9 ms·

The Great Downzoning

66 points by barry-cotter 11mo ago

userbinator 11mo ago
[flagged]
- rwmj 11mo ago
  Not putting polystyrene foam around the windows would be a more practical thing. The article even says in the first paragraph that fire regulations are important.
  - userbinator 10mo ago
    Regulations cannot change the laws of physics.
- mertd 11mo ago
  Did you read or even skim the article? It mentions fire safety codes specifically, violation of which is the very reason that fire happened not because it was a tall building. Do you understand why California wild fires are more lethal as of recently?
- mikelitoris 11mo ago
  Not sure if satire, troll or serious, but I think you are serious, so: yeesh, you can’t distinguish between densification and following fire regulations…
- vasco 11mo ago
  You’ve leveled up your Outrage Skill! Your rants now deal +12 emotional damage, gain +8 sarcasm potency, and unlock the passive ability “Righteous Indignation Aura” (allies within 5m feel mildly justified). New Skill Unlocked: Keyboard Fury Cooldown: None Effects: Your typing speed doubles when annoyed.
tsunamifury 11mo ago
We built a world that genuinely made a generation of people more or less happy. And it turns out happiness makes you indifferent toward the future and the people who have to live in it.
cornholio 11mo ago
Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't. Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
  - Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
    I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there. Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      Could you manufacture that for like a trillion dollars? Maybe, but there are better things to spend a trillion dollars on. That's the entire Medicare budget. Could you manufacture that for like a billion dollars? No.
      - sokoloff 11mo ago
        That’s the Medicare budget for one year. Cities have a useful life span measured in multiple centuries. (I also think it’s impractical to pull off, with Las Vegas being perhaps the most recent long-term conjuring of a city from “not much”, but comparing a multi-century stream of value to an annual consumption budget line seems like a strange way to make your case.)
AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> In some places, anti-densification rules continue to raise property values, and in these places we should expect the Downzoning to be as politically robust as it has been for the last century: it really does give property owners something they want. I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true. To begin with, if you have a single family home in an area with high demand, upzoning could make someone willing to pay you even more than the house is currently worth because they could still turn a profit when turning it into ten or twenty times as much housing on the same lot. In other words, the value of the house may go down but the value of the land goes up when you can build more housing on it. On top of that, higher housing prices don't necessarily equate to a better life or even more money. If your house is worth more but you still need a place to live then you can't sell it, unless you are planning to sell it soon in which case upzoning gets you more money because developers start bidding on your house before the new housing the upzoning allows to be built is on the market yet. If not, it's not just your house that costs more. The other ones do too, which increases cost of living. Local shops have to pay higher rents and pass on that cost to you, or can't find local workers because young people can't afford local rent, so they have to close down. Then you get higher local unemployment and more crime and homelessness. You might even lose your own job because your employer moved out. What do you think drives offshoring? High domestic costs. And if people are only thinking about the first order effect then they might imagine downzoning is to their advantage when it isn't. Which makes them support it but only until someone shows them the math.
- roenxi 11mo ago
  I tend to agree. There might be a big window for someone motivated to get a course "how to maximise the value of your house purchase" into schools to cover all that. If people are going to be greedy and selfish at least they shouldn't be stupid about it, land and housing policy is one of the more consequential things society deals with.
- jakobnissen 11mo ago
  Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks". Alternatively, you can use the value of your house as an emergency fund: If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out. If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house. Either way, the money you gain are real money, and you actually gain them.
kubb 11mo ago
The one thing that makes assumptions about free market forces miss the mark is the fact that ideal markets don’t exist in the real world. I case of housing, in the US, we’re as far from free market as possible. So making assumptions about what will happen if we build more based on a naive supply and demand model isn’t going to work. A paradigm shift is to think in terms of power distribution and policy incentives. Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Even if they become a minority, will they be able to get the others to not vote or vote against their own interests? The system caps its own growth.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  The housing market in the US is extremely competitive. Major cities have hundreds of thousands if not millions of competing landlords and a similar number of owner-occupied units. The supply constraint isn't that Comcast and AT&T each own half of the land and you can only get it from one of them, it's that the government effectively prohibits building more, so all the competing construction companies who want to increase supply because that's what makes them money are unable to do it because it's prohibited by law. > Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house but increase the value of the land, and homeowners of single-family homes have a high ratio of land to house. And because they lower cost of living and lower crime and they like paying less for things and not getting robbed. Or because they have a small house but need a bigger house, and then higher prices hurt them. Or because they have a bigger house and need a smaller house, in which case they're about to sell it and it's better for them to add a bunch of developers to the bidding who want to build more on the lot and then cash out before the new developments come onto the market. Or because they live in city B and want to move to city A where housing is more expensive, and then they would support state or national-level policies to reduce housing scarcity for the same reason as the person who needs a bigger house.
  - kubb 11mo ago
    They are competing, but not for the customer but for the land, which appreciates. Remember, there are different forms of competition. The "supply constraint" is that the landowners don’t want to change zoning laws, and that space around big cities is limited. The government doesn’t act of it’s own initiative, it represents people. If your logic held, it should be the homeowners pushing for density. Real world disagrees with your assessment, but you seem to be doubling down on it. Why not update your model?
tarsinge 11mo ago
Where I live in France there was a big relaxation in building permits in the 50s to 70s, and we are dealing with these projects badly designed (because of the lack of oversight) today. Neighborhoods that are urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc. With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.
- iknowstuff 11mo ago
  > same capacity could have been added That’s not at all likely.
- kubb 11mo ago
  What you need is to require new construction to have a certain density along with building standards (sunlight, insulation, etc.). Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee. If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.
  - nikanj 11mo ago
    If every developer was able to build as much housing as they ever wanted, the quality would go up through competition. In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different. But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
    - kubb 11mo ago
      Competition would have that effect… in a perfect market, which is a theoretical construct. Especially in context of urbanism, building an abomination can hurt the entire community and takes space from proper construction. Here my thoughts about ideal markets https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46085880 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46085880
Animats 11mo ago
I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space. Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.
- tonyhart7 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to. Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
  - Animats 11mo ago
    > Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-majority-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
    - barry-cotter 11mo ago
      That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      The title of the link indeed says "the majority of the San Francisco Bay Area" but it also says that the largest of them owns 293 buildings, so for twelve times that to be a majority there would have to be no more than about five thousand total properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile the Chronicle says there are about 2.3 million total properties, I couldn't find them repeating the claim that those 12 landlords represent a majority but they did say that "this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families". Which I wouldn't expect to be a majority of the >7 million people who live there.
anovikov 11mo ago
Well, you either get nice but prohibitively expensive places that also look and function like segregation tools increasing and perpetuating inequality, or you get slums that get progressively worsened simply as the time passes. Is there even a middle ground?
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  I think people voted with their feet to expand geographically into the suburbs where city cores experienced the bimodal outcomes. If the only place people would genuinely and completely freely choose to live inside a city is a place they can’t afford, but 3-30 miles away is a beautiful neighborhood of detached houses that they can afford, you don’t have to think very long to predict that there will be intense interests in these suburbs by people seeking to escape the city.
- card_zero 11mo ago
  Like, moderately expensive areas that are medium density, so that they exacerbate the housing crisis but aren't particularly nice to live in?
  - anovikov 11mo ago
    Indeed. In fact, unaffordability is the whole point. Main problem with the affordable housing is that it attracts the people who seek affordable housing.
    - card_zero 11mo ago
      People such as me! Ugh, I wouldn't like to live near me.
KaiserPro 11mo ago
> nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam. The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.
- card_zero 11mo ago
  "Residents of the London neighborhood South Tottenham recently persuaded their local councils to let them double the height of their houses", says the article, so evidently there was a restriction on height there. Elsewhere in London there are tower blocks, of course.
  - KaiserPro 11mo ago
    Ok look at n15(south tottenham) https://www.google.com/maps/place/London+N15/@51.5823145,-0.0855241,1679m https://www.google.com/maps/place/London+N15/@51.5823145,-0.... look at it in 3D. It has a mix of late victorian terraces (mostly posh ones) and then a large amount of 1960s-70s medium density blocks/maisonettes. That shit is already dense. Adding new floors doesn't actually make it more dense(unless people buy and split it into flats.) currently, you can easily add 6m extension out the back and up by one floor without too much hassle (so called permitted development). This means that you can easily double the floor space of a house, with little issue from the planning(zoning) people. The innovation that's pointed out is that they can add two floors up. Which is unusual, because its fucking expensive. We also don't have HoA bullshit, so adding extensions doesn't require brownosing the local busybody community. just pay £750 and wait a few weeks.
    - card_zero 11mo ago
      Doesn't London still have scandals about people renting out illegally small cupboards, or things like that? Why aren't all the house owners building those extensions, splitting the place into flats, renting them out at a thousand a month, and moving their own accommodation to Essex?
card_zero 11mo ago
That watercolor promoting "cite jardin de Gennevilliers" has a stormy and threatening sky. Lead white is probably the culprit (reacts with sulfur over time).

66 points by barry-cotter 11mo ago

userbinator 11mo ago

[flagged]

rwmj 11mo ago
Not putting polystyrene foam around the windows would be a more practical thing. The article even says in the first paragraph that fire regulations are important.
- userbinator 10mo ago
  Regulations cannot change the laws of physics.
mertd 11mo ago
Did you read or even skim the article? It mentions fire safety codes specifically, violation of which is the very reason that fire happened not because it was a tall building. Do you understand why California wild fires are more lethal as of recently?
mikelitoris 11mo ago
Not sure if satire, troll or serious, but I think you are serious, so: yeesh, you can’t distinguish between densification and following fire regulations…
vasco 11mo ago
You’ve leveled up your Outrage Skill! Your rants now deal +12 emotional damage, gain +8 sarcasm potency, and unlock the passive ability “Righteous Indignation Aura” (allies within 5m feel mildly justified). New Skill Unlocked: Keyboard Fury Cooldown: None Effects: Your typing speed doubles when annoyed.

tsunamifury 11mo ago

We built a world that genuinely made a generation of people more or less happy. And it turns out happiness makes you indifferent toward the future and the people who have to live in it.

cornholio 11mo ago

Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't. Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
- Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
  I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there. Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    Could you manufacture that for like a trillion dollars? Maybe, but there are better things to spend a trillion dollars on. That's the entire Medicare budget. Could you manufacture that for like a billion dollars? No.
    - sokoloff 11mo ago
      That’s the Medicare budget for one year. Cities have a useful life span measured in multiple centuries. (I also think it’s impractical to pull off, with Las Vegas being perhaps the most recent long-term conjuring of a city from “not much”, but comparing a multi-century stream of value to an annual consumption budget line seems like a strange way to make your case.)

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago

> In some places, anti-densification rules continue to raise property values, and in these places we should expect the Downzoning to be as politically robust as it has been for the last century: it really does give property owners something they want. I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true. To begin with, if you have a single family home in an area with high demand, upzoning could make someone willing to pay you even more than the house is currently worth because they could still turn a profit when turning it into ten or twenty times as much housing on the same lot. In other words, the value of the house may go down but the value of the land goes up when you can build more housing on it. On top of that, higher housing prices don't necessarily equate to a better life or even more money. If your house is worth more but you still need a place to live then you can't sell it, unless you are planning to sell it soon in which case upzoning gets you more money because developers start bidding on your house before the new housing the upzoning allows to be built is on the market yet. If not, it's not just your house that costs more. The other ones do too, which increases cost of living. Local shops have to pay higher rents and pass on that cost to you, or can't find local workers because young people can't afford local rent, so they have to close down. Then you get higher local unemployment and more crime and homelessness. You might even lose your own job because your employer moved out. What do you think drives offshoring? High domestic costs. And if people are only thinking about the first order effect then they might imagine downzoning is to their advantage when it isn't. Which makes them support it but only until someone shows them the math.

roenxi 11mo ago
I tend to agree. There might be a big window for someone motivated to get a course "how to maximise the value of your house purchase" into schools to cover all that. If people are going to be greedy and selfish at least they shouldn't be stupid about it, land and housing policy is one of the more consequential things society deals with.
jakobnissen 11mo ago
Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks". Alternatively, you can use the value of your house as an emergency fund: If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out. If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house. Either way, the money you gain are real money, and you actually gain them.

kubb 11mo ago

The one thing that makes assumptions about free market forces miss the mark is the fact that ideal markets don’t exist in the real world. I case of housing, in the US, we’re as far from free market as possible. So making assumptions about what will happen if we build more based on a naive supply and demand model isn’t going to work. A paradigm shift is to think in terms of power distribution and policy incentives. Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Even if they become a minority, will they be able to get the others to not vote or vote against their own interests? The system caps its own growth.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
The housing market in the US is extremely competitive. Major cities have hundreds of thousands if not millions of competing landlords and a similar number of owner-occupied units. The supply constraint isn't that Comcast and AT&T each own half of the land and you can only get it from one of them, it's that the government effectively prohibits building more, so all the competing construction companies who want to increase supply because that's what makes them money are unable to do it because it's prohibited by law. > Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house but increase the value of the land, and homeowners of single-family homes have a high ratio of land to house. And because they lower cost of living and lower crime and they like paying less for things and not getting robbed. Or because they have a small house but need a bigger house, and then higher prices hurt them. Or because they have a bigger house and need a smaller house, in which case they're about to sell it and it's better for them to add a bunch of developers to the bidding who want to build more on the lot and then cash out before the new developments come onto the market. Or because they live in city B and want to move to city A where housing is more expensive, and then they would support state or national-level policies to reduce housing scarcity for the same reason as the person who needs a bigger house.
- kubb 11mo ago
  They are competing, but not for the customer but for the land, which appreciates. Remember, there are different forms of competition. The "supply constraint" is that the landowners don’t want to change zoning laws, and that space around big cities is limited. The government doesn’t act of it’s own initiative, it represents people. If your logic held, it should be the homeowners pushing for density. Real world disagrees with your assessment, but you seem to be doubling down on it. Why not update your model?

tarsinge 11mo ago

Where I live in France there was a big relaxation in building permits in the 50s to 70s, and we are dealing with these projects badly designed (because of the lack of oversight) today. Neighborhoods that are urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc. With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.

iknowstuff 11mo ago
> same capacity could have been added That’s not at all likely.
kubb 11mo ago
What you need is to require new construction to have a certain density along with building standards (sunlight, insulation, etc.). Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee. If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.
- nikanj 11mo ago
  If every developer was able to build as much housing as they ever wanted, the quality would go up through competition. In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different. But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
  - kubb 11mo ago
    Competition would have that effect… in a perfect market, which is a theoretical construct. Especially in context of urbanism, building an abomination can hurt the entire community and takes space from proper construction. Here my thoughts about ideal markets https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46085880 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46085880

Animats 11mo ago

I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space. Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.

tonyhart7 11mo ago
[flagged]
AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to. Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
- Animats 11mo ago
  > Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-majority-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
  - barry-cotter 11mo ago
    That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    The title of the link indeed says "the majority of the San Francisco Bay Area" but it also says that the largest of them owns 293 buildings, so for twelve times that to be a majority there would have to be no more than about five thousand total properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile the Chronicle says there are about 2.3 million total properties, I couldn't find them repeating the claim that those 12 landlords represent a majority but they did say that "this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families". Which I wouldn't expect to be a majority of the >7 million people who live there.

anovikov 11mo ago

Well, you either get nice but prohibitively expensive places that also look and function like segregation tools increasing and perpetuating inequality, or you get slums that get progressively worsened simply as the time passes. Is there even a middle ground?

sokoloff 11mo ago
I think people voted with their feet to expand geographically into the suburbs where city cores experienced the bimodal outcomes. If the only place people would genuinely and completely freely choose to live inside a city is a place they can’t afford, but 3-30 miles away is a beautiful neighborhood of detached houses that they can afford, you don’t have to think very long to predict that there will be intense interests in these suburbs by people seeking to escape the city.
card_zero 11mo ago
Like, moderately expensive areas that are medium density, so that they exacerbate the housing crisis but aren't particularly nice to live in?
- anovikov 11mo ago
  Indeed. In fact, unaffordability is the whole point. Main problem with the affordable housing is that it attracts the people who seek affordable housing.
  - card_zero 11mo ago
    People such as me! Ugh, I wouldn't like to live near me.

KaiserPro 11mo ago

> nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam. The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.

card_zero 11mo ago
"Residents of the London neighborhood South Tottenham recently persuaded their local councils to let them double the height of their houses", says the article, so evidently there was a restriction on height there. Elsewhere in London there are tower blocks, of course.
- KaiserPro 11mo ago
  Ok look at n15(south tottenham) https://www.google.com/maps/place/London+N15/@51.5823145,-0.0855241,1679m https://www.google.com/maps/place/London+N15/@51.5823145,-0.... look at it in 3D. It has a mix of late victorian terraces (mostly posh ones) and then a large amount of 1960s-70s medium density blocks/maisonettes. That shit is already dense. Adding new floors doesn't actually make it more dense(unless people buy and split it into flats.) currently, you can easily add 6m extension out the back and up by one floor without too much hassle (so called permitted development). This means that you can easily double the floor space of a house, with little issue from the planning(zoning) people. The innovation that's pointed out is that they can add two floors up. Which is unusual, because its fucking expensive. We also don't have HoA bullshit, so adding extensions doesn't require brownosing the local busybody community. just pay £750 and wait a few weeks.
  - card_zero 11mo ago
    Doesn't London still have scandals about people renting out illegally small cupboards, or things like that? Why aren't all the house owners building those extensions, splitting the place into flats, renting them out at a thousand a month, and moving their own accommodation to Essex?

card_zero 11mo ago

That watercolor promoting "cite jardin de Gennevilliers" has a stormy and threatening sky. Lead white is probably the culprit (reacts with sulfur over time).