Comment by camgunz
2 days ago
The housing crisis is a cultural problem. We don't want to build density, and we don't want to build transportation, because this all lowers housing values, and besides the millions of homeowners you'll piss off, you'll destabilize an economy primarily built on the mortgage. Not a good reelection plan.
The places you're seeing growth are places where we could buy the land for cheap: suburbs and exurbs. We build huge ass subdivisions and then we run highways to them. This fucks no one's housing value, it bails out struggling/dying land owners, the auto industry loves it, the energy industry loves it, people love their faux-castles with lawn moats, it's a full employment plan to developers, and it's essentially all middle/upper-middle class housing so it's thoroughly unobjectionable to the voting majority.
The reason cities in Texas are out building blue cities is that they just do the suburb/exurb thing. Blue cities don't: where are the workable SF or NYC exurbs? Abundance gets so close, it more or less blames bureaucrats and the Jane Jacobs veto points built into the liberal building process. But these things arise out of the culture on the left, and whether we admit it or not, we like the walled gardens we built. We like our multi-million dollar castles we've got something like $80k in. We like people not driving/riding trams/buses through our neighborhoods, and we vote accordingly.
I personally think this is intractable. I think SF/NYC/etc have reached the ceiling and if we're gonna fix the housing crisis we need to build density elsewhere. I think we should lean heavily into remote work, lighten the infra grid costs with off-grid tech like solar, lighten the construction costs with low-car built environments (few if any parking requirements, rail instead of huge highways for shipping/transit, etc), invest heavily in the schools, and subsidize people moving to these areas--like with cash, not tax rebates. This is essentially "build the exurbs", but the progressive version of it that better meets health and climate goals, while also building communities we know are better for human flourishing (less isolation, more eyes on the street, etc). Focusing on permitting reform or democratic veto points is way, way too small a vision here.
SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-speed rail. You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries) and directing it to places that would fit according to a high-speed-rail master plan. Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions, but the lack of a larger master plan in helping link these regions with better transportation links and job creation has prevented them from reaching their full potential.
>Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions,
Not really. All of downtown Portland, OR has been designated an Opportunity Zone[0]. "the Ritz Carlton Hotel that’s going up in downtown Portland was partly funded with these tax breaks."
[0]https://www.opb.org/article/2021/10/22/new-book-looks-at-por...
> SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
> New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
All kinds of places overcome these things. Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Bridges and tunnels. NYC was doing this, but mysteriously stopped. SF and NYC don't even come close to densities in many Asian cities. You can think two things about this: we reject that kind of density, or we reject moving a city's center of commerce to a more geographically scalable area. For some reason, we put a low ceiling on density and refused to move where the jobs were, and I'm saying that reason was liberals culturally resisting it. We simply liked the status quo.
> The US simply needs to build new cities...
Extreme, full agree. Even if I disagree w/ you as to the causes of building woes in blue cities, I think we agree it's not worth it to fix. Let's try some new things.
> You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries)
Something that's different now than the last time we did this is that those large industries aren't gonna be (well, at least shouldn't be) places like auto plants or steel mills. I think the "large industries" part of your prescription should be some level of new tech.
> All kinds of places overcome these things
Yes, but it requires political will. America is rather characteristic (I want to say unique, but that's probably false) in its lack of political will to increase density anywhere that isn't already dense. Like I said, you're not going to suddenly see 50 story towers blanket San Francisco. This is why, as cities develop suburban and exurban sprawl to the point where the distances no longer become feasible to commute in an automobile, we need to develop new cities, with a strategy for reducing commute time between them (i.e. high speed rail).
> some level of new tech
I mean... it's not going to be datacenters, seeing as how they require a minimum of people and lots of power generation. So unless you have a suggestion, I would go with tried-and-proven approaches, yeah? A master plan for high-speed rail, with the budget to boot, is already a big spend of the innovation budget, the rest should be boring choices, right?
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> Jane Jacobs veto
As an aside, puts on Jane Jacobs defender hat I just want to point out that Jane Jacobs was on the record with the assertion that an ideal urban fabric was effectively small apartment buildings at densities well beyond what your typical North American city and suburb currently has.
It's deeply sad that Boomers took her ideas and distorted her message to preserve an ultra low density single family detached housing status quo.
https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2012/06/01/jane-jacobs-style-d...
Hey I think she was basically right (I think her ideas on local control are applicable way beyond building neighborhoods). But we have to admit the ability to get up at some board meeting and veto stuff was her idea. It wasn't perverted by people who came after. Jacob's herself used these veto points in her time in Toronto. I'm not saying she was wrong to oppose the stuff she opposed, but the ability to obstruct in this way was her idea.
yeah that is true.
It's a challenging thing to come down on in a clear cut simple way because there were a lot of things that that generation did fight against with grass roots neighbourhood democratic protest that are agreeable, such as fighting against razing neighbourhoods for freeway expansion.
The problem is that along the way somehow local citizens having a voice in how their city changes became a veto over development, and that veto became one dominated by those that had the most time to participate and dominate discussion, which were older, established wealthy, landowning residents. We didn't and still haven't developed systems for genuine real equitable participatory city making though I would like to think in recent years we are slowly making progress.
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this is sort of wrong though, there is a measurable increase in positive economic activity with increased density. you can increase housing in an area in a way that doesn’t mess with people’s existing home evaluations, at least in urban enough areas
That's interesting, are there comparable examples? Like, I'm sure China could do this by telling everyone what home values will be for the next 3 years while they build literally millions of housing units, but I'm skeptical we could double the density of SF without cratering its housing values or significantly changing its boundaries.