I’m traveling in The Netherlands right now, and it’s given me an appreciation of how silly some of the discourse is. Urbanism isn’t a new theoretical construct; it has been and is being executed well at scale around the world. Hundreds of people older than my parents are really out there riding the bicycles, strollers are effortlessly boarding the trams, and everyday families are living in 4-6 story apartment buildings on walkable streets. It’s happening! Go see it! We don’t have to invent these things from whole cloth or speculate about how they will play out. If we wanted to, we could just copy.
I also knew going in that the transit was going to better in terms of coverage and frequency. I didn’t realize how much it was going to be NICER. The tram has level boarding, it’s modern and clean, it moves with a sense of urgency and efficiency but isn’t actively trying to knock over the standing passengers. Even the bus is built like a luxury car - everything fits together tightly, vibrations and shimmies are well controlled. On a just off the line New Flyer in SF, you go over a slight bump and it’s literally a deafening rattle as every seat and panel down the length of the thing reacts. I understand why Americans refuse to use transit that communicates to its riders that they are poor. I wonder what is going to take us to get transit that makes you feel rich.
I understand that you mostly experience the Netherlands as a foreigner. If that's correct, I would like to point out that my view is that this country is pretty bad from a YIMBY perspective. It's hard to find somewhere to live in Amsterdam, and usually everything is much smaller than it is in the US. Moreover, you have an unfortunately large amount of people with very weird commuting patterns due to affordability issues (meaning that they live in other cities and have long commutes to Amsterdam instead of living in the city). If you have a transit strike, as it happened recently, people do get stranded. My understanding is that the main lobby that poses a problem is farmers and not incumbent homeowners though.
However, I'm writing here based mostly on personal experiences and anecdotal evidence, so if anyone has real data, I would be interested.
I don't have any hard data but my suspicion is that much of Amsterdam is mid-rise where it could or should be high rise. But it would be a big aesthetic change.
My general impression is that the "front line" of the housing debate in many European cities is between middle density and high density where in the US it is between low density and middle density.
Looking more closely, Amsterdam's density is in line with Boston -- high by U.S. standards but far below many European cities, so they would seem to have a lot of room for improvement.
Oh yes even as a foreigner I have been clued in to the housing crisis - your museums like to talk about squatters a lot, for example. But if the US were to replicate Netherlands style urbanism, that would be a massive increase in housing supply, and the Netherlands actual experience shows that this is neither unworkable nor some kind of hellhole, as US opponents claim it would be. It might reinforce the Scott Alexander critique about how YIMBYtopia Manhattan is in fact very expensive.
To be fair to the Netherlands, the whole country's population density is greater than every U.S. state's. I'm sure it has its problems (I've never been there) but it must be doing something right from a planning perspective.
That’s at least in part an artifact of where they drew the borders that you are averaging population density over. If New Jersey’s borders had been drawn just around the mouth of the Hudson, instead of getting half of the Hudson mouth and half of the Delaware, it would have higher density than the Netherlands, which happens to have its lines drawn around the many mouths of the Rhine.
Yes. Watch the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. It goes into a lot of detail about Dutch urban planning from the perspective of someone from North America, specifically the Toronto area.
I don't know how the population of Amsterdam has changed over time, but the cities where NIMBYism becomes a big problem are those that experience rapid growth. Slower growth would create fewer problems. I am sure we can learn things from Europe but not everything that works there will work here.
Several things here. The US suburban model actually requires a great deal of growth: the bonds that build the infrastructure for the first ring of suburbs assume revenue from the second, the bonds for the second assume the third, etc. See The Growth Ponzi Scheme. Strong Towns' big thesis is that you need to build in the more efficient dense, compact, less auto-centric way in order to insulate yourself from problems when the growth doesn't materialize (and due to traffic, such growth is inherently self-limiting).
Second, the NIMBYism seems to be worst when you have an area that's been plodding along as a static or slow-growing village/suburb and then later faces pressure to become a city. The village/suburb uses are there, and people are attached to them, but they have to change. What many great cities including Amsterdam have in common is being economically important early in their lifecycle, so that the original buildings are already urban and compact. Even better if they grow up along transportation corridors like rails and waterways. A fire or earthquake will also suffice to wipe out bad "bones" and build something in line with current needs.
Finally, I think you would need to posit something more specific about why the 4-6 story apartment + bike path + tram story would work in Europe but not here. The main thing I can think of is that combination of social services and norms (and enforcement) could perhaps make the Dutch more respectful and neighborly in shared spaces.
There's a lot of overlap in my experience (in LA) between YIMBY groups and Defund/Don't Enforce groups. Unfortunately, you cannot offer a safe public transit experience without law enforcement. Here in LA, the public transit safety situation has deteriorated (due to non-enforcement) so drastically in the last couple years that even many transit enthusiasts have switched to cars for that reason.
Moved to SF in 2015, got involved in YIMBY the next year. Over the past 6 years, it has been remarkable to see the progress. Thank you Matt for giving this issue so much visibility.
Here locally, the NIMBY forces seem despondent. They know they are loathed as the selfish “got mime, eff u” crowd, which is why their only argument is a hand wavy thing about gentrification of neighborhoods like Sunset SF where housing has been 1M+ for over a decade.
They’re losing, they know it, and the bitter tears make for great cocktails.
San Francisco is amusing, because the board of supervisors and very local parts of the government how strong NIMBY tendencies, but the mayor and the congressional delegation is more pro-YIMBY.
Note that the mayor and congressperson have 800,000+ voter jurisdictions, while the supervisors only represent about 160,000 each. This is the same point Matt mentioned in the original post - you need a slightly larger area to internalize the externalities.
I think this is true but I think individual politicians are a much bigger deal. I think the SF Yimby bench is generally pretty weak and rarely puts up strong candidates for supervisors. SF/CA got incredibly lucky in the election of Scott Weiner (I also love all of his other Yimby colleagues)
In your experience, how much have tech forces driven the success of YIMBYism in SF? In SF I can imagine both funding and voting could be backed by a much greater share of Silicon Valley workers than anywhere else.
And if the answer is "a lot" - what does that mean for YIMBYism elsewhere?
Good question. We have good organizers here who are not really part of the tech community. I don't have numbers, but I suspect its true a lot of tech money makes its way into YIMBY causes and organizations. More recently, GrowSF is being more explicit about not being shy about having tech folks advocate for YIMBY among other things in interest of tech - which is great as tech as traditionally been hesitant to assert itself for fear of being shouted down around here.
That's true, but tech people also used to making change quickly, and they get easily frustrated by "slow boring of hard boards" type politics.
I'm involved with local YIMBY organizing in SF, and there's a lot of member churn as people join, put in some effort, don't see immediate change, and then lose interest. We're trying to think through ways to make smaller wins seem exciting and keep people going after electoral defeats.
One way I've seen our local group work on that is to regularly focus on individual projects in the pipeline. That means we can count "this particular building got built" as a small win.
10 years ago we were also coming off the housing crash. To this day when I tell friends that we need to build more housing sometimes they’ll say things like “look how that worked out last time.” The affordability problem is just so bad now I don’t think people could continue to ignore it.
I consider myself an ardent YIMBY, but I do have some sympathy with the idea of limiting development in the countryside we'd like to bequeath to future generations. It may be that most of the world's classic "greebelts" are ill thought-out (they're just too close to city centers). That's my vague impression of the UK case (and maybe Oregon?). But if they're located sufficiently far from the urban core, maybe they're worth doing?
To give an idea of what I'm talking about, I'll use the example of my home state, Massachusetts. I have this vague notion it would be desirable to place relatively stringent regulations on sprawl once you get to some point west of Worcester—‚but let 'er rip in terms of house building east of this line.
To ease the possible spike on housing prices west of this line, green light pro-density regulations in the existing regional centers and already dense locations (Springfield, Amherst, Pittsfield, etc).
The key is removing the NIMBY-veto in favor of rules-based, non-arbitrariness implemented and enforced by the *state* government.
To be clear, I'd still take a completely laissez-faire house building rules system over our current NIMBY nightmare. It's truly awful. And maybe that's where we'll end up. (And maybe it won't make any difference because most people will want to live closer to urban amenities or jobs.) Another way to square the circle would be via the tax code: implement a strong "shall issue" legal standard with respect to homebuilding permits, but massage the tax code to favor density and punish sprawl.
Anyway, the rent is too damn high, agreed, but I personally thing dense housing abundance is better than sprawly housing abundance.
EDITED to add a TLDR: Like most YIMBYs I want to sweep aside rules against density. I'm more sympathetic to rules against sprawl...
I can be OK with urban growth boundaries* (I've seen them in work in Orgeon) so long as the urban grown that one's bounding is allowed to build up as appropriate.
(*It's also uniquely weird as a Boisean to hear this called a greenbelt, because here, the Greenbelt is our major non-motorist corridor that follows the river.)
I agree. One of my great frustrations as a city dweller in the US is in order to leave the city and access the countryside, you have to wade through 30 miles of shit. When I've visited Europe, cities and villages have a clear edge - and it's not uncommon to see two villages only a mile apart that have woods or farmland between them.
Usually I'm loathe to lay down a kluky policy like a blanket green belt without understanding the underlying economics and causes, but in the US there's simply so much incentive to build sprawl and it's happened so quickly that it seems like a valid emergency measures until we get our shit together.
Broadly endorsed. The entire attraction of Berkshire County is precisely that it *isn't* massively overbuilt.
One concern I have with this approach, however, is that it seems like it's designed in the long term to create a class of people who, having no experience with the countryside (because they've all been brought up in Hong Kong / Singapore style hyperdensity by design) place no value on it (and hence have no incentive to vote to preserve it) because they don't experience it--at best it becomes an abstraction in much the way that stars and constellations are for people who live in New York City or other places of ubiquitous light pollution. Ideally the people forgoing overbuilding the countryside would have a stake in so doing and get to benefit from its existence (beyond just a class of rich vacationers with lots of leisure.).
One approach that really works is to extend your "commuter rail" to a few rural leisure locations.
To explain (ie that sentence above is the TLDR).
Most commuter rail operates on existing rail infrastructure; ideally, trains run four to six times an hour from 5am to 1am between a main city station and the edge of the commute zone (typically a suburban community on the edge, typically about an hour from the city by train). In practice, many American commuter rail systems are infrequent, peak-only and unidirectional (to the city in the morning, away in the evening), and that needs fixing long before moving on to this sort of extra that goes beyond the basic service.
In most cases, the rail infrastructure is actually an old line that runs to another city, but there is either no intercity service at all, or the intercity service is no more than hourly and skips the vast majority of the commuter rail stations. This means that the commuter rail could run a lot further from the city if there was demand.
The proposal is to pick a small number of countryside leisure locations along the extended rail route - animal/bird reserves, forests, National Parks, hunting areas, beaches, whatever. Either walkable/bikeable locations, or somewhere you can locate a bunch of car rental places together (or a bunch of hotels and have organised coach trips). Then you build a station at each such location and extend a commuter train out there once every hour or two. If it takes a couple of hours from the city to reach such a location, that's still within easy day trip range.
200 miles should be about 2.5-3 hours - you can get halfway into Pennsylvania, or deep into Green Mountain National Forest from New York. From Los Angeles, you could get to Joshua Tree National Park, or any of a bunch of National Forests. There are similar or better choices from just about every other major US city.
The worst is probably SF, because you have to cross the Central Valley to get to most of the interesting nature, and that's already more than 200 miles from SF - though Mendocino National Forest is only about 180 miles north.
If there is enough demand, you can build and run specific trains - more comfortable for a long journey and with more luggage capacity - for this service; they still stop at all the commuter stops, but then they run non-stop to two or three outer tourist destinations (so they stop 10-15 times in the first hour out of the city and then have just two or three more stops in two and a half hours).
If there is even more demand than that and there are some specific locations with lots of demand that aren't on a rail route (is there a popular bus/coach connecting to the train? Are people driving and then staying there without using the car once they get there?), you could build some branch lines out to particular sites (maybe some ski resorts? Some of the National Parks and National Forests would need a branch line to get there).
You're actually explaining an underrated reason the South Fork of Long Island became the "Hamptons" with a capital "H". Don't underestimate the importance of the fact that Long Island Railroad extends all the way out to Mantauk and has done so for decades. Even if majority of people are getting their by car (or helicopter for the uber rich) these days, the story of how the Hamptons became the way it is can't be told without the LIRR.
Getting out of the city is invariably a pain in the ass and a very high time cost, the more so when cities discourage private vehicle ownership, which is generally a prerequisite both to getting into the countryside and moving around once you're there. Is it possible? yes. Is it costly? Also yes. There's a real premium to having nature be something that's readily rather than merely nominally accessible (indeed, isn't the lower time and transport cost the fundamental premise of urban density in the first place)?- I note that Matt's own father, given the opportunity, bought a house in coastal Maine to reside in.
I do generally approve of Richard's proposals to make it more accessible or reasonable for people to live cities to get out of them.
In Europe you can get off the train in a rural community, walk in a few minutes past the last 5 story apartment building and be in an open field. It’s the miles and miles of suburban and exurban transition zone that demand a car to access countryside in the US.
A *lot* more of the US is within walking distance of a train line than is of a train station.
US freight rail operations are regularly based on the assumption of exclusive use of the track, which makes it hard to share with passenger rail, but hard is not impossible and building stations at/near attractions and then running passenger trains there would get you access to a lot of them.
Sure, you're not going to get to Yellowstone by train without laying new track, and it's too far from any big population concentrations for that to make sense anyway (if there was a line through the park, then lots of people would ride it as an attraction, but it would not make any sense to build one). But you could open a station at and run a train to Willits CA (from San Jose* and/or Sacramento), open a bunch of car-hire places there and some hotels and camping-goods places and the like, and then urbanites could drive from there to all sorts of countryside and wilderness - lots of places to go hiking or camping or fishing or hunting or whatever.
Trains run *through* the Mojave: build a station and people could get off and walk around. There are lines all around Lake Okeechobee (FL) - but no trains from Miami, or stations to stop at. NJT even run service up to places like Mount Arlington - but advertise it purely as a commuter park-and-ride, not a way for urbanites to visit the nature on their doorstep.
* Trains stopped crossing the Bay Bridge in 1958; the rails were lifted in 1963. BART trains are physically incapable of running on regular track, so the only route from San Francisco would be to run a train to San Jose, and then back up the East Bay - better to start at San Jose, follow the Capitol Corridor route through the East Bay (collcting SF passengers at Oakland or Emeryville) and then branch off at Fairfield to head out into rural North California.
I grew up in Phoenix but have lived in the Portland metro area for the last 15 years. The former is all urban spread with an unpopular downtown while the latter has strong urban growth boundaries with a relatively lively downtown.
I too am much more sympathetic to the desire to control for urban sprawl. The sweet spot to me would be to let ‘er rip on density in Portland metro proper and if that doesn’t relieve the pressure enough start in on the growth boundary side.
One trend I notice in my sprawl-y sunbelt city (Houston) is that while there are single family homes close to the city core, once people start having kids they move out to the suburb to access “better” schools. I know housing and school policy are tied, but I feel the next YIMBY challenge will be getting people to stay & invest in their city core neighborhood beyond their DINK days.
There’s a chicken and egg problem though - developers won’t build family oriented housing in places without good schools and amenities for kids, and cities won’t provide good schools and businesses won’t orient towards kids in places where there isn’t family oriented housing.
Even in a city full of childless young professionals, there are still enough families to have schools and day care close by. And on the political side, I think even childless people want to have good schools out of civic pride. I think it’s just genuinely hard to provide education to people in poverty, and genuinely hard to provide child care in places with a high cost of living.
How does that work? Are houses in suburbs generally more expensive (though larger) than houses in cores? I thought houses in cores were both more expensive and smaller. Was that wrong as well?
Matt alluded to building code reform. THIS seems like the next frontier. To hear my architect/builder spouse tell it, getting things through planning and permitting in the Bay Area takes YEARS. Recent Chron op-Ed put average number of days to get permits in SF at over 900! Once you have your permits, you need an inspection basically any time a new subcontractor does any work on the property. We’re talking scores of inspections for residential, and many times more for commercial. They’re functionally bribes being paid to city officials. It’s completely inflexible. And the regs just keep getting more and more and more stringent. It’s time to take a hard look at the building code.
Even if they can't zone you out or kill you in discretionary review, Peskin and his cronies have a million ways to make sure your project never pencils out or dies half-completed, and they are not even remotely shy about employing all of them.
The zoning reforms are good. But as far as I can tell, they’ve done nothing to bring down the cost of building. This is a lynchpin of the housing issue.
Matt mentioned more technical expertise is needed to tackle building code reform, and I don’t totally disagree. Maybe the the American Institute of Architects (AIA) would be well-positioned to lead the technical review side. But I don’t think this should be off-limits to some smart and motivated YIMBYs. Get in there and figure out what is truly safety regulation, and what is graft, grift, and slough in the form of code regs!
Since Boise got cited here, my take is that the acuity is much more a one-off of the pandemic causing an unusual spike in in-migration (unusual even for Boise, which has been growing fast for quite some time), and now is quite aggravated by supply chain and labor shortages still ongoing. There are quite a few projects that are approved and queued up, but are waiting until these factors become more favorable to build.
On the whole, Boise's politicians lean on the YIMBY side. They're even in the middle of a complete rewrite of their zoning right now, where they want to allow more usages by right. Very excited about what comes out of it--but as always, I'm terrified that our overlords in the state legislature will find some way to ruin things.
Re: single stairs. For any building there should be a way out if the stairs are on fire. If there isn't a second staircase (and elevators are not safe in a fire), then the only option is to go out through a window. If you cannot rely on there being a firetruck with a ladder, then the Canadian two-storey limit makes sense, as jumping from higher than two stories is likely to cause serious injuries or kill.
If you can rely on the firetruck getting to you before the fire - and that means a combination of using fire-safe materials and having integrated alarms (reducing the time to the truck arriving) and fire-suppression systems (holding back the fire for longer), then you can safely have a single staircase up to the height of a firetruck ladder. Ladders on standard firetrucks run to about the equivalent of the tenth floor, so that should be the height limit for a single-stair building.
If you want higher then you should have to create a permanent endowment for the fire department sufficient to provide a truck with a longer ladder capable of reaching the top storey of your building and to replace that truck every six years.
Have rents in the Bay Area decreased? If not, isn’t Matt’s victory lap premature? Do we really know how the new legislation will play out once the lawyers get involved?
" But in actual Manhattan, single-bedroom apartments cost $3800 a month – even more than in San Francisco! If your theory predicts that turning a city into Manhattan will make rents plummet, then consider that turning Manhattan into Manhattan made rents much worse, and so maybe your theory is wrong."
The YIMBY rejoinder is that this reflects an even greater amount of concentrated economic value created by the additional density, so the increase in rents is a symptom of a net utilitarian improvement, and thus increased density still a good idea. Although as Scott Alexander notes in this piece, even if this argument is correct as far as it goes (and it seems likely that it is) it's nevertheless kind of 180 degrees of the central pro-YIMBY talking point.
Difference in these cases is that SF is being dragged along by a state-wide pro-housing regime, whereas Manhattan exists surrounded by some of the most extreme NIMBY territory in America. I think Scott's point is well-taken regarding the limits of housing abundance in the urban core, but if the situation had been that Manhattan creates even more economic surplus and people want to get a chunk of it, so they move to the suburbs and raise prices in the suburbs, and then people want to make money so they build lots of apartments in the suburbs so the prices normalize, etc. etc., the housing crisis in NYC would be lot better (and objectively more people would be getting to enjoy it)
I don't think I disagree with your point as such, but I admit I find it hard not to sympathize with the extreme NIMBY territory in this particular example - AIUI, the impetus to move to the suburbs from NYC has historically not been "the prices in central New York are too high" and more in the vein of "New York City is a garbage fire with terrible public schools and filthy public spaces and is no place to raise a child." Seems like a pretty compelling argument for NIMBYism / keeping your neighborhood as unlike central NYC as possible.
It’s not buildings that make it that way. There might be an effect where adding apartment buildings would change perception so that it is “supposed to be gritty” or no longer deserves the protection of “this is a residential area, real people live here!” but that’s a stupid arbitrary culture thing. Plenty of cultures prioritize niceness and safety in cities the way we can only seem to for suburbs. Car sewers aren’t exactly suitable for children either!
i always viewed the crux of the yimby argument as more housing produces lower prices, and from the perspective of prices, it doesn’t really matter whether the housing is dense or not.
the pro-density/anti-sprawl bent always struck me as more of an ideological thing? (which is fine since i agree with it)
Rents in San Francisco proper is maybe the wrong measurement; because the housing requirements apply across the state you’d hope to see increased infill development in suburban areas around the bay. The goal is not “everyone gets an apartment in the Mission” but rather “workers don’t have to commute in from Sacramento”.
I remember people declaring Obamacare a failure because healthcare costs kept rising. It’s about slowing the cost increase, not necessarily stopping it (though that would be great).
That sounds fun, but it will become harrowingly ironic if a few decades pass and then someone tries to get the triangle house labeled a historic landmark...
We need to push for inclusionary zoning in other areas besides high-cost blue states, too.
In Texas, where I live, areas with good schools often use deed restrictions to prevent people from building smaller and more affordable housing units within them. This perpetuates racial and economic segregation and locks lower- and middle-income families out of the best public schools.
I imagine the same thing happens throughout the South. I know of several municipalities that "seceded" from the main city in their metro area to form their own school districts after schools were integrated.
Do you mean more relaxed zoning? Inclusionary zoning usually refers specifically to requiring a certain amount of new development to be affordable, often artificially so.
I don't mean to speak for the consensus, but I think most of us think it does more harm than good. Anything that reduces the incentives to build means less gets built. Here's an example in Portland: https://cityobservatory.org/inclusionary-zoning-portlands-wile-e-coyote-moment-has-arrived/ They passed mandatory inclusionary zoning for all new large apartment buildings, so developers stopped building new large buildings.
Other cities couple inclusionary zoning with zoning exemptions or density bonuses. But if you can make those exemptions, why not just change zoning laws?
I agree with some of the proposed solutions, but I have always thought the diagnosis of the root cause was mostly bad, e.g., "Homeowners benefit from scarcity and strong local veto, homeowners care a lot about land use issues."
I have *never* heard anyone say they did not want more housing because *supply/demand* would make it worth less than it is. That would be N, not NIMBY. And most people are not looking more than 1/2 mile from where they area anyway. It's NIM Back Yard, not NIM City. Rather, they think not-unreasonably that if their house in a 1/4 acre community is flanked by two new 4-unit buildings, it will make their house look worse to people who want a home in a 1/4 acre community compared to the other homes.
Many homeowners look at their home as a 30+-year investment and think moving sucks. So they are conservative in the don't want change, because if they wanted something different, they probably would not have moved there in the first place. Many specifically choose a type of community related to density. A friend chose a 2-acre community because he's a homebody who wanted trees, lots of space, and few neighbors. My wife and I chose a 1/4 acre community because it was the balance of density we wanted. Another friend lives in Boston's dense South End and is a foodie and likes a bunch of restaurants to walk to.
Exaggerated, of course, but imagine a billionaire decided to mess with Matt Y and bought all the property except his in a 50 yard radius (or 100, or 200) of his DC townhouse, demolished everything else, and raised corn and chickens. Would he thnk, "food is good, and the new housing scarcity in my area will make my home more valuable"?
If one owns a house in a 1/4 acre community is flanked by two new 4-unit buildings, that house will look VERY attractive to people who want to build another 4-unit building in an area with proven demand, so it would probably appreciate in value quite a bit.
Also, the neighborhood in which I live has duplexes, fourplexes, and single-family homes, and they blend in well with each other because they're all 2-3 stories. IMO, no one should be afraid of fourplexes in their neighborhood.
> I have *never* heard anyone say they did not want more housing because *supply/demand* would make it worth less than it is
I think many people do think this, but I actually don't see how it's relevant. NIMBY homeowners are able to stop development because they have concentrated political power and a fear of change. Whether or not their understanding of the economics is correct is rather beside the point. You just shouldn't be able to take out a 30 year mortgage then spend those 30 years screaming at local meetings that nothing else should change around you. That's not how life works and I don't care who is mad about it. Things change, deal with it.
I'd love to hear the YIMBY perspective on Houston. I just moved away from near there after 24 years. Houston has no zoning laws and was able to annex most of its surburban areas due to laws set in place years ago. You would think it would be a free-for-all but actually has evolved very well over the time I was there. Its issues have to due with infrastructure due to expolsive growth and the impact of its climate (heat and storms). A comparison to Dallas would be interesting, as it has tougher zoning laws, but way more flexible than San Francisco, and has been better at building its light rail system. Both eventually will run out of land, but I think Houston will be in better shape due to the flexibility it has to adapt. I think a YIMBY/NIMBY discussion for Texas would be helpful as what is happening in California now will be going on there in the near future. It's already too late for Austin.
My understanding, as I keep reading from Matt and others, is that although Houston does avoid one veto point in lack of Euclidian zoning, they still have plenty of others that are typical, like minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size, and so on.
Dallas is a weird case because most of Dallas is actually the DFW Metroplex. Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Denton, Plano, Irving, Grapevine, and dozens of suburbs are all technically separate but have a singular identity thanks to the unified media market, the massive amount of highways connecting everything, and the Dallas Cowboys. While Dallas itself can run out of land, the Metroplex is likely to sprawl all the way down to Waco and all the way up to the Oklahoma border.
Austin also has bad bones for urbanism. You’ve got Lamar and the freeways as the only north-south spines (Congress works south of the Capitol) but very few east-west ways to get between them. Houston has a great grid in all directions that can be adapted with better buses and rail as it densifies (and can become locally walkable).
Part of it is the hills. The geography goes from flat on the east side to hills and valleys on the west side with almost no transition (thanks to a long-dead fault that runs from Dallas to San Antonio). There is only one major east-west artery on both sides of the Other Colorado River (183 and 71). Parmer, 2222, William Cannon, and Slaughter help somewhat, but don't have enough volume and are not limited access. For a long time I35 was the only major north-south artery until Mopac was built alongside an old railroad (Mopac stands for Missouri Pacific) and 360 was blasted through the hills. Austin still doesn't have a completed outer loop, and it won't if Hays County gets its way.
I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s partly because it’s on a river right where it comes out of the hills, and spent most of its history as a small town, so that what are now arterials were originally designed as country roads, and local developments sprung up off them rather than on a coherent grid. But Waco should have many of these same features, and if you look at a map of it, they’ve got a great grid.
"San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (SFBARF)"
I feel like they could have workshopped this a bit more -- why Federation and not Coalition, Alliance, Union, Organization, or basically any other word that didn't start with "f"?
My Seattle friends were telling me that when a streetcar line got extended to South Lake Union, there was a push to instead call it a trolley, so that people could advocate to ride the SLUT.
I’m traveling in The Netherlands right now, and it’s given me an appreciation of how silly some of the discourse is. Urbanism isn’t a new theoretical construct; it has been and is being executed well at scale around the world. Hundreds of people older than my parents are really out there riding the bicycles, strollers are effortlessly boarding the trams, and everyday families are living in 4-6 story apartment buildings on walkable streets. It’s happening! Go see it! We don’t have to invent these things from whole cloth or speculate about how they will play out. If we wanted to, we could just copy.
I also knew going in that the transit was going to better in terms of coverage and frequency. I didn’t realize how much it was going to be NICER. The tram has level boarding, it’s modern and clean, it moves with a sense of urgency and efficiency but isn’t actively trying to knock over the standing passengers. Even the bus is built like a luxury car - everything fits together tightly, vibrations and shimmies are well controlled. On a just off the line New Flyer in SF, you go over a slight bump and it’s literally a deafening rattle as every seat and panel down the length of the thing reacts. I understand why Americans refuse to use transit that communicates to its riders that they are poor. I wonder what is going to take us to get transit that makes you feel rich.
I understand that you mostly experience the Netherlands as a foreigner. If that's correct, I would like to point out that my view is that this country is pretty bad from a YIMBY perspective. It's hard to find somewhere to live in Amsterdam, and usually everything is much smaller than it is in the US. Moreover, you have an unfortunately large amount of people with very weird commuting patterns due to affordability issues (meaning that they live in other cities and have long commutes to Amsterdam instead of living in the city). If you have a transit strike, as it happened recently, people do get stranded. My understanding is that the main lobby that poses a problem is farmers and not incumbent homeowners though.
However, I'm writing here based mostly on personal experiences and anecdotal evidence, so if anyone has real data, I would be interested.
I don't have any hard data but my suspicion is that much of Amsterdam is mid-rise where it could or should be high rise. But it would be a big aesthetic change.
My general impression is that the "front line" of the housing debate in many European cities is between middle density and high density where in the US it is between low density and middle density.
Looking more closely, Amsterdam's density is in line with Boston -- high by U.S. standards but far below many European cities, so they would seem to have a lot of room for improvement.
Oh yes even as a foreigner I have been clued in to the housing crisis - your museums like to talk about squatters a lot, for example. But if the US were to replicate Netherlands style urbanism, that would be a massive increase in housing supply, and the Netherlands actual experience shows that this is neither unworkable nor some kind of hellhole, as US opponents claim it would be. It might reinforce the Scott Alexander critique about how YIMBYtopia Manhattan is in fact very expensive.
To be fair to the Netherlands, the whole country's population density is greater than every U.S. state's. I'm sure it has its problems (I've never been there) but it must be doing something right from a planning perspective.
That’s at least in part an artifact of where they drew the borders that you are averaging population density over. If New Jersey’s borders had been drawn just around the mouth of the Hudson, instead of getting half of the Hudson mouth and half of the Delaware, it would have higher density than the Netherlands, which happens to have its lines drawn around the many mouths of the Rhine.
Fair. But either way, the point is they can't really sprawl their way to housing affordability like most places in the U.S. have done.
Yes. Watch the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. It goes into a lot of detail about Dutch urban planning from the perspective of someone from North America, specifically the Toronto area.
I don't know how the population of Amsterdam has changed over time, but the cities where NIMBYism becomes a big problem are those that experience rapid growth. Slower growth would create fewer problems. I am sure we can learn things from Europe but not everything that works there will work here.
Several things here. The US suburban model actually requires a great deal of growth: the bonds that build the infrastructure for the first ring of suburbs assume revenue from the second, the bonds for the second assume the third, etc. See The Growth Ponzi Scheme. Strong Towns' big thesis is that you need to build in the more efficient dense, compact, less auto-centric way in order to insulate yourself from problems when the growth doesn't materialize (and due to traffic, such growth is inherently self-limiting).
Second, the NIMBYism seems to be worst when you have an area that's been plodding along as a static or slow-growing village/suburb and then later faces pressure to become a city. The village/suburb uses are there, and people are attached to them, but they have to change. What many great cities including Amsterdam have in common is being economically important early in their lifecycle, so that the original buildings are already urban and compact. Even better if they grow up along transportation corridors like rails and waterways. A fire or earthquake will also suffice to wipe out bad "bones" and build something in line with current needs.
Finally, I think you would need to posit something more specific about why the 4-6 story apartment + bike path + tram story would work in Europe but not here. The main thing I can think of is that combination of social services and norms (and enforcement) could perhaps make the Dutch more respectful and neighborly in shared spaces.
Makes me think of
"A developed country isn't a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation"
There's a lot of overlap in my experience (in LA) between YIMBY groups and Defund/Don't Enforce groups. Unfortunately, you cannot offer a safe public transit experience without law enforcement. Here in LA, the public transit safety situation has deteriorated (due to non-enforcement) so drastically in the last couple years that even many transit enthusiasts have switched to cars for that reason.
Moved to SF in 2015, got involved in YIMBY the next year. Over the past 6 years, it has been remarkable to see the progress. Thank you Matt for giving this issue so much visibility.
Here locally, the NIMBY forces seem despondent. They know they are loathed as the selfish “got mime, eff u” crowd, which is why their only argument is a hand wavy thing about gentrification of neighborhoods like Sunset SF where housing has been 1M+ for over a decade.
They’re losing, they know it, and the bitter tears make for great cocktails.
San Francisco is amusing, because the board of supervisors and very local parts of the government how strong NIMBY tendencies, but the mayor and the congressional delegation is more pro-YIMBY.
Also, Dean Preston must be destroyed.
Note that the mayor and congressperson have 800,000+ voter jurisdictions, while the supervisors only represent about 160,000 each. This is the same point Matt mentioned in the original post - you need a slightly larger area to internalize the externalities.
I think this is true but I think individual politicians are a much bigger deal. I think the SF Yimby bench is generally pretty weak and rarely puts up strong candidates for supervisors. SF/CA got incredibly lucky in the election of Scott Weiner (I also love all of his other Yimby colleagues)
In your experience, how much have tech forces driven the success of YIMBYism in SF? In SF I can imagine both funding and voting could be backed by a much greater share of Silicon Valley workers than anywhere else.
And if the answer is "a lot" - what does that mean for YIMBYism elsewhere?
Good question. We have good organizers here who are not really part of the tech community. I don't have numbers, but I suspect its true a lot of tech money makes its way into YIMBY causes and organizations. More recently, GrowSF is being more explicit about not being shy about having tech folks advocate for YIMBY among other things in interest of tech - which is great as tech as traditionally been hesitant to assert itself for fear of being shouted down around here.
My experience is that tech also provides a good talent pool of people with the sort of quantitative/analytic mindset that YIMBYism is rooted in.
That's true, but tech people also used to making change quickly, and they get easily frustrated by "slow boring of hard boards" type politics.
I'm involved with local YIMBY organizing in SF, and there's a lot of member churn as people join, put in some effort, don't see immediate change, and then lose interest. We're trying to think through ways to make smaller wins seem exciting and keep people going after electoral defeats.
Yeah, that's tough.
One way I've seen our local group work on that is to regularly focus on individual projects in the pipeline. That means we can count "this particular building got built" as a small win.
Preston, Mar, Chan, Peskin, Walton all need to be relieved of their duties. On it.
10 years ago we were also coming off the housing crash. To this day when I tell friends that we need to build more housing sometimes they’ll say things like “look how that worked out last time.” The affordability problem is just so bad now I don’t think people could continue to ignore it.
I consider myself an ardent YIMBY, but I do have some sympathy with the idea of limiting development in the countryside we'd like to bequeath to future generations. It may be that most of the world's classic "greebelts" are ill thought-out (they're just too close to city centers). That's my vague impression of the UK case (and maybe Oregon?). But if they're located sufficiently far from the urban core, maybe they're worth doing?
To give an idea of what I'm talking about, I'll use the example of my home state, Massachusetts. I have this vague notion it would be desirable to place relatively stringent regulations on sprawl once you get to some point west of Worcester—‚but let 'er rip in terms of house building east of this line.
To ease the possible spike on housing prices west of this line, green light pro-density regulations in the existing regional centers and already dense locations (Springfield, Amherst, Pittsfield, etc).
The key is removing the NIMBY-veto in favor of rules-based, non-arbitrariness implemented and enforced by the *state* government.
To be clear, I'd still take a completely laissez-faire house building rules system over our current NIMBY nightmare. It's truly awful. And maybe that's where we'll end up. (And maybe it won't make any difference because most people will want to live closer to urban amenities or jobs.) Another way to square the circle would be via the tax code: implement a strong "shall issue" legal standard with respect to homebuilding permits, but massage the tax code to favor density and punish sprawl.
Anyway, the rent is too damn high, agreed, but I personally thing dense housing abundance is better than sprawly housing abundance.
EDITED to add a TLDR: Like most YIMBYs I want to sweep aside rules against density. I'm more sympathetic to rules against sprawl...
I can be OK with urban growth boundaries* (I've seen them in work in Orgeon) so long as the urban grown that one's bounding is allowed to build up as appropriate.
(*It's also uniquely weird as a Boisean to hear this called a greenbelt, because here, the Greenbelt is our major non-motorist corridor that follows the river.)
I agree. One of my great frustrations as a city dweller in the US is in order to leave the city and access the countryside, you have to wade through 30 miles of shit. When I've visited Europe, cities and villages have a clear edge - and it's not uncommon to see two villages only a mile apart that have woods or farmland between them.
Usually I'm loathe to lay down a kluky policy like a blanket green belt without understanding the underlying economics and causes, but in the US there's simply so much incentive to build sprawl and it's happened so quickly that it seems like a valid emergency measures until we get our shit together.
Broadly endorsed. The entire attraction of Berkshire County is precisely that it *isn't* massively overbuilt.
One concern I have with this approach, however, is that it seems like it's designed in the long term to create a class of people who, having no experience with the countryside (because they've all been brought up in Hong Kong / Singapore style hyperdensity by design) place no value on it (and hence have no incentive to vote to preserve it) because they don't experience it--at best it becomes an abstraction in much the way that stars and constellations are for people who live in New York City or other places of ubiquitous light pollution. Ideally the people forgoing overbuilding the countryside would have a stake in so doing and get to benefit from its existence (beyond just a class of rich vacationers with lots of leisure.).
One approach that really works is to extend your "commuter rail" to a few rural leisure locations.
To explain (ie that sentence above is the TLDR).
Most commuter rail operates on existing rail infrastructure; ideally, trains run four to six times an hour from 5am to 1am between a main city station and the edge of the commute zone (typically a suburban community on the edge, typically about an hour from the city by train). In practice, many American commuter rail systems are infrequent, peak-only and unidirectional (to the city in the morning, away in the evening), and that needs fixing long before moving on to this sort of extra that goes beyond the basic service.
In most cases, the rail infrastructure is actually an old line that runs to another city, but there is either no intercity service at all, or the intercity service is no more than hourly and skips the vast majority of the commuter rail stations. This means that the commuter rail could run a lot further from the city if there was demand.
The proposal is to pick a small number of countryside leisure locations along the extended rail route - animal/bird reserves, forests, National Parks, hunting areas, beaches, whatever. Either walkable/bikeable locations, or somewhere you can locate a bunch of car rental places together (or a bunch of hotels and have organised coach trips). Then you build a station at each such location and extend a commuter train out there once every hour or two. If it takes a couple of hours from the city to reach such a location, that's still within easy day trip range.
200 miles should be about 2.5-3 hours - you can get halfway into Pennsylvania, or deep into Green Mountain National Forest from New York. From Los Angeles, you could get to Joshua Tree National Park, or any of a bunch of National Forests. There are similar or better choices from just about every other major US city.
The worst is probably SF, because you have to cross the Central Valley to get to most of the interesting nature, and that's already more than 200 miles from SF - though Mendocino National Forest is only about 180 miles north.
If there is enough demand, you can build and run specific trains - more comfortable for a long journey and with more luggage capacity - for this service; they still stop at all the commuter stops, but then they run non-stop to two or three outer tourist destinations (so they stop 10-15 times in the first hour out of the city and then have just two or three more stops in two and a half hours).
If there is even more demand than that and there are some specific locations with lots of demand that aren't on a rail route (is there a popular bus/coach connecting to the train? Are people driving and then staying there without using the car once they get there?), you could build some branch lines out to particular sites (maybe some ski resorts? Some of the National Parks and National Forests would need a branch line to get there).
You're actually explaining an underrated reason the South Fork of Long Island became the "Hamptons" with a capital "H". Don't underestimate the importance of the fact that Long Island Railroad extends all the way out to Mantauk and has done so for decades. Even if majority of people are getting their by car (or helicopter for the uber rich) these days, the story of how the Hamptons became the way it is can't be told without the LIRR.
Getting out of the city is invariably a pain in the ass and a very high time cost, the more so when cities discourage private vehicle ownership, which is generally a prerequisite both to getting into the countryside and moving around once you're there. Is it possible? yes. Is it costly? Also yes. There's a real premium to having nature be something that's readily rather than merely nominally accessible (indeed, isn't the lower time and transport cost the fundamental premise of urban density in the first place)?- I note that Matt's own father, given the opportunity, bought a house in coastal Maine to reside in.
I do generally approve of Richard's proposals to make it more accessible or reasonable for people to live cities to get out of them.
In Europe you can get off the train in a rural community, walk in a few minutes past the last 5 story apartment building and be in an open field. It’s the miles and miles of suburban and exurban transition zone that demand a car to access countryside in the US.
Well, that and the existence of countryside attractions that aren't within walking distance of a train station....
A *lot* more of the US is within walking distance of a train line than is of a train station.
US freight rail operations are regularly based on the assumption of exclusive use of the track, which makes it hard to share with passenger rail, but hard is not impossible and building stations at/near attractions and then running passenger trains there would get you access to a lot of them.
Sure, you're not going to get to Yellowstone by train without laying new track, and it's too far from any big population concentrations for that to make sense anyway (if there was a line through the park, then lots of people would ride it as an attraction, but it would not make any sense to build one). But you could open a station at and run a train to Willits CA (from San Jose* and/or Sacramento), open a bunch of car-hire places there and some hotels and camping-goods places and the like, and then urbanites could drive from there to all sorts of countryside and wilderness - lots of places to go hiking or camping or fishing or hunting or whatever.
Trains run *through* the Mojave: build a station and people could get off and walk around. There are lines all around Lake Okeechobee (FL) - but no trains from Miami, or stations to stop at. NJT even run service up to places like Mount Arlington - but advertise it purely as a commuter park-and-ride, not a way for urbanites to visit the nature on their doorstep.
* Trains stopped crossing the Bay Bridge in 1958; the rails were lifted in 1963. BART trains are physically incapable of running on regular track, so the only route from San Francisco would be to run a train to San Jose, and then back up the East Bay - better to start at San Jose, follow the Capitol Corridor route through the East Bay (collcting SF passengers at Oakland or Emeryville) and then branch off at Fairfield to head out into rural North California.
I grew up in Phoenix but have lived in the Portland metro area for the last 15 years. The former is all urban spread with an unpopular downtown while the latter has strong urban growth boundaries with a relatively lively downtown.
I too am much more sympathetic to the desire to control for urban sprawl. The sweet spot to me would be to let ‘er rip on density in Portland metro proper and if that doesn’t relieve the pressure enough start in on the growth boundary side.
Probably not much, though, as Matt himself has noted, remote and nomadic workers seems to have spiked demand for housing in the countryside.
Part of it depends on whether new central nodes can develop out there too.
A lot thanks to NIMBYS.
One trend I notice in my sprawl-y sunbelt city (Houston) is that while there are single family homes close to the city core, once people start having kids they move out to the suburb to access “better” schools. I know housing and school policy are tied, but I feel the next YIMBY challenge will be getting people to stay & invest in their city core neighborhood beyond their DINK days.
There’s a chicken and egg problem though - developers won’t build family oriented housing in places without good schools and amenities for kids, and cities won’t provide good schools and businesses won’t orient towards kids in places where there isn’t family oriented housing.
Even in a city full of childless young professionals, there are still enough families to have schools and day care close by. And on the political side, I think even childless people want to have good schools out of civic pride. I think it’s just genuinely hard to provide education to people in poverty, and genuinely hard to provide child care in places with a high cost of living.
Is it common for property taxes to be higher in suburbs than they are in urban centers?
I have always assumed the opposite, but have never actually looked into it.
Per value, yes. Per square foot, no.
How does that work? Are houses in suburbs generally more expensive (though larger) than houses in cores? I thought houses in cores were both more expensive and smaller. Was that wrong as well?
It depends on the core. A growing one that's in demand is expensive. Detroit, not so much.
Matt alluded to building code reform. THIS seems like the next frontier. To hear my architect/builder spouse tell it, getting things through planning and permitting in the Bay Area takes YEARS. Recent Chron op-Ed put average number of days to get permits in SF at over 900! Once you have your permits, you need an inspection basically any time a new subcontractor does any work on the property. We’re talking scores of inspections for residential, and many times more for commercial. They’re functionally bribes being paid to city officials. It’s completely inflexible. And the regs just keep getting more and more and more stringent. It’s time to take a hard look at the building code.
This ^^^^^^
Even if they can't zone you out or kill you in discretionary review, Peskin and his cronies have a million ways to make sure your project never pencils out or dies half-completed, and they are not even remotely shy about employing all of them.
The zoning reforms are good. But as far as I can tell, they’ve done nothing to bring down the cost of building. This is a lynchpin of the housing issue.
Matt mentioned more technical expertise is needed to tackle building code reform, and I don’t totally disagree. Maybe the the American Institute of Architects (AIA) would be well-positioned to lead the technical review side. But I don’t think this should be off-limits to some smart and motivated YIMBYs. Get in there and figure out what is truly safety regulation, and what is graft, grift, and slough in the form of code regs!
Edited: NIMBYs to YIMBYs
From experience:
Construction...
Costs what it costs. It ain't great but no one has good ideas on how to really supercharge productivity.
Compliance... OHMYFUCKINGGODWHATISTHISDUMPSTERFIREFULLOFWEEKOLDSHIT?!@!!@?!??!?
Plug for another great Substack called Construction Physics.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of
Lol, it's in the second row of my subscriptions on my user profile.
Since Boise got cited here, my take is that the acuity is much more a one-off of the pandemic causing an unusual spike in in-migration (unusual even for Boise, which has been growing fast for quite some time), and now is quite aggravated by supply chain and labor shortages still ongoing. There are quite a few projects that are approved and queued up, but are waiting until these factors become more favorable to build.
On the whole, Boise's politicians lean on the YIMBY side. They're even in the middle of a complete rewrite of their zoning right now, where they want to allow more usages by right. Very excited about what comes out of it--but as always, I'm terrified that our overlords in the state legislature will find some way to ruin things.
I think Boise was one of the fastest growing cities before the pandemic too.
Not quite - but Meridian was #4: https://www.quickenloans.com/learn/fastest-growing-cities-in-us
Boise metro in general was definitely up there pre-pandemic.
Re: single stairs. For any building there should be a way out if the stairs are on fire. If there isn't a second staircase (and elevators are not safe in a fire), then the only option is to go out through a window. If you cannot rely on there being a firetruck with a ladder, then the Canadian two-storey limit makes sense, as jumping from higher than two stories is likely to cause serious injuries or kill.
If you can rely on the firetruck getting to you before the fire - and that means a combination of using fire-safe materials and having integrated alarms (reducing the time to the truck arriving) and fire-suppression systems (holding back the fire for longer), then you can safely have a single staircase up to the height of a firetruck ladder. Ladders on standard firetrucks run to about the equivalent of the tenth floor, so that should be the height limit for a single-stair building.
If you want higher then you should have to create a permanent endowment for the fire department sufficient to provide a truck with a longer ladder capable of reaching the top storey of your building and to replace that truck every six years.
Los Angeles used to have a requirement of a rooftop helipad for buildings above 75 or 100 feet for this reason.
Have rents in the Bay Area decreased? If not, isn’t Matt’s victory lap premature? Do we really know how the new legislation will play out once the lawyers get involved?
in the long term high density may increase rents in SF rather than decrease them - see, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/
" But in actual Manhattan, single-bedroom apartments cost $3800 a month – even more than in San Francisco! If your theory predicts that turning a city into Manhattan will make rents plummet, then consider that turning Manhattan into Manhattan made rents much worse, and so maybe your theory is wrong."
The YIMBY rejoinder is that this reflects an even greater amount of concentrated economic value created by the additional density, so the increase in rents is a symptom of a net utilitarian improvement, and thus increased density still a good idea. Although as Scott Alexander notes in this piece, even if this argument is correct as far as it goes (and it seems likely that it is) it's nevertheless kind of 180 degrees of the central pro-YIMBY talking point.
Difference in these cases is that SF is being dragged along by a state-wide pro-housing regime, whereas Manhattan exists surrounded by some of the most extreme NIMBY territory in America. I think Scott's point is well-taken regarding the limits of housing abundance in the urban core, but if the situation had been that Manhattan creates even more economic surplus and people want to get a chunk of it, so they move to the suburbs and raise prices in the suburbs, and then people want to make money so they build lots of apartments in the suburbs so the prices normalize, etc. etc., the housing crisis in NYC would be lot better (and objectively more people would be getting to enjoy it)
I don't think I disagree with your point as such, but I admit I find it hard not to sympathize with the extreme NIMBY territory in this particular example - AIUI, the impetus to move to the suburbs from NYC has historically not been "the prices in central New York are too high" and more in the vein of "New York City is a garbage fire with terrible public schools and filthy public spaces and is no place to raise a child." Seems like a pretty compelling argument for NIMBYism / keeping your neighborhood as unlike central NYC as possible.
It’s not buildings that make it that way. There might be an effect where adding apartment buildings would change perception so that it is “supposed to be gritty” or no longer deserves the protection of “this is a residential area, real people live here!” but that’s a stupid arbitrary culture thing. Plenty of cultures prioritize niceness and safety in cities the way we can only seem to for suburbs. Car sewers aren’t exactly suitable for children either!
i always viewed the crux of the yimby argument as more housing produces lower prices, and from the perspective of prices, it doesn’t really matter whether the housing is dense or not.
the pro-density/anti-sprawl bent always struck me as more of an ideological thing? (which is fine since i agree with it)
Rents in San Francisco proper is maybe the wrong measurement; because the housing requirements apply across the state you’d hope to see increased infill development in suburban areas around the bay. The goal is not “everyone gets an apartment in the Mission” but rather “workers don’t have to commute in from Sacramento”.
I remember people declaring Obamacare a failure because healthcare costs kept rising. It’s about slowing the cost increase, not necessarily stopping it (though that would be great).
So far the YIMBYs have had legislative successes. We now need to change the world.
I’ll kick in $50 for a plaque at the triangle house: “At this site on [date], the YIMBY movement was born . . .”
That sounds fun, but it will become harrowingly ironic if a few decades pass and then someone tries to get the triangle house labeled a historic landmark...
That's basically what happened with the shark house in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/25/oxford-house-with-shark-sculpture-on-roof-made-heritage-site-despite-owners-objection
We need to push for inclusionary zoning in other areas besides high-cost blue states, too.
In Texas, where I live, areas with good schools often use deed restrictions to prevent people from building smaller and more affordable housing units within them. This perpetuates racial and economic segregation and locks lower- and middle-income families out of the best public schools.
I imagine the same thing happens throughout the South. I know of several municipalities that "seceded" from the main city in their metro area to form their own school districts after schools were integrated.
Do you mean more relaxed zoning? Inclusionary zoning usually refers specifically to requiring a certain amount of new development to be affordable, often artificially so.
What is the YIMBY consensus on inclusionary zoning? Many do-good progressive city councils are obsessed with it (of course).
I don't mean to speak for the consensus, but I think most of us think it does more harm than good. Anything that reduces the incentives to build means less gets built. Here's an example in Portland: https://cityobservatory.org/inclusionary-zoning-portlands-wile-e-coyote-moment-has-arrived/ They passed mandatory inclusionary zoning for all new large apartment buildings, so developers stopped building new large buildings.
Other cities couple inclusionary zoning with zoning exemptions or density bonuses. But if you can make those exemptions, why not just change zoning laws?
I agree with some of the proposed solutions, but I have always thought the diagnosis of the root cause was mostly bad, e.g., "Homeowners benefit from scarcity and strong local veto, homeowners care a lot about land use issues."
I have *never* heard anyone say they did not want more housing because *supply/demand* would make it worth less than it is. That would be N, not NIMBY. And most people are not looking more than 1/2 mile from where they area anyway. It's NIM Back Yard, not NIM City. Rather, they think not-unreasonably that if their house in a 1/4 acre community is flanked by two new 4-unit buildings, it will make their house look worse to people who want a home in a 1/4 acre community compared to the other homes.
Many homeowners look at their home as a 30+-year investment and think moving sucks. So they are conservative in the don't want change, because if they wanted something different, they probably would not have moved there in the first place. Many specifically choose a type of community related to density. A friend chose a 2-acre community because he's a homebody who wanted trees, lots of space, and few neighbors. My wife and I chose a 1/4 acre community because it was the balance of density we wanted. Another friend lives in Boston's dense South End and is a foodie and likes a bunch of restaurants to walk to.
Exaggerated, of course, but imagine a billionaire decided to mess with Matt Y and bought all the property except his in a 50 yard radius (or 100, or 200) of his DC townhouse, demolished everything else, and raised corn and chickens. Would he thnk, "food is good, and the new housing scarcity in my area will make my home more valuable"?
If one owns a house in a 1/4 acre community is flanked by two new 4-unit buildings, that house will look VERY attractive to people who want to build another 4-unit building in an area with proven demand, so it would probably appreciate in value quite a bit.
Also, the neighborhood in which I live has duplexes, fourplexes, and single-family homes, and they blend in well with each other because they're all 2-3 stories. IMO, no one should be afraid of fourplexes in their neighborhood.
> I have *never* heard anyone say they did not want more housing because *supply/demand* would make it worth less than it is
I think many people do think this, but I actually don't see how it's relevant. NIMBY homeowners are able to stop development because they have concentrated political power and a fear of change. Whether or not their understanding of the economics is correct is rather beside the point. You just shouldn't be able to take out a 30 year mortgage then spend those 30 years screaming at local meetings that nothing else should change around you. That's not how life works and I don't care who is mad about it. Things change, deal with it.
I'd love to hear the YIMBY perspective on Houston. I just moved away from near there after 24 years. Houston has no zoning laws and was able to annex most of its surburban areas due to laws set in place years ago. You would think it would be a free-for-all but actually has evolved very well over the time I was there. Its issues have to due with infrastructure due to expolsive growth and the impact of its climate (heat and storms). A comparison to Dallas would be interesting, as it has tougher zoning laws, but way more flexible than San Francisco, and has been better at building its light rail system. Both eventually will run out of land, but I think Houston will be in better shape due to the flexibility it has to adapt. I think a YIMBY/NIMBY discussion for Texas would be helpful as what is happening in California now will be going on there in the near future. It's already too late for Austin.
My understanding, as I keep reading from Matt and others, is that although Houston does avoid one veto point in lack of Euclidian zoning, they still have plenty of others that are typical, like minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size, and so on.
Dallas is a weird case because most of Dallas is actually the DFW Metroplex. Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Denton, Plano, Irving, Grapevine, and dozens of suburbs are all technically separate but have a singular identity thanks to the unified media market, the massive amount of highways connecting everything, and the Dallas Cowboys. While Dallas itself can run out of land, the Metroplex is likely to sprawl all the way down to Waco and all the way up to the Oklahoma border.
Austin also has bad bones for urbanism. You’ve got Lamar and the freeways as the only north-south spines (Congress works south of the Capitol) but very few east-west ways to get between them. Houston has a great grid in all directions that can be adapted with better buses and rail as it densifies (and can become locally walkable).
How did Austin get such a bad grid?
Part of it is the hills. The geography goes from flat on the east side to hills and valleys on the west side with almost no transition (thanks to a long-dead fault that runs from Dallas to San Antonio). There is only one major east-west artery on both sides of the Other Colorado River (183 and 71). Parmer, 2222, William Cannon, and Slaughter help somewhat, but don't have enough volume and are not limited access. For a long time I35 was the only major north-south artery until Mopac was built alongside an old railroad (Mopac stands for Missouri Pacific) and 360 was blasted through the hills. Austin still doesn't have a completed outer loop, and it won't if Hays County gets its way.
I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s partly because it’s on a river right where it comes out of the hills, and spent most of its history as a small town, so that what are now arterials were originally designed as country roads, and local developments sprung up off them rather than on a coherent grid. But Waco should have many of these same features, and if you look at a map of it, they’ve got a great grid.
Speaking of Houston—is there any more populous metro area in the developed world without heavy rail rapid transit? Serious question.
Dallas.
Touche.
"San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (SFBARF)"
I feel like they could have workshopped this a bit more -- why Federation and not Coalition, Alliance, Union, Organization, or basically any other word that didn't start with "f"?
It's odd sounding, sure, but it's also funny and memorable. I got a chuckle out SFBARF, so I'm way more likely to remember it then if it was SFCARF.
My Seattle friends were telling me that when a streetcar line got extended to South Lake Union, there was a push to instead call it a trolley, so that people could advocate to ride the SLUT.