally an exercise in NIMBY-ism that slides very smoothly into classism and racism about who would live in those denser units. Residents coming together to decide on rules by which they are governed can get us public lynching too. It doesn't mean it's good governance.
  - koolba 3y ago
    The example is meant to be silly to demonstrate that there’s clearly some limit of what is acceptable and it’s the stricter intersection of every level of government within the bounds of what’s constitutional. One of those levels is the local government consisting of the people that already live in a municipality. There’s no inherent right, whether constitutionally granted or innately, for you to build whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like. Just like I can’t go build a shack in the middle of NYC’s Central Park. Framing it as racism or classism is a sign that you don’t have any other valid arguments. It’s literally just an excuse for a land grab!
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > The example is meant to be silly to demonstrate that there’s clearly some limit of what is acceptable But you can use sensible rules for this like "does this impose a significant negative externality" that neatly allow you to exclude a landfill from a residential area but not a new residential building. > and it’s the stricter intersection of every level of government within the bounds of what’s constitutional. The entire question is what those laws should be. For example, should states or federal lawmakers prevent towns from imposing restrictive zoning rules, as permitted under their various constitutions? > There’s no inherent right, whether constitutionally granted or innately, for you to build whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like. Just like I can’t go build a shack in the middle of NYC’s Central Park. You can't go build a shack in Central Park because you don't own the land in Central Park. The issue here is when you do own the land and all you want to do is build housing during a housing shortage. > Framing it as racism or classism is a sign that you don’t have any other valid arguments. Only if you don't present any other valid arguments. Also, "this is racism or classism" can be a valid argument when it is in fact racism or classism. Just because it's massively overused doesn't mean it's never actually true. > It’s literally just an excuse for a land grab! The proposal does not involve the use of eminent domain.

MarkSweep 3y ago

It is a reasonable concern. So reasonable in fact that everyone has it and thus the natural state of things is American cities all try to ban dense housing. Hence the housing crisis. This is the logic behind some states like California trying to reduce the amount of local control over how dense housing can be. It is a state-wide problem that every city is disincentivized to solve. While you were probably using hyperbole, I don’t think it’s easy to 5x the population of a city with infill housing. Just financing, land acquisition, demolition, construction, and sales takes a while. Government redtape only adds more time.

lotsoweiners 3y ago
If you’re trying to 5x the population of any city with a housing cost issue then I suppose you are going to have a lot more problems than housing.
alistairSH 3y ago
Do we really need to 5x the population? Or would adding a studio apt to the basement of every SFH solve it (not saying this should be the solution, just thinking scope of problem)? FWIW, I spent a few weeks working remote/vacationing in Cape Canaveral, FL two years ago (the town, not the military base). It has mixed housing - SFHs, duplex, and two-story (~8 unit) apartment blocks - it seemed to work well. It felt like a place I could happily live (other than the heat).

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> You’re forgetting that the people living in those towns don’t want you to suddenly increase the housing stock by 5x and with it the class sizes. It's actually easier to have smaller class sizes with higher density because you spend less on transportation and real estate and can use the money hire more teachers, or lower your taxes, or do whatever you like with it. > Why should a minority of people, especially those that don’t even live in these towns, dictate how the town will be changing? Because it's every town operating under the same set of incentives. Existing homeowners don't want more housing because they want the value of their existing home to go up through scarcity. It's the same in every town, so if you want to build "cities" anywhere the decision on whether it can be done in a particular place can't be solely in the hands of the people who have the financial incentive to say no. > If dense housing is the bees knees, make people want to live in cities. If people didn't want to live in cities then why does the housing there cost more?

koolba 3y ago
> It's actually easier to have smaller class sizes with higher density because you spend less on transportation and real estate and can use the money hire more teachers, or lower your taxes, or do whatever you like with it. In practice, new housing increases the denominator (number of students) more the than numerator (tax dollars). This is because the existing tax base includes non-residential land that only provides tax dollars without increase school costs. So any new housing is always a net loss. > Existing homeowners don't want more housing because they want the value of their existing home to go up through scarcity. The flip side of that is that people who don’t have those houses want to take that away without paying the market price for that land. > If people didn't want to live in cities then why does the housing there cost more? Historicaly, being close to high paying jobs was a major driver. There’s also an annual resupply of starry eyed graduates. Though I’ll be honest to not understand why anyone would pay a premium to live like a sardine. The air quality alone is enough reason to move out of the city.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > In practice, new housing increases the denominator (number of students) more the than numerator (tax dollars). This is because the existing tax base includes non-residential land that only provides tax dollars without increase school costs. So any new housing is always a net loss. The assumption here is that you would have only new residential housing. But zoning that allows for higher density construction also allows for new businesses that pay taxes and have no children. And you would also have to be making assumptions about the ratio of taxes paid to number of kids. But the people who move into small cheap apartments and condos are most often college students and retirees, who don't have kids yet (and wouldn't continue to live there if they did) or their kids are already grown. From which you get new tax dollars but no new students. Whereas the people who can afford a 3- or 4-bedroom unit have money and pay an above-average amount of tax, so they might have kids but they're paying their own way. This is also not just a fraction with a numerator and a denominator. Many of a government's expenses are fixed costs, e.g. most single-lane suburban roads are nowhere near capacity and would not need to be expanded or even experience congestion if the amount of traffic on them doubled. Each new resident you get paying taxes increases the tax base over which you can amortize those fixed costs. Moreover, the ratio is irrelevant. If someone is paying $21,000 in taxes and then their presence requires the government to spend $20,000 more in services, you'd have a net gain of $1000 from their presence regardless of what the ratio is for some other people or existing residents. > The flip side of that is that people who don’t have those houses want to take that away without paying the market price for that land. They are paying the market price for that land. In order to build a multi-story building, you first have to buy a piece of land to put it on. What they're doing is making more efficient use of that land, by creating e.g. 10 housing units on a lot currently being used for 1. That reduces the market price of housing units by supply and demand, but the higher price was only ever a result of artificial scarcity. > Historicaly, being close to high paying jobs was a major driver. So a shorter commute makes up for a higher price. But if you prohibit housing construction, this trade off only gets worse. The job is in the city, you could have lived in a 6-unit building 20 minutes away, but if those are prohibited then you need 6 times as much land for the same number of residents and now they either have to pay more even for the 20 minute commute or take the far away housing with a 60+ minute commute. Whereas if you allow the 6-story buildings, anyone who wants the 20-minute commute can live there and anyone who wants to live in a single-family home can live five blocks away with nearly the same commute but for a lower price than they'd have had to pay when those higher density buildings weren't there satisfying housing demand. > Though I’ll be honest to not understand why anyone would pay a premium to live like a sardine. Density and small units are not inherently associated. You can put 4000 sq ft units in a multi-story building and still have ten times the density as a single-family home of the same size as one unit. > The air quality alone is enough reason to move out of the city. Tell that to the suburban ignoramuses who think it's a good idea to burn wood: https://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/chart_circles.gif https://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/... That graphic isn't even to scale. The pellet stove looks like it's only a little over twice as bad as an oil furnace when it's actually more than a hundred times worse, and the wood stoves and fireplaces people have are an order of magnitude worse than that.