The idea that the "tech industry" created this problem is just plain nonsense. Sure, the tech industry attracts young folks to creative urban centers and pays them a bit of money. But their parents (my generation) gave them birth and gave them expectations of prosperity.It's selfish to then blame them for wanting to live where the good jobs are.
This problem was created by restrictive zoning. And it will be solved by changing zoning laws.
And the restrictive zoning laws come from people who say, "Oh no, those people moving into new apartments will crowd our schools and our streets. We can't have that!" Whose schools are they? Whose streets are they?
The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people." That's stupid. Affordable housing is good for everybody. The basic law of supply and demand teaches us that increasing the supply of housing will lower the price. To address homelessness, build homes.
Government (who exist to serve people) can start to approach this problem by partly assessing property based on nominal beds per square foot. Higher taxes on lower density housing will give an economic incentive to build more housing on existing land.
Powerful companies should unapologetically press politicians, hard, for changes to these NIMBY zoning rules.
> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."
From a policy perspective, "affordable housing" refers to programs which through some incentive or another, get developers to rent some units at below market rates to people at certain income thresholds. They usually go away (for a specific building) after 10-15 years.
This is confusing, because sometimes it really is cheap housing for poor people and other times it's nice, very expensive but below market rate housing for middle class people.
The other problem, as mentioned in the OP, is that as you start trying to shift cost for more units you end up with higher overall prices. Thus making the market rate higher, and making it harder to get developers to make the same concessions they did before for future development.
Somewhere here on HN I read that in russian there would be a special word for having connections with someone who knows when goods will be in stores. Maybe we need a word like that for every language.
Oh, you want Section 8? Well, fill out these 20 forms, be in the right office at the right date and time, and you'll be entered into a lottery IF the paperwork you filled out matches our unstated criteria and allotted apartments.
Oh, and if you don't get in this YEAR, there's a nice city park. And the cops only harass you every other night.
I often wonder how much damage the term "affordable housing" has done to the goal of true housing affordability.
Politicians can pretend to be working on improving housing prices, while in reality doing nothing of the sort. As far as I can tell, "affordable housing" requirements produce only false hope for lower-income residents and increased market rates.
I know where I'm from, we have an influx of foreign students, paying out-of-country education costs. I have no issue with people from wherever coming here to study. It's cool, since it brings in a lot of ethnic stuff, as we all benefit.
The downside is actually that, alongside city government allowing "luxury highrises" for the students. We're in the middle of Indiana, and these rooms are going for $1400/mo.
It's a combination of many different things; Indiana University owns a great deal of land and pay taxes on pretty much nothing, the city council refuses to say no to the luxury condo makers, the council refuses to allow low cost apartments or assist funding them, the state refuses to let bloomington to annex more land. And of course, NIMBYs are in many neighborhoods, but this is only one facet.
What's "affordable housing"? The common refrain is 'The Market will tell us'. Well, the market also says "if you can't find a good job, you're gonna live in the city park".. So I don't put much trust in that market religion. Takes people in decision making roles to solve this one - Government.
Of course it's important to distinguish between the YIMBYs and the Yes In Your Backyard types, who typically masquerade as the former.
You'll find them on discussion boards enthusiastically supporting development and/or sanctioned homeless camps in other neighborhoods because they "have better transit" or "closer access to services" than their own neighborhood.
As long as "local control" is enshrined in California law, and anybody anywhere can come and stop development in somebody else's yard, YIYBY is an important counter to the NIYBY that dominate these meetings.
It's important to remember that NIMBYs aren't actually protecting their back yard, they're restricting what others are doing in their fully-owned backyard. So if you're going to complain about YIYBYs, then the category of NIMBY doesn't really exist, it's just NIYBY.
> enthusiastically supporting development and/or sanctioned homeless camps
These things seem quite different from each other.
And zoning should be a city wide discussion. If a city doesn't zone for density near to heavy transit, the city is zoning irresponsibly and should no longer have local control, and the State should take over zoning.
> These things seem quite different from each other.
Two things that are often considered "undesirable" by the people living near them.
That's why there's room for skepticism when self-described YIMBYs actively root for other neighborhoods to take on these and other "undesirable" projects. In addition to demonstrating their public display of enlightened urbanism, it also happens to be in their interest to keep these projects out of their own neighborhood.
Yes, exactly. Too much of "the YIMBY movement" consists of relatively wealthy people telling poorer people that they should re-develop their neighborhoods for the good of everyone. We'll all have cheaper rents! (...by like $10 a month, on average...but your rent, Mr. Poor Person, will be 10x higher. Sorry. It's for the good of the people.)
It's sad, for example, to see so much discussion of the Mission in San Francisco (which is already quite dense, by any standard short of "midtown manhattan"), when the western 3/4ths of SF (much of which consists of wealthier people in suburban-style mansions) is routinely ignored. And though I believe that YIMBY people do want to raise height limits and density everywhere (good, fine), in practice, the debates usually center on re-development in poorer neighborhoods, since it's an easier political lift.
You should think of Barcelona, Paris, and Amsterdam. Beautiful places with most buildings at about 8 stories high with large bike ridership and good public transit:
Well Barcelona has been developing under the Cerdà plan since mid 1850. That's I think the issue: won't the average American clamor against "cUmmUnism" one minute after he's told his grotesquely styled McMansion is not allowed?
Huh, that reminds me a lot of Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon (roughly the same building height and streetcape, although the Barcelona buildings are prettier).
I am a YIMBY who lives in the western neighborhoods of SF and would love to see them upzoned. I always think it's silly that there are perfectly pleasant pre-zoning 5-8 story apartment buildings down the street from my place that would be illegal to build under current regulations.
Citation absolutely needed. Show me source of your numbers. Brooklyn runs the gamut from skyscrapers to single-family houses, but the average construction is 1-3 story apartment buildings, just like the mission.
In any case, even if you're right, it's not a counterargument: how does the western 3/4ths of SF compare to Brooklyn? Why should we be focusing on the Mission, and not, say, Sea Cliff?
Let's try to put a condo building to Jack Dorsey's mansion and see what happens.
You're comparing SF in 2008 to Brooklyn in 2017. Click the source link, and you'll see that current estimate for the Mission (30,408/mi^2) is much closer to that of Brooklyn. The difference is only ~20%.
> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."
More specifically, it's come to mean "subsidized housing for poor people". It's often contrasted with "luxury housing", which is implicitly anything new-built and market-rate.
"If the distribution of wealth is incredibly skewed, how exactly could the distribution of home ownership not be similarly skewed?"
YIMBY seems reasonable as response to homeowners leveraging zoning to distort building priorities and so protect their home values. But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints. And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.
State housing projects and zoning that actually incentivizes affordable density indeed could help that. But here, not only have housing project not been build but a lot of these projects have been torn down (leveraged by poor-people horror-stories of course).
Anyway, I would answer my question above as "the way we've have decent housing for working class and poor people has generally involved the rich and powerful being far-thinking and seeing improving everyone's conditions improves their position overall." But a variety of factors have thrown out all the far-thinkingness of the powerful today, as is evident in any number of fronts.
But if one millionaire will pay (rent or mortage) more for a mansion on a hill than all the potential poor occupants of entire apartment building on that hill could pay, then the developers will build just that mansion, even freed from NIMBY constraints.
If so, then yes, but how many millionaires are there trying to grab up huge tracts of urban land for their own personal residences?
And that's not even taking into account way that the most developers are going to have an incentive to keep rents overall high and so have an incentive keep the housing markets tight.
They have that incentive collectively, but when rents are high, an individual developer's incentive is to build more apartments to rent out. Sure, building them might reduce the per-unit rent, but that developer collects more rent in total.
I agree with all of the above, but it's worth noting that YIMBY policies economically pollute the areas they upzone with an influx of investment that can have disasterous consequences in the short term.
Obviously, we need more housing, which needs to get built. And in the very long term, "increasing the supply of housing will lower the price". But in the short term, increasing the supply of housing will raise the price of housing. And regular people still have to buy housing every single day, regardless of the daily price.
YIMBYs have never had an answer for the short and medium term, and therefore like to ignore the short term and medium term, which causes them significant opposition from local communities at both ends of the spectrum. The wealthy people want to restrict zoning to inflate their wealth, but the poor/middle class people want careful applications of zoning, so as not to be displaced by the violent increase in 'market rate' for the next 5 to 20 years while we wait for the increased supply to lower the price. They can't just sit around for years while we all wait for the demand to fall -- they need housing to live in during that time, and have to pay for it at whatever the developer chooses to set 'market rate' as.
YIMBYs have developer money behind them, so they will win this fight. But they have no answer for the short/medium-term economic pollution they cause, so they are hurting a lot of poor/middle class people they claim to support, and will continue to do so with each victory they achieve over the next decade or two.
A price that you can't actually buy at is a fake price. When you replace a $100k single-family home with five $200k apartments, that's one person who's price has gone up (from $100k to $200k) and four people who's price has gone down (from infinity to $200k).
Low and middle class voters outnumber wealthy voters. Why do lower and middle class voters not vote for government regulation of housing? Or government creating land trusts to ensure enough affordable housing now vs 20 years from now? Is it simply apathy?
Tangentially, I’m a huge fan of how Germany (Berlin in particular) uses government regulations to keep housing affordable.
Voters can't vote in municipalities where they don't live. So if you have a muni that has low destiny zoning regs, voters
would have to move there first before having any say.
> Real "local control" would let people commuting to Cupertino from Stockton decide zoning in Cuptertino.
That's a sham argument. That would be letting corporations who demand workers be on site decide zoning by way of commuters from other areas. Every local zoning/district must then bend to the will of temporary workers (temporary in the sense that their employment is less permanent than land ownership).
Local voters, through property ownership or residency is the only acceptable form of governance. Workers should be angered at employers who demand them to be on site, not zoning regulations.
So police, teachers, firefighters, gardeners, construction workers, tradesmen, who work in a community and commute from outside it shouldn't have a say in the policies of the community? Most bay area cities don't have any of those people living locally anymore.
I agree with you that it's a problem. The solution is to find equitable ways to provide housing to those workers in the city where they should have a stake. Providing commuters a voice is a (pardon my language) shitty hack and ignores the underlying issue (wealth/income inequality in a constrained geographic region).
I would not be against subsidized housing (both rentals and coops where you acquire ownership interest) that is means/income tested, to fend off speculators, foreign investors, and high income/net worth individuals from soaking up all the housing stock.
I'm confused both by your proposal, and your resistance to this one. Commuters and "people with less wealth who have a stake in the community" are exactly the same group of people. What other criteria would you use?
I am also a fan of how Germany (and to some extent, the Netherlands) handle their housing regulations to keep housing affordable.
Except for a few minor exceptions, America has nothing even remotely similar. The assumption is that owning your home/condo is the one and only way you are supposed to keep housing affordable in the US.
That assumption sort of / kind of worked for a while, back when there were heavy restrictions and regulations on how non-human and/or non-citizen entities could own and invest in housing, and when jobs/"demand" were somewhat-more-evenly distributed. But as soon as that was deregulated, the wheels came off the bus and it's been gotten steadily worse every year.
> Why do lower and middle class voters not vote for government regulation of housing?
They do, and in some respects, they already have this -- that's why they have some local control of zoning today. The regulatory control lower and middle class voters have is this local control of zoning that YIMBYs are trying to eliminate. Part of the problem is that "YIMBYs" are attacking that authority, by pretending anyone who is anti-YIMBY must be NIMBY. This is because it just so happens that the local control lower and middle class voters can use to promote public housing or "affordable" housing is the same control that wealthy voters can use to eliminate new housing entirely.
What sort of regulation do you have in mind? Directly restricting price won't make room for all the people who want to live here. It just changes how the (currently too rare) living space gets allocated.
I totally agree, it's all about increasing supply: build more housing. Getting rid of zoning laws and increasing building heights, etc, are a great start.
But, to do that, we also need to work with developers to help reduce the underlying cost of housing. It's not just the cost of land, but also the actual cost of building it too. Once the actual cost of housing goes down, they'll be able to build much much more and they'll be able to profit even when the price decreases significantly which keeps them building more and more, as long as there's enough competition.
"Affordable housing" is not good for everyone. If it was, we'd probably already have it.
Existing real property owners have a serious financial incentive to oppose policies that might decrease the value of their property by 25-40% (or more), especially when a plurality of their net worth is tied up in that property.
This argument is so funny because it's true that owners make it, and the owners are narrow-mindedly mistaken. Right now in SF, a developer doesn't know if they'll be able to buy a single family home and replace it with a 3 story multifamily unit - even if the area is zoned for it. Because California doesn't have by right zoning, so anyone can just come along and get the project stopped.
Presumably, if a developer knows they'll be able to do whatever they can that's allowed in the zoning regulations, then the property value should increase even more as a significant risk has been removed.
If there are 1 million such single-family houses, and replacing 200,000 of them with multifamily structures is sufficient to sate all the demand that is driving up costs, then that zoning reform seems like it will reduce the value of 80% of the homes in the area.
Except it is good for everyone. Just not in the same term lengths.
For homeowners, constraining housing supply and ballooning their property values in the immediate sense stalls the economy at multiple layers. Without housing companies cannot attract hires, no hires means limited growth, or companies stop moving to your city. in the US, since this housing epidemic is practically national in scale, it means businesses just stop trying to expand in US markets where its impossible for people to live.
It means people who could otherwise be productive are instead destitute, and in macrospect that trend produces rampant poverty and criminal enterprise to compensate for the lack of legitimate business opportunity.
For every home owner individually the idea of deflating their ludicrous property values sounds bad until they can come to terms with the fact that their collective behavior contributes to diminished or absent growth both locally and nationally. You cannot grow industry on inflated single family home prices in major cities but you can wreck an economy and the lives of millions.
Yeah but "us" aka normal people who are not capitalists don't care. Every single person who is not a land owning capitalist wants affordable housing. If you can handle post-Marxist thought, a great manifesto called the Housing Monster addresses this. http://prole.info/thm.html
Most programmers/coders/software engineers could easily be considered capitalists by this quote from your article:
"X-ray techs can't take X-rays without access to expensive X-ray machines in the hospital, owned by the hospital's shareholders. Cement masons can't lay the foundations for houses without access to expensive concrete mixing trucks. Those of us who don't have property we can make money from are forced to sell our ability to work to a capitalist--we become wage workers. "
Even when I was the most de-humanized corporate drone at the largest company I've ever worked for, all I did was type on a keyboard. And I can easily afford those means of production.
I liked that article, it had great info on the workings of the construction industry, but I can't say I understand what, if any, action it was suggesting as a better alternative to build shelter?
Please don't disparage capitalism, it has no opinion on affordable housing, only people do. I'm a self-proclaimed capitalist, and affordable housing for ~all should be one of the highest priorities of a functioning society, capitalist or not.
I am sure true capitalists also think that people should be able to build multi-family units on their own land if they so desire. Or to sell their land to the highest bidder.
Restrictive zoning regulations have nothing to do with capitalism or free market economy.
I don't know I think something has got to give before YIMBY can move forward. For example, communities where new residents are simply not allowed to have a car. I'm just shocked no one cares how much traffic will increase if you increase housing. It's already past capacity. Not sure why the fire-department can't put a max-capacity on a freeway when they can on a per-building level. If we restricted our freeways to have 10% of the traffic they do, maybe things would get better in cities.
This is backwards, traffic doesn't come from housing, traffic comes from jobs.
Rush hour is from people traveling to jobs, not from everyday living. So if you want less traffic, get rid of the jobs in the area, or provide ways for people to commute other than by car.
In fact, putting housing closer to jobs is probably the best thing that could be done to reduce traffic. At least then people have a chance to live close to where they work, and are on the road for fewer miles.
As it is, people live further out, travel further, and create more traffic than they would if there was more dense housing close to jobs.
People can't afford housing where the jobs are, because there isn't enough housing available there. So a large fraction of people end up moving far away and commuting in. That's how traffic happens. If you want to decrease traffic, build more housing where the jobs are.
A more direct example - if people have to live in McSprawlsBurg and commute an hour each way every day to work in NIMBYville highways and endless leagues of single family copy pasted houses will be built to accommodate job demand in that city, and you will get ludicrous amounts of traffic.
If NIMBYville stops being awful and recognizes how high the land values are they dezone the city limits to enable substantially higher density. And then, a decade later after the demand bubble has been drained, you might finally have the workers living in the actual city they work in, commuting by train, bike, tram, walking, etc instead of with cars that, unless you go out of your way to subsidize, will be prohibitively expensive to own when the square footage land value is so high.
And everyone wins in that world. If you previously owned an upzoned house developers will buy your house for more than they would if it were just zoned for a single family dwelling because they can put a dozen+ apartments on it. Letting density happen would mean you can actually choose between a small inner city condo or apartment that dosen't cost a magnitude more than a several thousand square foot house fifty miles away because when housing demand happens in the city housing can actually be built to meet it.
It is all wrapped up in short sighted greed on the part of everyone involved. Nothing gets better because nobody wants to wait for the best outcome if they can make marginal victories by sacrificing the well being of the whole and even their own long term prospects in the immediate term.
Traffic doesn't have to increase with higher density. That's what public transit is for, and cities like New York or Tokyo (especially Tokyo, which has very little traffic jams) manage to increase density without scaling traffic proportionally.
Since the end of the financial crisis, Lubarsky says, Seattle has added roughly 100,000 jobs, but barely 32,000 new homes and apartment units. “We’ve underbuilt every year since 2010,”
Interesting how that lines up so nicely with this headline/factoid:
For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes
(The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City.)
I sarcastically say purely coincidentally because of how often I get told that (a large portion of) homeless people are drug addicts, mentally ill etc, so lack of affordable housing is not why people are out on the street.
Are the people telling you that many homeless are drug addicts or mentally ill professionals on the subject? It's well regarded that both types of people are over-represented in the homeless population.
I don't believe they are. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent 5.7 years homeless and got myself off the street a few months ago. I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. Because of that site, I've been interviewed by reporters a few times. So I'm something of a SME on the topic of homelessness.
In a nutshell, there are housed people who drink heavily or have mental health issues. Simply having a substance abuse problem or a mental health issue does not per se cause homelessness.
Homelessness occurs when an individual has too many problems and too few resources or options. The difference between a homeless person and a housed person can be one more problem or one less resource.
There is a longstanding and dire shortage of affordable housing in the US. Dismissing that as a contributing root cause of the homeless problem in this country sounds like crazy talk to me. It sounds to me like someone really reaching to wash their hands of the problem and chalk it up to personal failure rather than acknowledging the systemic issues that are causing enormous stress for a great many Americans of all kinds of income levels and demographics.
Saying that mental illness and substance abuse are the cause of homelessness, so much so that we can totally ignore the issue of housing affordability whole cloth and dismiss it entirely as not pertinent to the subject of homelessness looks ludicrous on the face of it to me. But I keep hearing it over and over and over. The best guess I have is that it is a narrative that serves a desire to wash one's hands of the problem and pretend that well known systemic issues are not relevant as homeless people are "just a few losers with unsolvable personal problems and they would be homeless even if our country didn't have a dire shortage of affordable housing."
It doesn't help to downplay substance abuse and mental illness' roles in homelessness (especially chronic homelessness)... He linked two different sources, but there are countless others, that point to both substance abuse and mental illness being noticeably more common in the homeless population...
That isn't to say that this is an excuse for America's lacking response to the homelessness crisis. But, to say the scale of Seattle's homeless population isn't an indictment of America's substance abuse policy and the state of its (mental) healthcare system, just as it's an indictment of dysfunctional urban bureaucracy and housing policies strikes me as a disingenuous assignment of blame.
If Seattle's high rate of homelessness is due much more to substance abuse and mental health issues and is largely unrelated to the high cost of housing locally, I would be interested in knowing what about Seattle is either causing people to be crazy or addicted or drawing inordinate numbers of such people there. If the high levels of local homelessness are an indictment of America's mental health and substance abuse issues, why isn't it equally bad elsewhere?
I'm aware there are many factors that contribute to homelessness and nowhere have I said that personal problems aren't a factor. But I fail to comprehend why there is such strong push back against the idea that lack of affordable housing is a factor at all, why every time this cones up, multiple people feel some need to say "Nuh uh, homeless people are just crazies and addicts and the cost of housing has no bearing" in essence, granted in slightly more PC language.
For what it's worth, my parents work in providing either free or below market rate housing. People provided eith such housing can have trouble keeping it due to their various personal problems.
I agree with you that there is a housing cost gradient which will cause people with moderate addiction or mental health issues to become homeless.
It's hard to keep any housing if you can't keep a job and your entitlements don't cover everything.
The article you linked says nothing of the sort, nor is it ever even really hinted at that the average age is 9... Which is quite difficult to believe without a lot of proof to contradict every bit of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I'm not an expert and I'd love to have proof of the average age one way or another but you have made an outrageous claim with 0 backup.
Researching just now, there's some questiion on that statistic, though the point remains that there are a tremendous number of minor children affected by homelessness, unlikely to fall under the scope of either addiction or mental illness as fiter was addressing, above.
Not that either gives cause to kick anyone to the curb.
It's not that anyone is bring kicked to the curb for being mentally ill or addicted. However, for most housing, you have to pay and respect some rules. If you can't pay or can't respect the rules, then you'll either have to find another place or you'll become homeless. The individual interaction is not heartless, but it is pragmetic. The larger issue does still need to be addressed.
The next question is whether their parents have any troubles...
If there's a failure to provide for those who cannot follow the rules, then the systemic effect is kicking to the curb.
What of those whose "respect" failures aresuch that they cannot gain or hold a job? Discrimination, disability, drugs testing, convictions or arrest screens, etc.?
The sytem you describe kicks them to the curb as well.
All of this also studiously ignores the fact that housing has been underbuilt for decades ineconomically vital areas.
My point was that the decisions are not being made based on disability or drugs testing. The individual decisions are being made based on the behavior of the person. That's not discrimination, that's just responding to another person's behavior. Is that not a fair system?
I've recently wondered why cities don't tend to spring up on their own anymore. Either that's true or I just haven't heard about it. Has anyone looked into this?
I was going to bring this up as an anecdote but looking at this (http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-o...) it seems to be true; a relative of mine lives in a small city in Utah and says he wants a couple acres but the land surrounding the city is federally owned, limiting his options. How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it?
>Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it?
Yes. For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours. This was true all the way to 1976.
"In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River."
But that's not the whole story. Another 10% of the entire US land mass (~200,000,000 acres) was granted free of charge to various railroad companies[0], many of which are still the largest private landowners in their respective states.
Not quite. The railroads were given the land at a price - they had to carry mail for the government at less-than-market rates. That continued until World War II. If you consider that many of the land grants were around 1870, that was 70 to 75 years of carrying the mail at less than cost. Then, during WWII, the federal government was desperate for revenue, and they let the railroads buy their way out of the existing deal.
The land wasn't just "granted free" to the railroads.
In addition, the land given to railroads was checkerboarded, meaning the they were given every other 640-acre section along the railway extending a few miles on either side.
> For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours.
You also had to band together with your fellow settlers into armed militias to kill the people whose land you were squatting.
Those are the same militias which are protected in the second amendment. Their original purpose was "killing indians". The secondary purpose was to catch escaped slaves.
It's always fun to remember where our real estate industry comes from. It's also interesting to see the hidden connections between America's passion for home ownership, its obsession with guns, and its racism.
Those are the same militias which are protected in the second amendment. Their original purpose was "killing indians".
False. The original purpose, predating even the government and the constitution, was to fight off armed oppression in the form of Hessian mercenaries and British soldiers.
It's also interesting to see the hidden connections between America's passion for home ownership, its obsession with guns, and its racism.
Gun Control was partly started by racist southern politicians who were horrified by the thought that black citizens would have the right to own firearms.
> False. The original purpose, predating even the government and the constitution, was to fight off armed oppression in the form of Hessian mercenaries and British soldiers.
You do realize that colonial militias existed for over a century before the war for independence with the British Empire? What "armed oppression" were they fighting exactly?
You do realize that multiple native groups obtained their land through war and what at times could be called extermination?
The Comanche are but one example. There are very few groups in history that ended up where they were peacefully. That's unfortunate, but depicting the European settlers as land-hungry thieving murderers should take into account that's what everyone did.
Here's an account of the Fort Parker massacre, which wasn't uncommon on the frontier:
Benjamin Parker was killed, and before the fort's gates could be closed, the raiders rushed inside. Silas Parker, who was outside with his brother, was killed before he was able to get back inside the gate. Samuel Frost and his son Robert were killed inside the gate, as they attempted to flee. John Parker's genitals were cut off and he was then scalped. His wife came out of the woods when she saw his torture and was captured.[5] Lucy Parker and her youngest two children were initially captured but were rescued by Luther Plummer as he ran up to the fort from the fields. Her two oldest children, however, along with Luther's wife (Rachel) and son, and Elizabeth Kellogg were successfully kidnapped.
Did those settlers deserve that? You can argue it, but this is a complex topic. Maybe some of those militias existed for good reasons, like if they didn't, people would get murdered by raiding parties, as they have in every locale in history.
Is there a point that you're trying to make? As a reminder you're responding to a message about the historical connection between gun ownership, home ownership and racism in the USA. I don't see anything in your message that's relevant to that, except maybe to confirm that colonial militias were created to "kill indians", and that the settlers were squatting on indigenous land.
What I'm trying to say is you have a very one-sided view of history. You've already decided that the purpose of militias was to "kill Indians". You didn't back that up at all.
Militias had offensive/defensive use against other colonial powers, but they also could have (but didn't always have) purely defensive use against native raids, which were not uncommon (nor were they the other way around).
You've also decided that that all land was "indigenous" when nobody has ever owned land, it's always been what group takes it. The natives often took the land from each other. You've decided that's different from European settlers doing it purely based on race. You're making a racial distinction without admitting this is just what people do. The plains weren't Apache land in 1500, why was it their land 200 years later after they'd kicked out other natives? Why was Mexico City Aztec land when they killed off the groups which originally owned it? Much land was loosely populated anyway, both groups could have coexisted but they did not. Killing "squatters" is just justifying the same militarism you despise.
Do you see what I'm trying to say? I don't deny atrocities against the natives, those are well-documented, but if you're you're going to talk about history, talk about how it was, not about how a 21st century view of race/society sees it. It's dishonest to those people and who they were.
> What I'm trying to say is you have a very one-sided view of history.
What do you mean by "one-sided"? What are the "sides" involved here?
> You've already decided that the purpose of militias was to "kill Indians". You didn't back that up at all.
Why would I have to back it up? It's a very basic fact which nobody is disputing, not even you. You feel that the killing of natives by militias was justified at least in part in self-defense, you have inferred from my choice of words that I disagree with you, and you're unhappy about that.
But you haven't proposed an alternative explanation to whom the militias were meant to kill (if not native americans, who? Other settlers? Bears?) or why (if not because the settlers were squatting on indigenous land, then why? Family feud? Religion? The color of their hats?) If you do have an alternative explanation for the existence of militias, now would be a good time to make your case.
The other poster said that militas were made to "kill Indians". I'm saying that it is very likely were designed to defend against them. Do we deny that many of these societies were militaristic tribes? Do we deny history?
Besides the fact that the colonial militias had military use because Britain wasn't the only imperial power in the region. Washington, for example, led a Virginia militia against the French way before the Revolutionary War.
You do realize that colonial militias existed for over a century before the war for independence with the British Empire?
Remember that you are the one who framed the discussion into the 2nd amendment context in the first place. The reason why the 2nd amendment is there is primarily to properly adjust the balance of power between the governed and the government, as is the rest of the Bill of Rights.
> The reason why the 2nd amendment is there is primarily to properly adjust the balance of power between the governed and the government, as is the rest of the Bill of Rights.
That's probably true. Also very abstract, and not in contradiction with anything I said. What's the point you're trying to make exactly?
> Gun Control was partly started by racist southern politicians who were horrified by the thought that black citizens would have the right to own firearms.
Then again guns were needed to catch escaped slaves and to keep control over large black population ... and south pre-civil war had manly man dueling culture ... it was complicated and very situational when guns were good and when they were bad.
I don't see anything uniquely American about it. More like The Human Way™ :p
(You do realize that all the societies are maintained with brutal force, right? And pick any country, go back a few centuries and you will find conflicts with as many casualties as American genocide).
>I don't see anything uniquely American about it. More like The Human Way™ :p
The uniquely American bit is the 300 years of institutionalized slavery which bred and sold humans like cattle by the millions and treated them as agricultural equipment on a scale unrivaled in all of human history.
Of course many societies have had slavery, but the transatlantic African slave trade (which was the very economic basis of the New World, centered on tobacco, sugar, and cotton production) was far and beyond the most brutal act ever committed against a race of people.
If you want to play a numbers game, that's fine, but you don't provide any sources for your numbers, anyway.
The slave trade was far from American-only. It began and continued through European support when those places were European colonies. It lasted well into the 19th century through Arab slave trading along the African coasts, and the Belgian Congo as of 1918 was as despotic a place as any. The Germans, British, and Dutch maimed, raped, tortured, and enslaved natives up until at least 1900 in southern Africa. The Dutch were notorious for their actions in the East. The Russians had defactos slavery and pogroms against minorities until at least 1850.
You're being myopic about history.
was far and beyond the most brutal act ever committed against a race of people
This is a contest nobody wants to win, but I'm not sure how you can say that with such confidence when we had actions like the Holocaust, Japan's attacks on China in WW2, Turkish atrocities against Armenians, etc.
This is the real world. Humans have historically been horrific to each other. If you really believe the US is some outlier, you are wrong.
> How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since?
It was doled out via the Homestead Act. Anybody could take the land and farm it. And what land did they take? Land that they thought they could grow enough on to not starve. What land was that? Land with water.
The land that didn't get taken was land that had no water - not enough to run a farm. And it probably still doesn't have enough water for a subdivision, at least not one with lawns.
Actually there are quite a few, with the classic example being "edge cities" like Tysons Corners near Washington DC - what was originally just offices and shopping has become a real community. But to tie in the zoning issues mentioned, places like Tysons developed in response to the stricter zoning in DC.
People only build elsewhere when distance costs less than cleaning up the regulatory pollution required to build.
The problem is that the regulatory pollution (crappy zoning) is so bad in certain areas and improves so little as you get further out that building a little further away isn't actually a better value.
The market may be saturated. There are lots of cities already and many of them have affordable homes. Why found a new city when you could move to Cincinnati, Lexington, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland? If you want really cheap housing you could move to Detroit or St. Louis.
I think about this too. Building more cities seems like an obvious way to help, but it doesn’t happen for many complicated reasons which I don’t pretend to fully understand. YC was looking into this at some point, I don’t know where they went with it, though.
Where I live(d) government owned land is rarely sold because it has 'protected' status either because it a wilderness protected area or future/previously farmland. That means land is not for residential/commercial development.
Much of the land in the American West made its way into private hands through homesteading, where farmers earned the land by improving (i.e. farming) it. It's worth considering what modern homesteading could look like. Perhaps large development groups could make deals to plant dense neighborhood seeds (e.g. multi-use buildings in grids with a plan to expand into an actual community) and pay for connecting highways in exchange for exclusive rights to surrounding parcels of land. There is a lot of federal land in the west that is close to existing development. Could it be used to create healthier cities in those areas?
That's a good point. It would have to be the right set of circumstances: with unused land in close proximity to an existing city that can't manage to scale up because of entrenched interests. I suspect such areas exist (perhaps around Salt Lake City, or Las Vegas) and there might be a chance to make a true dense city in those areas rather than the sprawl that has developed naturally.
20 years ago, Craftsman houses in Seattle were already unaffordable unless they were totally trashed, far north, or in a 'bad' neighborhood. They were, size for size, the most expensive form of housing on the market. Generally 1000sf, 2 bedroom, and 1 bath, I don't think I saw one under 225k. I wound up buying a skinny for 20% less money and 20% more space. (Observations from 1998-9, when I bought a house a mile or so from there).
Since then, prices have doubled at least twice. I could never afford to move back to my old neighborhood.
Moved out here last year. I actually commute from down south...I want so badly to feel comfortable planting roots here but staring down the barrel of this housing market makes me feel like a tourist simply enjoying the high pay and natural beauty until I decide I want to buy a home back east. I am glad I am here but there is definitely an internal conflict I have to tolerate to do so.
So, I live in Wallingford (the community mentioned here). In one of those Craftsman houses, no less.
Here's the thing: Wallingford will be valuable and therefore expensive no matter what kind of housing you build here. Literally anything. There are some crappy midcentury studio apartments that go for 2k a month not 10 blocks from here, because the location is great even if you don't have a house.
That means that basically everybody who doesn't develop property professionally is misdiagnosing the situation.
The NIMBYs say that rezoning will cause property values to crash. That's just not in line with available evidence from Ballard and similar, and flies in the face of reason besides. When your lot can be a beloved home to another family or a pile of income to a developer, math says the developer will eventually win the bidding war.
Most of the YIMBYs are wrong because housing prices just aren't going to come down that much here, and much of what comes in will be rentals. Those rentals will be luxury units because they can be, and will therefore be 2500+ a month. That's within a few hundred dollars of an existing mortgage (on one of the cheaper houses-- not the million dollar 3000+ sqft thing down the road) but without the potential upside.
Housing prices not coming down from increased unit implies some sort of market-resistant magical mumbo jumbo in that area. That doesn't sound plausible. Everything reacts to changing supply and demand, and increasing supply will always drop prices, somewhere. Increasing luxury units will mean a vacating of those non-luxury units currently occupied by luxury dwellers.
I think what you and others don't understand is that, there is SO MUCH demand, and SO MUCH money that no matter how much you build, the prices simply won't go down.
From a developer's perspective, building a brand new apartment building is ludicrously expensive, you simply MUST charge very high rent, or your whole project is not feasible.
So for one there is no such thing as "infinite demand". We can talk about Seattle having an unmeetable housing demand when the whole city is hundred story condo buildings and the population density is twice that of Tokyo.
Of course in the short term, wherever you lift the crippling shroud of insane zoning policy, new housing will still be very expensive. It is pent up demand. But by building density you exhaust said demand. And on top of that, the denser and larger you build, the most scale you apply, the cheaper it gets per unit to house people. Economies of scale plus a bunch of other scaling effects on construction.
One thing the first bastions of reasonable zoning policy will probably fail to do, though, is remove some fairly insane mandatory minimum square footage requirements, which puts a kink in any reasonable approach to housing - developers need profit, and the smaller you can make units the larger your market can be because you can fit more people into the same building footprint and thus afford to charge less per unit, and thus enabling poorer people to live there.
Without that you do just end up with the luxury 2000 sqft condos that are only better than the status quo because they reduce pollution and traffic. They also dramatically help the local economy by enabling high income earners to live there in greater numbers. But to actually help the poor, you need to unrestrict not just the outside building size but the inside as well.
Yeah spot on. I think the square footage thing, and the various zoning laws and requirements for permits are probably one of the biggest reasons housing is not affordable.
As it is now, if you build more housing, more wealthy people will move in to fill that housing, and more and more, and on and on until you hit a plateau. That plateau will never be affordable for a blue collar worker unfortunately.
My point is that building more houses is not the answer all by itself. Drastic changes to our understanding of property rights and landlording are required as well.
My whole point is that the plateau is only for the luxury first-wave large family condo type housing (at the highest denstiy, at least - if you aren't there yet, you need more density until you get there, then you move on to phase 2) and that if you let builders build housing smaller you can avoid such plateaus because after exhausting the rich you build smaller and more affordable but still net only slightly less revenue per square foot.
This isn't true, unless you're silently inserting caveats like "given that we all know that we can't build enough to meet demand" which turn it into a vacuous tautology.
Consider: if the amount of housing available within Seattle city limits was multiplied by 10 tomorrow, would prices go down?
Yes, I was speaking to the actual situation in Seattle with all the caveats that implies. Most important among those is that HALA is an actual policy that describes what will be rezoned, how, and when. It notably will not permit 10x growth in Wallingford.
Ok, so what you actually meant to say was "the Seattle housing market is totally responsive to supply and demand, but we are consciously limiting supply". Since we both agree that 10x the current number of houses would bring prices down, then there's a far more useful investigation to be done into what the lowest number of houses that needs to be built in order to reduce prices. That discussion is the one that needs to be actually had in order for policies like HALA to come from an informed and rational plan. Claiming "nothing will ever lower prices!!!!!1" is the opposite of that discussion.
edit: wait, you're not even the poster I responded to. What the hell?
Frankly, I don't think starting out with spherical cows and a neoclassical economics textbook is a rational approach to the housing problem. If you want to engage in it that's cool and you do you, but it's a bit like expecting everyone to start speaking Esperanto just because you happen to think it's a good idea.
In my view, any successful policy is going to have to be both incremental and carefully balanced to take everyone along for the ride. That will piss off lots of people who think the other side is trying to destroy or deny them the things they love, but it's pretty much the only way forward.
Even if that were true, that's not an argument to not build. People need houses, the pricing is reflecting a shortage, denying house is denying people housing and there's no way to spin that reality.
I agree with you, building must commence. But it will not help lower income people or make things more affordable. It might lower the price from astronomical to, very, very high, but really what it will do is create more housing stock for more upper middle class people to move into the city.
So what you'll be left with is even more wealthy folks coming in, and never anything affordable for the blue collar folks.
So therefore that demand needs to be satisfied. Seattle isn't the only place that has that problem. San Francisco, and most of California suffer from it. So did Tokyo, but they've ballooned to provide a quality living for over 10 million people.
No need for mumbo jumbo. Supply greatly outstips demand and HALA is not that ambitious of a plan (and took many years to get through). There just aren't enough new units in the plan to cause prices to drop.
I agree completely. I live in portland, and just next door they tore down a nice craftsman bungalow which the developer purchased for 450k, and then built an enormous 3-story monstrosity in. All the other homes in the neighborhood are 1 or 2 stories, so this gigantic building sticks out like a laughably sore thumb.
There are six 2-bedroom units, and each unit will probably sell for 500k. There is no parking since the building fills up the entire lot.
You know who lived in the bungalow before? a low-income family. Do you think this new condo building helped them have affordable housing? NOPE!
All this development does is push people who were already here out, and allow a flood of rich folks to move in. It does nothing for affordability.
Housing prices in Seattle will only come down if there's a downturn in the tech industry. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to encourage density to reduce prices.
I'm... not sure of this. A sharp spike in interest rates could make mortgages less attractive and dampen demand. Or, more positively, the Northgate or Othello areas could come up and start to look more like Ballard and increase the attractiveness or property away from the urban core. Either would dampen the hottest markets.
If the concern is that it takes roughly $60k/household just to live in Seattle, the answer is higher wages. Even if that acts as a drag on King county GDP, the King county housing market is north of 100% of GDP; better to endanger the smaller value. And personally, I don't think higher minimum wages will be a net negative in the long run-- but I could be wrong. If I was, we could fix it later though.
If you're trying to solve the problem of not being able to rent a place you like independent of not being able to afford a baseline place, the only answers are market distortions in your favor. The proposals I've heard for that are sort of a "fair, cheap, effective-- pick two" deal.
Personally I think the best approach is more and better transit, since that raises the utility (and therefore underlying value independent of market value) of homes both close and far from the urban core. But it is definitely on the fair, effective, not cheap side of that triangle.
There is one argument, perhaps the most powerful one, from NIMBY that I agree with and it's about traffic. The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point. The progression should be
- Suburb: Just roads are fine.
- Midpoint: Give a lane and make it dedicated for BRT. That's the only way people will take the bus seriously. When they see that bus zoom by while they are stuck in traffic, many will take the bus.
- City: Build rail and subway.
But high density development keeps happening without any of this. This just makes the NIMBY arguments stronger.
EDIT: Just thought of another possible solution for Midpoint: shutdown the bus system and use the funds to give everyone $X per month for Uber Pool/Lyft Line. Make using Pool/Line a requirement for using the money, since those provide the most benefit for increasing road capacity. Bus reputation is so bad in the US, something like this might be the only way.
This is why you target high density development close to where the jobs are, and close to public transit stations. What increases traffic more: people living an hour away from work and commuting in because they can't afford living near work, or people living close to work because sufficient high density housing is built near the workplace?
> The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point.
You're absolutely correct. This must happen.
Realistically, it happens when the residents of a newly dense neighborhood push for it to happen. It's rarely politically workable to build transit first.
It's a classic chicken/egg problem and the NIMBY argument is let's just not have the chicken or egg. City politicians can't fight that argument. Something needs to happen above the city level that makes density a given that they can't do anything about. Then the discussion can shift to how to handle the traffic from the density because even the NIMBY will accept they can't do anything to stop the density.
However, all the power is at the city level, so that's why the situation doesn't change. California recently tried to introduce a bill to use state level power to force density, but it was voted down and defeated.
I have mixed feelings about all this. I don't like the idea of a higher power like the state or federal forcing everywhere to be dense. Residents should have some control over how their neighborhoods develop. But the current housing shortage is really bad. Long term, it will destroy the economy because people will move away to other states when they start families, and that's often also when their careers reach their prime (maximum tax revenue).
Like you, I'm not fond of the idea of stripping local governments of their power and controls.
That said, also like you, I'm pretty damn worried about the crisis at hand. Given that the crisis has been pretty uniformly driven by local government policies, they're going to have to be dialed back to fix much of anything.
It's possible to build transit first, if the transit company can also buy the real estate at the terminus, and if the transit company is a private company (not sure if it's feasible in the US).
But for government owned transit, it's not possible to speculate or prospect transit lines, so it has to come after density is developed first.
There are private transportation vectors like the Ambassador bridge in Windsor/Detroit. I'm not sure why in our instances we end up with them trying lobby to block competing bridges from being put up while in Japan most of the transit lines are private and work spectacularly well. But the US has probably the biggest private Subway franchise in the world, if you count Subway restaurants ;).
It's probably something to do with the black and white view of free-market vs government regulation we have in the US. Everyone's gunning for all one or the other.
The gap in density between most city neighborhoods and where you have to have transit is enormous. Look at the density in old SF, the Sunset or Richmond, or in the inner city Montrose neighborhood of Houston, or many other examples. These places have several times the population per acre of typical post-war suburbs while still consisting mostly of detached houses and townhomes. They have poor transit, and people get by.
I’m not saying it’s utopia, but the idea that the roads can’t take any more people is, in most places, baloney.
I'm glad they're doing this, and I think there are more ways to use data to make this political argument for increasing housing supply. Specifically, I think one potential application of data to break up zoning limitations & NIMBY-ism is the use of energy and environmental simulation to argue against right-to-light/solar access rights get used to protect low-density housing.
I've worked to develop urban planning guidelines in my previous job, and in my experience environmental regulations like shading studies are heavily, heavily relied on as a quantitative way to post-rationalize NIMBY-ism's desire to stop construction. Why? Simply because there aren't a lot of other quantitative metrics to justify low-density development, and so the only real data-backed analysis that justifies building shorter buildings tends to be solar rights.
My current job is as a building energy researcher, and as I've gone about my job - which involves a lot of programming & calculating metrics for building energy (obviously), indoor/outdoor human comfort, daylighting thresholds - it's obvious that the urban argument that is made is a one-sided one that could be potentially undermined by demonstrating metrics that favor <i>less</i> solar access. Or, since the sun moves around the sky - metrics that give you equal solar access at different times, which can allow higher density. i.e what is the urban heat island consequence of exposed urban surfaces to sun, what is the comfort benefit of shade, the harm caused by direct UV, what is the building energy benefit of blocking direct solar gain etc.
This is not meant to (reductively) claim that less sun is a good thing - simply that there is more ambiguity then is captured by current zoning regulations or design standards, and as a result we are over-emphasizing solar access when in certain places it isn't benefiting us. At the very least, we shouldn't take the solar-access argument at face-value.
And I don't the planning officials and design professionals who are implementing this for the current state of environmental regulations. In my experience, given the impact their work has on the city, it's astonishing how little resources are expended to actually quantitatively study the effect of different typologies on the city, and as a result they tend to rely on community (NIMBY) feedback, and existing precedent for structuring cities. Better data-based tools could help them a lot make a progressive argument for higher-density.
The closer I get to purchasing a house the more I find myself pushing against measures like this. NIMBY exists to protect most people's largest financial asset.
That's one of the main issues here.
Houses should be about having a place to live, not your largest financial asset. The selfish protectionism that comes from treating housing as an investment is why so many cities are so broken.
(Most) people don't pour money into houses because they consider it an investment, they consider it an investment because they've poured money into it. The fact that real estate is scarce combined with the fact that people need a place to live causes homes to be people's largest financial asset.
People have got to save for retirement somehow. Company final salary pensions are a thing of the past. Investments in shares can go down as well as up. The government can’t or won’t help. What do you expect people to do? Sacrifice their own wellbeing for your unearned benefit?
> Investments in shares can go down as well as up.
So instead, homeowners vote for policies that make sure that they somehow get an asset that is guaranteed to go up. That's an unearned benefit, it's one that comes at our expense, and it's an expense that they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world.
they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world
No. Those people built the communities you find so desirable to live in, sometimes from scratch, sometimes by regenerating a dilapidated area. The value you crave would not even exist if not for them. And now that the hard work is done, you expect to waltz in and have it for the taking?
Millennials think they are the first generation ever to live through hard times. While raking in fortunes their parents and grandparents could only dream of, working for tech unicorns.
Most Millennials do not work for tech unicorns. Most Millennials do not even live in urban centers, most are living a very conventional suburban lifestyle.
Everyone else wants to think of Millennials as the first generation that is uniquely self-absorbed or whiney.
Really? How many cities were founded from scratch by Boomers? I'm in California, so let's think of the places that are having serious housing crises.
Oakland? San Francisco? Santa Monica? Los Angeles? Well before Boomers.
The small cities that are trying to bring in businesses without building any housing? Palo Alto? Menlo Park? Berkeley?
All of these places were within 25% of their current size by 1960. Boomers didn't build any of these communities from scratch; they may have grown up in them, but they're not special unique forebears that made everything around us.
> No. Those people built the communities you find so desirable to live in, sometimes from scratch, sometimes by regenerating a dilapidated area. The value you crave would not even exist if not for them. And now that the hard work is done, you expect to waltz in and have it for the taking?
Good luck with your desirable community as it closes itself to everyone, grows old and turns into an old-age home /s.
Just stop this characterization of all Millenials, will you? Young people are the future and they are contributing into the welfare programs that go into supporting old farts. Old farts who neglected the infrastructure, squandered billions in foreign wars and much more in toxic financial instruments and just elected the most unqualified idiot as the most powerful person in the world.
>So instead, homeowners vote for policies that make sure that they somehow get an asset that is guaranteed to go up. That's an unearned benefit, it's one that comes at our expense, and it's an expense that they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world.
The 0.1% sure know how to get the 99% to viciously attack one other over the scraps that fall from their table.
Most assets have been going up in value. It's because of wealth inequality reaching staggering levels. It isn't because of homeowner voting patterns and it isn't the fault of homeowners. They just didn't do as badly out of this problem as non-homeowners.
We’ve established there are ways and reasons for people to influence what happens on nearby land they don’t own themselves. Now we are merely quibbling over the details.
But we are not just talking about “homes” but “homes in a specific neighbourhood” and you can easily say they don’t “need” to live there in particular.
Problem with that is now you have people who can't afford to pay that tax, because they're the people who bought when housing was inexpensive, not because they're rich. Taxing those people out of their homes is not the answer either.
Exactly. This is why Proposition 13, limiting annual property tax increases, passed in California in the 70s. (It's now widely maligned by outsiders, but they're usually not interested in the history.)
Housing can go down too. It's gone up for a long time because of incredibly low interest rates, foreign buyers, etc., but there have been very long stretches of time in the past where it went down and it may easily happen again. All kinds of things could pop the bubble: rising interest rates, somewhere else for Chinese money to go, geographic diversification of hot industries, etc. These things are actually more likely to result in severe drops in price than anti-NIMBY/YIMBY efforts. Supply additions will gradually stabilize or drop prices while macroeconomic shifts can collapse them suddenly.
Look at the Japanese housing market for an extreme example of what can happen. After an insane housing run-up it's been a flat or depreciating asset for decades.
There are no safe single classes of asset. If you put all your money in a house you're not diversifying.
but there have been very long stretches of time in the past where it went down and it may easily happen again
But that is contrary to the Millenial narrative that every previous generation had it easy! And that they are uniquely in the entire history of the world hard-done-by.
No. They're upset because the cost of housing isn't high simply due to gentrification, but due to an artificially created shortage, which can be easily remedied if not for the stubbornness of the people who got there first.
> NIMBY exists to protect most people's largest financial asset.
To protect some peoples most larges financial asset, at the expense of everyone else.
I think as an owner the incentives are pretty clear. It is also cleary why the city indulges them: city officials live in the city and are owners, and local propositions will always have more participation of owners (concentrated interests) than renters and visitors (who might not be able to vote, dont have residency, nationality, commitment, etc).
Seattle and SF are cruising on the back of tech, they are not producing benefit with their regulations. This is not up for economic debate: official econoimsts of the city of SF and the state of California have made their case already. This can only turn economical if another city provides a better incentive than these and competes away at the taxation level.
The cities live on their incumbency, but they will pay a price in homelessness until another city starts taking away their business.
> The closer I get to purchasing a house the more I find myself pushing against measures like this. NIMBY exists to protect most people's largest financial asset.
Of course it's rational to push against decreased supply of an asset when you're buying one; but that's not a sufficient argument for making that desire government policy. I'm sure that it's nice to have convinced the state from preventing other people from building dense/tall housing on their own property, since it makes your asset more valuable than it'd otherwise be, but the effects of that policy on non-homeowners are absolutely horrendous.
The consequences of limited housing supply/density in US cities have been pretty nasty, between shitty dysfunctional transit systems, pathologically high rents (a complete apartment is cheaper in Tokyo than the cheapest form of housing in this city, namely a room in someone else's house), and a ghastly homelessness crisis.
Your overinvestment into certain asset classes doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer the consequences of artificially limited supply in that asset. Other countries manage to have better cities (with cheaper rents!) than US without NIMBY-enabling zoning laws, so it's not like this sort of land-use law is inherently necessary.
In the very long term, housing should be a 0% return relative to inflation because incomes pay for houses. And if incomes aren't increasing above inflation, in the longer term houses won't continue appreciate above inflation.
Here in CA we're in a 50 year macro bubble since the 60s where housing has increased above inflation and even above salaries, but once your paying 60% of your salary to housing, it's harder and harder for it go any higher.
And if society is actually progressing, it would be a bit less than 0%. Anything greater than 0% return is a bubble/ not sustainable increase - though there's nothing that says the bubble has to ever pop, but there are limits to how much it can go up.
It never fails to boggle my mind that we have cities all over the Rust Belt with ample real estate, state investment funding, and all the incentives in the world to attract people away from Seattle, SF, SJ, etc. - and instead the response is "let's ruin Seattle."
Same reason Y Combinator doesn't have a bigger presence in the "Rust Belt"? Network effects.
If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast?
Coastal cities have other advantages too. Better weather, favorable access to trade, better access to travel. Software could arguably be made anywhere but that severely discounts the importance of face to face communication. It's "only" a 4 hour flight from SF to Kansas City but if you're in KC and trying to work with partners in Asia that's an extra 8 hours of travel for each trip which effectively costs you a day. Make that trip several times a year and that cost becomes untenable.
>If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast?
Well, it's not true that "all the people are already on the West Coast", but even if it were, YC might awaken to the obvious truth that rapid population growth in west coast cities is not sustainable for much longer. Then, as a forward-looking, long-term thinking company, they might see fit to establish footprints in some of the less crowded, less expensive inland cities before someone else beats them to it.
Personally, I don't understand why people who have skills that are marketable in virtually any city in the first world choose to live with roommates in crappy century-old homes or tiny apartments in a handful of coastal cities. To each their own, I guess.
"Personally, I don't understand why people who have skills that are marketable in virtually any city in the first world"
Because, in reality, there are only a handful of decent cities that offer a plethora of jobs, interesting ones at that. Sure, a bunch of techies could move to Columbus, but there you have worse weather, more sprawl, fewer job options, and for those who do want to start their own company, a dearth of VC money.
Get YCombinator to open branches in the midwest, and you'll start to see that change. Until then, it likely won't.
For career driven people, it's not enough that just some company will hire them for something. And there are very few cities where it's easy to find a job matching the skills and expertise of e.g. a Microsoft tech lead.
Much less cities where you have the opportunity at multiple such large companies. Seattle has Amazon's HQ as well as Microsoft's, and presences from Facebook and Google.
You can be a Microsoft tech lead in Raleigh-Durham, too, but you aren't going to have as many opportunities with Amazon/Facebook/Google/etc there.
Because those Rust Belt cities don't have anywhere near what the coastal cities have, namely a plethora of tech jobs or a startup scene that produces highly successful companies, or a VC network that will just throw money at you.
Get YCombinator to open a branch in Toledo, and you might see that start to change. But currently, most people aren't rushing to go back to the Rust Belt because, while they might get one job, if they get fired/laid off/the company goes under/the management is abusive, there isn't much in the way of alternatives.
The have/have-not dichotomy is increasingly becoming a matter of geography, of have vs. have-not regions. A French sociologist whose name I forget has written extensively about this, and others claim that the theory applies throughout the industrialized world. If it's true, it answers your question almost by definition.
I met this young man from Stanford who was part of a project where people would buy a shipping container home, plant it in their backyard as a "Mother in Law Unit" and rent it out. That would be a way to show in action that you think, "Yes, in my Back Yard!"
- why do we spend like 60-70%+ of federal housing dollars on high income earners / rich people?
- why is section 8 gutted to all hell?
I don't see why it's so shocking that there's no affordable housing, when some of the big old programs aimed at reducing that are a shadow of their former selves, and we spend most of our effort in housing just throwing cash at people who already make a lot of it.
Or maybe people like Zach mentioned in the article do think this stuff, but they're taking baby steps because the political capital necessary to actually stop the above points is probably huge.
>When homeowners say they’re fighting to protect neighborhood character, Lubarsky says, “it really feels to me like they just don’t want young people in their neighborhood.”
This is also almost always coded language for not wanting to live near racial minorities. This whole article is yet another example of baby boomers pulling up the ladder behind them. The millennials I know are angry and there's going to be a reckoning in the near future as it comes to a head.
I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point. I own my apartment in Manhattan, but my family is very lucky in that we had an extremely motivated seller in a very underappreciated area, and that I have a good job. The traditional paths to adulthood have been broken by NIMBYs and a complete lack of investment in infrastructure after it was good enough for the Boomers.
Something is going to happen - you can't pull the ladder behind you, keep everyone you don't like out of your neighborhood, and reduce mobility to protect your assets without serious backlash.
>I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point.
The propaganda output of 1%'er think tanks has been consistently stating that it's an unaffordable luxury that will bankrupt the nation for 30 odd years.
They have several ulterior motives for saying this. It's not just that they want to free up money for tax cuts -- stripping people of social security benefits also makes them more dependent upon employers, which employers really like.
Wall Street would like to see that multi-trillion dollar pot of money privatized so that they can manage it and cream off fees.
These groups are the ones pushing for social security "reform". They tried pretty hard under Bush (who was willing) and pretty hard under Obama (likewise). Still no dice though - too many votes to be lost still.
I think that might be true in some circumstances, but think of it this way:
You have a nice backyard landscaped how you like, you've got beautiful maple trees, a deck. You've lived there and loved it for years. You made it what it is.
Then your neighbors house gets torn down and turned into a 5 story high-rise with no parking. Suddenly your privacy is gone, your serenity is gone, and so is your parking.
It should be easy to understand how this would be frustrating for people.
What if somebody you don't like wants to move in next door? Should you get a say in that too? What if your neighbor builds a spite fence? What if your neighbor plants a tree that sets off your allergies?
The NIMBY attitude of "This town was perfect when I moved here in 1974 and it should never change!" is such a terrible attitude for so many reasons. Change is a part of life sometimes and actively denying other people's opportunity to improve their own situation when you are in a position of privilege is how you eventually get guillotines in the streets.
Look, I agree with you completely. My point is that home owners move to a neighborhood for a reason. The neighborhood they pick, is the neighborhood they like. When a skyscraper goes in next door, suddenly it's not the same neighborhood.
I'm totally onboard with the fact that things need to change, and people need housing. 100% onboard. Why can't we do things like beautify the currently uninhabited/run down buildings and turn those into apartments? Why not change the old mill into a huge apartment complex and build a community around it?
Why does it have to be a skyscraper slapped into the middle of an existing neighborhood filled with trees and single family homes? Why do developers buy a perfectly good home, and tear it down and put 12 apartments on a single lot? That doesn't make economic sense, and it doesn't make aesthetic sense either.
It's nothing to do with Indian culture (not even sure where that came from), but everything to do with art on the margins. Semi rundown cheap post industrial space for people doing crazy shit just doesn't happen in a dense area that's become popular.
Cirque de flambe does not interact well with office buildings. The Fremont mostly free movies required an open parking lot, not a developed block.
That all moved to Sodo, and then Marginal Way area, and then I don't know. Maybe it died out. Maybe it moved on. I did.
Sure it is. What Indians find interesting and full of character is different than the artsy stuff / people doing crazy shit that you find interesting and full of character.
I'd love to see an infusion of Indian culture into the Fremont art scene.
I haven't, though, because artists were displaced by engineers. This has nothing to do with Indian culture; it has everything to do with STEM steamrolling the arts scene.
The irony is all the people piling into the west coast complaining about the problem are causing the problem they then are complaining about.
Instead they should all move to the midwest, south, or NE, where cost of living is a small fraction of the west coast. They can pay off a very nice house in full for less than the cost of a downpayment in any trendy west coast city, and they can easily afford to live a stereotypical middle class lifestyle - house, cars, kids, vacations, a stay at home parent - on a reasonable income, something which is now increasingly difficult on the west coast where cost of living is extraordinarily high.
I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.
As someone currently living in the Midwest/South. I love how spoiled I am with my low cost of living in a relatively under-exploited quirky/cool/hip destination.
If I knew a secret to get better tech jobs out here, I would do it yesterday. (If someone wants a technical cofounder in an interesting location, let me know. ;)
With so many of my friends on the West Coast, I feel the siren song myself, and it's tough to combat network effects.
Six figures in the rust belt is the life. I live in a beautiful historic home for a tenth of the cost of the ones shown in the article. I can afford to have my wife stay home while our kids are small. I'm dumping close to a quarter of my income into retirement savings despite still having significant student debt. I'm close to family members to help with the kids (a problem for my childhood friends who fled to the coasts after college.)
People talk about amenities being better on the coasts, but I'm an hour from downtown Chicago, which is easily the second-most spectacular urban center in North America. Plus I'm close to great weekend destinations like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Nashville. As for outdoor amenities, I'll put the great lakes up against any other region of the country when it comes to natural beauty. Western Michigan has some of the nicest beaches in the country. It's one of the many hidden-gems of the flyover states. Yeah the winters suck in the upper midwest, but they also end and the summers are spectacular.
You don't even have to make six figures to have a good life in the mid-west. My first job was in a mid-sized Michigan town. Starter homes were 150% of my annual pre-tax salary. Schools were very good. Of course the town couldn't offer what a big city could, but it had enough.
My boss was making under $200,000/yr and he was living a similar life to someone making over $1M on the coasts.
I lived in Buffalo for a while and can attest to the accuracy of this account. The great lakes region is beautiful and underappreciated, and in many ways superior to SeattleSanAngeles, and not just as a matter of cost.
Amen to that. Every time somebody starts talking about making the Midwest some sort of Silicon Prairie I just wanna smack them and ask why we want that sort of nonsense and baggage coming out and dragging us down and then having transplants act entitled to the right to live here.
That will just turn the west coast housing problem into a midwest housing problem.
If you think that businesses moving into the midwest will evenly distribute over its entirety, think again. Network effects will cause companies to cluster together into hubs no matter where they go.
It seems like there may have been a tipping point sometime in 2017. We are seeing a lot of satellite offices opening in Chicago. Foursquare, Glassdoor and Reddit have announced or moved recently, while Google has been amping up their office. I assume it’s caused by cost of living in SF and Seattle, but can’t be sure.
>I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.
God, I hope not. California can stay in California, keep it out of the Midwest.
Man, fuck this sentiment. It's just as bad as the whole "get these foreigners out of here!" anti immigration sentiment that's taking hold all over. There's an exceedingly high likelihood that your family moved to the Midwest from somewhere else at some point in time. Cities and regions change over time, people move to where there's an opportunity for them to have a better life. Just because you were born somewhere doesn't entitle you to that place staying unchanged.
I would like to see the bosses of these techies consider basing their headquarters and satellite offices not smack-dab in the middle of the hottest tech towns but rather in cities where there is lots of housing and room for commercial development, which are often former industrial areas.
In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge.
And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.
Actually, I started to type "I don't know why a company is willing to pay twice as much for an engineer in Silicon Valley than for one in Houston," but as I was typing that I had an epiphany.
What they're REALLY paying for is knowledge from other companies. A person who has worked at Google and other innovative shops has (hopefully) learned a bunch of great processes, and will (hopefully) implement them at their new workplace.
So an area like the Bay Area is filled with collective knowledge because there are great companies there, and all that talent is jostling around.
More like 47 years ago when Boring busts were still a thing. Real estate hasn’t busted like that since then, with only a down tick in the 90s along with the rest of the west coast.
The kicker is that the baby boomers also want the younger generation (who can’t afford homes) to pay for their entitlements. It’s like going to dinner with your rich uncle and he stiffs you on the bill. Housing is the biggest problem of this generation. Exorbitant rent seeking sucks up all marginal resources, leading to greater inequality and less of a means to fund entitlements. The irony.
>>The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City.
I knew it was bad, but didn't realize it's that bad. One Seattlite once told me there are a lot of homeless people because they refer to it as Freeattle, as they get lot of things for free - not sure if that is true. Anyone who is from Seattle know more?
For all useful purposes, it's false. A detailed in-person survey of homeless people in King County found that 10% of them said that homeless services were part of the reason they moved to Seattle, and it's more likely that they moved from other parts of Washington than from far away.
Homelessness rates in Seattle track rising (and falling! lol) rents very closely, which is a difficult-to-explain coincidence for anyone who really believes that the cause is actually random people from all over America catching a bus to Seattle to get into a shelter.
I think the demand side for single family housing will increase in Seattle over the near future. There has been a recent boom in tech company positions and equity (especially Amazon and Microsoft, but others as well such as Tableau, Facebook, etc.). There is a relatively (compared to SF) nascent startup and VC scene developing, and more tech companies are opening or expanding branch offices here as they observe the talent pool that's now well above critical mass. And many employees of these companies are young (in their 20s), recent transplants from around the country, or on temporary work visas and in the process of getting green cards / citizenship. Seattle is also a place people tend to want to plant roots (for the great career options, the natural beauty, and the culture).
As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up.
It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.
One thing I never see come up in these discussions is the overall increasingly wealth disparity in the US.
In most of these discussions there is an implied moral stance that people have some level of "rights" about where they can live. I think all but the most stringent anarchists agree you don't have a moral right to live in a sprawling mansion on the coast, regardless of your contributions to society. And most agree that it's not right if someone working 40 hours a week can't afford a home anywhere in the United States.
But, between those two extremes is an interesting continuum. My belief is that most of us grew up in a culture that placed the "right" point on that continuum right between the city and neighborhood level of scale. Most people should have the right to live in the city of their choosing, regardless of your income level. But you don't have the right to pick your neighborhood. If you want to live in the most desireable neighborhood, then it's fair for you to have to pay for the luxury.
I think that's been a stable cultural point for a lot of cities in the US for many decades. New York is a good example of a city that supported people from the righest elites down to poverty-level working class.
But economic disparity has gotten so bad now that the affordability point on the continuum no longer aligns with our rightful point. If you are working class, there are no cities where the entire commutable region surrounding it is outside of your price point. San Francisco is one and Seattle is well on its way.
I think much of the anger we feel comes from those two points being out of alignment. We feel that people should be able to live in the metro area of their choosing, but the economic reality is that for some cities now, they can't.
I don't believe any simple supply and demand model of housing will fix this. Seattle is a highly desireable area and the demand is elastic. I think you'd see:
Increase housing supply ->
Prices go down ->
City becomes more appealing for businesses ->
Business grow and need more employees ->
Demand goes up ->
Prices return
You'll end up with just as many $800k houses (or apartments), but now with comparatively worse infrastructure because it wasn't designed for higher density. There are plenty enough high paid tech employees in the US and the world at large to absorb any additional housing Seattle has to offer.
I think the fundamental problem is that when you combine increasing wealth disparity, high mobility, and people sorting themselves economically, you naturally end up with large regions of the country that are only affordable by certain economic levels. And that spatial fact conflicts with our moral belief that no large region of the US should be effectively off limits to someone based on their wealth.
And woe to the millennial who dares dream of starting a family, warns Myra Lara, a 30-year-old architect and affordability advocate. Of her Seattle friends who have become parents, all but one has been exiled to the suburbs. “It sucks—I never see them,” says Lara. “But that’s what they have to do.”
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Lol "woe" indeed. This is probably the ultimate first-world problem.
I mean, we would love to have affordable suburban houses within easy commuting distance of tech jobs in the Bay Area. So it certainly seems like a rather enviable "problem" that families in Seattle are able to move from the urban core to the suburbs...
I live in the Central District in Seattle, which is like a 10 minute bike ride from the downtown core. Before moving here I lived in Wallingford for twenty years. I have two children now, both under 5 years old and I can attest that I never see my friends, even the one that lives two blocks away. I'm pretty sure this is an effect of parenthood in general, not geography. We'll probably move north to Shoreline soon, not because the city has exiled us, but because it would be nice for our kids to have a yard to play in and we don't frequent the nearby bars and restaurants nearly as often as we used to.
> a housing market so expensive it’s throttling one of America’s biggest urban success stories. Decades ago, these tidy homes were cheap enough for schoolteachers and firefighters. Today, most cost at least a million dollars, and what was once a proudly middle-class neighborhood has morphed into a financially gated community
If you want a house like that, and you're not super wealthy, find a remote gig and move outside the big tech-boom cities. Here in the Rust Belt, houses like that are very affordably priced.
If enough people with tech-generated wealth start living and spending money here, it'll make progress solving the regional inequalities that are driving support for Donald Trump.
Remote gigs are also not terribly available to most.
Either your line of work demands you be at a specific location, or you're competing with the 0.001% of the entire world for a remote job, with employers that would rather do without than make do with sub-superlative people.
But I don't like that area. A house like that is not worth giving up the incredible outdoors lifestyle that the Seattle region offers.
I'm happy to live in a well-built, quiet condo that I pay a bit more for than "standard" condos or whatever. Don't really need a house. But even these are nearly impossible to come by. There's practically zero inventory.
FWIW if "incredible outdoors lifestyle" is what you seek and remote work is an option there are a number of better, cheaper places to live than Seattle.
It really depends what you are looking for but a short list of western cities which are superior outdoor destinations to Seattle at least in some ways (and are much cheaper) is Bozeman, Missoula, Salt Lake City, Rapid City, Reno, Boise, St George. If a city is not a requirement, the list is a lot longer.
Your mileage may vary depending on much or little you value things like remoteness, lack of traffic, mountains vs desert vs forest. Yes, if you're a hardcore mountaineer it might be tough to beat the north Cascades but for the rest of us there are a lot of good options.
A city's land is a scarce resource. It cannot just be doled out to anyone who "wants it". The whole problem of resource allocation is why we have capitalism in the first place.
Later in the article, the point is made that many young people move to the cities because they actually want to live there. I can see that: I would hate living in a suburb where the amenities are miles apart and nothing can be reached by foot or bike.
Detroit? Salt Lake City? El Paso? All I'm seeing is people demanding to be accommodated to live exactly where they want, even at the expense of the people who were there before they wanted to be there, even as there are plenty of viable options to go around.
But oh no, they don't have Seattle's views? Cry me a river.
Just curious what it is that you do in your day to day life that is so location dependent? I'm someone who enjoys a variety of activities including museums, fine dining, sporting events, kid-friendly activities like zoos, hiking, going to the beach, concerts, exploring interesting towns and cities, fishing, attending interesting lectures, woodworking, playing music, boating, golf . . . I think you get the idea. I've never had any problem doing or enjoying any of these activities during a lifetime spent in the Midwest and South. I can completely understand plenty of reasons why someone wouldn't want to live where I live: job, family, even weather (though I'm surprised how much quality of life people are willing to sacrifice for this one amenity), but "eeww, the rust belt" is a silly and insulting response.
I like mountain climbing, skiing, rock climbing, sea kayaking, hiking, snowshoeing, backpacking, mountain biking. Many of these things are only possible near mountains. I live in Boulder currently, but grew up north of Seattle, and it really does provide more variety in outdoor pursuits than just about anywhere.
Interesting. I can't hold it against someone for enjoying the area where they grew up. I know how it feels to have someone insult your hometown and wouldn't want to do that to anyone else. I've always enjoyed visiting the west coast.
If you ever find yourself in Northern Wisconsin, sea kayaking the Apostle Islands is pretty spectacular. Check out http://livingadventure.com/ for more info.
One other big reason: racial diversity. In much of the United States, the community is basically white race / white American culture by default, and people like me naturally end up being somewhat anomalous / outsiders.
In some places there is also racism to various extents, but even in the absence of racism, there is just a significant handicap to not being a member of the default group.
In contrast, I fit right at home in a cosmopolitan place like Silicon Valley where there isn't really a default culture. Of course, it's basically a global phenomenon that cosmpolitan cities tend to be far more expensive than the cities that more closely reflect the local culture.
This is an odd response to an article about housing costs in Seattle, one of the whitest big cities in the country in a state that is significantly whiter than my midwestern home state of Illinois. It's funny when I hear people who moved to the Pacific Northwest brag about the lack of black/white racial tension compared to much of the rest of the country. I always think it must be easy to not have racial tension when there's no black people. But of course it's the people in the middle of the country who are the real racists.
Well, Seattle isn't very strong in that regard either... It's where the Bay Area holds a distinct advantage. That said, Seattle still has a significantly larger fraction of Asians than any Midwestern or Southern city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_American...
Note that the proportion of blacks doesn't really contribute to a cosmopolitan city - it just means the city has two dominant native cultures instead of one.
I love the "American Nations" reference. I really enjoyed that book, though I don't remember it making any value judgements in regards to one region's culture being superior to another's. It mostly just presented a theory of why there is so much variation in regional cultures in the U.S. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't know what the hell you are talking about or understand how referencing that book proves the supposed superiority of west coast culture.
"Better" is highly subjective. Many people, myself included, find many aspects of west coast culture cloying and suffocating. Your values are not everyone's values.
The solution to expensive neighborhoods isn't destroying those neighborhoods with high density housing. Most humans don't want to live in hives.
The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts.
Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.
Not sure why you're getting down voted for this opinion. Living in a dense urban center like NYC is extremely stressful and unhealthy for some (most). It's baked into the human mind/body to need nature. To hear natural sounds like birds and creeks. Not garbage trucks and honking horns. I personally think that living in huge skyscrapers is detrimental to humanity because like you said, we are not insects.
That being said, it is definitely the direction we will need to head evolutionarily if we are going to survive and become a space-fairing species. All hail the borg I guess...
Several of those refer to redistribution of wealth. A Georgian LVT applies to high-cost, high-employment metropolises which have underprovisioned housing and exacerbated sprawl, but not really to low-cost, underperforming failed cities such as Detroit or Pittsburg.
Clarifying my question: how do you propose to create economic opportunities where housing is cheap but prospects are few, particularly as economic activity seems to want to concentrate.
I would distribute sovereignty more broadly, allow the smaller units of sovereignty to practice mercantilism to protect internal industries (i.e. productive capacity) and remove usury as the basis of the money supply to avoid wealth concentration in money centers.
Wealth redistribution is inevitable at this point, ideally in the form of debt jubilee but, given the political power of the banking class, more likely via something more chaotic.
I'd prefer dropping wealth distribution from the discussion and focus not because I disagree with it, but because 1. I'm already sold, 2. it's trivially implemented (technically if not politically), and 3. it tends, as evidenced here in another thread, to generate predictable and unproductive discussion.
Actually, I'll go a step or two further and suggest that a mix of rentier taxes (land and other monopolistic elements) and income supports (UBI, living minimum wage, additional targeted support as needed), workplace and labour protections, collective bargaining, are almost certainly required.
UBI without LVT merely pumps wages to landlords. Similar further arguments extend to otther elements above.
But that leaves us with the fundamental issue remaining: natural clustering tendencies of many economic activitties, particularly dematerialised ones ("informattion work") tend toward clusteering (where skills are scarce) or outsourcing to the lowest-wage centre (where skill is automated away). All other areas are effectively dead zones.
(In-person services, repair, and construction remain, but these are poorly-scaling, low-profit sectors.)
That's the dynamic I see as needing addressing. And UBI + LVT don't get you there, that I see.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
Check out this article. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/...
The idea that the "tech industry" created this problem is just plain nonsense. Sure, the tech industry attracts young folks to creative urban centers and pays them a bit of money. But their parents (my generation) gave them birth and gave them expectations of prosperity.It's selfish to then blame them for wanting to live where the good jobs are.
This problem was created by restrictive zoning. And it will be solved by changing zoning laws.
And the restrictive zoning laws come from people who say, "Oh no, those people moving into new apartments will crowd our schools and our streets. We can't have that!" Whose schools are they? Whose streets are they?
The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people." That's stupid. Affordable housing is good for everybody. The basic law of supply and demand teaches us that increasing the supply of housing will lower the price. To address homelessness, build homes.
Government (who exist to serve people) can start to approach this problem by partly assessing property based on nominal beds per square foot. Higher taxes on lower density housing will give an economic incentive to build more housing on existing land.
Powerful companies should unapologetically press politicians, hard, for changes to these NIMBY zoning rules.