13 ms·

Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build

143 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

baggy_trough 2y ago
The United States is too rich to be forced to deal with its parasites: bureaucrats and lawyers. Unfortunately, it will take a severe crisis before that tumorous mass can even begin to be chopped away.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Perhaps my view is too California-centric, but IMHO the biggest parasites are the rent seekers of homeowners and landlords. Those are the folks who benefit the most and who also control the process.
  - datameta 2y ago
    It boggles my mind that landlords gets to fully benefit from the completely externalized benefits from owning a building that without their efforts becomes a central location, or "pleasant" neighborhood, or a nightlife filled area, etс. And then still treat the housing market like some stock ticker to play with.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > Perhaps my view is too California-centric, but IMHO the biggest parasites are the rent seekers of homeowners and landlords. How are home owners "rent seekers"?
    - epistasis 2y ago
      Home owners block new housing to drive up their home valuations, treating housing as an investment and pricing out an entire generation.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        I think you're mistaking a small subset for the general set of home owners. The root cause of what you're talking about is demand is exceeding supply, by quite a long way. The population is growing - through various means - faster than homes are being created. That means a few home owners will do what you describe.
        KingMachiavelli 2y ago
        Prop 13 means local municipalities need to extract higher fees and taxes on new construction compared to existing property. Higher development costs/prices cause dead weight loss and therefore block/reduce new development.
  - horns4lyfe 2y ago
    And who do you think is their enforcement arm?
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    The same "parasites" who are the ones who would own the goddamn expanded housing in the first place if it were to come to pass? Calling that view "California-centric" makes it sound like a stand-in for insults.
- kiba 2y ago
  America is very rich because of its bureaucracy and its system of governance. It would be even richer if obstacles to good urban planning are identified and removed.
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    I really admire your optimism.
petermcneeley 2y ago
[flagged]
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
  I fail to see how one could argue that the shift to car-centrism was a win for cities. In any case, zoning law borne out of the mid-20th century is an outsized factor in a lot of modern societal woes.
Lammy 2y ago
> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods. Some serious persecution complex going on in this article. I'm sure there were places where that did happen, but here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg Sources: — https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/ https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer) — https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/ https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity) I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad once ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 2y ago
  The data show that urban highways very much impacted certain neighborhoods more than others, when you look at more than one city https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infra...
  - Lammy 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - hirsin 2y ago
      I mean, the same classes and groups instituting redlining were the ones picking where the infrastructure went. I don't think anyone is blaming the existence of infrastructure as the causative factor.
AlexandrB 2y ago
> ...and within 10 years we went from a housing bubble to a housing shortage where rent is the primary cause of national inflation. Either this article is misinformed or I am. The housing bubble was a bubble in asset values not inventory, right? I don't seem to recall that there was an abundance of excess housing even then.
- hervature 2y ago
  They are actually referring to now. Hard to take this article seriously when all the examples are California centric and that $5T of COVID relief more or less went straight into assets during the period referred to in that quote.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sologoub 2y ago
  It is an odd remark, but during the housing bubble crash, there was an inventory uptick. A lot of it was bought up by cash investors and even institutional investors securitizing housing. However, if you were still employed and had decent credit, there was a lot to choose from and prices were lower than rent. It didn’t last though - 2009 through 2012 was probably the best, then every year it ticked up until just before Covid. With Covid some areas shot up others went sideways for a bit.
  - kshacker 2y ago
    > during the housing bubble crash, there was an inventory uptick Of course, people did not have money to pay, and were under. There were forced liquidations. And the parent comment was talking about the bubble, not the aftermath which is what you are talking about.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  I think the idea is that the bubble implies prices are detached from a utilitarian valuation, whereas high rents are more attached to the value the housing directly provides.
D13Fd 2y ago
It doesn’t seem surprising that state officials with limited budgets would target areas with the lowest property values, because exercising eminent domain gets expensive real quick.
et-al 2y ago
Wait, author contrasts speed of development in China with a criticism of urban renewal in America without even addressing property rights in China? Those ultra modern subways and apartments of Chengdu didn't happen without many families being displaced. Not to defend urban renewal, but if it had focused on railways instead of highways, I wonder if we'd be as negative today. For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  If it had focused on railways instead of highways we wouldn't see it as that negative, because rail lines already existed and widening that would have little impact. And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people. This is especially true for interchanges, highway interchanges are freaking gigantic. Railway interchanges are cooperatively tiny. For railway you wouldn't need nearly as much removal, and a railway is far, far easier to cross then a highway. You can start with at grade crossings early on and then overtime add grade separation. Grade separation is much cheaper for a railway. Or you can build the whole railway above or below grade quite reasonably. This rail line here can beat most giant US urban highways, Zürich Switzerland: https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK With cut and cover, you can pretty cheaply build a railway and then build new building above, where the same people who live there before can live. > For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't. So by that logic it good to build highways, as long as the government also makes sure that everybody has a car? If everybody can use the least space and energy efficient method to get around, surely we have great solution.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people. I'd also like to note that overall capacity is sensitive to how big each train is and how fast it moves etc. There are certain lingering, er, unserious yet overhyped proposals out there for systems using many low-capacity pods, but because you need some sort of safe separation between them it tanks the capacity. (Unless you run them in an unsafe way that will eventually kill thousands of people in compound pile-ups.)
davidw 2y ago
He makes a good point. Broadly, in the US, the pendulum swung from "just go build stuff and don't worry about the opposition because they don't matter" to "we have to go through 5 years of process to build a 40-unit apartment building for people to live in". There are some good reasons for some of that process, but there's a strong argument that we went too far in saying no, slowing things down and in general not building things that are beneficial to society. And it turns out that some of that process doesn't actually help the more vulnerable groups it was intended to help, but gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood.
- PreachSoup 2y ago
  > gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood. Everything for inducing the demand and reducing the supply. The invisible hand of extracting values at all cost.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    I don’t think wealthy people are thinking too much about their property values when it comes to opposing building in their own neighborhoods. They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.
    - PreachSoup 2y ago
      > social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home. Value doesn't only mean monetary value. Social prestige is one of the values too. And sometimes they are transferable. The invisible hand is not just about the literal money
    - deprecative 2y ago
      Doesn't that seem to implicitly state that property values are precisely what they're thinking about when trying to keep the poors away? If the poors are able to move in then the value of the property must be inexpensive for them to be able to.
polemic 2y ago
Inefficiency in public infrastructure works might be a cost of a much higher degree of personal and political freedoms. Apparent efficiencies in public infrastructure works might be short-lived in a centrally directed economy and/or hides deep inefficiences elsewhere in the system. (It might also be that 1960s stucco houses are preferable to dense apartment living for many people, and that Op misses the forest for the trees in the wider context of why and for whom anything is built anywhere). I'm not in the USA or China though. Take with grains of salt.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  As always when talking about housing, only contrasting between HonkKong style density and US subburban sprawl is completely false view. Housing should be very diverse and historically was. Townhouses, Rowhouses, mini-apartment buildings, courtyard style, twin house and so on and so on. If it was about preference one would think it would result in a lot of diversity (as it has historically), and not 2 pretty strict categories. We also have evidence that old streetcar subburbs now fetch an insane price. So these kinds of neighborhoods are impossible to build now, but have high demand. Where I live in Europe, you can still have single family homes but there are also lots of other building types around it. So there is clear evidence that if there are fewer restrictions, people have choices to live in lots of different places. Japan has the same thing as well. It seems pretty consistent, in most of the world that if you give people options, many people choice many different things. That just outside of all the historical knowledge we have about everything that was done to enforce these patterns. There are to many things to list here but I assure you, there are a lot of them.
- kiba 2y ago
  Roads and highways are inherently public infrastructure and cars doesn't indicate personal and political freedom. They are just a mean to achieving personal mobility just as trains and bikes are. Look at China, there are highways and roads and streets filled with cars and traffic congestion. To say that political and personal freedom indicates why we are stuck in this quagmire is to ignore the role of suffocating zoning regulations and other mechanisms that enforces a car centric worldview of American politicans and planners.
panick21_ 2y ago
> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods. One of the big problems was that the federal government was handing out free money (as much as 90% for people to do highways). So of course all the states jump on that. But of course city officials also want to be part of the gravy train and demand projects in their area to. And of course that doesn't make sense in a city. But politically you can't just tell a city no. And if you are going to have a project, of course they have to build it where it is politically possible. So its basically dumb politics all around.
enceladus06 2y ago
Just build it. China built 10,000km of high-speed lines in six to seven years. The USA went to the moon in 1969 too, but hasn’t been back since... Now we can't even build true high-speed rail from NYC to DC, which would take an hour instead of 4.5h.
roenxi 2y ago
I don't like this article. It is undersourced and I don't think there is enough of an argument that the political situation in the 50s and 60s is all that significant. If anyone is arguing based on lessons learned in Urban Renewal projects they keep very quiet on Hacker News. The situation in the now seems to be short-term economic incentives and a genuine belief that cheap energy shouldn't a low-priority goal for society (you need energy to build things). There does seem to be a strong argument that there are vetos everywhere, but I think people would just add them in to the law today regardless of the political path over the last half-century.
tiku 2y ago
Here in the Netherlands we mostly worry about the neighbourhood sueing and complaining, about stuff like sunlight, parking space, prices diminishing on their real estate and lots of other stuff. Takes a long time to start building. Welcome to the modern world.
jeisc 2y ago
the carbon footprint of destroying and rebuilding is too high; isn't the green thing this to renovate and enhance existing infrastructure not bulldozing existing things?
anovikov 2y ago
Only way to truly solve it is to remove racial divide (that is, another Holocaust), and either remove democracy (so what people - majority of who are property owners - want, doesn't matter), or remove market economy (so people won't be property owners). Nothing of it is acceptable. Much better to keep things as they are. Let it be a competition for who gets in to the desirable areas.
ryaniscool 2y ago
Construction in the USA is driven by capitalism. From my own observations, a big part of why we build less in recent times is the real estate market crash in 2008. We're still feeling the effects. The construction companies (and capital) that survived the crash of 2008 were a lot more cautious. They hired and built less through the 2010's as the market recovered. More people got college degrees instead of learning construction trades. When the pandemic hit, and there was something of a boom in construction, I think they finally shook off the fear. Now, a few years later, the market is beginning to slump again due to high interest rates and general inflation.
- zjp 2y ago
  This may be true for the national market, but local markets particularly in high demand coastal cities are super dysfunctional -- their housing markets simply are not free. It is illegal to build enough there to meet demand.
- zhdc1 2y ago
  > Construction in the USA is driven by capitalism. From my own observations, a big part of why we build less in recent times is the real estate market crash in 2008. We're still feeling the effects. An efficient market would see an increase in supply to meet demand. This is exactly what happened in Minneapolis, Raleigh, and many cities in Texas, which made it comparatively earlier to get construction permits (in some cases, particularly for multi-family housing).
solatic 2y ago
US housing is a state-level issue that could be solved by state governments promoting high-density housing policy. Ultimately, those state governments are elected by voters, i.e. residents, including renters, and not exclusively landlords. But landlords disproportionately contribute to the finances of re-election campaigns, and thus have effectively seized control of the options offered to voters. It's fantastical, and unrealistic, to hope that improved voter education will result in better electoral outcomes and thus better policy outcomes. The root problem is in how elections are financed. Citizens United must be reversed and elections must be financed publicly, with fair financing to candidates based on the number of signatures they obtain, and equal airtime purchased from public funds. Only then will we see YIMBY candidates start to accede to positions of power and start to reverse these landlord-favorable policies.
- randomdata 2y ago
  The root problem is that democracy requires active engagement. It turns out the hired representatives are not mind readers. However, those with means are able to give more engagement, and thus are disproportionately represented. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say. The guy who is in their representative's face every single day is going to be more apt to get his way. The people who have never even spoken to their representative, even just once, most definitely won't get their way unless by sheer coincidence. There is no solution to that problem other than to give up democracy, but the alternatives come with their own set of trade-offs. The wonderful world of people problems.
- davidw 2y ago
  > Only then will we see YIMBY candidates start to accede to positions of power and start to reverse these landlord-favorable policies Our governor here in Oregon, Tina Kotek, is quite YIMBY. As is the mayor of the city I live in.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  In most local elections, the majority voters are often homeowners, despite the majority of eligible voters often being renters in cities. It’s not even a money issue but a political apathy issue.
jmclnx 2y ago
Yes, it ruined many small cities were I grew up. Lots of old and beautiful buildings were destroyed. In the City were I grew up, people and politicians still decry the history destroyed by urban renewal.
mountainb 2y ago
Baffling version of history that somehow ignores the constitutional dimension. It's also a back-assward interpretation of how contemporary environmental law came into being. It's like a guy typing with one hand while pointing at the heffalumps for causing the wet streets that made it rain with the other hand. There is just no real analysis here of law, policy, or society. It's just a pile of uncited errata. I'm somewhat sympathetic to some of his conclusions, but there is no reasoning process here.
- petermcneeley 2y ago
  I tried to sum this up with my now flagged comment. It was probably too quippy for hn.
nojvek 2y ago
US culture is very much driven by competition. If China is winning wars, has more influence on world, has better tech, better infra, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita. Americans will get their shit together to compete. The problem with US is that we're too complacent. SF has billions of dollars of VC money pumped in, house prices are astronomic. SF is wildly successful despite the shortcomings. Homelessness, crime, e.t.c doesn't matter. If the wealth of the upper-class is preserved, they are fine with it. They are voting for what they want. China is the best thing to have happened to US. I wish the best of prosperity for China and Chinese citizens so we in US have competition and inspiration to what is possible. Same for Europe, get your A-game together. Bring back a new renaissance period. A rising tide lifts all boats. It's time to build!
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  The predominant outlook about the future isn't positive in America anymore. The difference starts and ends with attitude. Americans cannot compete because excellence and pride of work and community are gone, pay is low for most people, politics are extremely divided, and most Americans keep to themselves and don't care about anyone else. China wins just on attitude and growth, but also has the "cheat code" of authoritarianism where anything can be imposed top-down without much push back.
sershe 2y ago
It's interesting that both extremes are actually signs of the same problem. First, why didn't other countries become too scare to build? The neighborhood I grew up at in Moscow was built in bulk in place of a village of the same name in the early 80ies. Nobody cared about the village; in fact it wasn't even replaced by housing - it was demolished to build a stadium and other assorted sporting venues; the housing was added shortly after. Did it make Russia too scared to build? No, it didn't. During the aughts oil boom, they demolished some 5-story flats to replace them with 20+-story flats, giving the residents better flats in more remote neighborhoods, with no real choice to stay in their neighborhood in many cases (like my grand aunt's). They just keep doing things the same way, and that has its own tradeoffs. Nobody is "scared". The difference in the US is that there's a stronger notion of individual rights, and it was obvious that the bureaucratic nightmare machine was running ramshod over those. So it was great that it was reigned in. The not-so-great part that instead of just respecting those as was the original intent, US has replaced an incompetent bureaucratic nightmare that ran ramshod over the local residents, with an incompetent bureaucratic/legalistic nightmare that tries to protect them instead. Or rather, some perverted collectivist distortion of "individual rights" where frivolous lawsuits from rich neighbors, disgruntled unions, idiot activists or basically anyone can hold up the project forever instead of just individuals negotiating their narrow concerns... If this thing was done properly, in some cases the weight of many individuals would counterbalance aggressive projects when it makes sense, but loonies would end up like Edith Macefield, with a house surrounded by a mall. As it stands, Edith Macefields of the world can delay and block entire projects forever, other property owners be damned.

143 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

The United States is too rich to be forced to deal with its parasites: bureaucrats and lawyers. Unfortunately, it will take a severe crisis before that tumorous mass can even begin to be chopped away.

epistasis 2y ago
Perhaps my view is too California-centric, but IMHO the biggest parasites are the rent seekers of homeowners and landlords. Those are the folks who benefit the most and who also control the process.
- datameta 2y ago
  It boggles my mind that landlords gets to fully benefit from the completely externalized benefits from owning a building that without their efforts becomes a central location, or "pleasant" neighborhood, or a nightlife filled area, etс. And then still treat the housing market like some stock ticker to play with.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Perhaps my view is too California-centric, but IMHO the biggest parasites are the rent seekers of homeowners and landlords. How are home owners "rent seekers"?
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Home owners block new housing to drive up their home valuations, treating housing as an investment and pricing out an entire generation.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I think you're mistaking a small subset for the general set of home owners. The root cause of what you're talking about is demand is exceeding supply, by quite a long way. The population is growing - through various means - faster than homes are being created. That means a few home owners will do what you describe.
      - KingMachiavelli 2y ago
        Prop 13 means local municipalities need to extract higher fees and taxes on new construction compared to existing property. Higher development costs/prices cause dead weight loss and therefore block/reduce new development.
- horns4lyfe 2y ago
  And who do you think is their enforcement arm?
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  The same "parasites" who are the ones who would own the goddamn expanded housing in the first place if it were to come to pass? Calling that view "California-centric" makes it sound like a stand-in for insults.
kiba 2y ago
America is very rich because of its bureaucracy and its system of governance. It would be even richer if obstacles to good urban planning are identified and removed.
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  I really admire your optimism.

petermcneeley 2y ago

[flagged]

knowaveragejoe 2y ago
I fail to see how one could argue that the shift to car-centrism was a win for cities. In any case, zoning law borne out of the mid-20th century is an outsized factor in a lot of modern societal woes.

Lammy 2y ago

> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods. Some serious persecution complex going on in this article. I'm sure there were places where that did happen, but here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg Sources: — https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/ https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer) — https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/ https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity) I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad once ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
davidw 2y ago
The data show that urban highways very much impacted certain neighborhoods more than others, when you look at more than one city https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infra...
- Lammy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - hirsin 2y ago
    I mean, the same classes and groups instituting redlining were the ones picking where the infrastructure went. I don't think anyone is blaming the existence of infrastructure as the causative factor.

AlexandrB 2y ago

> ...and within 10 years we went from a housing bubble to a housing shortage where rent is the primary cause of national inflation. Either this article is misinformed or I am. The housing bubble was a bubble in asset values not inventory, right? I don't seem to recall that there was an abundance of excess housing even then.

hervature 2y ago
They are actually referring to now. Hard to take this article seriously when all the examples are California centric and that $5T of COVID relief more or less went straight into assets during the period referred to in that quote.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sologoub 2y ago
It is an odd remark, but during the housing bubble crash, there was an inventory uptick. A lot of it was bought up by cash investors and even institutional investors securitizing housing. However, if you were still employed and had decent credit, there was a lot to choose from and prices were lower than rent. It didn’t last though - 2009 through 2012 was probably the best, then every year it ticked up until just before Covid. With Covid some areas shot up others went sideways for a bit.
- kshacker 2y ago
  > during the housing bubble crash, there was an inventory uptick Of course, people did not have money to pay, and were under. There were forced liquidations. And the parent comment was talking about the bubble, not the aftermath which is what you are talking about.
maxerickson 2y ago
I think the idea is that the bubble implies prices are detached from a utilitarian valuation, whereas high rents are more attached to the value the housing directly provides.

D13Fd 2y ago

It doesn’t seem surprising that state officials with limited budgets would target areas with the lowest property values, because exercising eminent domain gets expensive real quick.

et-al 2y ago

Wait, author contrasts speed of development in China with a criticism of urban renewal in America without even addressing property rights in China? Those ultra modern subways and apartments of Chengdu didn't happen without many families being displaced. Not to defend urban renewal, but if it had focused on railways instead of highways, I wonder if we'd be as negative today. For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't.

panick21_ 2y ago
If it had focused on railways instead of highways we wouldn't see it as that negative, because rail lines already existed and widening that would have little impact. And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people. This is especially true for interchanges, highway interchanges are freaking gigantic. Railway interchanges are cooperatively tiny. For railway you wouldn't need nearly as much removal, and a railway is far, far easier to cross then a highway. You can start with at grade crossings early on and then overtime add grade separation. Grade separation is much cheaper for a railway. Or you can build the whole railway above or below grade quite reasonably. This rail line here can beat most giant US urban highways, Zürich Switzerland: https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK https://ibb.co/sv8tzYK With cut and cover, you can pretty cheaply build a railway and then build new building above, where the same people who live there before can live. > For me, the fundamental issue is the highways that divided cities and split the populace between those who can afford cars and those who can't. So by that logic it good to build highways, as long as the government also makes sure that everybody has a car? If everybody can use the least space and energy efficient method to get around, surely we have great solution.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > And rail is incredibly more efficient, you need very little space to transport a gigantic amount of people. I'd also like to note that overall capacity is sensitive to how big each train is and how fast it moves etc. There are certain lingering, er, unserious yet overhyped proposals out there for systems using many low-capacity pods, but because you need some sort of safe separation between them it tanks the capacity. (Unless you run them in an unsafe way that will eventually kill thousands of people in compound pile-ups.)

davidw 2y ago

He makes a good point. Broadly, in the US, the pendulum swung from "just go build stuff and don't worry about the opposition because they don't matter" to "we have to go through 5 years of process to build a 40-unit apartment building for people to live in". There are some good reasons for some of that process, but there's a strong argument that we went too far in saying no, slowing things down and in general not building things that are beneficial to society. And it turns out that some of that process doesn't actually help the more vulnerable groups it was intended to help, but gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood.

PreachSoup 2y ago
> gets hijacked by wealthy people to stop things like needed housing from going into their neighborhood. Everything for inducing the demand and reducing the supply. The invisible hand of extracting values at all cost.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  I don’t think wealthy people are thinking too much about their property values when it comes to opposing building in their own neighborhoods. They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.
  - PreachSoup 2y ago
    > social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home. Value doesn't only mean monetary value. Social prestige is one of the values too. And sometimes they are transferable. The invisible hand is not just about the literal money
  - deprecative 2y ago
    Doesn't that seem to implicitly state that property values are precisely what they're thinking about when trying to keep the poors away? If the poors are able to move in then the value of the property must be inexpensive for them to be able to.

polemic 2y ago

Inefficiency in public infrastructure works might be a cost of a much higher degree of personal and political freedoms. Apparent efficiencies in public infrastructure works might be short-lived in a centrally directed economy and/or hides deep inefficiences elsewhere in the system. (It might also be that 1960s stucco houses are preferable to dense apartment living for many people, and that Op misses the forest for the trees in the wider context of why and for whom anything is built anywhere). I'm not in the USA or China though. Take with grains of salt.

panick21_ 2y ago
As always when talking about housing, only contrasting between HonkKong style density and US subburban sprawl is completely false view. Housing should be very diverse and historically was. Townhouses, Rowhouses, mini-apartment buildings, courtyard style, twin house and so on and so on. If it was about preference one would think it would result in a lot of diversity (as it has historically), and not 2 pretty strict categories. We also have evidence that old streetcar subburbs now fetch an insane price. So these kinds of neighborhoods are impossible to build now, but have high demand. Where I live in Europe, you can still have single family homes but there are also lots of other building types around it. So there is clear evidence that if there are fewer restrictions, people have choices to live in lots of different places. Japan has the same thing as well. It seems pretty consistent, in most of the world that if you give people options, many people choice many different things. That just outside of all the historical knowledge we have about everything that was done to enforce these patterns. There are to many things to list here but I assure you, there are a lot of them.
kiba 2y ago
Roads and highways are inherently public infrastructure and cars doesn't indicate personal and political freedom. They are just a mean to achieving personal mobility just as trains and bikes are. Look at China, there are highways and roads and streets filled with cars and traffic congestion. To say that political and personal freedom indicates why we are stuck in this quagmire is to ignore the role of suffocating zoning regulations and other mechanisms that enforces a car centric worldview of American politicans and planners.

panick21_ 2y ago

> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods. One of the big problems was that the federal government was handing out free money (as much as 90% for people to do highways). So of course all the states jump on that. But of course city officials also want to be part of the gravy train and demand projects in their area to. And of course that doesn't make sense in a city. But politically you can't just tell a city no. And if you are going to have a project, of course they have to build it where it is politically possible. So its basically dumb politics all around.

enceladus06 2y ago

Just build it. China built 10,000km of high-speed lines in six to seven years. The USA went to the moon in 1969 too, but hasn’t been back since... Now we can't even build true high-speed rail from NYC to DC, which would take an hour instead of 4.5h.

roenxi 2y ago

I don't like this article. It is undersourced and I don't think there is enough of an argument that the political situation in the 50s and 60s is all that significant. If anyone is arguing based on lessons learned in Urban Renewal projects they keep very quiet on Hacker News. The situation in the now seems to be short-term economic incentives and a genuine belief that cheap energy shouldn't a low-priority goal for society (you need energy to build things). There does seem to be a strong argument that there are vetos everywhere, but I think people would just add them in to the law today regardless of the political path over the last half-century.

tiku 2y ago

Here in the Netherlands we mostly worry about the neighbourhood sueing and complaining, about stuff like sunlight, parking space, prices diminishing on their real estate and lots of other stuff. Takes a long time to start building. Welcome to the modern world.

jeisc 2y ago

the carbon footprint of destroying and rebuilding is too high; isn't the green thing this to renovate and enhance existing infrastructure not bulldozing existing things?

anovikov 2y ago

Only way to truly solve it is to remove racial divide (that is, another Holocaust), and either remove democracy (so what people - majority of who are property owners - want, doesn't matter), or remove market economy (so people won't be property owners). Nothing of it is acceptable. Much better to keep things as they are. Let it be a competition for who gets in to the desirable areas.

ryaniscool 2y ago

Construction in the USA is driven by capitalism. From my own observations, a big part of why we build less in recent times is the real estate market crash in 2008. We're still feeling the effects. The construction companies (and capital) that survived the crash of 2008 were a lot more cautious. They hired and built less through the 2010's as the market recovered. More people got college degrees instead of learning construction trades. When the pandemic hit, and there was something of a boom in construction, I think they finally shook off the fear. Now, a few years later, the market is beginning to slump again due to high interest rates and general inflation.

zjp 2y ago
This may be true for the national market, but local markets particularly in high demand coastal cities are super dysfunctional -- their housing markets simply are not free. It is illegal to build enough there to meet demand.
zhdc1 2y ago
> Construction in the USA is driven by capitalism. From my own observations, a big part of why we build less in recent times is the real estate market crash in 2008. We're still feeling the effects. An efficient market would see an increase in supply to meet demand. This is exactly what happened in Minneapolis, Raleigh, and many cities in Texas, which made it comparatively earlier to get construction permits (in some cases, particularly for multi-family housing).

solatic 2y ago

US housing is a state-level issue that could be solved by state governments promoting high-density housing policy. Ultimately, those state governments are elected by voters, i.e. residents, including renters, and not exclusively landlords. But landlords disproportionately contribute to the finances of re-election campaigns, and thus have effectively seized control of the options offered to voters. It's fantastical, and unrealistic, to hope that improved voter education will result in better electoral outcomes and thus better policy outcomes. The root problem is in how elections are financed. Citizens United must be reversed and elections must be financed publicly, with fair financing to candidates based on the number of signatures they obtain, and equal airtime purchased from public funds. Only then will we see YIMBY candidates start to accede to positions of power and start to reverse these landlord-favorable policies.

randomdata 2y ago
The root problem is that democracy requires active engagement. It turns out the hired representatives are not mind readers. However, those with means are able to give more engagement, and thus are disproportionately represented. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say. The guy who is in their representative's face every single day is going to be more apt to get his way. The people who have never even spoken to their representative, even just once, most definitely won't get their way unless by sheer coincidence. There is no solution to that problem other than to give up democracy, but the alternatives come with their own set of trade-offs. The wonderful world of people problems.
davidw 2y ago
> Only then will we see YIMBY candidates start to accede to positions of power and start to reverse these landlord-favorable policies Our governor here in Oregon, Tina Kotek, is quite YIMBY. As is the mayor of the city I live in.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
In most local elections, the majority voters are often homeowners, despite the majority of eligible voters often being renters in cities. It’s not even a money issue but a political apathy issue.

jmclnx 2y ago

Yes, it ruined many small cities were I grew up. Lots of old and beautiful buildings were destroyed. In the City were I grew up, people and politicians still decry the history destroyed by urban renewal.

mountainb 2y ago

Baffling version of history that somehow ignores the constitutional dimension. It's also a back-assward interpretation of how contemporary environmental law came into being. It's like a guy typing with one hand while pointing at the heffalumps for causing the wet streets that made it rain with the other hand. There is just no real analysis here of law, policy, or society. It's just a pile of uncited errata. I'm somewhat sympathetic to some of his conclusions, but there is no reasoning process here.

petermcneeley 2y ago
I tried to sum this up with my now flagged comment. It was probably too quippy for hn.

nojvek 2y ago

US culture is very much driven by competition. If China is winning wars, has more influence on world, has better tech, better infra, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita. Americans will get their shit together to compete. The problem with US is that we're too complacent. SF has billions of dollars of VC money pumped in, house prices are astronomic. SF is wildly successful despite the shortcomings. Homelessness, crime, e.t.c doesn't matter. If the wealth of the upper-class is preserved, they are fine with it. They are voting for what they want. China is the best thing to have happened to US. I wish the best of prosperity for China and Chinese citizens so we in US have competition and inspiration to what is possible. Same for Europe, get your A-game together. Bring back a new renaissance period. A rising tide lifts all boats. It's time to build!

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
The predominant outlook about the future isn't positive in America anymore. The difference starts and ends with attitude. Americans cannot compete because excellence and pride of work and community are gone, pay is low for most people, politics are extremely divided, and most Americans keep to themselves and don't care about anyone else. China wins just on attitude and growth, but also has the "cheat code" of authoritarianism where anything can be imposed top-down without much push back.

sershe 2y ago

It's interesting that both extremes are actually signs of the same problem. First, why didn't other countries become too scare to build? The neighborhood I grew up at in Moscow was built in bulk in place of a village of the same name in the early 80ies. Nobody cared about the village; in fact it wasn't even replaced by housing - it was demolished to build a stadium and other assorted sporting venues; the housing was added shortly after. Did it make Russia too scared to build? No, it didn't. During the aughts oil boom, they demolished some 5-story flats to replace them with 20+-story flats, giving the residents better flats in more remote neighborhoods, with no real choice to stay in their neighborhood in many cases (like my grand aunt's). They just keep doing things the same way, and that has its own tradeoffs. Nobody is "scared". The difference in the US is that there's a stronger notion of individual rights, and it was obvious that the bureaucratic nightmare machine was running ramshod over those. So it was great that it was reigned in. The not-so-great part that instead of just respecting those as was the original intent, US has replaced an incompetent bureaucratic nightmare that ran ramshod over the local residents, with an incompetent bureaucratic/legalistic nightmare that tries to protect them instead. Or rather, some perverted collectivist distortion of "individual rights" where frivolous lawsuits from rich neighbors, disgruntled unions, idiot activists or basically anyone can hold up the project forever instead of just individuals negotiating their narrow concerns... If this thing was done properly, in some cases the weight of many individuals would counterbalance aggressive projects when it makes sense, but loonies would end up like Edith Macefield, with a house surrounded by a mall. As it stands, Edith Macefields of the world can delay and block entire projects forever, other property owners be damned.