As a center-right guy who loves reading your takes, I think the main factor that gets left out of urbanist/YIMBY/density discussions is schools. Realize this isn't the case for you, but I wonder if this is because a large number of self-described urbanists are young and don't have kids. Here's the issue I see:
People don't live in suburbs just because they enjoy backyards and don't like street noise (although those are real factors), but also because the schools are better. The are complicated reasons for this to be sure, but I can't think of a single metropolitan area where the public schools in the urban core compare favorably with those in middle/upper-middle class suburbs.
Even if you convinced people with kids that it was worth trading their yards, parks, and quiet streets for denser living situations, you'd need to make sure there was somewhere for them to send their kids to school. Sadly, this isn't just a funding issue. There's a death spiral issue wherein wealthier parents will not want to be the first one to send their kids to the local school, even if all of them doing so would make the school measurably better just from a student human capital perspective.
What you likely need to do is increase the number of magnet/charter schools that rely on testing for admissions to attract these parents back to downtown (and not private schools). Unfortunately, left-wing energy is very much in the opposite direction for equity reasons currently.
I really admire your efforts to make the case for density in the language of the right - I just think you'll need to have an answer on schools to make the argument more complete. I hope that's coming next!
" but also because the schools are better. The are complicated reasons for this to be sure, but I can't think of a single metropolitan area where the public schools in the urban core compare favorably with those in middle/upper-middle class suburbs."
The schools aren't better, the kids are better. Is Matt really smart because he went to Harvard or did he go to Harvard because he was really smart? I think we can all agree on the latter. I think everyone can accept that. But when it comes to public schools we think kids not doing well means the school is failing. It's typically doing a fine job with the raw material it has to work with.
In this case kids just a notch above the cutoff went to the highly regarded exam schools. Kids who just missed the cutoff went to the "urban public schools" that everyone is so afraid of. What was the result? Both sets of kids did equally well.
I was trying to make a similar point in a less normative way through the use of the word "human capital." Wouldn't want to open up a huge debate on a center-left page on nature/nurture. I'm bullish on the magnet school idea because I think it can help from a policy perspective. Even if the kids in urban public schools might do well, quality of life might be lower, and parents don't want to roll the dice on that.
I'm pro magnet school for the most part, but they aren't really a good option for most elementary school kids. For one thing, parents have to provide transportation each way or at least accompany them, because they're too little to take transit on their own for long distances. On the other hand, elementary schools are the easiest to quote-unquote/note-scare-quotes "turn around" - if you get a critical mass of young parents in one neighborhood, and they all agree to start putting their kindergarten-age kids in the neighborhood public school at once, then it can happen quickly. But it can be a challenge to get that critical mass.
This just tells us that kids on the cutoff margin do well (narrowly defined) in either environment. It says nothing about how well these schools will serve kids who are farther from the cutoff margin. Moreover, academics are not everything: you can be doing well academically and still be miserable in the wrong school. It's years out of a kid's life, it is an extremely important factor. As a parent, I'm not making a judgment for my kid based on what somebody thinks I ought to think. I'm going to judge for myself.
I’d be really interested in a replication in a generally less functional school district. Like would that hold up in Chicago, where the gap between e.g. Walter Payton and the average high school seems enormous?
The most straightforward way to make schools not an issue is to separate school funding from local property taxes and instead have schools funded solely from the central state treasury through a formula. (This doesn't mean abolish local school districts completely, just that they would no longer have independent income streams.) There is a cross-party coalition for this, as there's a constituency for this kind of centralization both in the cities and in rural areas. (In PA, at least, urban Democrats and rural Republicans both agree that there should be a formula, though they have never actually passed one because the Philly and Pittsburgh people say it should be purely by-head while the rural reps say it should factor in transportation costs. Naturally, the former favors dense districts and the latter favors more spread-out ones). The key step here, however isn't just having a formula, but also prohibiting local schools from taking any funding from outside the formula. Michigan tried to do this years ago, but had to let school districts retain some independent taxing power; as a result, the formula didn't make much difference to the school-quality gap. (I have a sketch of what this kind of system would look like in my thought-project for a new PA Constitution at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k27XaInKjjkOji1TG4AgwUzo9vo0r3rn/view?usp=sharing.)
Not sure I agree with this. It's not entirely a funding issue; it's also a composition of schools issue. One of the arguments the left uses against charters is that they take the smartest students away from traditional public schools. If you accept that line of reasoning, you accept that student human capital is a major driver of school quality (irrespective of funding levels).
In other words, suburbs will still be very attractive from a schools perspective even if they are mostly/entirely funded by state taxes vs property taxes. You need to do something about the school composition itself, not just the funding. That requires magnets/testing.
Definitely. Having my kid around other smart kids is something I moved for, and reversing that would be something I’d be skeptical about. Also I know our local schools have to cater to the demand of parents that are demanding, practical, and involved. I am sure funding is an issue but our local urban schools would need tremendous change to be acceptable to the suburban parents. Like the kind of change I pessimistically expect will never happen.
Yes but funding matters. As long as there is variation across communities you can effectively legislate that schools have the same composition of student, but you can legislate equality of funding. And there's just not a defensible reason why schools in adjacent districts have wide discrepancies in resources.
This is already done in Colorado and the dynamic between urban, rural, and suburban schools hasn't changed. The suburban districts are generally much better than urban and rural districts.
William Fischel says that this is what led to Prop 13 in California - once school districts couldn't hoard their own money, people did everything they could to starve the school system of their tax money.
Agree about schools, and also because the suburbs are the natural base of small-c conservatism. Not culture war "conservative" reactionaryism, but plain old traditional GOP conservatism, which is why Republicans used to dominate the suburbs from Eisenhower right through the first George Bush (both old-style Republican conservatives). I'd bet, in Pennsylvania, for example, that if the Republican party could lose its crazies, it would again make a strong showing in the Philadelphia suburbs which it used to own, as they are full of small-c NIMBY-style conservatives who just don't like the Republican reactionary culture war stuff.
My sense is that Matt doesn't want to convince anyone to live in any specific type of location. He primarily wants the rules to allow housing to be built in all the places so that people can find abundant housing wherever they choose to live. Better schools are good too, for their own sake. Or maybe I'm projecting my beliefs onto Matt. :-)
I'll give you one, the biggest school district in the country: New York City. Are there some bad schools in the city? Sure, but there are also a lot of good ones, aged I'm not talking about your Park Slopes. Scarsdale may be like a private school, but regular suburbs near the city? Schools are not as good as Central Brooklyn. How much of this is reality and how much is perception?
PS I am a regular (not charter, not magnet) public school parent in NYC who myself went to fancy CT public schools and I can give say my daughter is not missing out on anything I had (except a year without COVID)
I hope this sways some people, I really do. But I gotta say what I think is the case is that cultural conservatives hate cities qua cities because they think that living in cities causally makes people liberal.* And I suspect they're right! It's a different outlook on life when you're an atomized individual in a whole city of people from all over and can meet up in person with other people with your highly specific interests, instead of being a community member with a neatly defined place in a limited collective with shared cultural priors. And most Republicans seem to care much more about propping up their cultural traditions using state power than they care about the free market – consider Arkansas' attempt to ban meatless meat producers from using meat terminology in their product names. Less 'party of the free market', more 'vegetarianism is for sissies and we shouldn't encourage it'.
But today I was reminded of the poll finding that high-news-consumption partisan Democrats are worse at understanding Republicans than low-news-consumption Dems, so maybe I'm overstating the case. Plus I'm obviously biased here; I tried to phrase the above paragraph non-condescendingly but yeah if you put a gun to my head I'd admit I think cities are great and the higher proportion of humanity who lives in them the better. So it's not like I'm a dispassionate economist who's *not* doing cultural warfare, so maybe my pessimism about Republicans and their cultural views is motivated reasoning. But I'm still not holding my breath looking for YIMBY allies much further right than the Joe Straus/Chad Mayes school of Republicanism.
*an even less charitable view is conservatives hate cities because of the demographics of people who tend to live in cities, and I gotta say there's a fair amount of evidence that that's true of at least some conservatives.
The counterpoint to the belief that cities not only *attract* liberals but also help *generate* them (ie, help to convert people) is a belief that suburbs (as traditionally defined) help generate conservatives. The privileging of the family unit over the community, the need to maintain surface uniformity in appearance, the privileging of private transport over public, the encouragement of visible financial competition rather than a more amorphous cultural competition, etc etc.
Sorry, should have made clear the point of this comment: in my opinion, this is why people like Ring, if not Ring himself, are opposed to urban infill but want massive new suburbs.
Conversely I think the example of India gives us reason to be pessimistic (and, frankly, terrified) of any mass conversion to Matt’s viewpoint on the left — it’s entirely possible for large countries to deliberately impoverish multiple generations of their own citizens based on a cultural conviction that tall buildings are morally wrong, and I see that consensus getting stronger not weaker here in the US.
I love Matt's analyses of what makes good policy, but I feel like most of his political analyses go like this: "People who believe in small gov/deregulation should support XXXX. It seems so obvious. It's obviously good policy. I can't figure out why they don't like it . . . Also, people need to not talk about racism, which is just an uncomfortable distraction from figuring out why conservatives insist on disagreeing when it seems logical for them to agree . . ."
My main point is that most rank-and-file conservatives don't give a shit about the size of government. That's why I think attempts to win their votes by appealing to their articulated affinity for small gov/deregulation are doomed. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't try if they want to, just that I don't think it'll work.)
In answer to your direct questions, I think most people who call themselves conservative are motivated largely by attitudes toward race. That's not to say that they are all the same as Jim Crow, but I think the conservative movement is driven mostly by preferences for nonviolent racist policies.
I'm genuinely interested in how you come to hold that opinion so strongly. It's very far from my personal experience with the motivations of Republican voters. Granted I don't know a lot of people who've voted R their entire life, but I know a fair few who do now and the racism motivation doesn't really add up to me in those cases
I'm a brown guy who grew up in central Florida, spent a half-decade in southern Arizona, and almost a decade now outside of Atlanta. I married a white woman from small-town Alabama and visit her family often. I've lived and worked around purple- and red-state conservatives my whole life. I've played sports with them, worked with them, gotten drunk with them, and befriended several.
And there is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority of them absolutely do not give a shit about the size of government.
I think rank-and-file conservatives don't care about the size of government per se. Like, they might welcome a larger Medicare. I do think that there is a reasonable group of rank-and-file conservatives who don't like the government telling them what they can do on their land.
I would not expect conservatives to be receptive to any housing policy that they see as coming from non-conservatives. It's about the identity of the proposer, not the content of the proposal.
I think the solution is to attack conservative ideas (which are terrible) and the conservative movement (which is largely motivated by racism) so that they become unpalatable to people who don't already identify as conservative. I don't think trying to persuade people who are already conservative is achievable on a significant scale.
I very much thing this approach is what both sides have been doing for the last 10 years at least. Attacking the other parties ideas and movements so that they are unpalatable to people who don't identify as that already.
The results of that make me think that doubling down on that approach would be a mistake.
I do not think you are accurately characterizing the last ten years. About half of those were during an Obama administration who kept trying to negotiate with conservatives in good faith.
Many of the most popular attacks on Trump center around the claim that he is not a true conservative. I think this is unproductive and just hands conservatives the line they will need when it's finally time to rebrand after Trump.
A better strategy, in my opinion, is to characterize conservative values as Trump's values. One major benefit of this line of argument is that it's true.
I know that a lot of people think that, but Clinton and Obama did the opposite of what I'm suggesting, and they both turned 51% into 47% despite extremely positive real-world outcomes for most conservative voters.
I understand the desire to not rock the boat, but the evidence does not support what you suggest. It also doesn't support what you suggested in another comment above: "There’s an argument to be made that there would be less segregation and less racism today if angry and self-righteous liberals had just let well enough alone." This argument was made during the Civil Rights movement, and during every generation before the CR movement. Yet, progress was only made when people decided to refuse that argument and take direct action against racism.
Is your purpose here to argue that you are a genuine small-gov conservative who is persuaded by Matty Y's anti-regulation framing? And that I should be more willing to assign a not-racist benefit of the doubt to people who share your opinion?
If I understand you correctly (apologies if I do not), then my answer would be that I do not think you are representative of the vast majority of people who call themselves conservative.
I would say at best, it's race-correlative. The MAGA mindset (if that's a better term than "conservative populist") basically wants to keep the "wrong people" away from them, and feels entitled to it.
That can be racist in some situations; most of the time it's merely misanthropic.
For what it's worth, I believe the only time I have ever really convinced someone that they were "wrong on the internet" was in the comments somewhere, where an exurban or rural Republican clearly didn't understand the topic at hand but was spouting off about how cars and garages and single family homes should be required in all cities.
After trying with the tactic of saying, "no one is saying *you* shouldn't be able to build what you want and live where you want" she played dumb. But when I took another angle and basically asked, "Do you think that the government should be able to regulate what you do with your own property?" she completely flipped. The impulse to defend against government intrusion was stronger than the urge to troll.
I figured I would use illustrations today. (see links below) This is my backyard. It’s actually bigger than it looks here. If I could, I’d probably put up a small ADU, if for no other reason than to have a place for the constant influx of adult kids who rotate in and out of the house. 5 + 2 step. Don’t judge me.
California’s (or is it Washington’s) pro ADU law is one of the few liberal state laws I envy. There are a lot of these large or larger lots in Boise, and we have a severe housing shortage. They have tried to encourage more ADUs, but the issue is more HOAs than the city. We have to get permission and approval for what type of roof shingles to put on our houses.
Then again, I also own a small cabin in the middle of a old mining town in the middle of the Umatilla National Forest in Oregon. It’s actually classified as a ghost town (I will throw a link below as well). It’s pretty Wild West, with little building restrictions, but I would be pissed if someone put up a random apartment build there. (Not much chance of that though).
Anyway, on the to the YIMBY... affordability thing. From a borderline conservative point of view, one of the most irritating things about the political argument about infill and development, is the hypocrisy.
Matt used Palo Alto as an example, but a 3-million dollar home in Palo Alto is probably owned by a mid-level tech guy. The really rich people are going to live in places where the land is so controlled, they will always have power. No one is going to put up apartment buildings next door to the Mansions in the Hamptons or Malibu.
Anyway, I'm working at Brooklyn Navy Yard, and its amazing how many high rises are going up in this little area of Brooklyn right across from Manhattan. I was here two or three years ago, and I see multiple high rises going up. Pretty impressive. I really see no reason why Boise couldn't put up some taller downtown condos/apartments.
It's sort of crazy to me how Europe was able to organically build these dense livable and charming cities, but in the US, we struggle.
It helps that Europe built their cities organically before the car. If you accomodate cars in new construction, it makes it extremely hard to be livable, walkable and dense.
This is only partially true. Plenty of cities around the US existed before cars but then demolished large swathes of the city to make room for them, plenty of cities in Europe got blown to bits in WWII but built back with narrow streets and sensible grids or went back later and redesigned their spaces to be more pedestrian friendly.
But somehow most 19th century planning in the United States pre-built gigantic streets that turned out to be great for cars. Indianapolis and Salt Lake City, for instance, are both famous for their street grids that were designed to be large enough for two wagons to simultaneously turn around. I think Indianapolis has converted a lot of the lane space into a separated bike infrastructure in downtown, but Salt Lake City just has 8 lane streets or whatever.
We can still build good new towns and cities, they just have to be very careful about not being too accomodating to cars to the detriment of people. Narrow streets, minimal parking, mass transit included from the get-go.
Catering to the tiny fraction of Americans without cars is a bubble Europhile thing. As a bubble Europhile I sympathize, but the reality is that outside of a few cities in the US everyone who can afford a car has one because you need them to get to work.
I think it’s possible to build nice car-compatible suburbs—like British garden cities—but trying to replicate the Cotswolds in America isn’t realistic.
I really don't understand this point - no one's forcing folks to give up parking; these proposals largely involve scrapping state-mandated parking minimums & building restrictions. I'm genuinely curious why folks like you don't trust the market more to provide what folks actually want. This is one area where an overabundance of central (well, not so central) planning seems to be getting it wrong. What's wrong with a bit more laissez faire capitalism?
Bloomberg passed a major upzoning 10ish years ago, such is why you see all those towers going up. Pre COVID Brooklyn housing prices were starting to cool off. Zoning reform works, it just takes a while!
The North Enders are big YIMBYs... when it comes to other peoples neighborhoods. They love the homeless shelter moving further away from them by Coopers Court to Veterans Park.
We researched building an ADU for my mom in the yard. They were made illegal in my town in 2015. So we bought the twin we're attached to instead and there will be one less home on the market for the next two decades.
Anyone seen useful work articulating an alternative vision for zoning in the US? Matt, should advocates of reform push Abolish ICE-style absolutism on this—Abolish Zoning? Or is there a moderate approach that gets rid of the draconian prohibitions on multi family housing but keeps some perhaps necessary components around things like use types? Or maybe it’s the idea that states and regions should do all zoning and take authority away from localities? I’m intrigued by the idea of abolishing zoning but are there any models for pro-housing candidates or advocates to point to in articulating a more specific, achievable alternative?
I think the clearest wins have been repeated rounds of state legislation in California requiring cites to allow people to build ADUs on their property. Oregon also preempted single-family zoning in Portland recently. Washington DC is about to push a citywide land use reform through.
Unfortunately the rules themselves are very diverse so I don’t think there’s a single reform that applies everywhere. But the overarching principle is to try to get planning decisions made at a higher level — a state government typically — rather than by neighborhood groups.
California's laws do pre-empt HOAs for ADUs. Every single family house, including those in HOA areas, can have one detached ADU four feet or more from the side/rear property lines, and a second ADU in an unused space (like a garage) inside the house. Duplexes and other multifamily forms can also have ADUs.
From what I remember about property law and constitutional law, HOAs present a problem for state regulators. HOAs are generally established under covenants running with the land--i.e. they're creatures of contract between the homeowners, not government-created entities. (If you don't remember signing a contract to join your local HOA, it's because you didn't; since it "runs with the land", you agreed to the terms of the covenant just by taking title.) Under the Contract Clause of the Constitution, the states are prohibited from interfering with "the obligation of contracts," i.e. prevents/relieves people from carrying out their obligations under preexisting contracts. If a state (or even local) law comes down and says "HOAs are prohibited and all preexisting HOAs are dissolved," this will probably draw a Contract Clause challenge from some HOA. Now, I don't know if it will succeed--though given the conservative character of the current federal judiciary I wouldn't be surprised if it did--but the litigation risk alone is probably enough to discourage governments from trying.
(State governments would be on firmer ground prohibiting new HOAs from being established, since that doesn't interfere with an existing contract, but that wouldn't help with the issue of infill in existing neighborhoods.)
Contracts can't be binding if they require something illegal or against a compelling state interest. E.g. HOAs can't restrict buyers / sellers by race for example. I think you could make a strong argument that the state could overrule an HOA's rules around this as against a compelling state interest.
Alternatively, get the HOA to change it by setting a tax on any HOA that has such restrictions. Tell the HOA each homeowner is going to have to spend 10k a year to uphold it and I bet it is changed by the end of month in 90% of HOAs.
Here in Colorado state law trumps HOA covenants. Two quick examples are solar panels (HOA's can't prohibit them) and yards (HOA's can't prohibit xeriscaping).
Retrospective. The legislature is considering a bunch of changes to HOA's this year which would affect all of them. I'm not a lawyer and don't understand the contract clause Constitutional argument you're making, but no one here seems to believe that HOA's get any kind of exemption from state law - rather the opposite.
I think the "moderate approach" (at least in my book) is to set whatever regulations are desirable (on things like set back requirements, square footage minimums, height restrictions if any, and so on) at the state level and then abolish the "NIMBY veto" altogether. You could have different density "tiers" based on objective criteria (say, the existing population density of zip codes, or census tracts), but whatever would be allowable under the rules couldn't be shouted down by peeved, upper middle class homeowners worried about traffic or a change in the "character of the neighborhood."
In such a system there'd be a degree or order and predictability. But the arbitrariness and capriciousness that empowers the blockage of housing construction would be tamed.
I suggested this to the MO Dept of Economic Development Director. I was thereafter treated like a lunatic. Odd really, MO legislature happily removes local ability to regulate all the time. Trying now to create restrictions on what county officials can do in health emergencies.
Yeah, I think the most important major local reforms would be to the approval process – fewer public meetings, less of an opportunity for neuralgic neighbors to bog everything down.
Right. Maybe there by rights ought to be *some* regulations beyond basic public safety rules that can have the side effect of limiting the construction of new housing units, depending on specifics. So, say, a three acre parcel in an already dense, close-in suburb is greenlighted (by the master rules) for up to 300 units. And the same size parcel in farm country can only accommodate 60 units. And so on. Which would constitute a non-trivial concession to the restriction of house construction. But the key is, if a developer decides to build 60 units on the latter parcel, the local authority can't veto the project. The permitting process is default "shall issue."
As a developer, I can add that we'd very rarely want to overbuild that rural parcel. It's just cheaper to build less densely on inexpensive land. We go up when land prices require it.
I think there is so much variety in the built environment that a one-size fits all approach will not work. Moreover, in a big state the administrative burden of making such granular decisions far away from the source would become unmanageable. Better, I think, to put planning processes in place at the State level, that ensure that the local decisions are within the bounds of what is reasonable and lawful. Housing targets could be set through a State-approved local planning process (county or city, not town) and the rule could be something like “The plan says your zoning needs to accommodate at least x new housing units per year, and if it doesn’t, the State planning office won’t approve it and it won’t be effective.” In extreme cases, the State could impose a minimum regulatory plan, which the localities wouldn’t like: this would motivate them to do what they are supposed to do and not to try to do cute stuff to stretch the decision out.
This is true. People should visit Houston. Developers don't buy expensive land in upscale residential districts to put landfills and factories. You'll find some funny situations like that for historical reasons, but 98%+ of Houston has use mixes that accord with our sensibilities.
Then you'll see the two close to each other. Sometimes it's the housing that comes second because the land is so cheap in those locations. Note though that factories and housing for the poor are often in close proximity in the rest of the country.
There is a movement towards form-based zoning codes, which have the useful property of encouraging "missing-middle" housing (duplexed, four-flats, bungalow courts, garden apartments) in low-density urban residential neighborhoods, thus gradually densifying them without the specter of giant apartment buildings. They also eliminate parking mandates. You could achieve a doubling of densities by this means and greatly improve walkability while not at all impairing the residential and urban qualities that drew people to those places in the first place.
Localities only have such zoning and planning powers as the State chooses to delegate. I think the answer will lie in some combination of strategic State preemptions (i.e. eliminate single-family zoning) and broad-based State requirements or specifications for the use of localities, that would aim to ensure that the local zoning power gets used in a limited way and not as an exclusionary device.
I think a fundamental problem is that almost everyone is a closet NIMBY regardless of political leanings. And I'm hypocritical too - I like the principle of freer zoning but I bought my current house in large part for the view and would be pissed if zoning allowed construction of a high-rise that would block it.
And one also has to factor in the change in the value of a property, which can represent a homeowner's primary or only asset. People are naturally going to oppose a change that could lower the value of the property.
This is certainly true. People don't like to give up their entitlements and housing comes with a lot of entitlements, some of which are baked into the price and some of which aren't. Having a "view" is a big one. Nobody is willing to pay full price for it (i.e. buy the actual piece of land that is "the view" and maintain it undeveloped) but they still feel entitled to it and disgruntled when they lose it.
Same basic story for on-street parking and fears about losing it due to denser development and probably lots of other examples I can't think of right now.
While I'm basically YIMBY, it is also hard to square YIMBY with the reality that we're asking people to take on a 30-year investment (their mortgage) but also saying everything about that investment can change dramatically over that period.
We know that businesses don't like instability and that's with investments over much, much shorter time periods. So little surprise that there's a temporal mismatch between 30-year mortgages and "but we want to change the neighborhood over time periods of less than 30 years".
It's a bit like encouraging people to take on massive educational debt on the order of magnitude of medical school in order to join a career that may get offshored or replaced by robots in just the next 10 years.
“The next big fights may be about whether we can build tacky subdivisions near what are today’s cute historic small towns. Or it might be tall apartments right by the beach“
While I’m broadly supportive of YIMBYism, I’m curious - is Matt’s position that we should go ahead and let rip with all of the above? And pave paradise and put up a parking lot while we’re at it?
Is there nothing at all that should stand in the way of developers building as much housing of any type in any location that they can sell it, even at the cost of completely ruining the joint for the existing residents?
If there is land that we don’t want developed, I think the public sector should spend the money necessary to acquire it and turn it into a park. If it’s genuinely “paradise” make it publicly owned and accessible to the public.
But if it’s private land for private use then, yeah, put up a parking lot.
The fact that that song keeps getting brought up in this discussions is always ironic since parking lots are exactly what we’re trying to _avoid_ having to build.
Yeah, which is a point that Matt tries very hard to avoid, to the detriment of his argument IMHO. Zoning being part of the culture war is pretty much inevitable, because conservatism is so culturally identified with single-family suburbia and car culture. Talking about construction jobs isn't going to change that.
Sometimes I kind of think a practical political concession that YIMBYs ought to consider is mandating one big multistory parking garage (with ground floor retail) in every neighborhood, with subsidized rates for preexisting residents. You mollify them by saying you can still have a car, and you can store it there, and while it won't be attached to your house it'll at least be within a few blocks. In exchange, you get to have unshackled upzoning in the rest of the neighborhood.
If you own the property rights on your land, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. This is moral from an individual rights' and will lead to better utilitarian outcomes in the aggregate (more places for us to go on beach vacations, for example).
The losers from this proposal are those who are already living in $3 million Palo Alto homes or already have secluded beachfront property. Not sure why we have to bend the laws in their favor though.
And the 3 million dollar Palo Alto home is only 3 million dollars because nobody can build new homes in Palo Alto. Those homes would drop to 1 million (but probably never down to $300k) if construction was allowed to attempt to meet demand.
Tokyo is an example of a city that largely follows this playbook.
It does indeed have cheap, liveable housing and the odd very interesting piece of residential architecture, but on the whole it is an astoundingly ugly place despite its wealth.
So seriously here: what’s your aesthetic prescription for Japan? They have 126 million humans and roughly the land area of California. If you’re worried about paving paradise, I can’t think of any surer way to make it happen than to restrict infill development in Tokyo. That seems worth putting up with a few undistinguished buildings for.
Japan also has some incredibly beautiful natural vistas, which are easily reachable by rail and/or bus from Tokyo, as well as some substantial parks/gardens inside the Tokyo metro. Suggesting that Tokyo as a whole is "ugly", and suggesting the solution is more places built to look like Levittown, seems completely bananas. Suburban yards are fine -- I grew up in a house with a good-sized yard, and I spent plenty of afternoons running around in it -- but they're neither beautiful in the manner of a manicured garden, nor in the manner of a natural wonder like Muir Woods. I don't have (or want) kids myself, but I've babysat friends' kids and if you're walking distance from a place like Golden Gate Park, honestly I don't think you're missing out on much by not having a personal yard. You can run around and play with your friends just as much there as you would've in a yard.
Exactly. Absent a one-child policy and immigration restrictions (both of which are anathema to me), we can only build up, or out. Allow both up and out, but especially Up.
Tokyo rules! Also I just cannot believe that, given the incredible scope and scale of the housing crisis and all its manifold miseries, that we would hesitate to solve it due to....some people’s aesthetic sensibilities?!
“We were gonna build an army base to invade Normandy and win WW2, but the design was just too ugly. Sorry, France, D-Day is canceled.”
If Tokyo is the end result, then let’s go ahead. For an apples to apples comparison, it beats New York hands down as a pleasant place to visit. Not to mention the cultural imagination where West Side Story emphatically uses Manhattan as an astoundingly ugly background.
Most importantly, no one *has* to live in either. If someone likes rural environment and a lawn, the rest of the respective country is nearby (a convenient and fast train ride in case of Japan ;)
When you say “ugly” here are you just talking about the skyline? Fair enough but how much quality of life is that worth? Tokyo is a premier, world-class city in every way that counts—people want to live there, companies want to operate there, tourists want to visit and they have a great time when they do. I’d love to go back.
I love Tokyo, and Seoul. Both these cities are just full of identikit buildings that were built on the wreckage of war to fulfill the housing needs of huge and growing populations.
Like if you contrast them even in their own country with Kyoto and Busan they're much less old and full of old art and stuff like that.
Of the first-rank global cities I have visited, I agree that Tokyo is probably the most liveable in many ways. But the vast majority of building stock was just thrown up with little to no consideration of its aesthetic qualities. And their small-scale public spaces are pretty perfunctory - Tokyo kids playgrounds are just dismal.
I’m not opposed to density, and medium and high-density neighbourhoods can be made to be attractive. There’s plenty of medium-density cities in Europe that are beautiful - including in Germany, where much of it had to be rebuilt the same way that Tokyo did. But it seems like Japan, and particularly Tokyo, just doesn’t care about what its housing stock looks like from the outside, and I personally would resent my neighbourhood looking like a Tokyo suburb.
To summarise, increased density isn’t a problem in most places, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want it to be done in a way that makes some consideration of what it looks like from the outside. Ana’s there are places where high-rise development can ruin the environmental qualities hat makes the place so attractive in the first place (eg by the goddamn beach).
I'm not sure how widely your view of Tokyo's aesthetics is shared, and even if it were, I personally would absolutely choose a world of identical Soviet-style housing blocks if it meant no one went homeless or rent-burdened. After all, beauty in one's physical surroundings is only partly governed by public decisionmaking; when people have cheap, stable housing, it's easier for them to invest in interior design, a form of beauty you're liable to miss just looking from the street.
I don't know how much of the Tokyo playbook is applicable since you know it was all burnt to the ground. Kyoto is pretty noticeably less dense, and much more beautiful than other Japanese cities and it was spared the worst of the firebombing.
It’s not strictly residential development, but I would argue that Niagara Falls is one such example.
Surfers Paradise, Australia is another, though luckily there are hundreds of miles of equally nice beaches without the skyscrapers directly to the south.
I assume you mean the city on the Canadian side of the falls ruins it? I have to disagree, honestly I think it adds to the experience since you get to see how puny the buildings are compared to the falls. The falls are so massive and awe-inspiring that there's really nothing you could do to make the experience less majestic.
I'd also add that Niagara Falls on the US side really falls into the 'make it a park if it's really a treasure' group Matt mentions. The push for Yosemite or Yellowstone (can't remember which) was partly driven by not wanting it to become chintzy like Niagara, which had all sorts of vendors getting in the way of the views.
The important thing is for the buildings to look the same, even if everybody who lives in them was priced out and replaced by early-30s strivers decades ago.
The reasons for the original zoning rules were mainly things like, don't put a toxic chemical factory or slaughterhouse next to a school. Planning was mostly about planning roads and infrastructure to accommodate dense new housing (which doesn't necessarily mean high rises!). Neither of these things are what drive the practice today.
This simply is not true. The model zoning and planning enabling legislation (in the 1920's) envisioned different types and levels of residence districts. Here is a description of the zoning code of Euclid, Ohio, known for being the test case of the legality of zoning, adopted under that enabling legislation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/272/365
"Let's not make this the next culture war frontier"
Well, that should ensure that it will turn into a front in the culture war. You might as well wave a red cape at a bull.
You talk as though there are people of good faith on the other side of this debate. And in the faculty lounge of YIMBY/NIMBY think-tanks, there may be some.
But at the Fox News level of national politics, culture war is all they've got, and they are always looking to open a new front.
So, thanks for showing them where to find it! Soon, the Trumpist wannabes will be echoing his scare-mongering about the destruction of the suburbs. It won't matter whether it's true, or what policy they're attacking. All they need to know is that people like you are for it. For Tucker and little Mario and Ron the Florida man, that's reason enough to be against it.
I think there really is an "own the libs" culture war opportunity on zoning that conservatives can and should exploit. Like, shitty homes in Palo Alto cost millions of dollars while objectively nicer homes in the suburbs of Dallas cost a small fraction of that. Make high home prices due to zoning an example of liberal mismanagement (similar to how conservatives point to urban crime rates as an example of liberal mismanagement) and maybe we can get a groundswell of GOP leaders to culture war on the right side of this issue.
What we can't do is culture war on zoning from the left. "We need to reform zoning as a form of reparations and so we can ban cars" will just harden the GOP against us.
My sense is the MAGA right is steadily moving into the NIMBY camp. It simply makes political sense for them to do so. In broad swaths of the red state heartland, housing scarcity isn't much of an issue (affordability often is, but in rural areas that tends to be a low wage phenomenon from what I can see), so, in such areas pro NIMBY politicians pay no price for encouraging policies that intensity housing scarcity. And in the suburban battlegrounds where MAGA is more endangered (and where there's also opportunity for them), I believe they feel -- probably rightly -- that the political calculus ultimately comes down in favor of NIMBYism: restricting the rights of property owners is sadly still very popular among risk-averse middle class voters! Maybe that's changing -- anecdotally it does appear a lot of millennials and Gen Zers support the YIMBY case. But if there's one thing we can usually count on GOP politicians to do, it's to maximize *current* demographic strength and avoid spending much time worrying about where future votes will come from. Plus, let's face it, immigration is highly unpopular among many/most MAGA supporters, and lots of these people (perhaps accurately) conclude that liberalized house-building regulations are necessary to accommodate larger immigration inflows (certainly that's a big part of the reason conservatives like Tucker Carlson are hostile to house construction deregulation).
I agree "the people" aren't thinking about it this way. But I believe it's highly likely the the Tucker Carlsons of the world are aware many of the folks pushing for YIMBY also want higher immigration. And the former mold opinion on the right, which trickles down to "the people" (even if the underlying reasons for the policy position are obfuscated).
I think perhaps we're talking past each other. It's true liberals aren't about to stop pushing for more immigration if house construction rules aren't eased. It's also true Tucker Carlson knows this. But I think the two policies (immigration reform and house construction reform) are legitimately related as part of a more or less "progressive pro growth agenda." And I believe Tucker Carlson (and others of his ideological bent) are aware of this. That's part (not the sole reason, perhaps, but "part") of why Carlson and a growing number of people on the right have taken up the banner of NIMBY. I mean, the "natural" position of the right wrt house building rules would surely be the pro-property rights position. (And there's also little doubt that many of the most restrictive house building policies in America have been championed by affluent liberals). So why not oppose land use restrictions when you're, you know, a member of the party that has traditionally favored economic libertarianism (and also a member of the party that likes to stick it to snooty liberals)?
Well, the answer to that question, I would suggest, is that making housing more affordable makes a robust, pro-immigration policy work better, and renders it (overall) more feasible, and more politically plausible. Support for generous immigration inflows is liable to be easier to find when we're not all fighting over scare housing units!
The populist, MAGA right in America is an increasingly, explicitly isolationist, xenophobic, culturally paranoid political faction that opposes progress, change and growth of any kind.
Well, it's a smart strategy for conservatives/Republicans to drive a wedge between house owners and Democratic politicians. They don't necessarily have to be racists (?) to promote NIMBY policies; they just want to be able to strip Democratic voters from that party.
Not clear to me how you separate the issues of scarcity and affordability...they seem like two sides of the same coin. In many midwestern cities, housing prices are up sharply while wages are not, and affordability is a growing problem in cities in which many coastal people would be shocked at how "low" housing prices are. Truly rural areas and exurbs might be another matter. But low-income folks are being squeezed pretty hard in the cities.
I agree that making this a leftist culture war will radicalize Republicans, but we're still trying to convince local Dem primary voters and officeholders in big cities! (Banning cars is probably still a nonstarter with them though... ah well, give it time) I think the racial justice aspect is still really important for winning over city councils and blue-state legislatures, and we shouldn't give up on meaningful reforms from those quarters.
The big issue here is the new Democrat Coalition is more and more made up of the middle class white suburban voters... and I just don't see them embracing YIMBY-ism on a large scale.
Yep, which is why Trump saw it as a great wedge issue in the last campaign. Many people just didn't buy his "Cory Booker is trying to destroy the suburbs" talking point because it sounded so ridiculous and far-fetched, but as more laws are proposed to remove local controls in various states I wonder if this will continue to be true. First place to pay attention is the California suburban congressional districts that have been swinging recently between the parties (say, CA-25, CA-45, CA-48, etc.)--wonder if land-use preemption laws championed by Dems in Sacramento will start to play more of an issue in these campaigns and hurt Democrats in these Congressional races.
Well, I think that people pick up on the culture war aspect of this on their own. If the reforms are top-down and driven by obviously progressive groups (and to some extent anti-racist groups), the opposition is going to grow organically. May be better to try to put together a broader coalition to drive the state-wide changes, if possible.
I live in a county in the Philly suburbs and I was not prepared for how much these people care about empty fields. I grew up in NJ and every square inch of space is built on already so I didn't really have exposure to empty field politics, only apartment politics. But it seems like in PA they build a development in a totally empty field and everyone that moves in will oppose any development in the empty field next to them.
Everything is very local in terms of what people care about. Most of the new homes built I see are actually row homes, they are giant humongous row homes, but they are not detached. It's weird what people care about. I live in an old steel town on the river with twins with no front lawns and every single house here would be illegal to build under the recent Village Preservation District zoning we are now in. We're literally just down the street from the empty field housing politics and we have parking politics for our zoning fights since there are no driveways and the lots are tiny.
What you describe is human nature. Existing homeowners understandably perceive very little benefit from more houses. In general, construction puts downward pressure on their most valuable asset. And increases the length of their commute. And yes, might mar their view, or increase the chances they'll be awakened on a Saturday morning by a leaf blower. I'm quite convinced homo sapiens is evolutionarily hardwired to oppose the use of scare recourse (such as land on which to live) by others.
For this reason I tend to think we'll see major, root and branch deregulation of house construction in America only when home ownership in some state falls well below 50%, and it therefore becomes crystal clear to a majority of voters that the status quo hurts them. I'd guess California gets their first.
Efforts to change policy at the federal and state levels are good and necessary, but one thing I (maybe half-jokingly) think YIMBYs ought to do is treat suburban balkanization as an opportunity and not just a challenge, by choosing one or two or three "YIMBYtowns" in every high-cost metro, moving in, taking over, and changing the rules about the physical environment. Sort of like what some immigrant groups have done (Armenians in Glendale CA, Filipinos in Daly City CA, Koreans in Palisades Park NJ, Indians in Edison NJ, etc). It won't solve the problem alone, but if you turn, say, Hayward CA into Hong Kong on the East Bay *and it's nice*, then it'll be helpful as a proof of concept that dense, upzoned communities are nothing to fear.
That's a good idea. In fact, getting a bunch of modest single family homes rezoned to allow apartment towers in the right locations could also be economically rewarding. Developers would normally be afraid to try to assemble the land due to the problems caused by a couple of holdouts.
Thanks. Thinking about this some more, I guess you'd want to pick towns that aren't too big (less than 100k pop?), aren't so rich that people can't afford to move there (less than 80k median household income?), aren't so poor that moving there would be seen as "gentrification", are middle-of-the-pack for ethnic diversity, and have good transit access into the city. Maybe places like San Leandro CA or New Rochelle NY?
I always wonder how no conservative state government has enacted some sort of "right-to-build" law on urban areas in their state to own the libs. That seems like a win-win from a jobs and culture war perspective.
MA sort of did with Chapter 40b in the 70s. If don't go far enough to preserve affordability in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, but a HUGE percentage of the market rate housing in Eastern Massachusetts was built because of this bill.
On the subject of weekend villas and country homes becoming suburbs, the first commuter rail service was basically on the Boston & Albany (today's MBTA Framingham/Worcester line) when they started offering commutated tickets (effectively monthly passes) so the wealthy in Boston could freely go to their country homes in Auburndale.
In some sense it was the mid-19th century version of a frequent flyer program.
This is yet another fake conservative argument that masquerades as principled but really gives them disproportionate power. If by some miracle Democrats can overcome the numerous veto points and Conservative bias of the US political system, they should do so.
It's also been used to defend and uphold many of the most shameful policies in US history, including slavery, Jim Crow, and more recently LGBT discrimination.
"...fake conservative argument that masquerades as principled..."
It is not fake at all. It is literally how the country was set up from the beginning. And although federalism may have served in a small way in protecting the institution of slavery, that in no way indicates that every arrangement protected by federalism is bad, let alone as evil as slavery.
I am far more concerned about aggressively progressive (or aggressively conservative for that matter) policies being shoved down the throats of resistant states than I am local residents upset about state law.
Why? All the argument for federalism apply much better to cities than they do to states. "New York City" has a much better claim to being a coherent community of interest with shared values and identity than "New York State" does. People who live in New York City are more likely to know about the problems of the city than people in Albany (and for that matter, people upstate are more likely to know the problems of upstate).
I'm entranced by the Russian doll aspect of this argument. And what about the boroughs? Don't they know better than the dead hand of the city government behemoth? And let's not get started on how out of touch borough bureaucrats are about what's going on in the neighborhoods.
I'm reminded by a funny (if profane) military comic I saw years ago. You have to know that "REMF" stands for "rear echelon motherf**kers" (don't know the profanity etiquette here). It shows two soldiers on the very front line miserably crouching in a rain-filled foxhole and one bitterly says to the other, "Man, those REMFs back at platoon don't know shit."
The “REMFs back at platoon” includes, for example, the RTO, who carries more weight than any man in the platoon and is uniquely critical for the platoons’s success. (He’s the guy who can get mortar or artillery fire, or close air support.) A smart platoon leader babies his RTO when the situation allows. A smart platoon leader also cross-trains other members of the platoon not only to spread the knowledge and identify talent, but to show the rest of the privates how hard the job is.
Shockingly, I'm on Ken in MIA's side this time. Matt's argument that zoning reform is "consistent" with conservative populism is possibly correct and totally irrelevant. The best strategy in the Game of Politics is use wedge issues to divide your opposition's base. Defending SFH zoning in cities and suburbs while the Democrats push these policies loathed by many SFH owners (and current or potential Democratic voters) is a surefire way to cause turmoil in Democratic politics and strengthen Republicans.
The very last thing Democrats should do is try to make this a national issue. Let states like California fight this out on their own.
The SALT deduction is one way this is a national issue though. Places with more expensive housing have high local taxes and so benefit more from a federal SALT deduction. So one way to look at the SALT fight is high-cost coastal states are demanding that other states subsidize their NIMBY ways.
"...high-cost coastal states are demanding that other states subsidize their NIMBY ways."
If red states want to pick a quarrel with NY and CA about who is subsidizing whom, then they will lose that fight. We've been subsidizing them since they were territories.
Though kinda weak tea compared to changing eligibility for what can be built next to your house. You'll note that e.g. California representatives have been very quiet on changing the SALT deduction (it's a Northeast thing for some reason). In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a nice compromise in which the limit was raised to $15K and everyone is basically pretty happy and the controversy goes away.
I think a fair amount of opposition to suburban style zoning also comes from climate change. A large suburban home and a commute in a luxury suv are not very environmentally friendly. Lawns are water intensive and sustaining an aesthetic monoculture means fertilizers. Large homes are expensive to heat and cool and the electricity is not yet primarily renewables. Most vehicles are not yet electric or hybrid. Few mid/outer suburbs have quality public transit.
It’s not that I disagree with zoning deregulation, but I don’t think one key component of the left opposition is represented in the article.
The world would be in much better shape if there was a debate between the right-wing position (free market development, being allowed to build anything you want on your own property) and the left-wing position (density minimums and public housing). Instead, both camps double down on NIMBYism for their own reasons.
Most of southern San Francisco Bay is shallower than a public swimming pool. It could easily be reclaimed and given over to affordable housing. The shorter commutes would reduce carbon emissions. Everyone would win, at the expense of some brackish water and the fish who inhabit it. Why aren’t these kinds of solutions on the table?
I’m not an engineer, but real world engineers drafted plans to expand the SFO airport into the bay. Obviously, the loads imposed by landing planes traveling 160mph are at least comparable to garden or mid rise apartments.
The objections to this expansion were environmental, not safety based.
There's the additional advantage that the bay has no existing NIMBY residents. You can zone what used to be an area of open water any way you like. If people don't want to live there, they don't have to.
Because they’re about a million times more expensive than just letting people build fourplexes, townhouses and apartment buildings on the west side of San Francisco or anywhere in Palo Alto?
The technology necessary to make housing abundant in the Bay Area is decades to centuries old, cheap and well-understood. It’s just illegal.
They have been doing this kind of reclamation + desalination for centuries, and it's kind of awesome.
Applying the model to the south bay would be politically a heavy lift, but a great idea. And Otis already gave us the theme song -- "sittin on a dock of the bay, watchin the sod roll away."
Tokyo has tons of stuff built on landfill in what was Tokyo Bay.
Why do people so often make glib dismissals without considering whether there's anywhere else in the entire planet that invalidates the point they think they are making?
Landfill liquefies during earthquakes. What do they do in Japan to prevent that? Is there some form of engineering that we're not using in the United States? Or do the buildings just fall down and get rebuilt?
You seem to been overestimating how much liquifaction actually occurs as well as how damaging liquifaction is. There are also differences between soil liquifaction and surface liquifaction.
It is pretty easy to Google up lots of stuff about the 2011 Tokyo earthquake (9.0) and see the relatively minor impact on things like Disney World that are entirely built on landfill.
This is interesting. See this as an opportunity for education. What are the differences between soil liquefaction and surface liquefaction, that you are thinking of, that make a difference in the better performance of Japan's experience?
Exactly. The posh San Francisco Marina district was built on a landfill. That liquified nicely during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Not the place you wanted to be on that day.
I can't speak to the merits of this idea (it sounds environmentally dodgy to me, tbh, but I could be wrong!). But in any event the easier fix by rights out to be simply changing the law so it's no longer illegal in so many cases to build homes for people to live in.
The same people who oppose up zoning Palo Alto would hate this proposal and the people in favor of upzoning Palo Alto would be less likely to support.
Opposition to upzoning in the Bay Area or LA is primarily driven by people who want a population cap. Jeremiah Moss, a NYC NIMBY, is to his credit honest about his view. In a New York interview they asked him how NYC can accomodate more people: I don’t want to accommodate more people. There are too many . . . people here already."
I think the explicit proposal then was a dam at the Golden Gate, landfill of a large chunk of the bay for housing and industrial development (as well as expansion of the airports), and the remaining water converted into a freshwater reservoir so they wouldn't have to keep depending on Hetch-Hetchy.
They determined the net result would be a disaster, even long before the idea that wetland and riparian ecosystems are fragile and rare, and before the idea that extinction of species mattered.
I don't recall exactly what the disaster was that they predicted - I think it was something like either the land or the water becoming unstable as the rivers kept flowing and the hydrology was only temporarily changed. But it provided a good case study in philosophy of science for understanding models and how they help us think about the world - models aren't just computers and mathematics, but sometimes also a physical scale model of the San Francisco Bay that you can still go visit if you go to Sausalito!
As a center-right guy who loves reading your takes, I think the main factor that gets left out of urbanist/YIMBY/density discussions is schools. Realize this isn't the case for you, but I wonder if this is because a large number of self-described urbanists are young and don't have kids. Here's the issue I see:
People don't live in suburbs just because they enjoy backyards and don't like street noise (although those are real factors), but also because the schools are better. The are complicated reasons for this to be sure, but I can't think of a single metropolitan area where the public schools in the urban core compare favorably with those in middle/upper-middle class suburbs.
Even if you convinced people with kids that it was worth trading their yards, parks, and quiet streets for denser living situations, you'd need to make sure there was somewhere for them to send their kids to school. Sadly, this isn't just a funding issue. There's a death spiral issue wherein wealthier parents will not want to be the first one to send their kids to the local school, even if all of them doing so would make the school measurably better just from a student human capital perspective.
What you likely need to do is increase the number of magnet/charter schools that rely on testing for admissions to attract these parents back to downtown (and not private schools). Unfortunately, left-wing energy is very much in the opposite direction for equity reasons currently.
I really admire your efforts to make the case for density in the language of the right - I just think you'll need to have an answer on schools to make the argument more complete. I hope that's coming next!
" but also because the schools are better. The are complicated reasons for this to be sure, but I can't think of a single metropolitan area where the public schools in the urban core compare favorably with those in middle/upper-middle class suburbs."
The schools aren't better, the kids are better. Is Matt really smart because he went to Harvard or did he go to Harvard because he was really smart? I think we can all agree on the latter. I think everyone can accept that. But when it comes to public schools we think kids not doing well means the school is failing. It's typically doing a fine job with the raw material it has to work with.
As an example:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/evidence-on-new-york-city-and-boston-exam-schools/
In this case kids just a notch above the cutoff went to the highly regarded exam schools. Kids who just missed the cutoff went to the "urban public schools" that everyone is so afraid of. What was the result? Both sets of kids did equally well.
I was trying to make a similar point in a less normative way through the use of the word "human capital." Wouldn't want to open up a huge debate on a center-left page on nature/nurture. I'm bullish on the magnet school idea because I think it can help from a policy perspective. Even if the kids in urban public schools might do well, quality of life might be lower, and parents don't want to roll the dice on that.
I'm pro magnet school for the most part, but they aren't really a good option for most elementary school kids. For one thing, parents have to provide transportation each way or at least accompany them, because they're too little to take transit on their own for long distances. On the other hand, elementary schools are the easiest to quote-unquote/note-scare-quotes "turn around" - if you get a critical mass of young parents in one neighborhood, and they all agree to start putting their kindergarten-age kids in the neighborhood public school at once, then it can happen quickly. But it can be a challenge to get that critical mass.
This just tells us that kids on the cutoff margin do well (narrowly defined) in either environment. It says nothing about how well these schools will serve kids who are farther from the cutoff margin. Moreover, academics are not everything: you can be doing well academically and still be miserable in the wrong school. It's years out of a kid's life, it is an extremely important factor. As a parent, I'm not making a judgment for my kid based on what somebody thinks I ought to think. I'm going to judge for myself.
I’d be really interested in a replication in a generally less functional school district. Like would that hold up in Chicago, where the gap between e.g. Walter Payton and the average high school seems enormous?
This is a red herring argument, though, if it's being used to oppose actually equalizing school funding.
The most straightforward way to make schools not an issue is to separate school funding from local property taxes and instead have schools funded solely from the central state treasury through a formula. (This doesn't mean abolish local school districts completely, just that they would no longer have independent income streams.) There is a cross-party coalition for this, as there's a constituency for this kind of centralization both in the cities and in rural areas. (In PA, at least, urban Democrats and rural Republicans both agree that there should be a formula, though they have never actually passed one because the Philly and Pittsburgh people say it should be purely by-head while the rural reps say it should factor in transportation costs. Naturally, the former favors dense districts and the latter favors more spread-out ones). The key step here, however isn't just having a formula, but also prohibiting local schools from taking any funding from outside the formula. Michigan tried to do this years ago, but had to let school districts retain some independent taxing power; as a result, the formula didn't make much difference to the school-quality gap. (I have a sketch of what this kind of system would look like in my thought-project for a new PA Constitution at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k27XaInKjjkOji1TG4AgwUzo9vo0r3rn/view?usp=sharing.)
Not sure I agree with this. It's not entirely a funding issue; it's also a composition of schools issue. One of the arguments the left uses against charters is that they take the smartest students away from traditional public schools. If you accept that line of reasoning, you accept that student human capital is a major driver of school quality (irrespective of funding levels).
In other words, suburbs will still be very attractive from a schools perspective even if they are mostly/entirely funded by state taxes vs property taxes. You need to do something about the school composition itself, not just the funding. That requires magnets/testing.
Definitely. Having my kid around other smart kids is something I moved for, and reversing that would be something I’d be skeptical about. Also I know our local schools have to cater to the demand of parents that are demanding, practical, and involved. I am sure funding is an issue but our local urban schools would need tremendous change to be acceptable to the suburban parents. Like the kind of change I pessimistically expect will never happen.
Yes but funding matters. As long as there is variation across communities you can effectively legislate that schools have the same composition of student, but you can legislate equality of funding. And there's just not a defensible reason why schools in adjacent districts have wide discrepancies in resources.
This is already done in Colorado and the dynamic between urban, rural, and suburban schools hasn't changed. The suburban districts are generally much better than urban and rural districts.
William Fischel says that this is what led to Prop 13 in California - once school districts couldn't hoard their own money, people did everything they could to starve the school system of their tax money.
Agree about schools, and also because the suburbs are the natural base of small-c conservatism. Not culture war "conservative" reactionaryism, but plain old traditional GOP conservatism, which is why Republicans used to dominate the suburbs from Eisenhower right through the first George Bush (both old-style Republican conservatives). I'd bet, in Pennsylvania, for example, that if the Republican party could lose its crazies, it would again make a strong showing in the Philadelphia suburbs which it used to own, as they are full of small-c NIMBY-style conservatives who just don't like the Republican reactionary culture war stuff.
My sense is that Matt doesn't want to convince anyone to live in any specific type of location. He primarily wants the rules to allow housing to be built in all the places so that people can find abundant housing wherever they choose to live. Better schools are good too, for their own sake. Or maybe I'm projecting my beliefs onto Matt. :-)
I'll give you one, the biggest school district in the country: New York City. Are there some bad schools in the city? Sure, but there are also a lot of good ones, aged I'm not talking about your Park Slopes. Scarsdale may be like a private school, but regular suburbs near the city? Schools are not as good as Central Brooklyn. How much of this is reality and how much is perception?
And to Cobra's point, how much is the lack of poverty/wealth of the parents? (See: Scarsdale)
PS I am a regular (not charter, not magnet) public school parent in NYC who myself went to fancy CT public schools and I can give say my daughter is not missing out on anything I had (except a year without COVID)
I hope this sways some people, I really do. But I gotta say what I think is the case is that cultural conservatives hate cities qua cities because they think that living in cities causally makes people liberal.* And I suspect they're right! It's a different outlook on life when you're an atomized individual in a whole city of people from all over and can meet up in person with other people with your highly specific interests, instead of being a community member with a neatly defined place in a limited collective with shared cultural priors. And most Republicans seem to care much more about propping up their cultural traditions using state power than they care about the free market – consider Arkansas' attempt to ban meatless meat producers from using meat terminology in their product names. Less 'party of the free market', more 'vegetarianism is for sissies and we shouldn't encourage it'.
But today I was reminded of the poll finding that high-news-consumption partisan Democrats are worse at understanding Republicans than low-news-consumption Dems, so maybe I'm overstating the case. Plus I'm obviously biased here; I tried to phrase the above paragraph non-condescendingly but yeah if you put a gun to my head I'd admit I think cities are great and the higher proportion of humanity who lives in them the better. So it's not like I'm a dispassionate economist who's *not* doing cultural warfare, so maybe my pessimism about Republicans and their cultural views is motivated reasoning. But I'm still not holding my breath looking for YIMBY allies much further right than the Joe Straus/Chad Mayes school of Republicanism.
*an even less charitable view is conservatives hate cities because of the demographics of people who tend to live in cities, and I gotta say there's a fair amount of evidence that that's true of at least some conservatives.
Good post, and I completely agree.
The counterpoint to the belief that cities not only *attract* liberals but also help *generate* them (ie, help to convert people) is a belief that suburbs (as traditionally defined) help generate conservatives. The privileging of the family unit over the community, the need to maintain surface uniformity in appearance, the privileging of private transport over public, the encouragement of visible financial competition rather than a more amorphous cultural competition, etc etc.
Sorry, should have made clear the point of this comment: in my opinion, this is why people like Ring, if not Ring himself, are opposed to urban infill but want massive new suburbs.
Conversely I think the example of India gives us reason to be pessimistic (and, frankly, terrified) of any mass conversion to Matt’s viewpoint on the left — it’s entirely possible for large countries to deliberately impoverish multiple generations of their own citizens based on a cultural conviction that tall buildings are morally wrong, and I see that consensus getting stronger not weaker here in the US.
I love Matt's analyses of what makes good policy, but I feel like most of his political analyses go like this: "People who believe in small gov/deregulation should support XXXX. It seems so obvious. It's obviously good policy. I can't figure out why they don't like it . . . Also, people need to not talk about racism, which is just an uncomfortable distraction from figuring out why conservatives insist on disagreeing when it seems logical for them to agree . . ."
My main point is that most rank-and-file conservatives don't give a shit about the size of government. That's why I think attempts to win their votes by appealing to their articulated affinity for small gov/deregulation are doomed. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't try if they want to, just that I don't think it'll work.)
In answer to your direct questions, I think most people who call themselves conservative are motivated largely by attitudes toward race. That's not to say that they are all the same as Jim Crow, but I think the conservative movement is driven mostly by preferences for nonviolent racist policies.
I'm genuinely interested in how you come to hold that opinion so strongly. It's very far from my personal experience with the motivations of Republican voters. Granted I don't know a lot of people who've voted R their entire life, but I know a fair few who do now and the racism motivation doesn't really add up to me in those cases
I'm a brown guy who grew up in central Florida, spent a half-decade in southern Arizona, and almost a decade now outside of Atlanta. I married a white woman from small-town Alabama and visit her family often. I've lived and worked around purple- and red-state conservatives my whole life. I've played sports with them, worked with them, gotten drunk with them, and befriended several.
And there is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority of them absolutely do not give a shit about the size of government.
That's depressing for our country.
I think rank-and-file conservatives don't care about the size of government per se. Like, they might welcome a larger Medicare. I do think that there is a reasonable group of rank-and-file conservatives who don't like the government telling them what they can do on their land.
I would not expect conservatives to be receptive to any housing policy that they see as coming from non-conservatives. It's about the identity of the proposer, not the content of the proposal.
I think the solution is to attack conservative ideas (which are terrible) and the conservative movement (which is largely motivated by racism) so that they become unpalatable to people who don't already identify as conservative. I don't think trying to persuade people who are already conservative is achievable on a significant scale.
I very much thing this approach is what both sides have been doing for the last 10 years at least. Attacking the other parties ideas and movements so that they are unpalatable to people who don't identify as that already.
The results of that make me think that doubling down on that approach would be a mistake.
Hi John,
I do not think you are accurately characterizing the last ten years. About half of those were during an Obama administration who kept trying to negotiate with conservatives in good faith.
Many of the most popular attacks on Trump center around the claim that he is not a true conservative. I think this is unproductive and just hands conservatives the line they will need when it's finally time to rebrand after Trump.
A better strategy, in my opinion, is to characterize conservative values as Trump's values. One major benefit of this line of argument is that it's true.
That's a good way to turn 51% into 47%
I know that a lot of people think that, but Clinton and Obama did the opposite of what I'm suggesting, and they both turned 51% into 47% despite extremely positive real-world outcomes for most conservative voters.
I understand the desire to not rock the boat, but the evidence does not support what you suggest. It also doesn't support what you suggested in another comment above: "There’s an argument to be made that there would be less segregation and less racism today if angry and self-righteous liberals had just let well enough alone." This argument was made during the Civil Rights movement, and during every generation before the CR movement. Yet, progress was only made when people decided to refuse that argument and take direct action against racism.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure the liberal suburban Coastal zoning is also motivated by shall we say retrograde views on race.
Is your purpose here to argue that you are a genuine small-gov conservative who is persuaded by Matty Y's anti-regulation framing? And that I should be more willing to assign a not-racist benefit of the doubt to people who share your opinion?
If I understand you correctly (apologies if I do not), then my answer would be that I do not think you are representative of the vast majority of people who call themselves conservative.
I would say at best, it's race-correlative. The MAGA mindset (if that's a better term than "conservative populist") basically wants to keep the "wrong people" away from them, and feels entitled to it.
That can be racist in some situations; most of the time it's merely misanthropic.
For what it's worth, I believe the only time I have ever really convinced someone that they were "wrong on the internet" was in the comments somewhere, where an exurban or rural Republican clearly didn't understand the topic at hand but was spouting off about how cars and garages and single family homes should be required in all cities.
After trying with the tactic of saying, "no one is saying *you* shouldn't be able to build what you want and live where you want" she played dumb. But when I took another angle and basically asked, "Do you think that the government should be able to regulate what you do with your own property?" she completely flipped. The impulse to defend against government intrusion was stronger than the urge to troll.
I figured I would use illustrations today. (see links below) This is my backyard. It’s actually bigger than it looks here. If I could, I’d probably put up a small ADU, if for no other reason than to have a place for the constant influx of adult kids who rotate in and out of the house. 5 + 2 step. Don’t judge me.
California’s (or is it Washington’s) pro ADU law is one of the few liberal state laws I envy. There are a lot of these large or larger lots in Boise, and we have a severe housing shortage. They have tried to encourage more ADUs, but the issue is more HOAs than the city. We have to get permission and approval for what type of roof shingles to put on our houses.
Then again, I also own a small cabin in the middle of a old mining town in the middle of the Umatilla National Forest in Oregon. It’s actually classified as a ghost town (I will throw a link below as well). It’s pretty Wild West, with little building restrictions, but I would be pissed if someone put up a random apartment build there. (Not much chance of that though).
Anyway, on the to the YIMBY... affordability thing. From a borderline conservative point of view, one of the most irritating things about the political argument about infill and development, is the hypocrisy.
Matt used Palo Alto as an example, but a 3-million dollar home in Palo Alto is probably owned by a mid-level tech guy. The really rich people are going to live in places where the land is so controlled, they will always have power. No one is going to put up apartment buildings next door to the Mansions in the Hamptons or Malibu.
Anyway, I'm working at Brooklyn Navy Yard, and its amazing how many high rises are going up in this little area of Brooklyn right across from Manhattan. I was here two or three years ago, and I see multiple high rises going up. Pretty impressive. I really see no reason why Boise couldn't put up some taller downtown condos/apartments.
It's sort of crazy to me how Europe was able to organically build these dense livable and charming cities, but in the US, we struggle.
https://www.instagram.com/p/COfSEvJFcn6/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.historicsumpter.com/granite-oregon-ghost-town/
It helps that Europe built their cities organically before the car. If you accomodate cars in new construction, it makes it extremely hard to be livable, walkable and dense.
This is only partially true. Plenty of cities around the US existed before cars but then demolished large swathes of the city to make room for them, plenty of cities in Europe got blown to bits in WWII but built back with narrow streets and sensible grids or went back later and redesigned their spaces to be more pedestrian friendly.
But somehow most 19th century planning in the United States pre-built gigantic streets that turned out to be great for cars. Indianapolis and Salt Lake City, for instance, are both famous for their street grids that were designed to be large enough for two wagons to simultaneously turn around. I think Indianapolis has converted a lot of the lane space into a separated bike infrastructure in downtown, but Salt Lake City just has 8 lane streets or whatever.
Yep, it's a weird myth that American cities have wider streets because they were built for cars.
Manhattan has very wide streets (the North-South running Avenues).
Wide and logically laid out (not necessarily grids, but some form of order) were just very much in vogue in the 19th Century.
For example see the Hausmann renovation of Paris that created the modern city.
It was partially a fashion but there were numerous practical reasons for it (in no particular order)
a) Horse-drawn traffic had increased and wider streets were useful for accommodating more traffic
b) Letting more sunlight to the street level and to windows, esp. as buildings got taller
c) Serving as firebreaks
d) I think a viewpoint that wider gaps helped prevent disease?
e) Supposedly to make it easier for troops and cavalry to manoeuvre - and thus to put down rebellions
London was notably not remodelled in this way and it's one reason it has a somewhat different feel to continental cities.
Yes. I think this also explains Boston and New York as well.
I love Utrecht and Maastrict. Beautiful cities.
We can still build good new towns and cities, they just have to be very careful about not being too accomodating to cars to the detriment of people. Narrow streets, minimal parking, mass transit included from the get-go.
"Narrow streets, minimal parking" = Poorer quality of life.
Not for those of us who don't own cars.
Catering to the tiny fraction of Americans without cars is a bubble Europhile thing. As a bubble Europhile I sympathize, but the reality is that outside of a few cities in the US everyone who can afford a car has one because you need them to get to work.
I think it’s possible to build nice car-compatible suburbs—like British garden cities—but trying to replicate the Cotswolds in America isn’t realistic.
I really don't understand this point - no one's forcing folks to give up parking; these proposals largely involve scrapping state-mandated parking minimums & building restrictions. I'm genuinely curious why folks like you don't trust the market more to provide what folks actually want. This is one area where an overabundance of central (well, not so central) planning seems to be getting it wrong. What's wrong with a bit more laissez faire capitalism?
Narrow streets is capitalism how?
Bloomberg passed a major upzoning 10ish years ago, such is why you see all those towers going up. Pre COVID Brooklyn housing prices were starting to cool off. Zoning reform works, it just takes a while!
Boise desperately needs a YIMBY org to fight the North Enders
The North Enders are big YIMBYs... when it comes to other peoples neighborhoods. They love the homeless shelter moving further away from them by Coopers Court to Veterans Park.
We researched building an ADU for my mom in the yard. They were made illegal in my town in 2015. So we bought the twin we're attached to instead and there will be one less home on the market for the next two decades.
Anyone seen useful work articulating an alternative vision for zoning in the US? Matt, should advocates of reform push Abolish ICE-style absolutism on this—Abolish Zoning? Or is there a moderate approach that gets rid of the draconian prohibitions on multi family housing but keeps some perhaps necessary components around things like use types? Or maybe it’s the idea that states and regions should do all zoning and take authority away from localities? I’m intrigued by the idea of abolishing zoning but are there any models for pro-housing candidates or advocates to point to in articulating a more specific, achievable alternative?
I think the clearest wins have been repeated rounds of state legislation in California requiring cites to allow people to build ADUs on their property. Oregon also preempted single-family zoning in Portland recently. Washington DC is about to push a citywide land use reform through.
Unfortunately the rules themselves are very diverse so I don’t think there’s a single reform that applies everywhere. But the overarching principle is to try to get planning decisions made at a higher level — a state government typically — rather than by neighborhood groups.
Does California's law pre-empt HOAs? In Boise, ADUs are encouraged, but its HOAs that are the real problem.
California's laws do pre-empt HOAs for ADUs. Every single family house, including those in HOA areas, can have one detached ADU four feet or more from the side/rear property lines, and a second ADU in an unused space (like a garage) inside the house. Duplexes and other multifamily forms can also have ADUs.
From what I remember about property law and constitutional law, HOAs present a problem for state regulators. HOAs are generally established under covenants running with the land--i.e. they're creatures of contract between the homeowners, not government-created entities. (If you don't remember signing a contract to join your local HOA, it's because you didn't; since it "runs with the land", you agreed to the terms of the covenant just by taking title.) Under the Contract Clause of the Constitution, the states are prohibited from interfering with "the obligation of contracts," i.e. prevents/relieves people from carrying out their obligations under preexisting contracts. If a state (or even local) law comes down and says "HOAs are prohibited and all preexisting HOAs are dissolved," this will probably draw a Contract Clause challenge from some HOA. Now, I don't know if it will succeed--though given the conservative character of the current federal judiciary I wouldn't be surprised if it did--but the litigation risk alone is probably enough to discourage governments from trying.
(State governments would be on firmer ground prohibiting new HOAs from being established, since that doesn't interfere with an existing contract, but that wouldn't help with the issue of infill in existing neighborhoods.)
Contracts can't be binding if they require something illegal or against a compelling state interest. E.g. HOAs can't restrict buyers / sellers by race for example. I think you could make a strong argument that the state could overrule an HOA's rules around this as against a compelling state interest.
Alternatively, get the HOA to change it by setting a tax on any HOA that has such restrictions. Tell the HOA each homeowner is going to have to spend 10k a year to uphold it and I bet it is changed by the end of month in 90% of HOAs.
Here in Colorado state law trumps HOA covenants. Two quick examples are solar panels (HOA's can't prohibit them) and yards (HOA's can't prohibit xeriscaping).
Are those prospective or retrospective, though? (Genuinely curious.) As I said, prospective prohibitions on new contracts don't raise an issue.
Retrospective. The legislature is considering a bunch of changes to HOA's this year which would affect all of them. I'm not a lawyer and don't understand the contract clause Constitutional argument you're making, but no one here seems to believe that HOA's get any kind of exemption from state law - rather the opposite.
From what I researched, the California laws overrode the HOAs.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-updates/owners-of-california-properties-governed-by-hoa-may-no-longer-be-prohibited-from-building-accessory-or-junior-unit.html
https://www.hoaleader.com/public/Californias-New-Accessory-Dwelling-Unit-Law-What-HOA-Boards-Need-Know.cfm#:~:text=The%20ADU%20law%20invalidates%20any,also%20affect%20the%20law's%20application.
https://clarksimsonmiller.com/accessory-dwelling-unit-law-california/
But I am going to assume that there are going to be challenges.
Interesting. I wonder if that will pass muster because it just limits the authority of HOAs to interfere.
I think the "moderate approach" (at least in my book) is to set whatever regulations are desirable (on things like set back requirements, square footage minimums, height restrictions if any, and so on) at the state level and then abolish the "NIMBY veto" altogether. You could have different density "tiers" based on objective criteria (say, the existing population density of zip codes, or census tracts), but whatever would be allowable under the rules couldn't be shouted down by peeved, upper middle class homeowners worried about traffic or a change in the "character of the neighborhood."
In such a system there'd be a degree or order and predictability. But the arbitrariness and capriciousness that empowers the blockage of housing construction would be tamed.
I suggested this to the MO Dept of Economic Development Director. I was thereafter treated like a lunatic. Odd really, MO legislature happily removes local ability to regulate all the time. Trying now to create restrictions on what county officials can do in health emergencies.
Yeah, I think the most important major local reforms would be to the approval process – fewer public meetings, less of an opportunity for neuralgic neighbors to bog everything down.
Right. Maybe there by rights ought to be *some* regulations beyond basic public safety rules that can have the side effect of limiting the construction of new housing units, depending on specifics. So, say, a three acre parcel in an already dense, close-in suburb is greenlighted (by the master rules) for up to 300 units. And the same size parcel in farm country can only accommodate 60 units. And so on. Which would constitute a non-trivial concession to the restriction of house construction. But the key is, if a developer decides to build 60 units on the latter parcel, the local authority can't veto the project. The permitting process is default "shall issue."
As a developer, I can add that we'd very rarely want to overbuild that rural parcel. It's just cheaper to build less densely on inexpensive land. We go up when land prices require it.
I think there is so much variety in the built environment that a one-size fits all approach will not work. Moreover, in a big state the administrative burden of making such granular decisions far away from the source would become unmanageable. Better, I think, to put planning processes in place at the State level, that ensure that the local decisions are within the bounds of what is reasonable and lawful. Housing targets could be set through a State-approved local planning process (county or city, not town) and the rule could be something like “The plan says your zoning needs to accommodate at least x new housing units per year, and if it doesn’t, the State planning office won’t approve it and it won’t be effective.” In extreme cases, the State could impose a minimum regulatory plan, which the localities wouldn’t like: this would motivate them to do what they are supposed to do and not to try to do cute stuff to stretch the decision out.
Houston, TX.
It's not perfect -- they still have parking minimums and such -- but it's a model that the rest of us should strive for.
This is true. People should visit Houston. Developers don't buy expensive land in upscale residential districts to put landfills and factories. You'll find some funny situations like that for historical reasons, but 98%+ of Houston has use mixes that accord with our sensibilities.
What about in poor residential neighborhoods?
Then you'll see the two close to each other. Sometimes it's the housing that comes second because the land is so cheap in those locations. Note though that factories and housing for the poor are often in close proximity in the rest of the country.
Except let's scrap the parking minimums!
There is a movement towards form-based zoning codes, which have the useful property of encouraging "missing-middle" housing (duplexed, four-flats, bungalow courts, garden apartments) in low-density urban residential neighborhoods, thus gradually densifying them without the specter of giant apartment buildings. They also eliminate parking mandates. You could achieve a doubling of densities by this means and greatly improve walkability while not at all impairing the residential and urban qualities that drew people to those places in the first place.
Localities only have such zoning and planning powers as the State chooses to delegate. I think the answer will lie in some combination of strategic State preemptions (i.e. eliminate single-family zoning) and broad-based State requirements or specifications for the use of localities, that would aim to ensure that the local zoning power gets used in a limited way and not as an exclusionary device.
I think a fundamental problem is that almost everyone is a closet NIMBY regardless of political leanings. And I'm hypocritical too - I like the principle of freer zoning but I bought my current house in large part for the view and would be pissed if zoning allowed construction of a high-rise that would block it.
And one also has to factor in the change in the value of a property, which can represent a homeowner's primary or only asset. People are naturally going to oppose a change that could lower the value of the property.
I'm a mostly closeted YIMBY, at least when I'm at neighborhood parties.
This is certainly true. People don't like to give up their entitlements and housing comes with a lot of entitlements, some of which are baked into the price and some of which aren't. Having a "view" is a big one. Nobody is willing to pay full price for it (i.e. buy the actual piece of land that is "the view" and maintain it undeveloped) but they still feel entitled to it and disgruntled when they lose it.
Same basic story for on-street parking and fears about losing it due to denser development and probably lots of other examples I can't think of right now.
While I'm basically YIMBY, it is also hard to square YIMBY with the reality that we're asking people to take on a 30-year investment (their mortgage) but also saying everything about that investment can change dramatically over that period.
We know that businesses don't like instability and that's with investments over much, much shorter time periods. So little surprise that there's a temporal mismatch between 30-year mortgages and "but we want to change the neighborhood over time periods of less than 30 years".
It's a bit like encouraging people to take on massive educational debt on the order of magnitude of medical school in order to join a career that may get offshored or replaced by robots in just the next 10 years.
“The next big fights may be about whether we can build tacky subdivisions near what are today’s cute historic small towns. Or it might be tall apartments right by the beach“
While I’m broadly supportive of YIMBYism, I’m curious - is Matt’s position that we should go ahead and let rip with all of the above? And pave paradise and put up a parking lot while we’re at it?
Is there nothing at all that should stand in the way of developers building as much housing of any type in any location that they can sell it, even at the cost of completely ruining the joint for the existing residents?
If there is land that we don’t want developed, I think the public sector should spend the money necessary to acquire it and turn it into a park. If it’s genuinely “paradise” make it publicly owned and accessible to the public.
But if it’s private land for private use then, yeah, put up a parking lot.
The fact that that song keeps getting brought up in this discussions is always ironic since parking lots are exactly what we’re trying to _avoid_ having to build.
Exactly! The status quo regime requires more parking lots. We prefer freer choice which I believe will result in fewer parking lots.
I can guarantee you that pitching zoning reform as a way to get rid of cars is not going to help us win over conservatives
Oh trust me, I’m painfully aware. But that’s a bit of a problem, since car-centric cities are very much part of the problem here.
Yeah, which is a point that Matt tries very hard to avoid, to the detriment of his argument IMHO. Zoning being part of the culture war is pretty much inevitable, because conservatism is so culturally identified with single-family suburbia and car culture. Talking about construction jobs isn't going to change that.
I mean, eh. Zoning reform enables ending car-centricity but doesn't require it. It all depends on what people do in each place.
Sometimes I kind of think a practical political concession that YIMBYs ought to consider is mandating one big multistory parking garage (with ground floor retail) in every neighborhood, with subsidized rates for preexisting residents. You mollify them by saying you can still have a car, and you can store it there, and while it won't be attached to your house it'll at least be within a few blocks. In exchange, you get to have unshackled upzoning in the rest of the neighborhood.
yes.jpg
If you own the property rights on your land, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. This is moral from an individual rights' and will lead to better utilitarian outcomes in the aggregate (more places for us to go on beach vacations, for example).
The losers from this proposal are those who are already living in $3 million Palo Alto homes or already have secluded beachfront property. Not sure why we have to bend the laws in their favor though.
3 million dollar Pali Alto Home = $300K Des Moines Home
And the 3 million dollar Palo Alto home is only 3 million dollars because nobody can build new homes in Palo Alto. Those homes would drop to 1 million (but probably never down to $300k) if construction was allowed to attempt to meet demand.
Tokyo is an example of a city that largely follows this playbook.
It does indeed have cheap, liveable housing and the odd very interesting piece of residential architecture, but on the whole it is an astoundingly ugly place despite its wealth.
So seriously here: what’s your aesthetic prescription for Japan? They have 126 million humans and roughly the land area of California. If you’re worried about paving paradise, I can’t think of any surer way to make it happen than to restrict infill development in Tokyo. That seems worth putting up with a few undistinguished buildings for.
Japan also has some incredibly beautiful natural vistas, which are easily reachable by rail and/or bus from Tokyo, as well as some substantial parks/gardens inside the Tokyo metro. Suggesting that Tokyo as a whole is "ugly", and suggesting the solution is more places built to look like Levittown, seems completely bananas. Suburban yards are fine -- I grew up in a house with a good-sized yard, and I spent plenty of afternoons running around in it -- but they're neither beautiful in the manner of a manicured garden, nor in the manner of a natural wonder like Muir Woods. I don't have (or want) kids myself, but I've babysat friends' kids and if you're walking distance from a place like Golden Gate Park, honestly I don't think you're missing out on much by not having a personal yard. You can run around and play with your friends just as much there as you would've in a yard.
Exactly. Absent a one-child policy and immigration restrictions (both of which are anathema to me), we can only build up, or out. Allow both up and out, but especially Up.
Im going to sick Noah Smith on you! Calling Tokyo ugly. Sheesh.
Tokyo rules! Also I just cannot believe that, given the incredible scope and scale of the housing crisis and all its manifold miseries, that we would hesitate to solve it due to....some people’s aesthetic sensibilities?!
“We were gonna build an army base to invade Normandy and win WW2, but the design was just too ugly. Sorry, France, D-Day is canceled.”
If Tokyo is the end result, then let’s go ahead. For an apples to apples comparison, it beats New York hands down as a pleasant place to visit. Not to mention the cultural imagination where West Side Story emphatically uses Manhattan as an astoundingly ugly background.
Most importantly, no one *has* to live in either. If someone likes rural environment and a lawn, the rest of the respective country is nearby (a convenient and fast train ride in case of Japan ;)
When you say “ugly” here are you just talking about the skyline? Fair enough but how much quality of life is that worth? Tokyo is a premier, world-class city in every way that counts—people want to live there, companies want to operate there, tourists want to visit and they have a great time when they do. I’d love to go back.
I love Tokyo, and Seoul. Both these cities are just full of identikit buildings that were built on the wreckage of war to fulfill the housing needs of huge and growing populations.
Like if you contrast them even in their own country with Kyoto and Busan they're much less old and full of old art and stuff like that.
Of the first-rank global cities I have visited, I agree that Tokyo is probably the most liveable in many ways. But the vast majority of building stock was just thrown up with little to no consideration of its aesthetic qualities. And their small-scale public spaces are pretty perfunctory - Tokyo kids playgrounds are just dismal.
I’m not opposed to density, and medium and high-density neighbourhoods can be made to be attractive. There’s plenty of medium-density cities in Europe that are beautiful - including in Germany, where much of it had to be rebuilt the same way that Tokyo did. But it seems like Japan, and particularly Tokyo, just doesn’t care about what its housing stock looks like from the outside, and I personally would resent my neighbourhood looking like a Tokyo suburb.
To summarise, increased density isn’t a problem in most places, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want it to be done in a way that makes some consideration of what it looks like from the outside. Ana’s there are places where high-rise development can ruin the environmental qualities hat makes the place so attractive in the first place (eg by the goddamn beach).
Fair enough as far as it goes, but it seems to be the opposite of allowing density looks like Route 1 in NJ, not any kind of of architectural paragon
What about the people who want to live near the beach but can't because of CA coastal policies?
I'm not sure how widely your view of Tokyo's aesthetics is shared, and even if it were, I personally would absolutely choose a world of identical Soviet-style housing blocks if it meant no one went homeless or rent-burdened. After all, beauty in one's physical surroundings is only partly governed by public decisionmaking; when people have cheap, stable housing, it's easier for them to invest in interior design, a form of beauty you're liable to miss just looking from the street.
I don't know how much of the Tokyo playbook is applicable since you know it was all burnt to the ground. Kyoto is pretty noticeably less dense, and much more beautiful than other Japanese cities and it was spared the worst of the firebombing.
What's the standard for a neighborhood being 'completely ruined'?
Chipotle
It’s not strictly residential development, but I would argue that Niagara Falls is one such example.
Surfers Paradise, Australia is another, though luckily there are hundreds of miles of equally nice beaches without the skyscrapers directly to the south.
I assume you mean the city on the Canadian side of the falls ruins it? I have to disagree, honestly I think it adds to the experience since you get to see how puny the buildings are compared to the falls. The falls are so massive and awe-inspiring that there's really nothing you could do to make the experience less majestic.
I'd also add that Niagara Falls on the US side really falls into the 'make it a park if it's really a treasure' group Matt mentions. The push for Yosemite or Yellowstone (can't remember which) was partly driven by not wanting it to become chintzy like Niagara, which had all sorts of vendors getting in the way of the views.
The important thing is for the buildings to look the same, even if everybody who lives in them was priced out and replaced by early-30s strivers decades ago.
People are forgetting that planning and zoning were created in the first place for a reason.
The reasons for the original zoning rules were mainly things like, don't put a toxic chemical factory or slaughterhouse next to a school. Planning was mostly about planning roads and infrastructure to accommodate dense new housing (which doesn't necessarily mean high rises!). Neither of these things are what drive the practice today.
This simply is not true. The model zoning and planning enabling legislation (in the 1920's) envisioned different types and levels of residence districts. Here is a description of the zoning code of Euclid, Ohio, known for being the test case of the legality of zoning, adopted under that enabling legislation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/272/365
Right but that wasn't widely adopted until the 70s.
"Let's not make this the next culture war frontier"
Well, that should ensure that it will turn into a front in the culture war. You might as well wave a red cape at a bull.
You talk as though there are people of good faith on the other side of this debate. And in the faculty lounge of YIMBY/NIMBY think-tanks, there may be some.
But at the Fox News level of national politics, culture war is all they've got, and they are always looking to open a new front.
So, thanks for showing them where to find it! Soon, the Trumpist wannabes will be echoing his scare-mongering about the destruction of the suburbs. It won't matter whether it's true, or what policy they're attacking. All they need to know is that people like you are for it. For Tucker and little Mario and Ron the Florida man, that's reason enough to be against it.
I think there really is an "own the libs" culture war opportunity on zoning that conservatives can and should exploit. Like, shitty homes in Palo Alto cost millions of dollars while objectively nicer homes in the suburbs of Dallas cost a small fraction of that. Make high home prices due to zoning an example of liberal mismanagement (similar to how conservatives point to urban crime rates as an example of liberal mismanagement) and maybe we can get a groundswell of GOP leaders to culture war on the right side of this issue.
What we can't do is culture war on zoning from the left. "We need to reform zoning as a form of reparations and so we can ban cars" will just harden the GOP against us.
My sense is the MAGA right is steadily moving into the NIMBY camp. It simply makes political sense for them to do so. In broad swaths of the red state heartland, housing scarcity isn't much of an issue (affordability often is, but in rural areas that tends to be a low wage phenomenon from what I can see), so, in such areas pro NIMBY politicians pay no price for encouraging policies that intensity housing scarcity. And in the suburban battlegrounds where MAGA is more endangered (and where there's also opportunity for them), I believe they feel -- probably rightly -- that the political calculus ultimately comes down in favor of NIMBYism: restricting the rights of property owners is sadly still very popular among risk-averse middle class voters! Maybe that's changing -- anecdotally it does appear a lot of millennials and Gen Zers support the YIMBY case. But if there's one thing we can usually count on GOP politicians to do, it's to maximize *current* demographic strength and avoid spending much time worrying about where future votes will come from. Plus, let's face it, immigration is highly unpopular among many/most MAGA supporters, and lots of these people (perhaps accurately) conclude that liberalized house-building regulations are necessary to accommodate larger immigration inflows (certainly that's a big part of the reason conservatives like Tucker Carlson are hostile to house construction deregulation).
I feel like that immigration point is too 4D chess to be actually how people are thinking about this issue
I agree "the people" aren't thinking about it this way. But I believe it's highly likely the the Tucker Carlsons of the world are aware many of the folks pushing for YIMBY also want higher immigration. And the former mold opinion on the right, which trickles down to "the people" (even if the underlying reasons for the policy position are obfuscated).
I don't think progressives would stop wanting more immigration if zoning reform was off the table, and I think the Tuckers of the world know that.
I think perhaps we're talking past each other. It's true liberals aren't about to stop pushing for more immigration if house construction rules aren't eased. It's also true Tucker Carlson knows this. But I think the two policies (immigration reform and house construction reform) are legitimately related as part of a more or less "progressive pro growth agenda." And I believe Tucker Carlson (and others of his ideological bent) are aware of this. That's part (not the sole reason, perhaps, but "part") of why Carlson and a growing number of people on the right have taken up the banner of NIMBY. I mean, the "natural" position of the right wrt house building rules would surely be the pro-property rights position. (And there's also little doubt that many of the most restrictive house building policies in America have been championed by affluent liberals). So why not oppose land use restrictions when you're, you know, a member of the party that has traditionally favored economic libertarianism (and also a member of the party that likes to stick it to snooty liberals)?
Well, the answer to that question, I would suggest, is that making housing more affordable makes a robust, pro-immigration policy work better, and renders it (overall) more feasible, and more politically plausible. Support for generous immigration inflows is liable to be easier to find when we're not all fighting over scare housing units!
The populist, MAGA right in America is an increasingly, explicitly isolationist, xenophobic, culturally paranoid political faction that opposes progress, change and growth of any kind.
Well, it's a smart strategy for conservatives/Republicans to drive a wedge between house owners and Democratic politicians. They don't necessarily have to be racists (?) to promote NIMBY policies; they just want to be able to strip Democratic voters from that party.
Not clear to me how you separate the issues of scarcity and affordability...they seem like two sides of the same coin. In many midwestern cities, housing prices are up sharply while wages are not, and affordability is a growing problem in cities in which many coastal people would be shocked at how "low" housing prices are. Truly rural areas and exurbs might be another matter. But low-income folks are being squeezed pretty hard in the cities.
I agree that making this a leftist culture war will radicalize Republicans, but we're still trying to convince local Dem primary voters and officeholders in big cities! (Banning cars is probably still a nonstarter with them though... ah well, give it time) I think the racial justice aspect is still really important for winning over city councils and blue-state legislatures, and we shouldn't give up on meaningful reforms from those quarters.
The big issue here is the new Democrat Coalition is more and more made up of the middle class white suburban voters... and I just don't see them embracing YIMBY-ism on a large scale.
Yep, which is why Trump saw it as a great wedge issue in the last campaign. Many people just didn't buy his "Cory Booker is trying to destroy the suburbs" talking point because it sounded so ridiculous and far-fetched, but as more laws are proposed to remove local controls in various states I wonder if this will continue to be true. First place to pay attention is the California suburban congressional districts that have been swinging recently between the parties (say, CA-25, CA-45, CA-48, etc.)--wonder if land-use preemption laws championed by Dems in Sacramento will start to play more of an issue in these campaigns and hurt Democrats in these Congressional races.
Great point.
Well, I think that people pick up on the culture war aspect of this on their own. If the reforms are top-down and driven by obviously progressive groups (and to some extent anti-racist groups), the opposition is going to grow organically. May be better to try to put together a broader coalition to drive the state-wide changes, if possible.
I live in a county in the Philly suburbs and I was not prepared for how much these people care about empty fields. I grew up in NJ and every square inch of space is built on already so I didn't really have exposure to empty field politics, only apartment politics. But it seems like in PA they build a development in a totally empty field and everyone that moves in will oppose any development in the empty field next to them.
Everything is very local in terms of what people care about. Most of the new homes built I see are actually row homes, they are giant humongous row homes, but they are not detached. It's weird what people care about. I live in an old steel town on the river with twins with no front lawns and every single house here would be illegal to build under the recent Village Preservation District zoning we are now in. We're literally just down the street from the empty field housing politics and we have parking politics for our zoning fights since there are no driveways and the lots are tiny.
What you describe is human nature. Existing homeowners understandably perceive very little benefit from more houses. In general, construction puts downward pressure on their most valuable asset. And increases the length of their commute. And yes, might mar their view, or increase the chances they'll be awakened on a Saturday morning by a leaf blower. I'm quite convinced homo sapiens is evolutionarily hardwired to oppose the use of scare recourse (such as land on which to live) by others.
For this reason I tend to think we'll see major, root and branch deregulation of house construction in America only when home ownership in some state falls well below 50%, and it therefore becomes crystal clear to a majority of voters that the status quo hurts them. I'd guess California gets their first.
Efforts to change policy at the federal and state levels are good and necessary, but one thing I (maybe half-jokingly) think YIMBYs ought to do is treat suburban balkanization as an opportunity and not just a challenge, by choosing one or two or three "YIMBYtowns" in every high-cost metro, moving in, taking over, and changing the rules about the physical environment. Sort of like what some immigrant groups have done (Armenians in Glendale CA, Filipinos in Daly City CA, Koreans in Palisades Park NJ, Indians in Edison NJ, etc). It won't solve the problem alone, but if you turn, say, Hayward CA into Hong Kong on the East Bay *and it's nice*, then it'll be helpful as a proof of concept that dense, upzoned communities are nothing to fear.
That's a good idea. In fact, getting a bunch of modest single family homes rezoned to allow apartment towers in the right locations could also be economically rewarding. Developers would normally be afraid to try to assemble the land due to the problems caused by a couple of holdouts.
Thanks. Thinking about this some more, I guess you'd want to pick towns that aren't too big (less than 100k pop?), aren't so rich that people can't afford to move there (less than 80k median household income?), aren't so poor that moving there would be seen as "gentrification", are middle-of-the-pack for ethnic diversity, and have good transit access into the city. Maybe places like San Leandro CA or New Rochelle NY?
I always wonder how no conservative state government has enacted some sort of "right-to-build" law on urban areas in their state to own the libs. That seems like a win-win from a jobs and culture war perspective.
MA sort of did with Chapter 40b in the 70s. If don't go far enough to preserve affordability in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, but a HUGE percentage of the market rate housing in Eastern Massachusetts was built because of this bill.
On the subject of weekend villas and country homes becoming suburbs, the first commuter rail service was basically on the Boston & Albany (today's MBTA Framingham/Worcester line) when they started offering commutated tickets (effectively monthly passes) so the wealthy in Boston could freely go to their country homes in Auburndale.
In some sense it was the mid-19th century version of a frequent flyer program.
If you want to end (or avoid) the culture war, don't try to force this issue from the federal level. Do it the hard way, state by state.
This is yet another fake conservative argument that masquerades as principled but really gives them disproportionate power. If by some miracle Democrats can overcome the numerous veto points and Conservative bias of the US political system, they should do so.
It's also been used to defend and uphold many of the most shameful policies in US history, including slavery, Jim Crow, and more recently LGBT discrimination.
"...fake conservative argument that masquerades as principled..."
It is not fake at all. It is literally how the country was set up from the beginning. And although federalism may have served in a small way in protecting the institution of slavery, that in no way indicates that every arrangement protected by federalism is bad, let alone as evil as slavery.
Culture war is quite compatible with state-level or municipal politics.
Example: https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/how-gov-greg-abbott-plans-to-punish-texas-cities-that-defund-police/
I am far more concerned about aggressively progressive (or aggressively conservative for that matter) policies being shoved down the throats of resistant states than I am local residents upset about state law.
Why? All the argument for federalism apply much better to cities than they do to states. "New York City" has a much better claim to being a coherent community of interest with shared values and identity than "New York State" does. People who live in New York City are more likely to know about the problems of the city than people in Albany (and for that matter, people upstate are more likely to know the problems of upstate).
“All the argument for federalism apply much better to cities than they do to states.”
Not according to the New York State Constitution.
More explicit hypocrisy.
Democrats using federal power despite states' reluctance = "ramming down states throats", "culture war".
Republicans using state power despite cities' reluctance = "the constitution".
Wow. What “federal power” are you referring to?
I'm entranced by the Russian doll aspect of this argument. And what about the boroughs? Don't they know better than the dead hand of the city government behemoth? And let's not get started on how out of touch borough bureaucrats are about what's going on in the neighborhoods.
I'm reminded by a funny (if profane) military comic I saw years ago. You have to know that "REMF" stands for "rear echelon motherf**kers" (don't know the profanity etiquette here). It shows two soldiers on the very front line miserably crouching in a rain-filled foxhole and one bitterly says to the other, "Man, those REMFs back at platoon don't know shit."
The “REMFs back at platoon” includes, for example, the RTO, who carries more weight than any man in the platoon and is uniquely critical for the platoons’s success. (He’s the guy who can get mortar or artillery fire, or close air support.) A smart platoon leader babies his RTO when the situation allows. A smart platoon leader also cross-trains other members of the platoon not only to spread the knowledge and identify talent, but to show the rest of the privates how hard the job is.
Shockingly, I'm on Ken in MIA's side this time. Matt's argument that zoning reform is "consistent" with conservative populism is possibly correct and totally irrelevant. The best strategy in the Game of Politics is use wedge issues to divide your opposition's base. Defending SFH zoning in cities and suburbs while the Democrats push these policies loathed by many SFH owners (and current or potential Democratic voters) is a surefire way to cause turmoil in Democratic politics and strengthen Republicans.
The very last thing Democrats should do is try to make this a national issue. Let states like California fight this out on their own.
The SALT deduction is one way this is a national issue though. Places with more expensive housing have high local taxes and so benefit more from a federal SALT deduction. So one way to look at the SALT fight is high-cost coastal states are demanding that other states subsidize their NIMBY ways.
"...high-cost coastal states are demanding that other states subsidize their NIMBY ways."
If red states want to pick a quarrel with NY and CA about who is subsidizing whom, then they will lose that fight. We've been subsidizing them since they were territories.
Though kinda weak tea compared to changing eligibility for what can be built next to your house. You'll note that e.g. California representatives have been very quiet on changing the SALT deduction (it's a Northeast thing for some reason). In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a nice compromise in which the limit was raised to $15K and everyone is basically pretty happy and the controversy goes away.
I think a fair amount of opposition to suburban style zoning also comes from climate change. A large suburban home and a commute in a luxury suv are not very environmentally friendly. Lawns are water intensive and sustaining an aesthetic monoculture means fertilizers. Large homes are expensive to heat and cool and the electricity is not yet primarily renewables. Most vehicles are not yet electric or hybrid. Few mid/outer suburbs have quality public transit.
It’s not that I disagree with zoning deregulation, but I don’t think one key component of the left opposition is represented in the article.
The world would be in much better shape if there was a debate between the right-wing position (free market development, being allowed to build anything you want on your own property) and the left-wing position (density minimums and public housing). Instead, both camps double down on NIMBYism for their own reasons.
Most of southern San Francisco Bay is shallower than a public swimming pool. It could easily be reclaimed and given over to affordable housing. The shorter commutes would reduce carbon emissions. Everyone would win, at the expense of some brackish water and the fish who inhabit it. Why aren’t these kinds of solutions on the table?
Could it be easily reclaimed? I’d read something about that, but would hesitate to just eyeball the geology.
I’m not an engineer, but real world engineers drafted plans to expand the SFO airport into the bay. Obviously, the loads imposed by landing planes traveling 160mph are at least comparable to garden or mid rise apartments.
The objections to this expansion were environmental, not safety based.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport
There's the additional advantage that the bay has no existing NIMBY residents. You can zone what used to be an area of open water any way you like. If people don't want to live there, they don't have to.
Because they’re about a million times more expensive than just letting people build fourplexes, townhouses and apartment buildings on the west side of San Francisco or anywhere in Palo Alto?
The technology necessary to make housing abundant in the Bay Area is decades to centuries old, cheap and well-understood. It’s just illegal.
You're not by any chance Dutch, are you?
They have been doing this kind of reclamation + desalination for centuries, and it's kind of awesome.
Applying the model to the south bay would be politically a heavy lift, but a great idea. And Otis already gave us the theme song -- "sittin on a dock of the bay, watchin the sod roll away."
No earthquakes in the Netherlands
Through no fault of their own.
Tokyo has tons of stuff built on landfill in what was Tokyo Bay.
Why do people so often make glib dismissals without considering whether there's anywhere else in the entire planet that invalidates the point they think they are making?
Landfill liquefies during earthquakes. What do they do in Japan to prevent that? Is there some form of engineering that we're not using in the United States? Or do the buildings just fall down and get rebuilt?
You seem to been overestimating how much liquifaction actually occurs as well as how damaging liquifaction is. There are also differences between soil liquifaction and surface liquifaction.
It is pretty easy to Google up lots of stuff about the 2011 Tokyo earthquake (9.0) and see the relatively minor impact on things like Disney World that are entirely built on landfill.
This is interesting. See this as an opportunity for education. What are the differences between soil liquefaction and surface liquefaction, that you are thinking of, that make a difference in the better performance of Japan's experience?
Exactly. The posh San Francisco Marina district was built on a landfill. That liquified nicely during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Not the place you wanted to be on that day.
I have Dutch ancestors if you go back 13 generations, but I’m basically a western European mutt.
I can't speak to the merits of this idea (it sounds environmentally dodgy to me, tbh, but I could be wrong!). But in any event the easier fix by rights out to be simply changing the law so it's no longer illegal in so many cases to build homes for people to live in.
The same people who oppose up zoning Palo Alto would hate this proposal and the people in favor of upzoning Palo Alto would be less likely to support.
Opposition to upzoning in the Bay Area or LA is primarily driven by people who want a population cap. Jeremiah Moss, a NYC NIMBY, is to his credit honest about his view. In a New York interview they asked him how NYC can accomodate more people: I don’t want to accommodate more people. There are too many . . . people here already."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/05/new-york-landmarks-law-debate.html
Same in the Bay Area. They want these people to live in Texas. There is no creative solution to avoiding that fight
This was proposed in the late 1940's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
I think the explicit proposal then was a dam at the Golden Gate, landfill of a large chunk of the bay for housing and industrial development (as well as expansion of the airports), and the remaining water converted into a freshwater reservoir so they wouldn't have to keep depending on Hetch-Hetchy.
The Army Corps of Engineers built a physical model of the Bay to figure out what the net result would be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model
They determined the net result would be a disaster, even long before the idea that wetland and riparian ecosystems are fragile and rare, and before the idea that extinction of species mattered.
I don't recall exactly what the disaster was that they predicted - I think it was something like either the land or the water becoming unstable as the rivers kept flowing and the hydrology was only temporarily changed. But it provided a good case study in philosophy of science for understanding models and how they help us think about the world - models aren't just computers and mathematics, but sometimes also a physical scale model of the San Francisco Bay that you can still go visit if you go to Sausalito!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/simulation-and-similarity-9780199933662
https://www.spn.usace.army.mil/Missions/Recreation/Bay-Model-Visitor-Center/
In twenty years it will be deeper than a public swimming pool, though.
Where's Floyd Dominy and the Reclamation Bureau when you need em?
My first thought is I don't think an affordable housing developer could shoulder the land reclamation costs.
Probably not. But the State of California could afford it. And then sell lots to house builders.